Some thoughts on Figuration and André Forcier’s Film “Coteau Rouge”

(the interview is in French, but the video also shows a few cool pictures of the Coteau Rouge neighborhood)

Things happen, and art often transgresses the clean boundaries that we set up between the realms of our internal conversations regarding the world and that world’s so-called physical presence. The plan was to continue on with a somewhat disciplined approach to Auberbach’s Figura essay (see previous post). That will come later next week. But today, I feel inexplicably compelled to write about Quebec filmmaker André Forcier’s new movie (I haven’t’ seen the movie yet, only a few scenes on youtube, so as usual, it’s a pre-text…).

The baroque neighborhood

Forcier just finished a movie about a street and a neighborhood that I criss-cross everyday. The street, neighborhood and movie share the same name; Coteau Rouge is a scrawny working class neighborhood in Longueuil, on Montreal’s South shore (gratuitous American analogy: a kind of French-speaking Hoboken, New Jersey). Forcier, who owns a house in the neighborhood, says the street’s name was changed to “boulevard Sainte-Foy” (literally, the boulevard of sacred faith) in the 1960’s in an attempt by catholic regents to conjure what they saw as the population’s mischievous paganism (sort of). Today, it’s a baroque mix of old working class houses and a few bland generically-architectured condos. At its south-western extremity, as boulevard Ste-Foy eases into the urban decay of the Taschereau highway leading to the Jacques-Cartier bridge, we find a small “Rôtisserie Benny” outlet which, I suspect, was the one that delivered chicken dinners to the Chénier cell of the FLQ (the guys who kidnapped Pierre Laporte and whose participation in his death is still heatedly debated among conspiracy theorists) during Quebec’s October crisis of 1970. (This last part has nothing to do with Forcier or the movie, by the way).

Beyond subjective enjoyment…

From what I was able to gather, the movie (set to be released early september in Quebec, after its participation in Montreal’s pathetic little film festival)) is about gentrification. About a douchebag promoter destroying the spirit of the neighborhood. In the interview, Forcier talks about the “poetry” and “patrimonial value” of the working class houses. In a very real and uncanny way, the entire project strikes me as related to what Auerbach was tackling with Figura. Obviously, today, the question of the “spirit” of a beat down house or neighborhood is a matter of taste, as we say. Most of the time,  when critics write about Art, or what’s left of it in the public sphere, they focus on its “cultural heritage”, where culture generally means the symbolic expression and transmission of universal and “ahistorical” values like love, honor, courage, freedom, innovation, identity, etc. That’s not to say that the vehicles through which we consume these  ideals are of no interest to them; but my impression is that most culturally educated people feel the general population is too stupid – and its attention span too meager – to withstand a long explanation about how the material conditions in which art is produced have a modifying effect on the ideas that are communicated through the artistic medium. I know a few people with Ph.Ds who don’t get it either, for that matter. After years of not writing about this stuff, most people, no matter how many degrees they own, forget. But, as I said, the physical presence of art still makes sense: Hedge-fund administrators have wet dreams involving the physical artifacts that re-present those universally static values. Western culture is made up of solid silos, and most of them are dichotomized: High/Popular culture; Progressive/conservative, Religious/Atheist, Philosophy/Aesthetics; Physical/Spiritual, Excitingly Urban/Ordinarily Suburban, Form/Content, etc. The silos live on, like neighbors who never ackowledge each other’s presence. The people who “enjoy” working class houses have the right to do their thing, etc., as much as those who “prefer”  asceptic gated-community brands of architecture are equally legitimized in their own righteous preference. Variety is the spice of life (in French, we say “tous les goûts sont dans la nature” – something like “all tastes can be found in nature”), and all that stuff. What’s striking about this is how Art has become such a subjective issue; subjective in the sense of an individual human subject’s “judgment/taste/appreciation” becoming the sole conclusion to any appreciation of an artistic performance.

Symbolic fallacies…

Faced with a house in Coteau rouge, there are those who see the creative freedom of working class people finding solace and a haven from their alieaned lives working minimum wage at Tim Horton’s. And then, there are those who see desolation, filth, and a lazy unwillingness to improve one’s situation. In both cases, the house plays an essentially passive role, a symbolic role, where the “physical, graspable” reference is also the least important, least meaningful element in the semiotic equation. Forcier does the same thing when he talks about the “patrimonial” (fatherly, divinely spirited ?) value of the houses. In this mindset, a house is never really just a house. In fact the house’s “houseness” is barely something that requires consideration. Of course, many of the smart analysts who take time to write about one of these houses will try to hide this fact; they’ll spend time describing the infinite details of the house and its occupants, analysing their “material presence”, etc. And yet, in order for these “material details” to make any sense, they inevitably need to point back to a symbolic order (Marxist or Poststructuralist or Postmodern theory, the discourses of bourgeois aesthetics or technological evolution, etc.) that transcends the prosaic realm of empirical reality. This order imposes one of two options: 1) the houses must be destroyed in the name of economic growth, etc. 2) they must be preserved as static symbols of the past’s “patrimonial” presence. The notion of the houses actually following the complex paths cleared by their occupants – wherever those paths may lead – seems to have no place in this equation.

In his book, Auerbach shows how the notion of Figura differs from our usual concept of symbolism. In Figura, the “houseness” of the house is the central element or “aspect” (I don’t mean it in the sense of eidos, but hey, my pathetic knowledge of ancient Greek being what it is, I’m open to suggestions), ; it will always remain at the forefront of any interpretation of the house’s “meaning”. For the Fathers of the Church who used the notion of figura in the first millenium AD to establish the iron-clad tenets of Christianity, the bodies and empirical objects of the human world were invested with divine spirit; any interpretation of God’s Will required a thorough analysis of the physical world and its historical mutation. Jesus was killed in the flesh, and God was more than just an idea, more than a “spiritual” or symbolic interpretation; his power was graspable in the basic objects and tools manipulated by the illiterate mass of followers. Although understanding God’s presence in this physical world obviously required a “spiritual interpretation” (intellectus spiritualis), discussing this spirit as an autonomous and abstract entity was considered a grave and arrogant mistake, to say the least.

This is something I’m reminded of when I read about how people interpret the houses in Coteau Rouge. I’d like there to be a way of appreciating the spirit of the neighborhood without falling into old-left nostalgia. I’d like to be able to describe my interpretation of Coteau Rouge the same way I might describe my reading of a Neal Stephenson novel. We all agree that the houses are signs. Some may refuse to acknowledge any spirit in these signs. They are mistaken, that much I know. For some others, the issue is: what do these signs mean ? This is also a mistake. The real questions are: “How do they mean ?” and “What new possibilities do they allow us to imagine ?”. This is why I chose to get back to Auerbach, to Figura. I will continue to write about this next week…

Thanks for taking the time to read this.