I first saw the Empire State Building as most first saw it: in images where you only see its top, never with its base. These images came to me as they might have come to you: in postcards and textbook covers and B-roll and movie montage clips and backdrops.
None of these images require us to get in the weeds. Its finer details—its height, its style, the engineering marvels, the floor count and its square footages, its uses and abuses, its architects and where they went to school, their mentors and their mentors’ mentor, how this or that element is reflective of so-and-so and emblematic of blah blah blah, all of it—fade into architectural noise. I trust you can picture the building in your mind without the spec sheet and flash card trivia.
But I must admit, if pressed to describe the building in writing, I don’t know if I could. I’ve always struggled to talk about objects with overabundant archives. The Empire State Building comes to me already cataloged and indexed to the atom, well-documented and preserved in literal ivy-covered ivory towers. It is a building already pre-consumed by the historical record, hermeneutics as grab-to-go gas station meals. What is there left to say after history?
In “Venus in Two Acts,” Saidiya Hartman grapples with the opposite problem. How in the world, she asks, can a Black woman historian write Black women history if we have not collected the material of Black women’s pasts? Her solution is inspired: weaving critical theory and creative writing to fill the gaps the archive could not. This intervention has inspired many contemporaries, scholars and artists alike, to produce historical knowledge contra historical constraints. Nowadays, Doreen St. Felix argues, “a great way to get into the museum system is to satirize the museum system.” See: Kehinde Wiley’s appropriations of Jacque Louis David’s Neoclassical masterpieces. Or Awol Erizku’s pleasantly titled “Girl with a Bamboo Earring.” Or Kara Walker’s harrowing-yet-playful adaptations of the Sphinx and Victoria Fountain. Even MoMA has the appetite to bruise history with their new curatorial strategy dubbed “a new MoMA” where “seemingly unlike objects are put next to one another.”
The Empire State Building’s archive is born from the same vector of power that follies Hartman’s: to describe the world as it exists (or existed) is to be beholden to its imperial collections. Frantz Fanon argues that life under empire makes monsters out of us all, unrecognizable to even our own selves. The task of description under empire, then, is to shatter the archive until a reflection appears from the shards.
And for as long as the Empire State Building has existed, descriptions of it have resisted architectural convention in favor of the shards found in polemic and metaphor. H.G. Wells wrote when the building was only three years old that it would be the “last of the ancient skyscrapers.” Giannina Braschi imagined it as even more of a relic of an already-past, depicting it as a twentieth-century Mount Sinai where “a shepherd has stood up to sing and dance.” On the cover of the first edition of Rem Koolhaas’ Delirious New York, the Chrysler Building is fucking the Empire State Building (or maybe the Empire State is fucking the Chrysler. It’s hard to tell). Robert Moses, always a traitor to historical preservation, wanted to build a highway through the building in the name of modernist beauty. And it was Andy Warhol who, as if giving up on description altogether, created an eight-hour-long film that is one continuous grayscale shot of the building.
The task of description under empire, then, is to shatter the archive until a reflection appears from the shards.
These are all anxious images, to paraphrase Merve Emre. One would not create them if all were well in the state of cultural production and historical attachment. But these images are also all satires. While Hartman and her acolytes fill the archive’s silences, these depictions coax the archive’s loud, drab song into a sweeping aria fit for Midtown. The archive, after all, is quite boring. There’s only so much rehashing one can do before we’re confronted with the harrowing reality of having not said anything that isn’t already stored in neat little boxes. The Empire State Building almost taunts us to make a mockery of it in order to render it in four dimensions.
Here’s what the Empire State Building looks like: I’m at the club and already I’ve had too much to drink. Franny and Andy are cutting up lines in the middle of the floor, only looking over their shoulder to see if Saidiya is coming back from the bar soon. Rem, always a dog, is flirting with his sixth boy of the night. Huey, on the other hand, is dancing by the front left speaker with her orange ear plugs in. The music is at a mellow 180 bpm, too slow for Giannina to come back from the smoking section, but too fast for Robert to consider it a good time. I’m hopping around. Saying hi and hello and cute shirt and oh my god, I haven’t seen you forever, how have you been. Andy rolls his eyes, but I’m not sure if that’s directed at me or history at large. The DJ is playing my song. The DJ is playing everyone’s song. Everyone’s dancing to what they can’t capture. Later, all of us will walk back to our neat little apartment, passing buildings whose stories won’t ever be told. Occasionally, I will turn my head to the right and steal a glance at the Empire State Building in the distance with its head poking. It’s gorgeous really. It comes to me this morning as blurred and dismembered, architecture severed from its archival body.