First published in : “TOUR-ISMES. La derrota de la dissensió”. Fundació Antoni Tàpies. Barcelona, 2004.

“When I found myself on my feet, I looked about me, and must confess I never beheld a more entertaining prospect. The country round appeared like a continued garden; and the inclosed fields, which were generally forty foot square, resembled so many beds of flowers. These fields were intermingled with woods of half a stang, and the tallest trees, as I could judge, appeared to be seven foot high. I viewed the town on my left hand, which looked like the painted scene of a city in a theatre.”
Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels

“The liner is the first stage in the creation of a world organised according to the new spirit.”
Le Corbusier, Vers une architecture

“Tourism, human circulation considered as consumption, a by-product of the circulation of commodities, is fundamentally nothing more than the leisure of going to see what has become banal. The economic organisation of visits to different places is already in itself the guarantee of their equivalence. The same modernisation that removed time from the voyage also removed from it the reality of space.”
Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle

On 8 January 2004, in a spectacular ceremony held in the port of Southampton, the Queen of England baptised the Queen Mary 2, the largest ocean liner every built: "I name this ship Queen Mary 2. May God bless her and all who sail in her." The international press gave wide publicity to the event, especially to the boat’s record statistics: 150,000 tons in weight, 345 metres in length, 5,000 stairs, 72 metres high (the same as a twenty-storey building) and a capacity for 2,600 passengers and 1,250 crew (in a ratio of two to one, which gives an idea of the service it hopes to provide for the tourists who pay out the huge sums of money a cruise costs). The maiden voyage, as almost always on cruises of the Cunard Line (owner of such famous 1930s cruise ships as the Aquitania, Mauretania, Majestic, Queen Elizabeth, Queen Elizabeth II and the Queen Mary) will be from Southampton to New York. Other destinations fixed for the months of February and March –Barbados, Martinique, the Bahamas and Aruba– perfectly describe the cruise model. The only European destinations which recur during the first year, aside from the port of origin in England, are Piraeus in August, during the Olympic Games in Athens, and Barcelona at the end of May, early September and mid-October, on a Mediterranean route that combines the Catalan port with Palma de Mallorca, Málaga and Cádiz, and a destination on the Riviera, and which will allow the passengers of the brand-new cruise ship to attend the Universal Forum of Cultures.

The comparison between the Queen Mary 2 and the Titanic has obviously been immediate and deliberate. In both instances superlatives are sought –the biggest, the most luxurious– the maiden voyage has been the same, from Southampton to New York, many of the cabins on Queen Mary 2 reproduce the Titanic’s fixtures and fittings, in the library there is an abundant representation of the bibliography on the famous ocean liner sunk in 1912. The promoting of the new Cunard Line cruise ship still benefits from the impact of James Cameron’s 1997 blockbuster starring Leonardo di Caprio and Kate Winslet. The colossal publicity campaign undertaken to sell the most expensive movie in history ($200M), the huge number of spectators, the prizes, the countless articles, the webpages, the forums of debate, the sale of part-works, the subsequent documentaries. It seems beyond doubt that in the mind of every single one of the Queen Mary 2 passengers the Titanic is present. As a matter of fact, during the last thirty years or so no new liner had been built with British money, and so its launching must be set within the context of a rehabilitation of the tourist cruise. Over the last decade this form of tourism, especially attractive to the Americans, has shown an annual increase of 3%. It may be said that both businesses, the movie industry (and its tie-ins) and cruise tourism, have perfectly complemented one another in a conjoint promotional strategy. If the events of 11 September 2001 caused a temporary crisis in the tourist sector, it has been precisely the security angle, despite what the mythology may have us believe, that has led many tourists to show a preference for this form of hotel-cum-shopping mall cut off from any fixed setting and forever on the move. "Clearly the safety of our passengers and crew is absolutely paramount and we have been operating a level of heightened security”, Cunard Line President Pamela Conover told the Times on 8 January. This high level of security didn’t extend to, or rather failed, during the ship’s construction in the French port of Saint-Nazaire. In November 2003 a gangway tipped over and fifteen people died. This tragic incident has nonetheless served to foster the morbid coincidences with the Titanic. In fact the comparison with the Titanic has displaced what would appear to be the most logical relationship: with the first Queen Mary. The ocean liner of the same name and the same shipping company was launched in 1934 by the Queen Mother, Queen Mary, and still exists, although since 1967 it has been permanently moored in Long Beach, California, and functions as a theme park, hotel and place for weddings and celebrations.i In a curious reversal of the process the theme park does not become an ocean liner weighing anchor, but the ocean liner becomes definitively a hotel by having permanently dropped anchor.

Whoever has seen the film will know that in the Golden Age of the ocean liner, the 1920s and 30s, most of the passengers consisted of emigrants who were travelling in bunks in the cramped cabins below decks. The luxury of ballrooms, swimming pools and dinners with orchestra was restricted to a very small number of pioneer tourists who were remaking the trip that the emigrants of the lower decks were undertaking for the first time. Up until the beginning of the 20th century and the advent of the first period of tourism, the function of the great transatlantic ships was exclusively military and for transport, and the transporting of people was mainly of emigrants or of slaves, that is, of workers, the productive force that was generating the wealth of the places of destination, in particular in America. In a social context in which the weight of generating profits has shifted from production to consumption, liners no longer move workers, but consumers. This transformation is parallel to the conversion of industrial and commercial ports into leisure spaces, to the displacement of factories from their former urban locations to less visible settings, and to strategies for promoting the attractiveness to tourists of traditionally industrial cities (Barcelona, Genoa, Liverpool and the like).i In a sense, as occurred with the ocean liners of the Golden Age in which the tourists travelled in the superstructure situated above decks and the emigrants in the space below them, tourism and work function as two sides of the same coin and undergo inverse processes. While work is delocalised and rendered invisible in free zones (in Central America and Southeast Asia) or even on ships –factories situated in international waters in order to dodge labour legislation and the tax burden of different states– tourism becomes increasingly visible, occupies both the central public space of cities, and media space as well.

The third instalment of the excellent documentary The British Empire in Colour,ii which makes use of previously unseen images in colour of the former British colonies in the 1950s and 60s, includes a curious film shot on one of the liners that transported a million British emigrants to Australia during the quarter of a century following the Second World War, many of them workers from the former factories of the industrial revolution which, after the war, had remained damaged or definitively obsolete and were rationalised or closed. Faced with the necessity and the prospect of a huge wave of immigration in an almost unpopulated country, the Australian government initiated a programme in the 50s which was explicitly intended to make sure that the population which it was predicted was going to arrive was white, if possible English-speaking, and not Asian and African. Basically, this racist programmeiii consisted of an intense publicity campaign in the country of origin, the almost total subsidising of the trip (the passage from England to Australia only cost the immigrant ten pounds), and the organisation of reception camps and employment offices on arrival. The film you can see in the documentary shows one such crossing. Within the context of the publicity campaign, the voyage is conceived as a pleasure trip and not a migratory one. In the images you see the emigrants in bathing costumes, with sunglasses, playing at the poolside, dozing in deckchairs or attending an evening dance. Being announced and preformulated at that precise moment was the transmutation which was to come about later in the function of the great ocean liners, which ceased to be a vehicle of, mainly, the migratory phenomenon to become an exclusive vehicle of the tourist phenomenon. In the intervening period between these two moments, air transport came to the fore as the practically hegemonic form of long-range travel. Analysis of the world transport data of non-overland travellers shows, then, a distinct change during the years following those images in the proportion of travellers who utilised the boat and those who utilised the plane, in favour of the latter. The 1970s and 80s constituted a period of crisis for the major cruise lines, which are recovering today thanks to their increasing tourist use. Right now the only immigrants who travel by sea do so in a rubber dinghy in the Straits of Gibraltar or in flimsy craft in the Gulf of Mexico. The immigrant’s current vehicle of sea transport is a vessel that is the exact opposite (in size, form, and so on) of the liner, with the exception of Dantesque cases of drifting merchant ships like the Norwegian cargo boat Tampa with four hundred Afghans aboard who the Australian government threatened to bomb in August 2001. Setting aside these events, which may be considered marginal, or sensationalist, as far as the connecting thread of the story of these great ships is concerned it is clear that for the new, contemporary apogee of the ocean liner, it was a crucial moment when the passenger list began to be made up of tourists rather than workers, a phenomenon that was enunciated in the hybrid image of those touristised workers who featured in the scenes of the Australian immigrant programme.

Barcelona, a one-time industrial city and now an eminently tourist one, has made inroads on this score as the main port for Mediterranean cruises. In 2002 633 tourist ships with 843,000 passengers docked in the port. (In 2001 it was 544 ships and 655,000 passengers, and the prediction for 2003 was already 712 stopovers).i The enormous liners tie up as genuine floating cities on the fixed city’s seafront. The liner-city may be read, then, as a miniaturisation of the real city. A container for services that are plentiful on the other side and which define the city, as well as, particularly, all the desirable forms of leisure: bars, restaurants, shops, swimming pools, jacuzzi, gymnasium, beauty salon, tennis court, miniature golf, discothèque, casino, library: all slightly reduced in size. But the reading can also be made in the opposite direction: the real city as a reverberation, a repetition on land of what is found concentrated on board ship. The hotel room as a securing of the cabin, the tennis club as an amplification of the deck court, the port casino as a displacement of the ship’s casino, the beauty salon on land as a continuation of the beauty salon of the cruise liner. For cruise tourists the model of a bedroom, tennis court, casino and beauty salon is the one that accompanies them on their sea voyage, plus the reinterpretation of that model, what they encounter in each port in an only slightly different version. The city finally imitates the miniaturised model, then, the reduced city fiction constituted in paradigmatic form.

At this point it’s impossible not to think of Vers une architecture, one of the books that has most influenced the architecture of the 20th century. In the chapter devoted to the ocean liner, which occupies a central place in the argument of the essay, Le Corbusier concludes: "The liner is the first stage in the creation of a world organised according to the new spirit.” A world in which urban planning and a style-free architecture will play an exemplary role. A new architecture that responds to a new world: where buildings are concerned Le Corbusier calls for technical simplicity, a utilitarian spirit and the projectural rigour of the machine (“The house is a machine for living in”). And within this system the ocean liner constitutes the essence of an imaginary which the machine constructs for the new spirit, that “spirit of construction and of synthesis guided by a clear conception.” The pivotal image for the new architecture of this world of production will be, then, the ocean liner. Not only modern architecture (with its flat, plain facades, sliding windows, metal stairways, tubular handrails and so forth) but also entire cities must be built in the image and likeness of the great ships. Or better yet, it is the machine itself that builds it: “machines will lead to a new order of work, of relaxation. Entire towns are to be built, to be rebuilt.” One of Le Corbusier’s first urban projects is precisely the Pla Macià, sponsored by the Republican Generalitat and realised in 1933 in collaboration with Josep Lluís Sert, Josep Torres-Clavé and other members of the GATCPAC. In this urban project, as is well known, the building was foreseen of three skyscrapers in the port, on a spot not very far from the one the World Trade Center now occupies, an office building with hotel and conference hall planned by the American office Pei Cobb Freed & Partners and constructed in the post-Olympic decade within the framework of the restructuring of the former merchant port into a tertiary and leisure centre. The building, situated on the tautological Moll de Barcelona, one of the current port terminals intended for tourist cruises, has the shape of an ocean liner, not conceived in this instance as a Corbusian machine but as a rhetorical image alluding to its maritime context. In the face of the touristisation of the city Le Corbusier’s slogans acquire a new and hilarious slant. The tourist is the new worker, figure, labourer, machine and imaginary who fatefully decides the formal, social and productive destiny of the city. The same tourist who, in short, moves his own habitat, and as he passes converts the urban into a picturesque stage set.

Ever since the blossoming of Barcelona as a tourist city in the years following the 1992 Olympic Games an obvious substitution has occurred of the shopping spaces on the main itineraries of those who visit the city. The new shops are the same ones that occupy the shopping and tourist centre of any other place with a capacity to attract people. It isn’t necessary to cite the brand names (of clothes, accessories, beauty products, food, and so forth) because they are ubiquitous. These a-geographical businesses have a largely tourist clientele. The repetition of the same franchises accompanies the traveller in his or her search to acquire the known in a place that is unknown. The most extreme instance of this type of behaviour are the tee shirts of the fast-food chain Hard Rock Café: as a distinctive souvenir of his or her visit to the city the tourist gets an advertising tee shirt identical to those that are sold in all the other cities on the planet, the sole difference being the name of a specific place printed on it (obviously the different tee shirts have been designed and manufactured in a single place).

There’s a revealing phenomenon associated with the ubiquitous concentration of luxury shops of another type directed towards a-geographical consumerism. The giant ads that we associated until recently with the American urban landscape now cover the facades of European avenues and boulevards. Cities are full of huge advertising images whose effect is disturbing. The framework they are inserted into, the advertising hoarding, forms a flat space which is repeated with relative independence of the geographical location. The totality, the sum of advertising hoardings installed simultaneously throughout the globe is interconnected by ideological, financial and marketing flows. This agglomeration of ads is produced in a space, the city centre, where the main boutiques of the advertised brands are also situated. It would seem that this same urban context, which has developed an extraordinarily commercial interpretation of the city, has finally produced a particular variety of inhabitant which fits it perfectly, in such a way that the measure of the city corresponds to these giant canvases and not to that of the inhabits passing through it. Thus, if we were to take the scale of these colossal figures with which the advertising fills these urban facades as a real scale that enables us to resize the world, and at the same time the environment were to be proportionally reduced, the city would be dwarfed in such a way that the pigeons would be the size of a housefly. This is an easy operation. All we have to do is imagine that their faces are real faces, that their hands and feet are life size, in order for the environment, the city and we ourselves to be extraordinarily miniaturised. This restitution of scale is an act of humanising the model in which we as spectators are consumed by the actual advertising image by means of a hypnotic exercise whose main aim was to modernise by endlessly renewing the disciplined production of the desire to consume associated with style. In an increasingly overwhelming and bewildering form, which ends up conducting our subjectivity, now unreservedly, through the smooth, hypnotic world of global images that nullify any rejection of consumerism as contemporary updates in an advertising vein of the classic propaganda devices of fascism. From the gigantic, endlessly repeated image of the tyrant to the gigantic, seductive and changing image of the model, the icon becomes less identifiable. It is depersonalised and at the same time multiplied. The same leader’s face isn’t depicted over and over again, but rather a kind of magnum essence of style which may be transmitted by changing physiques that change but which are always in fact responding to a marked tendency. That’s to say, in fact being repeatedly a bearer of the same hypnotic message. The subject, interpreted by the passer-by, miniaturised, is converted into noise, like a slight distortion of a situation in which the hegemony of style tends to invade everything.

Another turn of the screw vis-à-vis the play of scale in the main tourist and shopping route of Barcelona, the “shopping line”, which begins in the port’s shopping mall, the Maremagnum, and progresses up the Rambla, the Passeig de Gràcia and the Diagonal, in a westerly direction, where the higher-income districts are: more or less midway along this shopping line, at the junction of Passeig de Gràcia and Gran Via, the passer-by is summoned by a window display: “Hey, you! Look at me!” An exhortation, a sudden shock. Boxed in on a screen, a model, in this case life-size, demands our attention in a tone that fluctuates between friendly invitation and the imperative. The advertisement is no longer static, but endowed with movement and a voice. He is young and elegant, although he acts out a situation of genuine boredom, cloistered in a perfectly white room, his only window on the world being the video screen in the shop window. He sings, dances, fools around so as to attract attraction. The video is routinely repeated more or less every fifteen minutes. It’s inevitable to think of this young man as a digitalised reworking of the sandwich man of the 1930s, one of the first occupations of European immigrants arriving in America by boat, who were provided with a sort of rigid suit, a double placard illustrated front and back, and who strolled up and down the streets, inserted in a compressed space between advertising slogans.

/ Ivan Bercedo y Jorge Mestre

Transatlàntics (2004)
Photographs:

Ocean Liners (2004)
1. Seven Sees Mariner in Barcelona.
2. Reception of Seven Sees Mariner.
3. WTC Gran Marina Hotel of Barcelona.
4. Seven Sees Mariner casino.
5. Gran Casino de Barcelona.
6. Seven Sees Mariner.
7. Gimnàs Alfa5, Barcelona.
8. Interior of Seven Sees Mariner.
9. Gay Pride 2003, Barcelona.