dialectical utopias - dave hickey

I AM INTERESTED IN the architecture ofdesire—in the multitudinous ways inwhich human beings, given the oppor-tunity, always build their dreams, andin the extent to which every building isa little utopia and every modern city arepublic of little utopias. In these re-marks, I would like to discuss twocities in which a single dream predom-inates—two of the most successfuldesert enterprises since Persepolis—atonce resorts and last resorts: Santa Fe,New Mexico, and Las Vegas, Nevada.I have chosen to call them “dialecticalutopias,” although they could just aseasily be characterized as “comple-mentary utopias,” or even “contraposi-tive utopias.” “Dialectical utopias” isprobably best, however, since the citiesdo speak to one another—althoughneither of them listens.

So I am talking about resorts, aboutcities that market themselves as theheart’s destination. Since such discus-sions constitute the dream work of cul-tural criticism, I shall try to ground myobservations, as much as possible, inmy own waking experience of theseplaces. I should probably try to sup-press my own utopian expectations, as

well, but there is no denying that I livein Las Vegas, and have chosen to livethere, when I could just as easily residein Santa Fe. So let me confess at theoutset to my preference for the realfakery of Las Vegas over the fake reali-ty of Santa Fe—for the genuine rhine-stone over the imitation pearl.

As Jean Baudrillard has remarked,Las Vegas is a theme park, like Disney-land, except for the fact that peoplelive in Las Vegas. The same, I shouldnote, can be said of Washington, D.C.or 5th-century Athens or ImperialRome—or Santa Fe. What interestsme about Las Vegas and Santa Fe,specifically, is that they present them-selves as choices—as dreams within thedream. Santa Fe is older and was in-vented as a tourist destination by therailroad, while Vegas was invented bythe highway and the mob, but they areboth theme parks, conceived and con-structed as such, each grounded in adistinct mythology of the Great Amer-ican Desert.

These two mythologies are so dis-tinct, in fact, that, if you combined LasVegas and Santa Fe, you would havean ordinary city of the American West,

H A R VA R D D E S I G N M A G A Z I N E 1

This article appeared in Harvard Design Magazine, Winter/Spring 1998, Number 4. To order this issue or asubscription, visit the HDM homepage at <http://mitpress.mit.edu/HDM>.

© 2001 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College and The MIT Press. Not to be reproduced withoutthe permission of the publisher

Dialectical UtopiasOn Santa Fe and Las Vegas, by Dave Hickey

like Phoenix or Los Angeles, with in-tensified iconography, but with verylittle redundancy—since, in a very realsense, Las Vegas and Santa Fe arerefuges from one another. So, in thisnew, combined city, Santa Fe wouldprovide the upper crust, the guardianliberal establishment and the indige-nous lower depths—the white top andthe brown bottom, if you will—whileVegas would provide the green mid-dle—the vast mercantile center ofAmerican society.

To draw the distinction moresharply, we might say that Santa Fe is aresort that attempts to embody andevoke the eternal West—a Shangri-Lawhere time doesn’t move—a fortressand a refuge from history, a purifiedenvironment that embodies the valuesof a peculiarly American brand ofparental modernism. Thus Santa Fehas become a theme park for America’sprofessional classes—there dentistsand lawyers ride in Broncos, not onthem. On this site, the hierarchicalstatus quo is naturalized into an etiolo-gy of spiritual elitism.

Las Vegas, on the other hand, is aresort that seeks to recall the frontierWest—an egalitarian boomtown in aBiblical wilderness of fallen nature. Itis a nonstop, round-the-clock saturna-lia, an American fantasy of slaves inthe role of masters, providing its cus-tomers with a slave’s idea of a master’slife—which is, of course, a hell of a lotmore fun than the master’s actual life,since the masters of this culture arenecessarily burdened with puritanicalnoblesse oblige. So Vegas is an institu-tionalized social revolution. Its em-blem is the wheel—not the normativewheel implied by the Modernist “cy-cles of nature” but the Wheel of For-tune. This emblem of postmoderncontingency presides over a denatural-ized marketplace that becomes its owncommodity—that regales the Ameri-

can commercial classes with aniconography of secular ambition.

At the turn of this century, Santa Feand Las Vegas were virtually indistin-guishable environments. From the late1800s through the early 1900s, bothtowns were Victorian Protestant clap-board environments, a mix of colonialand indigenous cultures. Eventuallyboth these Victorian cities were torndown, and the native cultures overrid-den by intellectual iconographies. To-day, the two cities are bound together

by the fact that both are invented com-munities, although we do find, in theirhistorical precedents, manifestationsof their contemporary iconography.From the beginning, Santa Fe hasbeen a trailhead and a seat of govern-ment, and it has contributed to the ad-ministration of those two mostinterior of human social activities,mining and religion. Las Vegas, on theother hand, has always been a whistlestop. Like most Western cities, it hasparticipated in the economics of min-ing and religion, since it has served asa refuge from borax mining on the onehand and from the Mormon Churchon the other. One might say that LasVegas has traditionally provided a wayto “unredeem” mining and religionthrough gambling and prostitution.

Both cities are as much ideas as lo-cations, then, and each has been in-vested with its iconography,conceptualized and ideologized bycreative visionaries. In the case of San-ta Fe, these visionaries include Gener-al Lew Wallace, the governor of NewMexico and the author of Ben Hur,who tried, unsuccessfully, to pardonBilly the Kid, and Willa Cather, whosebook, Death Comes to the Archbishop,inspired and attracted another creatorof Santa Fe, Mabel Dodge Luhan, thepatron who brought the cult of Mod-ernist art to the city. Carl Jung foundin Santa Fe and its pueblos a perfect

example of everything he wanted tofind there. D.H. Lawrence found thesame things Jung found and wrote bet-ter books about them. Georgia O’-Keefe painted the pictures of whatJung and Lawrence found.

Las Vegas has its own hierarchy ofvisionaries, beginning with the gang-ster Bugsy Siegel, who in the 1940s in-vented the Strip as an oasis, a refugefor contingency and embodied desire,for iconography and idolatry in theProtestant West. Soon after therecame Howard Hughes, Orson Welles,Frank Sinatra, B.B. King, and Liber-ace, all residents at one time or anoth-er. Then, in the early 1960s, Vegas’sstatus as the American Lourdes ofChance was confirmed by a visit fromits spiritual father, Marcel Duchamp.

In its transformation into a touristdestination, Santa Fe’s indigenousiconography was adapted to Mod-ernism’s religion of natural materials,cosmic sublimity, and Jungian primi-tivism—all built over a real desert. Itsideology was probably expressed bestby Kasimir Malevich in his essay“Suprematism” (1927), in which hewrote, “The ascent to the heights ofNon-Objective art is arduous andpainful, but is rewarding nevertheless.The familiar begins to recede into thebackground. The contours of the ob-jective world fade more and more, stepby step until finally the world, every-thing on which we have lived, becomeslost to sight. No more likeness or real-ity, no idealistic images, nothing but adesert. I was fearful of leaving the or-dinary world of will and idea, but thepromise of liberation drew me on-ward, onto a desert filled with the spir-it of Non-Objective sensation, wherenothing is real except the feeling.”

This is more or less what Jung,Lawrence, and O’Keefe felt about theplace, and Santa Fe has flourished eversince as a kind of naturalized allegoryof Modernist values. The iconographyin Vegas, in contrast, is about the vali-dation and celebration of secular am-bition. (What else is Caesar's Palacebut a historical etiology of the Mafia?)So Vegas speaks the language of

Popular Places Dialectical Utopias

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Let me confess at the outset to my preference for the real fakery of Las Vegas over the fake reality of Santa Fe—for thegenuine rhinestone over the imitation pearl.

worldly empires, while Santa Fespeaks the language of cosmic sublimi-ty; these differences wouldn’t be nearlyso interesting, however, if their simi-larities were not so intriguing. To be-gin: they are both high desert cities towhich one ascends. To reach Santa Fe,the city of faith, one ascends from thedingy mining town of Albuquerquethrough benign, picturesque foothills.To get to Vegas, one ascends from LosAngeles, the City of Angels, to thebleak unredeemed Hell of the Nevadadesert.

The built environment in bothcities is desert architecture, its exteriorsurfaces by necessity hard and reflec-tive. The hard, reflective surfaces ofSanta Fe are those plain, solid volumesthat connote strength and virtue in theiconography of Modernism. Theirmonochromatic surfaces signify theoneness of everything (as it always doesin the language of the sublime, as itdoes in the paintings of Franz Klineand Ad Reinhardt). Here too we findthe suppression of language andiconography functioning as a Mod-ernist icon of deferred spiritual re-ward, whose plangent interiority isembodied in the cozy, tomblike roomsof these blank edifices.

The ornate reflective surfaces ofLas Vegas, by contrast, do not somuch enclose space as shelter it, with-out signifying any form of interiority.Rather than privileging the space be-hind the surface, these hard surfacesprivilege the space before it, so outsideand inside flow together, both adornedby ornamental surfaces that providethe immediate secular reward of bodi-ly rhetorical effect. These surfaces celebrate their difference from every-thing around them rather than theironeness with the world—and celebrateour difference as well, with no implica-tion of hierarchy. Thus in Santa Fe weare all one in our elevated specialness.In Vegas we are different but equal.

These reflexive characterizations,of course, are about architectural “spe-cial effects.” Like all resort architec-ture, the built environment in bothcities is essentially diversionary, al-

though each environment aspires to itsown form of disorientation. Simplyput: to be in Santa Fe or Las Vegas isto feel lost. First, you are lost in time,lost from history. In Santa Fe you’relost in perpetual quaintness, perpetualoldness; even its newest buildings lookantique, and this oldness is legislated.In Vegas, you’re adrift in perpetualnewness. Everything is perpetually be-ing renewed; all local institutions—thecasinos, the unions, the government—are in a state of perpetual renovation.Had you seen the explosion of TheDunes, you would understand that thesheer joy and true rapacity with whichthe past is destroyed in Las Vegas iseasily equivalent to the earnestnesswith which that past is preserved inSanta Fe.

Such temporal disorientation is re-inforced by the disorienting functionof language in these environments. In

Santa Fe, of course, language and sig-nage are simply suppressed; you’re al-ways lost because everything looks thesame, and nothing has a sign on it:you’re disoriented in the oneness andsublimity of the eternal West. In Ve-gas, everything is signed and new, butthe signage is about dislocation, aboutrelocating you in some imperial histori-cal instant. Thus, rather than lookingthe same from every angle, as Santa Fedoes, Las Vegas always looks different.In both places you’re disoriented, asyou should be on vacation.

The interior spaces of Las Vegasand Santa Fe, like those of all desertarchitecture, are arboreal: they evokethe lost forest environment that thedesert has taken away. In Santa Fe, theinterior arboreal space mimics thebower, the nest, or the redoubt; thewalls shut out the lateral world. In Ve-gas the long, low spaces of casinos arethe arboreal forest disappearing inevery direction; in Las Vegas the walls

don’t shut out the world; the ceilingshelters us from the sky—and also, Iwould suggest, from God and eternity.There is one particular dice table atthe Mirage, in fact, that actually hasthree visible roofs: a long tiki roof cov-ering the entire area, a smaller tikiroof over the dice tables and an evensmaller roof above the table itself;above these roofs, of course, is the ho-tel itself. All these protect us from thevault of the sky, but there is not a wallin sight, only the forest disappearingin the crepuscular distance.

So the issue, again, has to do withtwo ways of living in the desert—withthe question of whether one is keepingout invaders, in the lateral flow oftime, or whether one is rescuing one-self from the eternal all-seeing panop-ticon of the sky. This raises aninteresting point about Vegas, sinceyou are always under surveillance in

Vegas by the cameras that overlookthe gambling areas. What is being sur-veilled, however, is the body and notthe soul. Unlike surveillance in therest of America, surveillance in Vegasis in the interest of ethics, not morali-ty. It regulates cheating but not theidea of cheating, since by definitiongambling is cheating probability. SantaFe, on the other hand, is a fortressagainst time and contingency; its one-ness enforces the rigorous standards oftaste, dress, and behavior that are ritu-ally enacted there; it also privileges theperpetual complaints of its inhabitantsabout the vulgar changes that seem al-most daily to pollute its perfection.

Unlike most of America, then, San-ta Fe and Vegas are consistent archi-tectural environments. In mostAmerican cities, “high architecture”functions as an intellectual repudiationof the vernacular. In Santa Fe and LasVegas, the “serious” and vernacular ar-chitectures are coextensive. In Santa



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Had you seen the explosion of The Dunes, you would understand that the sheer joy and true rapacity with whichthe past is destroyed in Las Vegas is easily equivalent to theearnestness with which that past is preserved in Santa Fe.

Fe, the high architecture is legislated;its “serious” buildings, in the bestModernist tradition, are simplifica-tions of its vernacular buildings,whereas in Las Vegas the self-con-scious buildings are elaborations andrecombinations of the vernacular—se-lections from the eclectic palette ofpre-Modernist American architecture.So it’s easy to see Caesar’s Palace asthe combination of a neoclassic build-ing and a filling station or to see theMirage as a building Albert Speermight have built for the king of Tongaor the fraternity of Freemasons.

Thus we may identify two distincticonographies: in Santa Fe, theiconography of taste; in Vegas, theiconography of desire. The iconogra-phy of taste is a signifier of the absence

of desire, since one cannot exerciseone’s taste when driven by appetite.Hunger must be satiated before onecan select the perfect morsel. Thehigh rituals of Santa Fe involvedemonstrating one’s theatrical lack oflack—one’s transcendence of need anddesire and ascendance into the realmof taste. Vegas, on the other hand,rather straightforwardly embraces theiconography of desire.

Consider the contrasting styles ofshopping. Shopping in Santa Fe isslow; its pace is geological. The poten-tial buyer is concerned with the au-thenticity of the object, its source andchaste appeal; in the case of nativehandicrafts, the buyer is even con-cerned with the blood, the genealogy,of the author, with his or her antiqueauthenticity. Shopping in Vegas isquick. It is about spectacle, not scruti-ny; about our desire, not the object’s“virtue.” So we respond not to the au-thenticity of the object, but to its per-

suasiveness, to the ornament, the rhet-oric of the design. We do not care whomade the things we buy in Las Vegas;we luxuriate in the privilege of notcaring.

Let me tell you a story. I recentlywent to Santa Fe to give a lecture. Onthe morning after my talk, my wifeand I strolled downtown to a littleplace where one can buy croissantsand cappuccino. To get this croissantand this cappuccino, you stand in aline of dentists—a filling of dentists,an agony of dentists . . . whatever.When you achieve the counter, youorder your coffee and are issued anumber. Then you seat yourself out-side upon an unstable raffia chair at awobbly table. There you may enjoythe light and space so beloved by

northern European architects, whilean aged Navajo crone operates a giantespresso machine. When she has oper-ated the giant espresso machine to hersatisfaction, she passes the tiny cup toan indolent low rider who strolls overand deposits it on your table, aveccroissant.

So, I am sitting there waiting, feel-ing a little embarrassed about enlistingsomeone older than my grandmotherto score my caffeine. I’m also a littleannoyed because I’ve been sittingthere for thirty minutes waiting for mycoffee. And it suddenly occurs to methat I am thinking “Las Vegas.” I’mexpecting comfort and efficiency; I’mgetting leisure and authenticity. Thepeople around me, I realize, havecome to Santa Fe to waste time,whereas people go to Las Vegas towaste money. So I’m sitting therewasting my time, which I value, whenI could have been in Vegas wastingmoney, which I don’t.

Eventually the low rider arriveswith our coffee, and noticing my casi-no jacket, he says, “Hey, you been toVegas?” I admit to living there and hesays, “Boy, it’s great! My wife and I gothere every year.” I ask him why, andhe says, “Oh, we like it. They treat younice.” “Do you gamble?” I ask, and hesays, “Well, you know, I don’t gambleand never plan to gamble. But the firsttime I went there, we had a nice room;they were nice to my kids; they werenice to my wife. And as I was walkingout of the casino I said, ‘What thehell? I think I’ll gamble.’ And I gam-bled, and I lost, but I didn’t care. ThenI came home and I could stand all ofthese dentists.”

What the low rider was describing,I would suggest, is a distinction thatJane Jacobs makes in Systems of Sur-vival—she describes the differencesbetween elite leisure cultures andcommercial comfort cultures. Eliteleisure cultures are composed of prac-titioners who must work sporadicallyand with great intensity in jobs thatrequire extensive educational indoctri-nation and elaborate initiation rituals,each of which imbues the practitionerwith a sense of class responsibilities.Such practitioners include hunters,surgeons, dentists, lawyers, professors,and soldiers. What this sporadic activ-ity gives these people, Jacobs suggests,is not so much money as time, vasthours of leisure that class traditiondictates should be “well spent.”

Jacobs opposes this leisure cultureto a commercial culture that valuescomfort and convenience, inhabitedby people who, because they work inthe commercial world, must work allthe time and engage in perpetual, on-the-spot innovation. Where the suc-cessful inhabitants of leisure culturesgain time and status, the successful in-habitants of commercial cultures gainmoney and mobility.

Thus the perpetual conflict be-tween democracy’s hierarchical elitesand its commercial culture is sortedout in Santa Fe and Las Vegas. In San-ta Fe, one may exercise one’s hierar-chical, elitist preferences without the



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Shopping in Santa Fe is slow; its pace is geological. The potential buyer is concerned with the authenticity of theobject, its source and chaste appeal. Shopping in Vegas isquick. It is about spectacle, not scrutiny; about our desire, notthe object’s “virtue.” We do not care who made the things webuy in Las Vegas; we luxuriate in the privilege of not caring.

confusions of commercial democracy;in Las Vegas, one may experience therisk, spectacle, comfort, and conven-ience of commercial life without theburden of “eternal values” or wastedtime. Where else in America but SantaFe could a member of the professionalelite stand before a member of anotherculture who kneels behind a blanket oftrinkets, and, like some 18th-centuryNeapolitan nabob, patiently select theperfect authentic object from those ondisplay? Where else in America butLas Vegas could a hardware salesmanfrom Indiana bet his year’s earnings ona turn of the card and then spend hiswinnings on a lamé sport coat? Theseare the two sides of the American ur-ban coin—each pure and unadulterat-ed by the other—each a little shockingin the glamour of its permissiveness.Dialectical utopias.

Dave Hickey is an art critic. Air Guitar, acollection of his essays, was published recentlyby Art Issues Press. The essay above was origi-nally presented as a paper at a GSD confer-ence “Denaturalized Urbanity,” organized byMohsen Mostafavi, formerly a member of thearchitecture department faculty.



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dialectical utopias - dave hickey

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