Neo-Romanticism was partly created by Philadelphia’s architecture. What this means,
in practice, is that all of us, especially Abby and I, were subconsciously
attuned to the architectural level of Philadelphia as a city, and had spaces in
our brains geared to create art out of processes of absorption, both by osmosis
and in our conscious appreciation of what in Philadelphia architecture is
sublime. As to Neo-Romanticism being, in a generalized way, about the spectral,
the haunting/haunted, or the apparitional— Philadelphia architecture, from City
Hall to the PMA to (even) the Liberty Place Towers and the PSFS Building in
Center City, not to mention the houses and row-homes in West Philly and Fayette
Street in Conshohocken, all have a sense of being channeled from an ethereal
place, where elaborate maze-like structures wind into unexpected corners and
something (a specter, an apparition) is always hiding in the maze of the
buildings which you did not notice before. Neo-Romanticism channels and refines
the same energies, as imposed on us by the architecture, which also has to do,
as Neo-Romanticism does, with multiple meanings and complexity. As a work of
architecture, what PhiladelphiaCity Hall (or PMA, or Fayette Street)
means can never be pinpointed simply or briefly. Complications in architectural
exegesis lead to other complications, issues create and develop other issues,
and the whole process Neo-Romanticism channels is an infinite string of
tangents, beginning with the work of art out of the architecture. The tangents,
which express these multiple meanings, can also be thought of as specters or
apparitions. The development of perceptive powers, in these Philadelphia
contexts, also require an acknowledgement of the omnipresence of phenomenology
as an issue— what is inside and outside of our minds, and what is the nature of
raw consciousness itself. Philadelphia
architecture, and Neo-Romanticism, do not give perceptive viewers the option of
closing interpretive vistas with simplicity and singularity that much.
Because
our work was in many ways channeled from a city’s architecture, which can
signify (among other things) a past, or the past, Neo-Romanticism’s relation to
temporality, and how aesthetic pasts may impinge upon the present, is a complex
tangent as usual. Because English Romanticism and French Neo-Classicism loom large for us,
complicating the summons to action from Philadelphia’s varied, often baroque
architecture, as we have created our body of work, we have worked out of weird
temporality, or kinds of “time warps” (leading, it must be said, to some Rocky
Horror-ish reactions to our work), which make the past an apparitional issue
which creates tangents out of us and our endeavors. The phenomenological
reaction to temporality— how our consciousness registers time passing, or not
passing— is thus steeped in a Solid World sense that engagement with the
aesthetic creates universes and dimensions in which new kinds of temporality
may be experienced; and this sense, of odd time dimensions, is right there in
the Philly streets (and in Conshohocken), as receptive psyches are imposed on
by buildings which still emanate their own levels of consciousness, of
being-in-the-world. The meaning of space, and a sense of phenomenological
engagement which registers that space inside and outside of the mind offer
opportunities for mirroring or “mirrored” situations to develop, makes it so
that Neo-Romanticism has many levels of richness built into it from being hewn
out of something already Solid. Do cities with the best architecture often
produce the best art? Whatever brain space we worked out of, with Romanticism
and Neo-Classicism bargaining a deal with architectural Philadelphia, and also
with a good amount of general engagement with recent developments in the
art-world (and I include under the “art” aegis literature as well), we began a
process of creating for whatever audience was there the spectral, apparitional
world which was demanded of us, and with inhering all the multiple meanings and
tangential significations possible. That, I will assert, was always what was
waiting to develop as serious art in Philadelphia,
if it bothered to happen, which it now has. If some audiences used to
singularity are wondering why we, as the Neo-Romantics, are so defiantly
multiple all the time, now you know the reason: our architecture did this to
us. An artist who is not susceptible to be imposed on by the sublime, when and
where it exists, is not an artist. Architectural Philadelphia has been looking for apt
conduits for a hundred years to answer its siren call, and we just happened to
be there. The larger question remains: once other cities and art-worlds have
stepped into the maze, grasped the spectral and the apparitional, gleaned the
right multiple meanings, what will the world then bother to make of us, and us
of them?
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