Hollywood Land

Time Travels to the Places in Space between the Professor’s Dream and the Professor’s Nightmare

Author: Mark Hampson, Head of Material Processes, Royal Academy Schools, London.

New works by Tom Leighton

“Arriving at each new City, the traveller finds again a past of his that he did not know he had. The foreignness of what you no longer are or no longer possess lies in wait for you in foreign, unpossessed places”

Tom Leighton has been travelling……… extensively. Many of his journeys have been actual, involving the usual acquisition of airmail points and jetlag from numerous visits to the major cities of the world. He has spent countless creative hours time travelling. Taking trips through the labyrinthine potentialities of the imagination that have expanded his travels to adventures leading him all around the world and in every conceivable direction. Forwards and backwards, above, below, up, down, in and out and around the bend.

In doing so he has developed the rare ability to closely resemble both the characters of Marco Polo and Kublai Khan, the fictional protagonist’s in Italo Calvino’s Seminal Architectural Allegory “Invisible Cities”. He has become their combined conversation. An explorer of wondrous, fantastic places and the appreciative receiver of the others encounters delighting in the absorption, translation and interpretation of this bountiful information; creating images in the mind and in print for his own purposes and pleasures.

Along the way he has acted like the ultimate tourist.

Not your average holiday snapper but a more demanding and devouring eye, searching for treats other than souvenirs. His search has been for subject. The speed of his approach does not allow him time to learn the native language or adopt the local customs. Cultural integration is not needed in his art. This purpose of his travels is to photographically plunder. No stone is left un-scanned; no building escapes his voracious, probing gaze. Every city is a repository of raw material, a universe of possible imagery inviting selection, editing, manipulation and re-configuration.

Lincoln Highway

His passion for this adoring pursuit of architectural wonders is that of a constant honeymooner.

His lens is madly in love with the scenes and subjects he surveys and he swoons over the myriad ways the city can be seen and re-imagined. His camera can capture close focus detail to be combined with panoramic vistas and every angle in between, with deceptive ease. He takes this camera to the top of the tallest towers and into the bowels below, always hunting for a way to see the world afresh.

The resulting images may share some of the characteristics of the world we all live in, we may even recognise some of the iconic buildings featured in certain scenes but the amalgamated visions he presents us with have shifted far from the facts of real life experience and into the poetics of the fantastical. This is a new world and Tom Leighton is its God.

“He cannot stop; he must go on to another City, where another of his pasts awaits him or something perhaps that had been a possible future of his and is now someone else’s present. Futures not achieved are only branches of the past; dead branches”.

On a first flight of time travel into his world you could easily mistake the experience as being blasted fast forward into the future.

Certainly the Cities he creates with their sharp and sexy sky scrapers, high gloss and high definition digitalized spectacles and electric neon glow share much common ground with the projected prophesies of future cities that we have become accustomed to through science fiction’s cinematic masterpieces. But for all their superficial similarities and suggestions of speed, technologies and energies of the future, Leighton’s cities are blatantly not the Los Angeles of “Blade Runner”. In their abundant absurdities and anachronistic juxtapositions they are closer to the extremes of Las Vegas. A deeper inspection of his work quickly reveals a plethora of historical details. Classical, gothic, Victorian and archaic buildings rub up against the contemporary,evidencing a passion for the past. His cities exist outside of real time, fusing periods of the past with both the present and future dimensions.

Does anybody truly believe cities could look like these in the future, as previous generations believed they would soon live on the moon? It is unlikely unless the fundamental principles of physics collapse and time and space shift towards unforeseen possibilities. What is certain is that Leighton is no town planner of our future cities. This type of reality would offer little satisfaction, suggesting that if forced to consider the pragmatic functions of an actual building he would also make a poor architect. His art is collage not construction, the collaging of dreamscapes.

“Cities like dreams, are made of desires and fears, even if the thread of their discourse is secret, their roles are absurd, their perspective deceitful and everything conceals something else”.

This dreaming drags us backwards in time. We snake along the fanciful lineage of the architectural capriccio tradition which first came to prominence in the late 17th Century through the works of Artists such as Marco Ricci and Giovanni Paolo Panini experimenting with composited views of roman ruins and imagined architectural picture galleries.

These works inspired the genius of Giovanni Battista Piranesi to create his famous prison engravings, which moved the art of Capriccio out of strict reality into entirely imagined spaces and fantastical schemes. These quickly became a blueprint for the use of imagination in depicting architectural landscapes.

The Carnival

Leighton is a natural descendant in this lineage and in this context his new works share a useful connection to Charles Robert Cocherelli’s masterpiece “The Professors Dream”, created in 1848.

This image was essentially a teaching aid used by Cockerell in his lectures at the Royal Academy schools where he held the position of Professor of Architecture. He used this mammoth watercolour as a visual backdrop in order to instil the importance of the idea to his student, that the skills and achievements of the past were the foundations for creating great architecture of the future. It depicts a composite cityscape encompassing most of the canon of western classical architecture to that date. It’s a greatest hits anthology spanning a period of 4,000 years.

This was a radical, ground breaking work. Not only did it not focus on the work or style of one single architect as had been the vogue, but it combined all available sources and the unusual device of representing a chronological timeline in receding perspective, beginning with plain earth in the immediate foreground, moving backwards in architectural development over four terraces of evolution; ending with the largest buildings of the world at this time - the great pyramids of Cheops.

Previously designs had always represented timelines moving from left (as the oldest) to right (the newest) in a more conventional manner.

No such timelines or chronological ordering exist in Leighton’s amalgamated cities; this world is in contrast; chaotic, fractured and at points violently distorted. His images share much with “The Professors Dream”, not least in that they depict some of the same amazing buildings but also a sense of other worldly atmospherics. As we would expect for an Artist working 160 years later there are also huge differences, especially one whose formative visual experiences have been rooted in an age defined by digital, technological and mass communication advancements. The choices available to Leighton far outweigh those of Cockerell.

Golden Gate

The seven wonders of the world have now been multiplied several times over. Dubai’s Burj Khalifa building dwarfs the mythology of the Hanging Gardens of Babylon and the Shanghai World Financial Towers shrinks and shades the now miniature St Peters Basilica in Rome.

The list of the world’s tallest buildings needs to be constantly updated as our skyline’s image and history is continuously adapted and added too. The images of this ongoing global real estate development can be viewed at speed at the click of a mouse.

Digital technology offers the contemporary artist mind blowing choices and Leighton is a master at managing and exploiting these options. His spaces are stretched and squashed. Images are expanded, flipped, fragmented and cloned.

A warped mirroring suggests, but never fully delivers, a symmetry of scene and is further complicated by Escher-esque layers of tessellations and deliberate distortions of detail.

“At times the mirror increases a things value, at times denies it”.

The uncanny unrealities this creates is further amplified by complex changes in colour scheme. Within a single image, passages of descriptive colour merge seamlessly into areas of expressive colour, which in turn is informed by high key choices that could only be the product of photographic processing and Photoshop’s unprecedented palate with its extensive range of possibilities for hue, saturation and contrast control.

Cockerell could not have conceived the plethora of approaches and available for the production of contemporary capriccios. Time travel was a much simpler conceit in Victorian London and technology less available.

Basillica

Leighton’s latest works are a master class in digital print production. They obviously involve huge amounts of knowledge and skill but additionally much trickery in their transcendence of process. The didactic intent of “The Professors Dream” begins to transform into the conjuring of “The Professors Nightmare”.

“The Professors Nightmare” is a magic routine involving three ropes of different lengths which performers firstly change into ropes of the same length before returning them back once again to three ropes of different sizes. It is a classic illusion which is thought to date back to early Chinese and Japanese cultures. However, when it was “re-invented” and performed by Magician Bob Carver at the 1957 IBM magic competition it was greeted with total disbelief. The Judges refused to accept that this was a pure sleight of hand trick and in order to win the event Carver was forced to reveal the secret of his act.

Similarly the trickery used by Leighton in the creation of his kaleidoscopic, illusionistic images is met with equal disbelief, even from a knowing modern audience who are well versed in the lies of digital manipulation, airbrushing and CGI wizardry. He is frequently asked to reveal his tricks. How are these images made? Which aspects are real and which are virtual inventions? Like all good magicians, good artists know never to reveal all their secrets and understand that there are mysteries within their art that are, if not unexplainable then not so easily explained.

In his most recent images Leighton does in fact offer up some revealment. He allows his audience more clues to the characters of his researches and there seems to be less interest in disguising his sources, particularly in the dominant use of so many recognisable iconic references. In the hands of a lesser Artist this could be reduced to a simple naming game. Spot the shard! Point at the Petronas Towers! Guess the location of the Gherkin……….

This type of pictorial detective work is not without its entertainment or enjoyment but it is only a minor aspect of the extended creativity on offer. The iconic details are swamped by the artistic liberties Leighton subjects these buildings to through his various combinations of differing scales, view points , style and period clashes. Mystery, ambiguity, confusion and magic all play their part. The ropes of this visual poetry are constantly changing in size and shape. The consequence of which are works of almost poisonous beauty and breathtaking ambition in their compositional complexities. Meaning, if indeed any exists at all, will only be found somewhere in the spaces between “The Professors Dream” and “The Professors Nightmare”.

“For those who pass it without entering, the City is one thing; it is another for these who are trapped by it and never leave. This is the City that you arrive for the first time and there is another City which you leave never to return”.

All quotes are taken from “Invisible Cities” by Italo Calvino, first published by Giuio Einaudi in 1972.

The Forum

Colosseum

Paris 1

Paris 2

Forbidden City

Broadway

 7th Avenue