Near New York's Times Square, wrapped digitally around the entire second story of a building, is a giant video screen depicting the walking legs of a crowd. Although this is not an intended as a piece of art, strictly speaking, its illustration of city-ness is perfect and it is remarkably beautiful. Slowly, the newly renovated 42nd Street has become an outdoor mall, with elements of art gallery and part amusement park.

Narratively speaking, city people and country folk are still depicted as separate stereotypical entities even though there is a tendency now to blur the distinction. This becomes noticeable when you say hello on the streets of a small town and receive friendly acknowledgement in return. Compare this to the indifference one meets big city where you naturally are required to keep to yourself. This difference is well illustrated to humorous effect in the scene from Crocodile Dundee when Paul Hogan ambles up New York's Fifth Avenue and nods an amiable "G'day" to each and every (confused) passerby. This certainly takes the piss out of New Yorkers. But this stereotyping veils a deeper suspicion of the crowd and if the crowd represents city-dom, the whole of modernity is held up for scrutiny. Following on from this, if the city was also the mother of modern art, then all those precepts come into doubt as well. So this myths leads to a suburban/urban divide.

In film and television there are many known crowd scenes that usually function as establishing shots to tales of iniquity from the mean streets of Metropolis. They immediately indicate to the viewer the sophistication and/or callousness of individuals as they negotiate their place in the group. These ubiquitous scenes have prepared us for more intensive investigation by artists using the same trope but to different ends. Like much of his recent work, Beat Streuli's main piece, Pallasades 2001, at Arcadia's Gallery, presents the crowd for examination. Shot from a safe distance in Birmingham, England using a telephoto lens, one can easily become immersed watching it without fear of contact. This is not voyeurism per se but simple people watching writ large. A two-channel video projected into a corner of the gallery, this piece is comprised of a 45 minute loop that presents a slow waterfall of individuals moving forward en masse at the viewer. They bob slowly as they walk on. As hundreds of faces appear, the viewer attempts to identify with each person behind their respective public expression of serious intent. Occasionally a massive pedestrian crosses sideways and blocks the view of the onrushing crowd. Once or twice we witness a conversation or shared smiles. It almost breaks the mood of the solemn procession. Even with all this closeness, we enjoy watching without fear of communing. There is an empathy that is disturbing and an ambivalent pull to stay apart. It is significant that these works are recorded in cities all over the world thus giving further credence to the general notion of one world, the so-called Global Village. Odd how this phrase is not used as much these days. However, it is reassuring that Pallasades delivers an incredible human warmth while simultaneously keeping its distance.

Looking at the life of the crowd summons up Baudelaire¹s flanéur and there is a temptation to make a case that the whole world has now become an extention of 19th century Paris. Walter Benjamin traces this phenomenon back from Baulelaire's city-phile to Edgar Allan Poe's tale, "A Man of the Crowd," which describes a strange creature who gorges visually on the crowd. This was the prototype for the original flanéur. So was Poe the first to notice the marked deviance of the city person in early 19th century London (where the story takes place)? It must also be significant that Poe is credited for inventing detective fiction of which "A Man in the Crowd" is an early example. His gift for the poetic horror genre also indicates an obsession with the deeply psychological, which predates much other modern fiction and relates to our conception of the city as a dark place full of danger.

The chief attribute of the flaneur of Baudelaire is that he prized anonymity while being at home in the crowd the same way we crave community (in theory) yet coddle our respective egos. His hangout, the Parisian arcades, so acutely investigated by Walter Benjamin, doesn¹t equate exactly with our malls but they certainly were a hint of what was to come. Malls owe their existence to the corporate consumer culture rather than the French Bourgeoisie but they have similarly brought the outside in and given us a "city" promenade with a roof. This comparison is convenient. And even though the original flanéur died out with the era, there have been facsimiles since then and in our day. His closest relative recently has got to be Andy Warhol but it seems that era has faded as well. Mall Rats don't seem to have the same resonance.

Also relevant are the simple lessons from Baudelaire that the center of life is seen in the everyday detail rather than in the remarkable. And so with the details seen in Strueli's work. A so-called mundane street scene is full of logos and cell phones and headsets. In the end, this technological accoutrements illustrated here and otherwise used for enlightenment bring us no closer to each other. In fact, on the street, it changes nothing, certainly for the participant. Although we are the watcher in this case, we are participant also. Streuli is representing the Urban and merging all these myriad faces into one public face. This presents us all as a global personification of humanity. Much art today is concerned with the identification of the city and its inhabitants in order to define the present. But what of the Suburban element which is neither rural or urban? Think McMansion and Gregory Crewdson. Here it is perhaps the crowd vs the individual voice or more specifically the Mall vs the Street. However, a pull away from the crowd is exemplified by the cell phone phenomenon in both cases. They are used in order to be alone in a crowd or at least completely at home in public. They are now used to verbally describe minutiae within every itinerary. We over hear the ubiquitous, "I'm on the train now," or "I'm stuck in traffic." The phones are used in close quarters in crowds at parks or baseball games exactly like their walkie talkie military predecessors. And now complete with digital cameras, cell phones can document visually every banal activity with extensive detail. The aural and visual are thrown together in mass trivia. Baudelaire would balk at this as he watched everybody out the window of a Parisian Starbucks. Is this
continual communication link-up a resistance to being where you are in a given moment and a resistance to sinking incognito into the crowd or is it simply another example of following the "crowd"?

-James Rosenthal, May, 2003