texts : Stand Clear of the Closing Doors
(Lieven De Boeck (*. LaB)
Entering the
96 Street station, I take the Lexington Avenue local downtown.
The number 6 subway accelerates and rattles, leaving behind
the glowing, cluttered platform upon which I had just stood
along with 54 others. The chestnut, ochre and sienna-coloured
plastic seats all around me are scratched; some burned around
the edges by pocket lighters. The Plexiglas windows are tagged
with marker graffiti. The train enters the 86 Street station.
An electronic C# and C sound before the silver doors hiss
open with automatic jolts. I know that the Metropolitan Museum
looms above ground to my west, somewhere in the sky above
the grimy tiles, cables and earth. But I cannot see the steps
to the museum or the visitors scattered about their Neo-Classical
magnificence, eating sandwiches and sipping from aluminium
cans, while the over-sized draperies announcing the current
exhibition flutter in the wind behind them. I have never been
inside the museum in the middle of the night, to examine the
unfinished portrait of George Washington by the light of the
security system. I have never ran a curious finger freely
across the canvas of Vermeer’s Young Woman with a Water
Pitcher or watched Perseus sling the severed head of Medusa
out through the entrance hall, under the wheels of the 5th
Avenue traffic. I have never been there when the giant copper
crabs positioned about the base of Cleopatra’s Needle
crawl up the obelisk’s shaft and wave their enormous
pinchers at the stars above Central Park’s Great Lawn.
The subway train’s conductor speaks garbled words into
the intercom. No one on the train understands what he says.
As I pass underneath Lennox Hill Hospital, I could not understand
the doctors, speaking in quiet voices, dozens of metres above
my scratched plastic seat. From the shaking metal vacuum of
the number 6 local, I could not feel the patients in the emergency
room, nor could I smell the ethylene and anxiety gliding across
the shiny, buffed and scuffed floors.
The train enters 68th Street station. Hunter College students
press into the cramped interior of the car. There are no longer
any seats available. Anonymous persons stand centimetres away
from me, their arms dangling from the swinging overhead grips.
They do not look me in the eye. I do not look them in the
eye. They cannot hear the doctors.
Lips move, the florescent lights attached to the top of the
cabin illuminate a swarm of teeth. Fragments of conversations
in Spanish, English, Filipino and Hebrew merge like a circulated
fog of syllables that we all breath in and out again. At the
51st Street station, I have no way of seeing The Citicorp
Plaza, and its slanting, triangular apex. I have never once
stood atop that building like a skydiver, watching a rose-coloured
steam leak away into the autumn atmosphere of the Upper East
Side. I have never had the opportunity of actually hearing
this building whisper to the Art Deco gargoyles of the Chrysler
Building, speaking of the winds and the storms and looking
below, comparing the steady stream of 3rd Avenue to a vast,
chromium Nile.
In Mid-Town, the bodies packed into the subway car are humid.
There is a claustrophobic closeness between the jackets, briefcases
and fingernails. A shopping sack presses against my knee.
A cardboard tube, with the word MOMA printed in red letters,
sticks upward from the sack, nearly grazing my cheek as the
train lurches forward into Grand Central Station. People with
names, social security numbers and addresses wearing suit
jackets, baseball caps and high-heeled shoes, race towards
the Times Square shuttle. In all their haste and commotion,
the lock of Walt Whitman’s hair encased in the Public
Library remains still. The concrete lions on the other side
of 42nd Street do not move. Even if I were to turn my head
around and peer through the iron beams lining this mechanised
cave, I would not be able to see the United Nations Building
standing against the East River like a massive, white monolith.
Through all the kilograms of soil and asphalt I could not
smell the air-conditioned corridors, nor could I touch the
cold, Post-Modern sculptures decorating the various lobbies.
I am swishing through the underground, riding a humming current
of light and speed, with no way of being able to answer the
telephone ringing at that very moment on the 84th floor of
the tall, black glass tower looming unseen like an eagle’s
scream tearing across the troposphere.
At 33rd Street there is more room in the subway car. Axel
grease and urine permeate the air. A homeless man shuffles
into the car and asks for everyone’s attention. He holds
a $ 1.00 newspaper up into the air and claims that if he could
only sell one million copies of Street News, he could retire
in happiness. As he comes around with his stack of newspapers
and a worn-out coffee cup jingling with coins, I examine his
bedraggled attire. His shoes are half Air Jordans, half plastic
bags. There are bits of crud in his beard and one of his incisors
is broken off, exposing a discoloured portion of the dentine.
Quietly, I wonder if he is aware of the mini-palaces of Park
Avenue South whizzing by above us? What does he, a man who
sleeps each night in a different shelter, surviving on cheeseburgers
and cups of coffee, think of the frosted glass and polished
brass Valhalla’s racing by, hundreds of yards in the
sky? I consider what distance separates this ragged man from
the corporate lawyer sitting down to his gourmet take-out,
tucked snugly away amid the co-op canyons above? What lies
between the persons I see, pipes, girders, wires, digits and
codes?
Union Square station is busier than 23rd Street. Being so
close to downtown, I can imagine the bookshops and the deli’s
rolling along like subterranean clouds in my mind. The pedestrians
come and go, ascend and descend. Everything pushes and pulls
as an enormous machine with ten million stories floating,
sitting, walking, talking and eating.
Passing Astor Place, Bleecker and Spring Streets…silent
Chinese come and go between Canal Street and City Hall. The
subway rolls on, hissing, becoming less populated, chiming
and jerking along its vascular way towards the Brooklyn Bridge.
I was not there when the Dutch traded with the Indians. I
did not arrive on Ellis Island in 1901. I did not shoot John
Lennon. I did not jump from the burning windows of the World
Trade Centre…
“This is the Lexington Avenue local, transfer for the
four and five, last stops in Manhattan, Wall Street and Bowling
Green.”
Alice Evermore
2003
Entre-deux -
Paul Casaer,
Lieven De Boeck (*.LaB)
Two person exhibition Netwerk Galerij
20/09/03 > 25/10/03