Radisson Station
This painting offers an impression of Montreal’s subway, suggesting the logic inherent in travel. Most obviously, subways allow us to traverse large expanses of the city relatively quickly. In making such movement possible, it also changes our sense of the urban space, as illustrated in the diagrammatic subway map.¹ These maps were developed to make traveling the subway easier by simplifying the relationship between the different lines and stations. Because of the need for ease, the subway map no longer corresponds to the actual geography of the city, which, even if necessary, dislocates travels from the space through which they are passing.
The Depressed
That dislocation often seems imprinted on the riders. They seem “depressed,” but may actually be in a kind of suspended animation. I recall this state vividly among the riders of the first subway I used regularly. I was studying in Vienna and had to travel Monday through Thursday from the Thirteenth to the First District. Each morning, I would slide into the packed cars and totter downtown while smashed against several other polyestered, sweating bodies. Even though there was literally no empty space on the train, few people talked; the eerie silence seemed Gothic, feeling deranged or diseased. The sense of being with that many people while avoiding all engagement with them hinted at some sort of mental illness. The behavior was anti-social and suggestive of a defense mechanism against the shear weight of urban life–the horrid abundance of living replete with its innumerable desires and fears that manifested in b.o. We were all moving, but few of us could see it, a blindness aided by the tube’s banality. Indeed, I felt as though imagination had been turned off, as people waited to reach their destination, which shrank the experience of the city to microspheres, spaces the body and, so, mind could reasonably conceive and control. It was like talking to yourself.
Microspheres
Because of these microspheres, I had no sense of the city until a friend drove me back to my apartment after a long night of drinking. I was young, 21, and he, probably twice my age, was drunk, driving the meandering city streets at high speed in his Mercedes while asking me, “Hast du angst!” The city sprawled around us in spokes of impossibly beautiful three or four story buildings. Founded on these spokes, the city was hardwired to its history; no one could alter either the city or its history without a significant act of destruction. Here, one could not simply replace a tower of windows and steel with another tower of windows and steel. Rather, alteration would require a revolution in sensibility, an unimaginable desire to divorce history and tradition from the Viennese identity. The solidity of this geography seemed a tonic against the panic of hyperspeed and hyperspace. It is not a website or Google Earth where one can click to where she wants to be, but instead requires a conscious decision to move elsewhere, transitioning through that journey to a new place. The transition equates roughly, I think, with living. In order to create more efficient movement, the subway removes this experience from one’s understanding of the city and, more significantly, of life.
Of course, the subway helps maintain the integrity of the city and increase safety. If not for the subway lines, streetcar or elevated tracks would eviscerate the city, creating chaotic segments and endangering the lives of pedestrians. To experience such chaos, view old movies of the Chicago streets when they were cluttered with streetcars, wandering pedestrians, and innumerable lines powering the entire malaise. The subway removes some of this chaos from view, allowing us to imagine and experience a more placid city. Even New York, which is often touted as an emblem of chaos, feels quieter when your walking on some of its streets. When walking along 41st Street headed toward Broadway, for example, passing the Irish bars and Italian restaurants, the street seems airy and quaint. I’ve sauntered along this street with a light breeze channeled between the tall buildings tousling my clothes. The street was quiet, and I didn’t feel rushed. Yet when I stepped onto the subway, I felt dejected, as though dropped into somebody’s bad day or waking nightmare: a postmodern experience where meaning is as such and drawn from fragments and interpreted by one’s lonely psyche.
The Loneliness
This loneliness seems etched on the riders’ faces. They gaze without seeing; it’s an odd experience. Some read, or stare at opened books, to resist being or avoid engaging the multitude of stimuli. Others create islands of sense with friends or a partner, huddling into each other. The disjointed nature of the painting was my attempt to represent this aspect of the subway, colors colliding among disjointed objects that are slightly off center and non-mimetic. Yet the subway feels garish and the image seems to reflect that–sheer overabundance.
All this, however, is not to say I don’t appreciate the subway. No doubt, cities would suffer considerably without them. Yet that allowance does not necessarily alter the story subway tell. Pain has settled within those steel cans, and it can be felt and smelt. Notice how the hopeful or well-adjusted try, in a variety of ways, to shield themselves from it. They huddle, read, listen to music. Others, though, give into the anxiety and pain and bellow at the concrete and riveted girders. The experience is to tumble from shock to peace to fear while trying to stay above the tide, breathing at least for another day.
¹An example of a diagrammatic subway map is located here.
An American Scholar 