Paris 9:30 pm on 11 Aprl: JR

Time Magazine reports on how the artist known as JR was commissioned to create an art work for the recent Covid-19 issue of the magazine.  Titled, "Paris  at 9:30 pm on April 11," the work is a photograph taken from an upper apartment window in the 19th Arrondissement. We look down at a painting created on street asphalt by the artist, on a nearly deserted street (only a masked young woman, perhaps a medical worker, walks by). A zebra style cross walk has been transformed so that the painted stripes seem to bend, as if they are window blinds, or flexible bars of a cell. We see an eye staring out, a blind held back by several fingers.  The simple title on the cover is "Finding Hope."

We see in that tentatively emerging eye, long confined to its apartment, a mirror of our own condition, as new perceptions and apprehensions begin to congeal. What we thought was solid, is now disrupted, cracked upon. All seems unstable.  Here, we have Marx's definition of modernity exponentially accelerated, "All that is solid melts into air."

Street are important in every city of course, but they carry special resonance in Paris, globally known for its vibrant street life. Streets have been battlefields throughout the history of the city, during the storming of the Bastille in the Revolution, when barricades were thrown up in 1871 in defense of the Commune against the French army,  and during the student uprising of May 1968. Artists such as JR have repeatedly made claims to 'rights to the city' through uncompromising street art.  Streets have long been the vibrant arteries of the city, yet they are now empty of life. JR's image can be read  as a long confined giant,  perhaps even Hobbes' Leviathan, the sovereign social order, reawakening and resurfacing from underground up onto the surface of the street.

Having said that, the image is surely more than just a call for a return to normalcy. The old world is lost for ever. We might behold the escaped prisoner emerging from the Cave in Plato's Republic, discovering to his shock that everything he and his fellow inmates had assumed to be real was only the play of flickering shadows. The emerging eye can be read in radical and psychoanalytic registers as a coming to consciousness, a return of the repressed, a fissure in the taken for granted foundations of our world.  A crack in the pavement, and in the closed window blinds, heralds the coming dawn.  Yet just what the new sun will illuminate is, for now, beyond our capacities to envision.