Leisureland

With its origins in Thorstein Veblen’s culture of display, modern leisure remains conspicuous even as our consumption of it has grown wary. The leisure industry struggles with its related, less organised, more pathological forms: unemployment, torpor, vandalism, addiction. At Casinos, punters can access counseling as well as ATM’s.

The fantastic diversity of commodified leisure experiences, each with its own grammar of peril and reward, operates in a complex time frame that matches, and perhaps compensates for the gradual replacement of ‘careers’ by flexible employment. In an uncertain market, leisure is something we work at, calibrating our pleasures to cardio-vascular health and the management of stress, to self-improving spectacles and improved spectacles of the self.

In Rock Climbing Gym, 1999, a group tackle a reiterated diorama. It is a simulation excerpted from the triumphalist practises of alpinism, yet one deprived of a summit. This psychodrama finds its pleasures elsewhere. The rocky complexity of the cliff face is re-cast in the familiar multi-coloured coding of highlighters and post-it notes, sourcing its aesthetics in the office and its metaphors in corporate climbing.

The climbing gym is the revenge of motivational rhetoric upon a landscape indifferent to the life-goals of the aspirational body. At leisure, we favour immersion in simulated landscapes that stay focussed on us.

The Blue Mountains too are experienced as an artificial panorama, doubly framed though the camera and the struts of the Scenic Skyway, 1998 as it scrolls across the horizon. Leisureland is a repository of obsolete utopian transports, a recognition of its beginnings in the World Fairs and Expositions of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; each with their vision of a future cosmopolis serviced by fun people-movers. Relocated from zones of speculative urbanism to Katoomba, among other mountain resorts, the Skyway retains memories of its past. When the operator playfully (and routinely) swings the carriage, eliciting squeals from the young and sour adrenaline from the old, we recall elevator pioneer Elisha Otis at New York’s Crystal Palace in 1853, slashing the cable that held him aloft above the crowd. Nothing happened, safety mechanisms precluded disaster, inaugurating the anti-climax as theatrical triumph.

One hundred and five years later the Scenic Skyway opens, spanning 350 meters above a perilously deep gorge. It too routinely cheats death, yet in a context of mounting anxiety. It is, after all, avowedly scenic, a tautology the photograph reveals by occupying the same field of vision. Zahalka’s image does not dwell on the abysmal depth beneath the carriage. Rather we see the machine at work, instrumentalising visuality, extracting spectacle from a landscape whose exhaustion is announced by the very mechanism that value-adds its topography through vertigo. The trip activates the vista but precludes its proper operation through unrelated thrills. In its seven minute transit through a terminated sublime, the skyway acts as a heritage plaque, so valued in leisure for its ability to condense and privatise history to the dimensions of the viewer’s body. On this spot, it announces, people experienced wonder.

Imax, 1999 suggests a related form of spectacle along the lines of the cartographer’s fantasy, a map on the scale of 1:1. The gigantic screen returns cinema to its beginnings as attraction, and landscape to its enchantment in the cult of immensity. Imax, the name blurring monstrous egotism with physical distortion, is a perceptual game played on the peripheries of vision. On a screen this vast, the edges are lost, the spectator is immersed and begins to lean into the pitch and yaw of the camera. Before the show, the audience is given a warning (that is also a coy promise) about possible nausea, a pleasure avidly pursued since the advent of the carousel.

The photograph cuts across the dynamics of this solitary immersion, re-positioning the frame to incorporate the equally gigantic, eye-shaped audience. The whole resembling a diagram of vision in which the world, pixilated by receptors, awaits some future moment of integration.

The englobed completeness of what we see at Imax is of course a projection onto a screen which, if it were to magically disappear, would reveal the real-time spectacle of Darling Harbour. In a building shaped like an eye and sited on expensive foreshore land, Imax’s audacious blindness to its own spectacular view is a testament to the premium we place on simulations. But maybe our queasy delight in those gigantic immersive landscapes is tied to that other obscured scene. On the screen, we see multiple frames from the valley of the kings, an uninhabited desert projected over the unseen harbour, unmaking its familiar geography, its architecture, its division into titled lots. In leisure, we return the city to a dream of pure potential.

If Imax draws a line between its spectacle and those who consume it, Star City Casino, 1998 mixes it up. This is a crowd picture, a witty paraphrase of Breughel, but drained of sociality. The photograph is too distant to invest in the drama we associate with gambling. Instead, it shows us flow patterns, intensities of light and space. It holds us tensely in that moment of first impression, holds us longer than any gambler could sustain, forces us to parse this room.

We look down and across the floor. Zahalka shoots from the vault, the airy domain of the initial gasp. There is so much room, but the meanings up here are thin. The real action is scripted at waist level. The usual features are in evidence — the casino equivalent of the Palladian order — no clocks, mechanical or organic; discreet surveillance orbs; the tables laid out labyrinth style. Rumours circulate here, secret corners where machines are wildly generous, dealers who bear a curse. Like the breathtaking tack that junks up the room, these stories attest to the existence of holes in the system, anomalies in the house’s grasp of mathematical probability. This is encouraged; it is the stuff of hope.

You can hear this floor, not conversation, the room is too big for that, but the drone of leisure spiked with panic. In the middle of this climate-controlled anxiety rises a mesa, a secure totem, rock solid amid shifting fortunes.

In leisure, we enjoy the familiar in unfamiliar circumstances and vice versa. The trottoir roulant, a mechanised footpath, 3.5 kilometers of moving track, with three speeds, makes its debut at the Paris Exposition of 1900. Its dream of fatigue-free-urban mobility goes nowhere except Leisureland, specifically Oceanworld, 1999, where it enables a form of underwater flaneurie. Beneath the surface, the strollers encounter a shark, but also anamorphotic effects that disperse their reflections along the skin of the tube and into the water itself. Although this is a tourism of impossible space, the multiple distorting effects, the gaze directed at more colorful, more powerful doubles, place us in a reassuringly habitual domain. We shop like this too, mirrored beyond recognition, and encouraged to identify with improbable representations. Even the arched shape of the tube pays its debt to the arcade, those nineteenth-century test labs of the mesmerising effects of commodities under glass.

In Mall de Mer, we can browse for spectacle beneath the waves.

If Oceanworld offers the comfortable occupation of impossible space, Madam Tussaud’s Wax Museum, 1998 counters with a tourism of illegal proximity and permissible stalking. The fan at the wax museum tests the outer limits of auratic celebrity. At Tussaud’s we claim the acquaintance of the famous as well as measure the capacity of wax to conduct charismatic presence. We mingle among mannequins who are in a bind, ideally they hold us in a thrall, yet we cannot resist an improper caress.

Zahalka’s image contains within it a family posed for another photographer whose composition records longing and dis-inhibition, a slightly nervous group portrait with star. Their nerves are understandable, like the corpse, the waxen star does not cease to be powerful, but their power becomes fixed in one mode. Tussaud’s began by overcoming the obstacle of death, in the faithful masks of the murdered Marat and the guillotined Marie Antoinette. Now it allows us to overcome the related obstacle of our own obscurity.

As a seasonal event with links to much older traditions of carnival and harvest festivals, the Royal Easter Show features modern industries cast as nostalgic curiosities, returning them to coherent, if slightly elegaic spectacle. Extracting enjoyment from the canny display of superseded technology is oddly appropriate for agricultural fairs, which in reality are more about the genetic manipulations of Monsanto Corp. than the battler ruralism of Steele Rudd’s Dad and Dave. And yet in the lavish detail of the popular agricultural displays, it is always the latter that is represented in the sympathetic medium of apples, pumpkins and pears. Perhaps one day we will see a section of sinuous genetic code etched out in soybeans.

In Wood chopping, 1999 hypermasculine bodies of a type excluded from contemporary athleticism practise an extinct form of labour as sport. As a sound, woodchopping is the equivalent of a wax cylinder recording: the thwack of metal hacking into eucalyptus registers like the plod of Clydesdales on cobblestones, or the thin voice of Nellie Melba as Gilda. As they chop, we retrieve data from the archive of bygone industrial ambiences, a frame in which tree-felling is translated back into the limited organic power of the axe-wielder, and away from the inexhaustible power of tree harvesting machines.

These men work in a simulated landscape, chopping uniform logs under acoustically enhanced conditions. This is nothing short of virtual reality.

In leisure, technology transforms itself into pleasurable analogies or, as it is often the same thing, Jurassic dinosaurs. Robosaurus, literalises the transformation of technology achieved by outsourcing leisure to an adolescent imaginary. The joke here is that this big boy packs down to a demure street legal trailer, travelling the highways between bouts of acting out. Touted as the world’s first "Car-Niverous"monster, Robosaurus wreaks havoc on automobiles, chomping, then burning the wrecks, although never actually eating. Even though the metal dinosaur is a machine age nightmare, this is not technologies vengeance on itself. This is an entertainment extrapolated from the oral consumption patterns of the nuclear family. The bills posted on the hoarding ringing the oval set the tone with their regressive pitch; milk for the kids, something soft for the ladies, beer for the blokes.

Robosaurus performs before orderly, terror-free families, put through its paces by the combined efforts of a pilot strapped into the cranium, and the woman in the background with a large remote control pad. Strangely exempt from the predations of the beast, she offers clues to its evolution. It is after all just a prosthetic device for picking things up, placing the robot with those often outlandish labour saving technologies that fill the home, whose solemn promise was always the creation of more leisure time. And here the promise is fulfilled, the machine returns to put on a show, before neatly packing away until next required.

Zahalka’s images are the preliminary entries in an impossible compendium of leisure spaces. Her encyclopedic impulse is mirrored in the comprehensive nature of the attractions themselves, their determination to be a total leisure experience. She organises the images by degrees of simulation, levels of risk, volume of visual noise, and techniques of immersion. The last, the repeatedly encountered effort to immerse us in leisure has its own logic in a city built around water. But the immersive impulse is also found in the scale of the images themselves, their exaggerated size situating us in the domain of totalising entertainment with its own manufactured landscapes, its own contracted horizons, even its own time that dilates to include the inevitable return visit.

Finally, these photographs establish a fluid exchange of properties between the leisure they document and the activity of viewing them. As observation slides seamlessly into participation, we find ourselves again in Leisureland.

David Ellison

References:

Anne Friedberg, Window Shopping: Cinema and the Postmodern, University of California Press, Oxford, 1993

Rem Koolhaas, Delirious New York, Monacelli Press, 1994

Stephan Oettermann, The Panorama: History of a Mass Medium, (trans. Deborah, Lucas Schnieder), Zone Books, New York, 1997