The Balloons and Spaceships of Paris
The Eiffel Tower & 'Paris Syndrome'
Another Monday, another reflection on what the opening of the Eiffel Tower really meant for contemporary art.
It's difficult to overstate the way that I will never look at this symbol of modern Paris in the same way. And yet it seems that the more that I look at it, the more interesting and important that it seems to become.
The more that I try to understand the historical moment that created it, the more that this seems to hold the key to so much that we now take for granted in the sphere of modern art — in the Western world at least.
The marketing of the tower as something that is somehow a symbol of romantic love, creates a schism between Paris as an idea, and Paris in reality. It was, afterall built as a symbol of factory production and the machine age, not love. This type of disjuncture arguably entirely explains the phenomenon of the infamous Paris Syndrome.
The reality of Paris is so different from the lore of Paris, that it can be damaging to one's mental health.
"...I detest this Tower..."
At the time of its construction, the Eiffel tower was also considered the very antithesis of art and romance.
The French writer Guy de Maupassant (1850 – 1893) reportedly ate lunch in the Eiffel Tower's restaurant every day for years after its opening—not because he loved the tower, but because, as the story goes, it was the only place in Paris where he could sit and not have to look at the tower itself.
Yet the Eiffel Tower is also so much more than an eyesore and a marketing accomplishment. It is also a piece of technology that radically changed Europeans' ways of seeing, forever.
As the tallest structure that the world had ever seen up to that point, the Eiffel Tower gifted Parisians with a newly accessible bird's eye view of earth that had previously only been available to those who were wealthy enough to be able to afford a jaunt in a hot air balloon.
For, up until 1899, the view of Paris from an aerial viewpoint had indeed only been available, via expensive balloon rides, to a select few from the wealthy leisure classes.
Up, Up and Away...
The world's first successful hot air balloon voyage had actually also taken place in Paris, more than 100 years before the opening of the Eiffel Tower in 1783, but even by 1899, at the tower's opening, this was still not an experience that most normal Parisians could afford.
Nonetheless, this idea of human flight had captured people’s imaginations. Even if they couldn't experience it for themselves, people were fascinated by this idea of flying, of the possibility of seeing the earth from above.
Images of the city from above —in the form of paintings, illustrations and even (thanks to the enigmatic Nadar), photography— sold like hot cakes.
"Nadar": Gaspard-Félix Tournachon (5 April 1820 – 20 March 1910)
The aerial view was a symbol of technological progress and ingenuity, and for most people, it was an immense a source of wonder. The view from the sky was a perspective that symbolised a triumph of Man over Nature, it was a symbol of the perfectibility of human progress and the Enlightenment, and it marked The Death of God.
The Eiffel Tower democratised this miraculous view.
It revealed a view of the city from above that had never been seen by Parisians before.
The Sky's The Limit...
When the Eiffel Tower opened its viewing platforms to the wider public in 1889, suddenly this view of urban space, of Paris, was visible from 276 metres above the ground. This was a height from which a human being below would appear to be approximately 0.6% of their actual size. It was a height from which the city unfolded in unison for the first time, like a dynamic and vibrant patchwork quilt.
The opening of the Eiffel Tower enabled the average person to see their fellow humans from a vantage point where they appeared to be only half a percent of their actual size. Moreover, the city of Paris unfolded before them in an unprecedented and dynamic panorama, forever altering the way Parisians perceived their city.
The once divided Paris was seen, for the first time, as a unified entity.
For us today, it's challenging to imagine not having an aerial view of our cities. Most of us have experienced this perspective countless times when our routine airplane flights prepare to land.
To truly appreciate the novelty and transformative impact of this viewpoint, I recall academic readings from media studies and ecocriticism. These texts highlighted the profound shift in human consciousness that occurred with the advent of space exploration and the distribution of the most dramatic photographs of Earth taken from space.
The Pale Blue Dot...
The most renowned among these images was captured by the Voyager 1 spacecraft from a staggering distance of over 6 billion kilometers in February 1990. This image inspired the phrase "pale blue dot," famously used by Carl Sagan to describe our planet Earth.
NASA's Remastered image: Voyager I pictured Earth as "a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam"
The depiction of Earth as a minuscule blue speck amidst the immense expanse of space underscored the planet's fragility and invaluable nature.
From the perspective of an observer situated among the stars, gazing upon Earth from a distance of over 6 billion kilometers, the borders and national boundaries that seemed so vital to those standing on the planet's surface appeared utterly inconsequential and trivial in the infinite void of space.
It’s an experience that astronauts, as human beings, could likely never fully express in language.
The author Frank White tried to account for this phenomenon experienced by astronauts, by coining the phrase “The Overview Effect.”
The idea of The Overview Effect for White, seeks to convey the fact, that from such a distance, there is a complete shift in how humans can imagine ourselves in relationship to one another.
Carl Sagan’s poetic commentary at the time also solidified this understanding in the way that his words crystallised the fact that everything we have ever known, all of our human history, all of our experiences, all of our wars and love affairs and prophecies, have all occurred on this tiny speck of dust in the photograph.
"To See the World in A Grain of Sand..."
This shift in perspective can also be understood to be one that is less anthropocentric, or human-centred, because The Overview Effect allows for a point of view that sees all of the earth’s life as unified, on the head of a pin, as it were.
And indeed in the 1990s, the Overview Effect, arguably helped to provoke a greater awareness of environmental issues. This beautiful and tiny image of our planet helped to catalyse the idea of a shared destiny, of the idea of humans as caretakers of our precious home, and the image enabled more widespread discussion of global issues that might affect the fragility of life in this vast universe.
It catalysed and enabled a more planet-centred view, quite literally.
A Tower of Babel Made of Iron...
A century earlier, the panorama from the summit of the Eiffel Tower had offered a somewhat analogous experience to this elusive "Overview Effect," as much as could be feasible in 18th century France.
However, instead of a planet-focused perspective emerging from a viewpoint among the stars, it was a city-focused perspective that was born, this time from the panoramic viewing platform of a vertical bridge.
This viewing platform of the Eiffel Tower was one step closer to infinity, it was heretical, it was an industrially manufactured Tower of Babel.
Seeing the city from 100s of metres in the sky was new, and exciting, and the real epitome of high-tech at the time, a time in which the Wright brothers still had not managed to get their iron bird into the sky.
This new vista of the city from above, this Overview that could be experienced and immersed into in real time, was one that caused great excitement.
It stimulated the intellectual curiosity of the people at the time with respect to what scientific progress, and Enlightenment rationality could reshape the world into. What mysteries could these new Gods of empirical science and industrial technology reveal, what could they allow the Western mind to understand for the first time?
This was at a time of seeming innocence, before WWII would fully reveal what industrial technology was capable of, in all its barbarism.
In 1889, the ordinary Parisian could observe how the city that they called home formed a tapestry across all of its various neighbourhoods.
From a view on high, it was possible to see how the city flowed from one arrondissement to the next, how one stately building related to all of the others in its hinterlands, or to the city as a whole.
Of infinite Details and Grand Designs...
The Tower allowed for a new understanding of the city’s scale and grandeur, which, perhaps inevitably, provoked a sense of pride during a time in which France’s ego was rather bruised after losing the war with Prussia.
From an elevated perspective, the merging of the city into the surrounding riverbanks, fields, and natural spaces around Paris was evident. The city centre was dotted with pockets of greenery, creating a visual blend of urban and natural elements. From above it was obvious that there was a natural world interwoven with all of the urban constructs, smokestacks, and city grime.
This interplay between the organic and the synthetic, the grand and the minute, was eloquently captured by Marcel Proust shortly after the Tower’s opening:
”From the heights of the Eiffel tower, Paris unfolds like a delicate tapestry, each thread a street, each knot a life and one cannot help but feel both immense and insignificant in the face of such a panorama.”
Proust's words echo elements of Frank White's Overview Effect. In this fresh perspective of the city from above, observers were confronted with the staggering reality of the populous city. They saw countless individuals, each appearing less than half a percent of their actual size from this height, living out their lives in the patchwork quilt metropolis below them.
The Vertical Bridge Between Earth & Sky...
For weeks, I've been contemplating the influence of technology on contemporary art as it emerged in the early 20th century. There's a common tendency among Europeans to perceive and interpret the world as if they hold a God's eye view, a perspective that's deeply embedded in our history of art.
This understanding gives rise to more questions, about how technology has reshaped and influenced the European God's Eye view.
Technology is what enabled Nadar to take the first aerial photos in 1858 using a hot air balloon, and indeed it is what enables photos in the first place.
Technology is what enables The Overview Effect, via which humans seem to realise their collective nature. But it also creates the God's Eye View of colonialism.
How is this different to the affective and embodied experience of the astronaut's gaze? Is the astronaut's gaze a colon-eyes-ers one in disguise?
Our technology not only enables these experiences but also generates and represents them, thereby reshaping our perception of ourselves and our environment in the process.
The Eiffel Tower, an emblem of Paris, and the viewing or 'overviewing' Eye it symbolizes at the onset of the 20th century, provides a interesting entry-point into the emergence of contemporary art in Paris during the early 1900s.
Man With A Guitar, Braque (1911)
At a historical moment in which the literal perspective of Paris was being shifted forever, Picasso and his Braque began to conceptually explore this question of the single-point-perspective and the history of visual representation.
They tried to depict objects from multiple angles at once, to shatter this single point of view, to completely reject the way that space would appear on canvas, and also to do so, in large part, by plundering representational forms from the colonies, without attribution.
As the point of view of Paris very literally changed, the artists of Montmartre were moving visual expression from a very representational style to a far more conceptual one.
This makes me wonder, in fact, if it is not worth re-visiting this Exposition Universelle in Paris of 1889 that gave rise to what we all now know as the Eiffel Tower.
Perhaps in the next instalment, we can dwell on what the Exhibition as to teach us about our Western-eyed world, which, much like the art world, which has been shaped by technology and convention?
For the exhibition, like the artwork, like the telescope and like the microscope is, after all, above all else “Organised for the View.”