zagreb abstract

THE HIDDEN MANUSKRIPT OF THE CITY
The relentless, fluctuating forces underlying urban life leave existential
traces both elusive and unstable. This is a subject to have inspired many
writers, from theoreticians like Simmel, who tends to see the metropolis as
an imprint of individual or collective spiritual life, to Marshall Berman.
In stating that ‘it is not possible to step into the same modernism twice‘,
Berman stresses both the dynamics of the general theoretical discourse
and the individual histories comprising the vast mechanism that makes up
the city. This distinction or chasm between the private and the public is a
function of the modernizing effects of constant building and destruction:
a fundamental, performative function of the city. The chasm establishes
a modernist aesthetic of resistance to the contemporary mill of change.
One of the most beautiful and unusual dedications to the city is that of
Allen Ginsberg, on Ghetto Defendant by The Clash: ‘Do the worm on Acropolis.
Slamdance Cosmopolis. Enlighten the populace. Hungry darkness of living.
Who will thirst in the pit? Hooked in necropolis. She spent a lifetime
deciding. How to run from it. Addicts of metropolis...‘ Ginsberg is referring
here to the complexity of relations between the individual and the public,
whilst hinting at the disappearance of the intimate from the modern urban
landscape.
From the theoretical anticipation of the ‘global village’, the global city
formed itself as a place in a perpetual state of ubiquitous exposure. On one
side of the theory, theoreticians and poets strive to stand out from the
torment of the General. In this context, for the ordinary citizen in the
metropolis, the possibility for personal recording reveals itself through
small strokes: graffiti, a spontaneous intervention, scribble, clusters of
historical layers of communication and similar remnants of modernization
and its vicissitudes. That is what Marian Detoni saw in his ‘Fantasy of the
Deteriorated Wall‘, when he created a surface, seemingly without any real
significance, which offers an intimate, self-realizing universe to the
attentive and inspired eye. In such a way, one of the most important paintings
in Croatian modern art was conceived.
This book aims to capture the hidden manuscript of the city - that which
is present in unseen urban spaces, either left there intentionally or
spontaneously created over time. Contrary to the grandiose, representative
portrayals of the city, often hidden in ideologies presenting the city as a
platform of collectivism, this book offers an intimate micro-image of the
metropolis, elevating the ephemeral and seemingly worthless to the level of
the General. It is about the spontaneity of mass culture, and as such it does
not seek to engage at the spectacular, ideological level of the representative
culture. Rather, the book operates at a capillary level, tracing
personal ideas and emotional pictures, almost a psychogram of the city, the
less visible city; a Zagreb which reveals itself as unfamiliar or previously
unseen.
Feđa Vukić