Beyond Wind Eye
Morning Sun, Edward Hopper, 1952.
It was March 2020 and every window in Hochelaga was a rainbow. Some were crafty, others more conceptual. In some, you could see labor while others were evidently experiments to distract the boredom. I started photographing them unconsciously, most probably to look at them in the future and reminisce about those complicated times when a rainbow once again was a beacon of hope, and a window with the phrase Ça Va Bien Aller drew a smile on my face.
Back then, like many of us, I walked endlessly. Without a North nor purpose but to unwind to the rhythm of my favorite playlist, to clear my mind from the world falling apart. Back home and to reality, bored and fed up with online learning, I would engage in the danse macabre of the Instagram feed. Scrolling up and down, between selfies, conspiracy theories, and the usual social media cry for attention I started noticing something repeatedly: Edward Hopper paintings. Modern art had gone viral.
Next thing, The New Yorker was writing about him, The Guardian as well, and even local magazines like Maisonneuve were discussing his art. I think it’s safe to say that the early pandemic brought us an Edward Hopper revival.
And yet, in these ample compositions in which isolation and human vulnerability are the leading actors, there is also, in the background, a tenacious understudy pushing through: a window.
Photos taken during the first wave, March-April 2020.
More than just a mere element of architecture, one can also appreciate a window as a philosophical framework. But in order to elevate a window’s nature it is necessary to first revise its anthropology: originally from vindauga (the Old Norse for “wind eye”) and the French fenêtre (which itself came from the Latin fenestra), the word “window” as we know it traces back to the 1066 Norman Conquest, when a great influx of French poured into the English linguistic area.
Evident in its wording, even from its early days, a window indicates contemplation. And when we contemplate we raise our level of consciousness to build a cognitive relationship with a subject. In the case of Old Norse, “wind eye” suggests nature-human osmosis but could also refer to an exchange between entities, or even dimensions. Suddenly, what was conventionally interpreted as the portrait of a person looking through a window now reads as a portrayal of human transgression.
Office in a Small City, Edward Hopper, 1953.
In Japanese culture, windows are considered “a path that exists for the sole purpose of the eye, built for humans to engage,” according to the Window Research Institute, a foundation dedicated to the development of architectural culture through the collection and dissemination of ideas and knowledge related to windows. In a society that is shrinking due to high density, windows are transforming into “a symbol of a fading society,” as written by Takashi Machimura, a Professor of Social Science at the Hitotsubashi University. “Windows give us happiness.”
Takashi Homma, a Japanese artist currently exhibiting at the Canadian Centre for Architecture (CCA) with Eye Camera Window: Takashi Homma on Le Corbusier (through 15 August, 2021), also theorizes around windows but takes it up a notch to embed a meta-discourse concerning photography—his principal technique. “The camera is a small room and a lens is a window,” he writes—referencing the camera obscura, the great grandparent of all of today’s image-capturing devices: a box (room) with a hole on a side (wall) that reflected an inverted image through a set of mirrors, resulting in photography. How is this description different from a house? Or if taken even further, the human skull?
Homma’s discourse becomes a Russian Doll in which the lens is the human eye, and the human eye the lens—a remittance with vindauga‘s sense of reciprocity.
If experienced from the inside, windows are undoubtedly intriguing. As naturally curious beings, we are drawn to them because they promise amusement and discovery. Every morning, after brushing our teeth, a good stretch, and with a mug of coffee already in hand, we approach our windows to peep at society, to check what’s up and meter how the day is going to be: if it’s grey so will be our mood, if sunny our disposition lightens and we engage better with life. “Windows mediate relationships between humans and experiences,” sustains Hideo Hama, a Professor of Letters at the Keio University—and who also collaborates with the WRI—“the characteristic of a window as media is that it connects the inside with the outside via the eye while physically separating the inside from the outside.”
Most importantly, windows are frameworks for political agency because by looking through them we reconfirm our role in society. Regardless of what waits on the other end—either nature or city, a person or an object—a window is a reminder that we’re part of something bigger, that we’re not alone. In her latest single, stemming from her 2020 album What’s Your Pleasure (EMI Records)—which was highly influenced by pandemic blues—the British songstress Jessie Ware chants, “Every day you get up, and look out of the window take a breath of morning air, and listen to the people out there. As the birds are singing; A duet with the morning traffic, What’s the one you’re hearing?” The song is aptly titled Remember Where You Are.
A year has passed and the future is now. As the world begins another cycle with the promise of a better future materializing in the form of a vaccine, snow melts once again to wake us up from hibernation. People’s humming and bikers’ ringing bells bring Montreal back to life, I take a break between online classes and approach my closest window for a bit of my favorite hobby: people watching. I stare attentively at a couple of elders who cross their path with a gang of toddlers led by their teacher, they’re in their daily walk around the block.
The circle of life in front of my eyes, a never-ending cycle in which we are all the radiuses pushing it forward. I picture myself as part of a Hopper composition and in my mind I look as poised and human as any of his subjects: complex, well-rounded, and ready for what lies ahead—come rain or shine. An individual with hopes and dreams who, in his loneliness, resorted to the outside to answer some of his unconscious questions. Like everyone else my eyes need to travel, only this time I now understand that my window will be the passport.
