PYROTECHNIC INSANITARIUM
"The Nevsky Prospect always lies... but more than ever when the thick mass of night settles over it... and the devil himself lights the lamps in order to show everything in an unreal light."
- Nikolai Gogol, Nevsky Prospect (1835)
"To be modern is to find ourselves in an environment that promises us adventure, power, joy, growth, transformations of ourselves and the world - and, at the same time, that threatens to destroy everything we have, everything we know, everything we are."
- Marshall Berman, All That Is Sold Melts Into Air (1982)
The Pyrotechnic Insanitarium is a place of frightful grandeur. Of haunting beauty, stagecraft, and… nightmare.
The Nevsky Prospect was the first such place. In the glare of the wonderful new streetlights, all of St. Petersburg came to stroll in the seductive dark. To see, and to be seen.
Gogol’s story is a warning to us. He tells us of a sensitive young artist named Pishkarev, who one night goes to the Prospect, and sees a beautiful young girl. And what a beauty she is! So elegant, so innocent. Clearly, she is the girl of his dreams.
But dreams die hard in the Nevsky. Desperate to know where she lives, Pishkarev follows the beautiful girl, street after street, enchanted. Finally she arrives home. To his amazement, the girl turns around and beckons to him. Pishkarev follows her up the steps . . . . to her brothel.
The truth is that she’s a whore. Never the less, he asks her to marry him, to save her from her dreadful existence of pornography, mediocrity and shame. The girl laughs in his face. Pishkarev is devastated. A few days later in his lonely room, he slits his own throat. Pishkarev: a man destroyed by his dreams. The artist; shattered not by success or failure, but the incredible gulf between his dreams and the phantasmagoria of the lights.
Coney Island was the second such place, and not the last. Its million electric lights could be seen some 12 miles out to sea. Part funhouse… part madhouse. Today, modern man is still trying to survive in the maelstrom of those lights. The ghost of PT Barnum looks down on us with a sinister smile. For the making of illusions is the only proper business. As all magicians know, the trick only works when you’re looking in the wrong place….
And so, at twilight, as the sun goes down, the lighting technician begins to stir, and Gogol’s devil lights up the lamps. We, the fascinated victims, trying to assert our personal dignity in the stage of lightning and frenzy.
The Pyrotechnic Insanitarium is the temple of illusion: terrible, beautiful and delightful. Light and fire, embryonic with possibilities both glorious, and ominous.
In the deceptive luminosity, all its lies are beautiful.
John D’Agostino
January 20077