The Indiscreet Windows of Michael Wolf: A Look at the City through the Eye of the House

Abstract

Early on, I started suspecting that this apparently so important task as it is to”get to know yourself” is a simple ploy made by a clique of prie sts, who only try to deceive man, so as to keep him away from all activity in the outerworld s urrounding him, by distracting him with exigencies imposible to achieve; they intend t o drag him into a fake self-contemplation. Man only gets to know himself as long as he knows t he world, the world he will only get to know in itself, just as he will only get to know hi mself in it. Goethe (Sennett, 1991:9) The first thought that emerges when staring at Mich ael Wolf´s images, is that the city appears like an extension of our own living space. What we see through the windows belongs to our own living environment. We feel like citizens immersed in that particular urban construct at once. But, what does the city we see in these images look like? At first, it could look as a setting city, foam board city, light, where curtain wall li ghtness turns out to be principal, frame and glass versus Stone and brick. Idea that is rein forced by the point of view chosen by the artist; Wolf takes pictures of an unrooted city , where there are no streets, Gotham city from the hights, where buildings have been stripped of their own massiveness, without gravity, without weight. Despite this, Wolf´s image s are overwhelmed with traces of beings inhabiting the city. Souls leaning out the w indows telling us their stories and affairs, their outcoming in the everyday life of th eir shelter, ultimate bastion of their intimacy. Images of an inhabited city, and therefor e a city. Images with flowing information about the life of the others. Thousands of scr eens to watch the world, the eye of the house as one screen more.