City Light

In 1935, at the behest of his New York colleagues, Walter Benjamin set out to synopsize his famously unfinished epic, The Arcades Project. The resulting precis, "Paris, the Capital of the Nineteenth Century," offered a preview of the critic's Herculean attempt to compile all the various majorae and minutiae that gave rise to his own historical moment as revealed in that central symptom: Paris. I don't particularly like the idea that New York is the center of the universe; it bothers people who don't live here even more. But like Paris in the nineteenth century, New York is (was) the capital of the twentieth century with respect to certain ideas, objects, and symbols commonly synonymous with triumphant capitalism: not only skyscrapers and automobiles, televisions and telephones, but AbEx painting, Pop art, Minimalism, even postmodernism.

The British-born artist Paul Etienne Lincoln has been living and working in New York since 1986; still, at least on the face of it, he seems a little out of the swim in the art capital of the twentieth century. Not your typical sympathy case--the artist who's older, old-fashioned, naive, or hopelessly provincial--Lincoln is nonetheless difficult to think about in terms of currently fashionable contexts and tools. While he's enjoyed several major gallery shows and produced exciting, serious, original work for more than twenty years, his clippings amount to a thin little bundle. In fact Lincoln has received less attention from art critics than from popular journalists, who marvel at the technical complexity of his work but even more at the wackiness of it, the paradoxical purposelessness of his labor-intensive endeavors. The artist understandably would prefer not to be written about as a mad inventor, hair askew and eyes focused on some distant beaker, but pity the poor newspaperman. Lincoln's odd, obsessive w ork does call to mind antiquated scientific experiments, making him a rather unlikely observer of our condition at the threshold of the new millennium.

NINE A.M.: A phone rings, somewhere in Brooklyn. Behind it, four electrostatic generators use LP records to create electrical charges, then store the energy in Leyden jars. The records are carried down from the Public Library on Fifth Avenue and Forty-second Street each morning in a fur-lined case (fur and vinyl produce static electricity when rubbed together--a specialized fetish to be sure). Each disc features a collection of a different type of sound, indexed chronologically: vanished natural and industrial noises (extinct songbirds, outmoded car engines); A- and B-side popular songs about the city; ill-fated political speeches; high-and low-register vocal performances from the Met. These recordings will eventually serve as the sound track for a sixty-hour film documenting the only performance of Lincoln's current project, New York-New York, 1986-.

In its delirious complexity, Lincoln's magnum-opus-in-progress gives Benjamin's encyclopedic ambition a run for its money. Generally speaking, the artist's work divides into two categories: small aesthetic amuse-bouches and large-scale, labyrinthine cosmologies. Belonging to the former group is Ginsmaid,(C) 1990, a labor-saving device--or parody of one--that dispenses the perfect gin and tonic when activated by pressing an image of '4os British movie star Vera Lynn (cockney rhyming slang for the liquor itself). Although not as overtly useless as many of his pieces, Ginsmaid, like all of Lincoln's work, combines the utilitarian and the effete, labor and luxury, to strange effect. New York--New York, which raises production (industrial age--style) to new artistic heights, falls decidedly in the expansive camp. Once the ringing phone triggers the four record generators, the accumulated electricity lights up two long strings of twelve glass coils that frame a reflecting pool about forty feet long. This light, en ergy made visible, sets off a pair of large machine towers-New York (Hot) and New York (Cold)--which are the heart of the work.

New York (Hot) is essentially a big brass boiler that functions as a barrel organ, playing John Philip Sousa's "Stars and Stripes Forever" at excruciatingly slow speed over the work's sixty-hour run. Composed with references to all sorts of machines (Charles Babbage's difference engine, for one), it operates via a system of slide valves that open and close, transferring steam to an arrangement of eighty-six brass 1935 Buick car horns, each tuned to a different note. (Lincoln read somewhere that dinosaurs made sounds not unlike those of a '35 Buick horn; one can imagine the klaxons groaning like a similarly extinct brontosaurus herd.) New York (Cold) is made of aluminum, a chilly, futuristic contrast to the warm, antique-y brass. Each hour, the water it receives from the pool freezes, producing an icy impression of a single five-dollar bond note minutely etched with the score of the Sousa march. The bond then floats down the reflecting pool, where it melts. The element connecting these hot and cold machines i s a hugely enlarged integrated circuit (a copy of the first one made in the United States), which feeds them alternately. When New York (Cold) issues its frozen certificate, it completes the circuit, lighting up the glass coils on their course back to the telephone, and begins another round. Throughout, temperature and production readings are taken and punched into a ticker-tape machine. And there you have a primitive sketch of the workings of New York-New York, minus its ten compressors, pigeon timer, cloud chamber, tailor-made transfer gramophones, accompanying book and record editions, and, of course, drawings.