Friday, January 7, 2011

Isolation and the Modern


If the city never sleeps, where does everyone go? Hopper’s 1921 Night Shadows is featured in the current exhibit at the Whitney. Hopper illustrates a lonely vision of the modern.  Despite the construction of impressive skyscrapers, modernity seems to render us isolated. The figure in the etching is walking down a desolate street that represents a certain side of Manhattan. Walking down the streets at five in the morning is at once serene yet chillingly isolating.

In a city abundant with high-rise apartment buildings, I can’t help but feel sometimes that we’re living a giant complex of dollhouses. At night, when we’re done engaging in commercial and social activity, all the dolls are put back in their little boxes or rooms, alone. The teeming masses that breathe life into the city streets during the day go to rest and those same streets become barren.

Rather than cripple under the feeling of isolation, I find repose in these quiet city streets. For those who are willing to brave the ungodly hours of the morning and walk them, these streets offer a scene for introspection and reflection in contrast to their chaos during the day. The streets hold the energy from the day like a dish out of the oven.

Hopper’s vision of modernity as a state of isolation leads me to react with a more positive figuring of the city. In a modern city such as New York, the activity of the day can be so fervent that it necessitates repose. I like this quiet time in New York that allows me to reflect as an individual. City dwellers are forced to make their own lasting –in contrast to the fleeting connections that come from being a member of the crowd—connections. Living in a city necessitates being proactive. For all the city does provide, it doesn't hand you a community. I rarely experience the lack of human connection that Hopper fixated on, because I've found my place here. I feel no less modern for it. This feeling of place changes almost daily, but I think that's what it takes to make this modern city home.

1 comment:

  1. Your post makes me think about the opening of E. B. White's classic essay Here is New York, first published in 1949:

    On any person who desires such queer prizes, New York will bestow the gift of loneliness and the gift of privacy. It is this largess that accounts for the presence within the city's walls of a considerable section of the population; for the residents of Manhattan are to a large extent strangers who have pulled up stakes somewhere and come to town, seeking sanctuary or fulfillment or some greater or lesser grail. The capacity to make such dubious gifts is a mysterious quality of New York. It can destroy an individual, or it can fulfill him, depending a good deal on luck. No one should come to New York to live unless he is willing to be lucky.

    If I were going to illustrate this paragraph, I'd choose a painting by Hopper from the 1920s.

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