The Piled-Up Exoticism of Flaubert's Carthage

I recently mentioned Flaubert's violently exotic novel Salammbo, about the Mercenary revolt in Carthage after the First Punic War, in this post over on WorldBin, and it reminded me of this small extract which shows how well his immeasurably precise and spare style lends itself equally well to both the emotive realism of his novels 'Madam Bovary' and 'Sentimental Education', as well as to the evocative, romantic, strange and spectacular constructions of this book, and his short story Herodias (a story set in the great fortress of Herodium, and revolving around the dance of Salome, Herodias' daughter, and John the Baptist's subsequent execution). His description here of the city's disposition packs all the dreamy immutability of some of Bocklin's paintings, with their implied rituals and fusions of building-and-nature that recall something, although one can never be quite sure of what, with the sharp power of analogy through which he uses language to pack the image he creates with a clear, although impossible, juxtaposition of compound impressions. When I first read this book, it felt as if Flaubert had taken that period just before sleep, when as a young teenager in love with architecture and antiquity, I had tried to imagine the physical grandeur and luscious sensibilities behind the ruins I had seen in photographs, and stretched that state out into an entirely alternate, but historicaly located, world. And although he researched intensively for the narrative, there is only so much information that one can gather about any one moment in the past, and it was a magical revelation to see how the threadbare paucity of history and its march of facts can be taken up at one point, and be as it were enlivened to a degree such as this where it becomes a credible alternative to explanations of the present, or speculations on the future.


Behind extended the city, its tall, cubed shaped houses rising in tiers like an amphitheatre. They were made of stone, planks, pebbles, rushes, seashells, trodden earth. The temple groves stood out like lakes of greenery in this mountain of multi-coloured blocks. Public squares levelled it out at regular intervals; countless intersecting alleys cut it up from top to bottom. The walls of the three old quarters, now mixed together, were still distinguishable; they rose here and there like great reefs, or extended huge sections -half covered with flowers, blackened, widely streaked where rubbish had been thrown down, and streets passed through their gaping apertures like rivers under bridges.

The Acropolis hill, in the centre of Byrsa, was covered over with a litter of monuments. There were temples with twisted pillars, bronze capitals, and metal chains, cones of dry stone with azure stripes, copper cupolas, marble architraves, Babylonian buttresses, obelisks balancing on their points like upturned torches. Peristyles reached to pediments; scrolls unfolded between colonnades; granite walls supported tile partitions; in all this one thing was piled on another, half-hiding it, in a marvellous and unintelligible way. There was a feeling of successive ages and, as it were, memories of forgotten lands.Behind extended the city, its tall, cubed shaped houses rising in tiers like an amphitheatre. They were made of stone, planks, pebbles, rushes, seashells, trodden earth. The temple groves stood out like lakes of greenery in this mountain of multi-coloured blocks. Public squares levelled it out at regular intervals; countless intersecting alleys cut it up from top to bottom. The walls of the three old quarters, now mixed together, were still distinguishable; they rose here and there like great reefs, or extended huge sections -half covered with flowers, blackened, widely streaked where rubbish had been thrown down, and streets passed through their gaping apertures like rivers under bridges.

A Room Returning From The Sum To Its Parts: Marguerite Yourcenar's Abyss

Pieter Janssens Elinga, Room in A Dutch House. The Hermitage Museum.

This is the point in the book “Zeno of Bruges” (or “The Abyss”) by Marguerite Yourcenar, where the main character, a physician, alchemist and philosopher in sixteenth century Flanders, begins a descent during the process of which all forms of meaning, use and abstraction, applied and overlaid onto the material and physical world by man, begin –for him- to fall away, eventually revealing a vast, certain, terrifying, meaningless, but ultimately liberating Nature, into which, at the end of the book, he calmly releases himself in an act that takes him back to a state like the one he is imagining of the room and its contents below. Spending his entire life in buildings and cities, discussing ideas, science and theology, he himself goes through several shifts in perception where the constructs of man, both logical and spatial at first seem tenuous, then infinitely ephemeral, dissolving into an unending and timeless process against which they stand as strange, illusory solidities, vainly encrusting tiny moments of space and time with systems and values which although meaning everything to their respective civilisation, count for nothing in the march of time and the teeth of nature.

P170

For nearly half a century Zeno had used his mind, wedge-like, to enlarge, as best he could, the breaks in the wall which on all sides confines us. The cracks were widening, or rather, it seemed that the wall was slowly losing its solidity, though it still remained opaque, as if it were a wall of smoke and not of stone. Objects no longer played their part merely as useful accessories; like a mattress from which the hair stuffing protrudes, they were beginning to reveal their substance. A forest was filling the room: the stool, its height measured by the distance that separates a seated man’s rump from the ground, this table which serves for eating or writing, the door connecting one cube of air, surrounded by partitions, with another, neighbouring cube of air, all were losing those reasons for existing which an artisan had given them, to be again only trunks or branches stripped of their bark, like the Saint Bartholomews, stripped of their skin, in church paintings; here and there the carpenter’s plane had left lumps where the sap had bled. These corpses of trees were laden with ghostly leaves and invisible birds, and still creaked from tempests long since gone by. This blanket and those old clothes hanging on a nail smelled of animal fat, of milk, of blood. These shoes gaping open beside the bed had once moved in rhythm with the breathing of an ox at rest on the grass; and a pig, bled to death, was still squealing in that lard with which the cobbler had greased them.

On all sides there was violent death, as in a slaughterhouse, or in a field of execution. The terrified cackling of a goose could be heard in the quill pen scratching its way, over old rags, to record ideas deemed worthy of lasting forever. Everything was actually something else: this shirt that the Bernadine sisters laundered for him was, in reality, a field of flax, far more blue than the sky; but it was, at the same time, a mass of fibres put to soften in the bed of a canal. The florins in his pocket, stamped with the head of the late Emperor Charles, had been exchanged or given away, stolen, weighed, or shaved off a thousand times before he had thought them, for one brief moment, his own; but all such turnover and back and forth between hands avaricious or prodigal was of short span as compared with the inert duration of the metal itself, which had lain infused in the earth’s veins before Adam had ever lived. The brick walls around him were resolving into mud from which they came, and which they would again become one day.

Breaches, and Other Places

A storied proposal about architecture as a democracy of institutionalised reification, told from the perspective of one of its citizens.

I realised some-time after the adventure that it is something one simply has to do as a child, a sort of right-of-passage, a coming-of-age. You slip through the barriers set up by all the conventions which surround that beguiling taboo that is the Other places (that taboo which in turn girdles our cities as tightly as did our old ring of suburbs), and find something more wondrous than speculation. Those Other places which we always grew up being warned about, and yet could do nothing but endlessly speculate on, those places which were fashioned so alluringly in their inapproachability, their possible wonder, they became so big in our minds, so important for both our communally fabricated childish, ghostly and ghoulish mythologies, as well as for our developing sense of independence and accompanying intrepid curiosity, that their pull was entirely irresistible. The delicious tickle of fear induced by the tales we had all whipped out of thin air to further mystify whatever caverns lay beyond the dark entrances; the transgressive thrill which swamps any such experience with the power of having circumventing rules laid down by parents and society, together with the pre-eminence and respect amongst classmates that would be obtained, meant that sooner or later such an undertaking was inevitable for any group of kids with any inclination to adventure and imagination whatsoever.

And, at one stage or another, most did: however when living at that age, with the classroom as your only source of news, it was difficult to gauge where one stood in relation to others. Facts are fluid, especially at that age, and just as we would invent, often from the most meagre scraps of half-heard fragments of sentences grabbed whilst listening in on our parents’ dinner conversations, completely ludicrous tales about what occurred beyond the Breaches, so we would all invent, normally with no basis in reality other than whatever truth can be conferred by the avidity of a disclosure, impossible adventures that we ourselves had made into those forbidden places. I believe that before any of us had even so much as peeked across a Breach, we had all filled the classroom with a complex history of our own experiences adventuring beyond where we had yet to look. Of course believable corroboration could not function across the span of a group of twenty-five eleven year olds, and so the class was split into several ‘clans’, each of which maintained the truth of a specific set of proven ‘facts’ about what was beyond, clinging to each other’s stories with a few shared elements in order to authenticate the group as a whole.

Pretty soon these stories became rather wild, and came to involve all the dramatic flourishes, fantastic embellishments, and histrionic complexity brought about by the need to keep inspiring others in the group, as well as for each group to continue gathering awe and respect from the others in the class. Scaffolding hovering tenuously over cascading waterfalls which could not be seen in the immense darknesses beyond the Breaches, only heard through the roar of their falling waters, and felt through the shaking they induced in the metal frames; creatures that followed you wherever you went, their eyes being one with the walls, and their bodies separated by your presence, only ever partially seen, flitting this way and that, prowling around you, marking time until your departure, watching so that you go no farther than destiny has allotted to your journey; rooms full of whispering adults, dressed in riotous clothes which more than made up for their oral restraint, and which this world has not seen the likes of since the mineral and fiduciary wealth of whole continents was transposed into the garments of kings-cum-gods; tales to put any theme park to shame, and to a degree of elaboration and mystical atmosphere that no real experience could ever compare, let alone correspond.

They may have been beautiful, and fun, but these edifices of our imaginations grew too labyrinthine, too fantastical, to a point at which they became a burden to maintain, and within our group we began to only half-heartedly believe each other: we needed the solid bond of assurance that would come from an actual voyage beyond a Breach. We held off for a long time, maybe almost a year. I think there was a combination of the silent fear that whatever we experienced would not live up to our fictions, and the terror that if we did make the journey, we would not be believed, since we had cried wolf so many times, and our previous cries would probably have been so much more seductive than the real thing. There would also be the moment as we stepped over, when we would have to simultaneously drop any pretences we had maintained up until that point, of having passed similar ways before, the moment at which our storied edifice would collapse. It was necessary, a worthwhile sacrifice, a point of maturation that had to be reached in which actions consume words, and real experiences silence daydreams; and besides, we were not sure who else in our class had made the journey, and how could we let ourselves be beaten, let ourselves be eaten up by the jealousy induced by the speculation that we were less brave than other people?

We had all been told, with serious airs and concerned frowns, that we must not venture across any Breaches. At school and at home it was explained, in terms which bound us in a terrible contract of guilt and conscience, that the boundaries between the Other places and our streets were called Breaches not because they were mistakes or ruptures between the two, but because they existed in order to test people’s strength of respect for the grave importance society placed on the need for the Other places to be unseen and untouched. They were there so that they might be crossed, but crossing them was the most damaging act you could put between you and society as a whole: you would be breaching the very contract between individual and nation that has kept the country sane. The Breaches were there to maintain the potential for the Other places to be seen and entered, notionally, thereby heightening the sense of their presence and reality, but to actually cross them was seen as a profound failure, a breach of trust, a sad act.

But we did. And I think we were meant to. Nobody ever explained to us what they had to do with sanity, or even what they were, only some vague ying and yang stuff, nothing terrifying, or even systemically important enough to instil the fear of God in us of transgressing. Only the power of taboo. The fear of the unknown and guilt. Terrible in its own way, but not a force I would daresay that has ever been strong enough to restrain youth, in any form. While I never went back across again, and I don’t think anybody else did either, I cannot believe from the change it affected in me and my friends, and the lifelong commitment and participation in the perpetuation of the Other places which that “transgression” engendered, that the need to cross a Breach and enter an Other place is in fact not a necessary, in-built part of the system. As I said at the beginning, I believe it to be an unsaid, but entirely necessary, almost mandatory, and probably universal right of passage.

Most things that we didn’t understand the reasons for we speculated as being related to the Other places, from them somehow encapsulating and containing sexual activities, to their being places of punishment or of poverty (at one stage I thought they were where these mysterious “taxes” that everyone always talked about were hidden). Some of us believed in one speculation, others in another, but we were united in the instinctive certainty that they definitely had something to do with what every adult seemed to hide from us every evening, every weekend, in their attics, studies, garages and bedrooms. Without exception our parents, or whoever our guardians were, would leave us alone each evening as they would retreat to a room of their own, shrouded in the same solemn demeanour as when they would tell us about the gravity and importance of respecting the Breaches. This daily hour or two, and the respectful privacy that was expected by the adults to be its companion, was somehow composed of the same weighty material, the same mysterious, hidden atmosphere, as the Other places and the stern hardness they seemed to always produce in our parents’ faces. We were expected to behave ourselves whilst leaving our parents in peace, but again this void, like the void in our cities that the Breaches encircled, was tantalising and impossible not to see as a challenge to our faculties of mischief and enquiry.

Some of us, of course including me, had managed to catch lateral glimpses in ours and other of our friends’ homes, momentary flashes of piles of colourful shapes, odd images on computer screens, chunks of material of indecipherable origin, seen through keyholes in the rooms to which the adults withdrew. We mentioned fleetingly to each other the oddly coloured crystals, the hieroglyphic drawings of unfathomable shapes, and the mess of what looked like votive stage-sets that we thought we had seen, but we did not talk about it too much. We were less inclined to hypothesize with each other about what our own parents were doing in our own homes, it was too real, too personal for us to feel that we could be entirely whimsical with our thoughts and free with out tongues at school. We left all conjecture hanging with an open, but oddly certain, surmisal that whatever they were doing was related to whatever was beyond the Breaches, and it was most probably some kind of devotional act, of worship, or of appeasement.

Whatever it was that our parents were paying homage to, whatever it was that had something to do with their mental well-being, was across the Breaches, which were everywhere. Every other street had one, and the closer you came to the edges of the city, where I lived, the more there were. They didn’t look particularly odd, just like boarded-up openings in plain concrete walls, the shape of the openings being sometimes regular, sometimes as if something had smashed through a wall, but always filled with a patchwork of chipboard panels and corrugated sheets imperfectly sealing the un-walled expanse. What was strange was how they proliferated, multiplied, without any sign of construction. Sometimes a wall with a Breach in it would appear between two houses, and then over a period of several months a cubic geology of concrete forms would spread backwards from it, away from the road, between allotments, pressing up against the sides of buildings. Other times a similar voluminous mass would arrive from elsewhere with the steady march of a dull glacier, and as it reared up against the roads, unable to go any further, would tear apart, opening up a Breach as if it had been a piece of fabric steadily filled up with contents until it had ripped. It was one of the latter kind that we approached, one which had arrived on my friend’s road a few years back, and continued to grow so that we could no longer see behind it, and its flat smooth face was pockmarked with Breaches that rose up several stories above the level of the houses around it.

At the time I hadn’t seen the satellite images which show these architectures, these envelopes which contain the Other places, entirely circumscribing our cities, creeping in towards the centres along every possible route, every gap, it might have scared me at the time. Now it can only give me pleasure. It seems an insurmountable joy to think that all around me, with the material certainty of a fact, the intangible expansiveness of a thought, and the hidden majesty of the divine, the Other places continue to triumphantly spread. Nothing and nobody guards the Breaches, and with a shocking matter-of-factness we stepped through a gap in one of the impromptu barriers, weighed down and partially restrained only by the fabricated terrors and mysteries we had spent our lives constructing about what we were stepping into. Terrors that momentarily held back our breath as they lent too vivid life and body to an overlaying of several high-pitch sounds we could hear immediately on passing through, somewhere in the distance, a compound noise along the lines of several hundred muffled dentist drills all operating on different materials and at varying frequencies.

We couldn’t see anything unusual or frightening with our flashlights, just plain, dirty concrete walls, and a floor that rose up, away from us to another space beyond this one, into which we passed and from where we could see, directly above, through what looked a Breach, but couldn’t be because it was between two spaces both inside the Others, what looked like a mirrored ceiling. Our lights were reflected back at us broken into a thousand shafts, illuminating the plain room we were in as if it were a box inside a turning crystal, above which we could see pieces of ourselves sparkling behind the returning rays of our flashlights, enlarging as we approached, and separating again and again as they enlarged, into more abundant parts and facets that soon atomised us into a dusting of colour amidst a nebula of coruscating fluorescence. Even the slightest movement of the hand holding the torch would send the reflections into a panic, and only as we climbed through into the space did we manage to steady ourselves enough to grasp that this sea of lights was in fact thrown back at us from a room whose forms were almost as dizzying as the way the material they were constructed from reflected light. Under the ceiling, which was like a crumpled tarpaulin made of silver crystal, rows of tables stretched away until what looked like infinity (but was only a fortuitously positioned mirror at the other end), each of which were of different design but all of the same height, and which were uniformly made of a translucent, ever so slightly orange material which appeared glisteningly wet, and on which seemed to be gathered a layer of fine, sharp and luminous powder that glistened like snow. The tables were waiting for something, and the strength of the light multiplied through the endless surface area of specular materials barely left room for shadows, with only one patch of dark, a hole, a Breach in the floor between several of the tables, relieving the space of its overwhelming glare, and through which we passed quickly and in silence.

It was like in those war films which attempt to faithfully recreate what it is like after a bomb has gone off near you, and which portray everything in silence from the moment the explosive goes off. I am sure that there was still the distant sound of drilling, we have asked each other about it since, and each of us remembers noticing it again momentarily at various points, meaning it was most likely continuous; but from stepping up, into that first Other place, we didn’t say a word, we didn’t hear a thing, it was as if the aural had been subsumed by the visual faculty in order to help it digest a sudden, catastrophic excess of input. We climbed down through the hole in the floor of the first room and entered the next space, the second of I don’t know how many that we passed through. I don’t even remember how we found our way back out. I only remember certain tiny specks and moments very clearly: a wall maybe two hundred metres long, built of blocks which caught the light like an opal and were as purple as the deepest hue in an amethyst; a tower containing niches at regular intervals, each carved as ornately as any arabesques drawn in the Book of Kells, and which uniformly faced rough cubic spaces in another tower on the other side of a thin gap, that were all as bare and metallic as containers; something that could have been a library, only instead of books there were rather infinite variations of geometrical shapes in any number of colours and materials; also particularly, one moment when we turned off our torches and realised that there were no lights in any of these places, that they had not been and were not meant to accommodate anybody, at all, and feeling as if everything we were seeing existed only as far as we believed it to exist.

When we turned our torches off it disappeared, perhaps the humming of something far away remained, but the mysteries that we had witnessed with our eyes evaporated as totally as any image on a screen being turned off. It was as if all that strangeness, which although devoid of monsters, bizarre peoples, and ludicrous activities, was so much more extraordinary than any of our puerile speculations had been, could be as tenuous as they were. Our burgeoning edifice of facile story-crafting had been blasted away in the kaleidoscopic twist of our ascent up to the first room, and was never mentioned again, and why should it? It had had no basis in reality other than the boredom, camaraderie and pride of several young boys, and so it disappeared without a trace; but in these rooms, even when we turned our torches off and our minds could barely believe what had been there only seconds before, if we just reached out our hands and touched something near us, the darkness would fall away because what we were surrounded by was real. Perhaps either a cold iciness would undulate gently away from our fingers, feeling at once like satin and chilled porcelain, or else to our left our other hand would stroke its way into crevices that might feel like grained wood, but would give slightly as if it were dense sponge, either way would be given confirmation that these Other places were not images that would disappear at the flick of a switch, and were not speculative conjectures existing only in the mind, but were more fantastical than both of these and existed in all their glorious factuality.

Our fears about whether or not our classmates would respect or care about our claims or not had been based on the triple assumption that what we would see would not in any way be able to live up to our fantasies, that we would need to explain ourselves to the rest of the class, and that we would probably not have been the first to have crossed a Breach. As we found ourselves walking down the road again, after having not only crossed a Breach but penetrated deep into the network of Other spaces and seen them in all their inexhaustible variety and invention, those fears had left about as much trace in our thoughts as had the stories we used to find so important. Not only had reality proven to be far beyond anything we could have imagined, but it was everywhere, it was a part of the very spaces we moved through everyday, inverting their banality in on itself, within its concrete surfaces, to contain a magic that was more powerful than the imagination in all its endless tangible, but unseen permutations. Fact had proven to be stranger than fiction, our humdrum surroundings had revealed themselves to contain a weight of unknowable, and great strangeness, which with its revelation had rebalanced the scale of importances which had previously laid so much gravity at the feet of tale-telling, myth-making, plain lying and classroom jostling. None of us ever mentioned anything to anyone else in the class, we simply stopped talking about the Breaches. It was too great a truth to play with, and would only be reduced by any attempt to convey it, would deflate it to the thin flaccidity of idle wordplay. The last thing that occurred to us to worry about was what the class would think of us, or whether we should explain ourselves, we were entering in to the world of facts, and we knew it would replace the fading mystique of a child’s whimsy with the transformation of everything we had thought so mundane.

The thoroughness of the way this experience changed our perception of every aspect of our lives can only be conveyed by describing how the very deepest, and most private feelings we had were reinvigorated in the same way as the streets now seemed to hide endless magnificence. We had been certain, instinctively sure, before going in there, that all the time our parents would spend alone each day, behind their locked doors, had something to do with what was beyond the Breaches; and as we passed through those places it was impossible not to recall the glimpses we had caught through keyholes and doors left ajar of what now seemed like prototypes, models, plans and preparations for so many of the inimitable places we had lit-up with our flash lights. A pile of pink luminescent material that I thought I had seen as my friend’s father opened and shut his door now became the glowing bloody knife edge adorning the full frontage of each step in a deep, falling staircase; what had looked like part of an elaborate set for an ornate doll’s house when sitting on the edge of a desk, now rose up in every direction around us, as big as a theatre, as lurid as a bordello; what had appeared to be a toy-set, building blocks making train-set bridges, now shot away from us, wide, long, and held as tenuously aloft as any structure by Eiffel or Maillart. It was certain, or rather we were sure, that our parents had designed all of it, that our homes, unknown to us and all along, were, and had always been, the workshops from where issued this bizarre material, the make-up and thought behind the Other places, all of them. Our homes, that we thought we had known so well, were the heart of the whole system.

We were sure, we knew, and our families could see that we did: we were unusually quiet, with a certainty to our step and a seriousness to our looks. Our demeanour intimidated the other classmates, but our families took us aside, one by one, to explain the mystery of the Other places. We were initiated after they saw that we had seen something, and I am sure it was a crossing of a Breach that they had been waiting to see hints of before inducting us. It was an informal affair, just an explanation in the living room, private and domestic, like everything to do with the Other places. No government, no officials, no written rules.

We were told how each adult, everyday, could, and almost always did, take authorship over a place somewhere in the Other places. Every single adult had the right, and the duty, to take part in the creation and extension of them, of these great counterweights to the blanket of knowledge that had trapped us, and still holds the rest of the world in its suffocating minuteness. It was explained that at some point around the time that the last rainforests had been replaced with grazing cows, the northern passage had been filled with regular sea traffic, and creativity had been virtualised and sublimated in the total perfection of the handset; our nation had as a community decided to restructure itself with an unknowable, but self authored absolute at the core of its constitution. A plebiscite mandated the redirection of a significant portion of our wealth, into the ongoing creation of this man made, unfathomable, unnatural nature. As any form of believable mystery disappeared from the rest of the planet, we began to rebuild a new class of vast, mythic, and irresolvable problem. A vengeful, autonomous simulacrum which would span the whole breadth of an ecosystem, contain the entire meaning of a civilisation, and be composed of the concerted sweat, and considered labour, of the sum of all citizens who were alive, and would ever live. We were all to be little gods designing a forbidden Olympus. We were all set about creating something to stand in Awe of.

We were able, and expected, to commit our very being, the life and thoughts through which we existed, into form and material, to be entrusted to our great memorial, to be interred in the process of our country’s immortalisation. This they explained to us was a great private joy, that also formed an unbreakable public bond between everyone in the nation. It joined people together in the knowledge both of their individual fulfilment and continuity, and in the certainty of that being a part of something greater, universal, but nevertheless physical, permanent, untouchable. They explained it as permanent, unstoppable and ongoing, citing the self-perpetuating equipment that our defence industries had built as lovingly as they would have an army, however even after all my years seeing them continue to send Other places marching across our towns, I would still be wary of claiming any kind of material certitude through time. Even fifty million souls should not tempt the fate of Ozymandias.

After us, the others, group by group, fell silent on the subject as I suppose, each of them went through similar experiences to one degree or another. Perhaps they did not penetrate as far into the Others as we did, but I am sure that they each had their own variation of the conversation on the couch, each had the meaning of the places conveyed to them with different emphases, perhaps some more mystic, others more practical, maybe a few jingoisticaly, but all essentially conveying the fundamental core: you work on your own, seriously, considerately, each night, on a space given to you in its outer dimensions, and when you are done, you are sent another, which you treat with the same sobriety. You keep a job during the day, and you pay taxes to keep the system running. It is simple, but in its continuation it is producing a leviathan worthy of Babel.

I have in the past lived abroad for some time, and perhaps that is why I have written this, almost convinced as I was by the continuous accusations of illogical mysticism, and barbaric, uncivilised misuse of technology, that were thrown at me constantly by people from other countries. I was almost convinced. But I am here. With my child. She is coming up to that age now, at which I am sure, if she is anything I have brought her up to be, she will be making her way across a Breach any week now, and coming back to me changed. For the better, I think.

A Bedchamber and a Boudoir, Balzac's Architectures of Pleasure.

Here are two spaces described in two of the three novels that make up Honore De Balzac’s ‘History of The Thirteen’, books written at the inception of the Human Comedy. They capture the beginnings of his ability to mix architecture, art, ornament, design and decoration into an inseparable continuum with the passions, dreams, impressions and activities of the people who play out their lives within their walls, an ability which reaches its apogee in the pages of his novel “The Wild Ass’s Skin” where he manages to describe the entire state of a civilisation, its dreams and nightmares, through long scenes which flit effortlessly between objects, conversations, tastes, smells, lust, art and architecture. It is a tendency in his novels which is partially explained in his book “Seraphita”, a strange tale which explains his philosophy on art and life, heavily influenced by the eighteenth century Swedish mystic Swedenborg, and which emphasises the nature of all materiality as being something through the understanding of which an interconnectedness, and totality, can be touched or adumbrated through its apprehension:
“If matter terminates in man by intelligence, why are you not satisfied to believe that the end of human intelligence is the Light of the higher spheres.”
And conversely, that divinity, or the unique and spiritual essence of ‘nature’ is present in any work of man, and by this renders all possible relationships between the parts of man’s creations to be something profound beyond the material of their parts and the consequence of their existences.
“Earth has divided the Word –of which I here reveal some syllables- into particles, she has reduced it to dust and has scattered it through her works, her dogmas, her poems. If some impalpable grain shines like a diamond in a human work, men cry: ‘how grand! How glorious!’ That fragment vibrates in their souls.”
Hence Balzac, who called himself a Historian, wished to describe a complex continuum, not a sequence of facts, and his science, while always vivid and descriptive, never fell to cataloguing. He was looking for an urban ecology which made every furnishing and candelabra pulse with whatever pathetic fragment of divinity Balzac managed to divine.
These two novels were meant to be his History of love in the efflorescence of luxury that occurred at the time of the Bourbon restoration in the Faubourg Saint-Germain.

From “Ferragus: Chief of the companions of duty”
Book 1 of “The History of The Thirteen”
P81
Madam Jules’ bedchamber was a holy of holies. Only she, her husband and her chambermaid had right of entrance. Opulence has fine privileges, the most enviable of them being those which give the greatest scope to the expression of our feelings, bring them to fruition through the accomplishment of the innumerable whims they inspire, surround them with a radiancy which magnifies them, with the studied attentions which purify them and the delicate touches of courtesy which add yet more to their attractiveness. If you hate al fresco luncheons and badly served meals, if it gives you some pleasure to see a glisteningly white damask tablecloth, a silver-guilt cutlery service, exquisitely delicate china, a gilt-bordered, richly sculptured table, lit with diaphanous candles and then, under emblazoned silver globes, the miracles of the choicest cuisine; if you want to be consistent, you must then spurn attics and house-tops, streets and street-walkers; you must say goodbye to the garrets and grisettes, to umbrellas and galoshes, you must abandon them to people who pay for their dinner with vouchers. Also you must understand the basic principle of love: it can only be achieved in all its grace on carpets from the Savonnerie, under the opal glimmer of a marmoreal lamp, between dicreet, silk-lined walls in front of a gilded fireplace, in a room muffled from all noises by Venetian blinds, shutters and billowy curtains, whether these noises come from the streets or from neighbouring flats. You must have mirrors which make play with human shapes and reflect to infinity the woman you would wish to be multiple and whom love does indeed render multiple. You must have very low divans and a bed which, with a sort of secretiveness, allows its presence merely to be divined; and, in this dainty chamber, fur rugs for bare feet, candles with glass shades amid draped muslins, so that one may read at any time of the night; also flowers whose scent is not too heavy, and linens whose fineness of texture would have contented even Anne of Austria.
Madame Jules had carried out this delicious programme, but that was only a beginning. Any woman of taste could do as much, even though the planning of these things requires a stamp of personality which gives originality and character to this or that ornament, to this or that detail. Today, more than ever before, there reigns a fanatical craving for self-expression. The more our laws aim at an impossible equality, the more we shall swerve from it by our way of living. In consequence rich people in France are becoming more exclusive in their tastes and their attachment to their personal belongings than they were thirty years ago. Madame Jules knew what this programme entailed and put everything in her home into harmony with the luxury which went so well with their conjugal love. ‘Sixty pounds a year and my Sophie’ or ‘Love in a cottage’: only starvelings talk like this. Black bread is all right to start with, but having become gourmets if they really love each other, they come round to regretting the gastronomic pleasures they cannot afford. Love loathes poverty and toil. It prefers to die than to pinch and scrape.

From “The Duchesse de Langeais”
Book 3 of “The History of The Thirteen”
P366
That half of the boudoir in which Henri now found himself described a softly graceful curve, contrasting with the other half, which was perfectly rectangular and resplendent with a chimney piece of white and gilded marble. He had entered through a side door hidden behind a rich portiere with a window standing opposite. The horseshoe section was adorned with a genuine Turkish divan, which is a mattress laid on the floor, wide as a bed, a divan fifty feet in circumference, of white cashmere offset by black and poppy-red silk rosettes forming a lozenge pattern. The back of this huge bed rose many inches higher than the numerous cushions, the tastefulness of whose matching gave it even further richness.
This boudoir was hung with a red fabric overlaid with Indian muslin, its in-and-out folds fluted like a Corinthian column, and bound at top and bottom with bands of poppy-red material on which arabesque designs in black were worked. Under this muslin the poppy-red showed up as pink, the colour of love, repeated in the window curtains, also of Indian muslin, lined with pink taffeta and bordered with poppy-red fringes alternating with black. Six silver-gilt sconces, each of them bearing two candles, stood out from the tapestried wall at equal distance to light up the divan. The ceiling, from the centre of which hung a chandelier of dull silver-gilt, was dazzlingly white, and the cornice was gilded. The carpet was reminiscent of an Oriental shawl, reproducing as it did the designs and recalling the poetry of Persia, where the hands of slaves had worked to make it. The furniture was covered in white cashmere, set off by black and poppy-red trimmings. The clock and candelabra were of white marble and gold. There were elegant flower-stands full of all sorts of roses and white or red flowers. To sum up, every detail of decoration seemed to have been thought out with loving care. Never had wealth of adornment been more daintily disguised in order to be translated into elegance, to be expressive of taste and incite voluptuousness. Everything there would have warmed the blood of the chilliest mortal. The iridescence if the hangings, whose colour changed as the eye looked at them from different angles, now white, now wholly pink, harmonized with the effects of light infused into the diaphanous folds of the muslin and produced an impression of mistiness. The human soul is strangely attracted to white, love has a delectation for red, and gold gives encouragement to the passions because it has the power to realize their dreams. Thus all that is vague and mysterious in man, all his unexplained affinities, found their involuntary sympathies gratified in this boudoir. There was in this perfect harmony a concerto of colour to which the soul responded with ideas which were at once voluptuous, imprecise and fluctuating.

The Fight Between Utility, Pleasure, Morals and Desire in Mlle De Maupin and Its Preface

Using the popularity of History novels in 1830s Paris, Theophile Gautier wrote a book that was ostensibly about the historical figure Mlle de Maupin, a seventeenth century Opera star known for dressing as a man, fighting duels, and generally making a sensation. Not at all a banal starting point, and even if the novel had attempted to faithfully recreate the epic narrative of that woman’s life, playing off of its swashbuckling shock-value, it would have been far from normal.

Illustration of Mlle de Maupin by Aubrey Beardsley

Instead Gautier took the potentials embedded within the thrill that is elicited by a woman successfully occupying the role of a man, potentials which up until then had lain dormant, hidden behind the scandalous excitement and/or moral opprobrium surrounding the tale, and drew them out, unrolling each of them, giving them body through the unique structure, the independent voices, the confused desires, and almost unbearable atmospheres of the book. He did precisely the opposite of what would have been expected from an author in those times to make money in publishing, and with a hero who could have offered just the right pitch of marching plot, duels and spectacular encounters and fights and related moral conclusions that would have got Parisians’ eye’s flying, thoughtlessly, through the pages. Nothing really happens in it. A young man gets a mistress, then meets the mistress’ friend, with whom he falls in love, and eventually beds, once. Everything happens in the grounds and interiors of the same country house. But the intensity of each page consumes far more than could any amount of flashing knives, with the author forever keeping us unsure of who exactly is who, what they are feeling, what is real and what is not, as everything we are told is in letter form, deeply transfigured by the intense, confused passions of the person writing. Underneath the sensational nature of a woman taking on the role of a man, Gautier falls down a magical hole of his own making and discovers a shifting and anxious world of protean identities, indefinite boundaries, emotional, intellectual, and sensual desires that have no respect for binary oppositions. He discovers (I refer to this as a discovery since, like all the best writing, he manages to illuminate parts of our natures that simply lay undescribed, but which were always there) a place in which there is no defined way for each of the characters, and by extension the reader, to know how to judge themselves, their actions, and even how to know what is right and what is wrong. Judgements arise from the solid ground of morally imbued categories (like promiscuous, chaste; active, contemplative), with their various interactions being frowned upon or celebrated; but when these positions become unstable, when male becomes entirely indistinguishable from female, innocence from supposed corruption of the flesh, earnest passion and ingenuousness from a libidinous worldliness, then the reader, and the characters, are left completely on their own as arbiters of an entirely personal judgement. Like the characters with their necessarily continuous and acute insights, and their long, agonising self analyses, we find ourselves as readers having to analyse and carefully consider our own responses to the impassioned and daring situations set up by Gautier, in order to feel –even slightly- as if we know how to see what we are being shown. Like descending into a world of supposed sin and debauch, only to find deeper good, and more profound forms of humanity than we had known before, there is a need to constantly re-evaluate ones position and viewpoint amongst the homosexual confessions, the serial sexual exploits, and the confused minglings of affection and passion between pubescent and adult.

Mlle de Maupin is apparently the Romantic novel par excellence, and lays out many of the tropes that came to define the romantic atmosphere, from the power of androgyny (although after this mostly kept as feminine attributes in a male character), to the free appeal of sensual liberation coupled with a nostalgia for gallantry and pre-industrial chivalry, and the ultimate impossibility of lasting love. Romantic in the best sense of the word, the book is stifling in its desire to break free of any moral straightjacket, any outside force that may exert pressure on the novel itself, and the content within it, to serve any specific purpose, any moral good. It serves itself and sets us a little bit freer because of it, a little bit freer and a lot more desirous. It is almost a system of libidinous reconfiguration, somewhere in between Sade and Masoch, in which uncertainty, introspection and acting create a tense fever-pitch of speculation and amplified desires, heightening the potency of every physical description, every possible point of contact between characters.

Either way, Gautier was explicit and self conscious in his construction of the book’s world, intending it as a rallying cry against the critics of the time who were demanding that art either “serve” the Republican cause, be “morally uplifting” for the people, be “virtuous”, or be “useful” and help further “progress”. Below are some extracts from the Preface to the book, which is long, aggressive, eloquent, quite devastating, and aimed as a riposte to those very critics, all demanding that literature serve what they saw as necessary causes, with Gautier standing up and, daggers of sarcasm in hand, spectacularly managing to reclaim his own ground. As an architect, I was set alight by the preface (which has been called a manifesto for Romanticism, and art for art’s sake), since, like the way in which the book triumphantly describes and celebrates things which were considered somehow shameful, he takes an attitude to art production seen as contemptible, one rooted in pleasure and elegance, whose system of value is based entirely upon stimulation, and propounds its transcendence, explains how for him it was the very essence of literature. I am also fascinated by, and hold most dear, everything that comes after the point of appeased necessity, and while I have only respect for those who make their business the solving of problems, the furthering of causes, or the alleviation of physical poverty, I have always wondered why the production of pleasure and the celebration of life through art, and architecture, always either gets mistaken (how?!) for the pompous showmanship of wealth in search of signs of differentiation, or else is attacked for being unnecessary and wasteful.

Enough for now, the extracts from this manifesto of manifestos (1837…):

Page 3

In the glorious age in which we have the good fortune to live nothing is more ridiculous than the efforts being made by every journal, of whatever political hue be it red, green, or tricolour, to re-establish morality. Morality is of course greatly to be respected, and, heaven knows, we shouldn’t want to treat her discourteously. She is a good and worthy woman. We are indeed of the opinion that behind her spectacles her eyes are brilliant enough; that her stockings are properly adjusted; that from her gold snuff box she takes her snuff as elegantly as can be; that her lapdog bows like a dancing master. That is our opinion. We shall even concede that she is in pretty good shape for her age and carries her years very well. For a grandmother she looks fine, but she is nevertheless a grandmother… It would seem quite normal, especially when you are twenty, to prefer some immoral, pert, coquettish and feminine little thing, with tumbling curls and a skirt somewhat on the short side, with provocative eyes and feet, a flush on her cheek, laughter on her lips and her heart on her sleeve. Even those journalists who are monstrously virtuous would not argue with that. And if they say the opposite, more likely than not they do not believe it. Thinking one thing and saying another is something that people, especially the moral ones, do every single day.

Page 20

You fools, you imbeciles, you goitrous idiots, a book does not make jellied soup; a novel is not a pair of seamless boots nor is a sonnet a vaginal syringe; a drama is not a railway; all of these things that are essential to civilisation and to the advancement of humanity along the path of progress.

By the bowels of all the popes past, present and future, no, two hundred thousand times no.

You cannot make a cotton bonnet out of a metonym and you cannot put on a comparison as you do a slipper; you cannot use an antithesis like an umbrella; you could not, more’s the pity, wrap a few multicoloured rhymes round your middle by way of a waistcoat. It is my deep conviction that an ode is too light for winter wear and that you would be no better clothed with a strophe, antistrophe or epode than was the cynic’s wife who made do with her virtue for a chemise and went stark naked, or so the story goes.

People who claim to be economists, and who want to rebuild society from scratch, seriously suggest such nonsense.

P21

I should like to know first of all the precise meaning of the great gangling fellow of a noun they pepper their vacuous columns with every day, and which they use as a shibboleth or a sacred word. Utility. What does it mean and what is its application?

There are two sorts of utility and the meaning of this word is only ever relative. What is useful to one person is no use to another. You are a cobbler, I am a poet. It is useful for me that my first line rhymes with my second. A rhyming dictionary is very useful to me; but you don’t need one to mend a pair of old boots; and it is fair to say that a shoe-maker’s knife would be no good to me for writing odes. Then you will object that a cobbler is far superior to a poet, and that you can more easily do without the one than the other. Without wishing to disparage the noble profession of cobbler, which I esteem equal to that of constitutional monarch, I humbly submit that I should prefer to leave my shoes unstitched than my verses badly rhymed, and that I should rather do without boots than poems. As I almost never go out and since I make better progress with my head than my feet, I get through fewer pairs of shoes than a virtuous republican who does nothing but run from one ministry to the next, in the hope of landing a job somewhere.

I know some prefer windmills to churches, and the bread of the body to that of the soul. I have nothing to say to them. They deserve to be economists in this world, and in the next.

Does anything exist on this earth of ours, in this life of ours, which is absolutely useful? In the first place there is very little use in our being on earth and alive.

P23

Nothing that is beautiful is indispensable to life. If you did away with flowers, the world would not suffer in any material way. And yet who would wish there not to be flowers? I could do without potatoes more easily than roses and I think there is only one utilitarian in the world capable of tearing out a bed of tulips to plant cabbages. What use is the beauty of women? Provided a woman is medically fit and capable of bearing children, she will always be good enough for the economists. What is the good of music? What is the good of painting? Who would be mad enough to prefer Mozart to M.Carrel, and Michelangelo to the inventor of white mustard? The only things that are really beautiful are those which have no use; everything that is useful is ugly, for it is the expression of some need, and the needs of men are ignoble and disgusting, like his poor and infirm nature. The most useful place in the house is the lavatory.

Whether these gentlemen like it or not, I belong to those for whom the superfluous is necessary. And I prefer things and people in inverse proportion to the services they render me. Instead of a certain useful pot, I prefer a Chinese one decorated with dragons and mandarins, which is no use to me whatsoever. I should be quite happy to renounce my rights as a Frenchman and a Citizen to see and authentic picture by Raphael, or a beautiful naked woman.

P24

I would sell my trousers for a ring, and my bread for jam. The most appropriate occupation for a civilised man seems to me to be to do nothing, or to reflect upon life as he smokes his pipe or cigar.

Pleasure seems to me to be the aim of life and the only useful thing in the world. God has designed it thus. He who created women, perfumes, light, beautiful flowers, good wine, thoroughbred horses, greyhounds and angora cats; Who did not say to his angels “Be virtuous”, but: “Be loving”; and who has given us a mouth more sensitive than the rest of our skin for kissing women; eyes which can look up to see the light; a subtle sense of smell to breathe in the souls of flowers; strong thighs to grip the flanks of stallions and fly as fast as thought without railway or steam engine; delicate hands to stroke the long heads of greyhounds, the velvety backs of cats, and the satin shoulders of creatures with very little virtue; God who, in short, who has given to us alone the threefold glorious privilege of drinking without being thirsty, of striking a light, and of making love all year round, which distinguishes us from the animals much more than does the custom of reading journals and making charters.

Extracts From Cezanne-Picasso Exhibition

These are two extracts taken from the Musee Granet's exhibition about Cezanne's influence on Picasso, showing now in Aix-En-provence. The first was written from L'estaque, a small fishing village at the time, near Marseilles, when Cezanne first discovered its charms, and was placed next to the painting of L'estaque from the same period, pictured below. I find the tenuously presentated, but hugely forceful conclusion quite remarkable. The second text, by Picasso, was placed in a room full of quite sketchy paintings of apples by him, so I instead picture here the epic still life by Cezanne that so luckily for us Londoners is in this city, hanging in the Courtauld galleries.

Cezanne, written in a letter to Pisarro 2^nd July 1876 from L’estaque:

“It is like a playing cards. Red roofs on the blue sea […] There are olive trees and pines which never lose their leaves. The sun is so terrible there that it seems that the objects advance from the background in silhouette, and not only in black and white, but in blue, red, brown and violet. I might be wrong, but to me it is the opposite of volume.”

Picasso said to Francoise Gilot

“If we concern ourselves with what is solid, that is to say the object as a positive form, the surrounding space is reduced to virtually nothing. Are we more interested in what happens inside or outside a form? When we look at the apples of Cezanne, we see that he has marvellously painted the weight of the space on this circular form. The form itself is a hollow volume, on which the exterior pressure is such that it produces the appearance of an apple, even if this apple doesn’t exist really. It is the rhythmic thrust of space on this form that is important.”

Interview for the Exhibition "Parallel Cases" at the Rotterdam Biennale 2009

I was kindly Invited by Karel Wuytack to be interviewed by two of his students, in order to take part in a textual exploration of the theme of 'Open City', all the texts of which will be exhibited in the "Parallel Cases" Exhibition -curated by Ralf Pasel- of this year's Rotterdam Biennale, as well as being published retrospectively in a themed publication.
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Michael Callant

What is the role of the city in the 21st century for you? What are the biggest threats for the open city in your opinion? Do you agree with the ideas of the open city? (everybody can coexist with everybody and should do so…) Do you believe in the open city and are you in that context rather positive or rather negative about the future?

Adam Nathaniel Furman

Cildo Meireles -a Brazilian artist- recently had a retrospective at the Tate, in which there was an installation exhibited that consisted of a space created out of a range of boundary objects that we traditionally use to divide space up into demarcated zones that relate to an individual, activity, or group, these objects being banal units of separation ranging from wooden fences to metal grilles, bead walls, plastic shower curtains, railings and perforated walls, all united by the fact that their physical disposition would not allow you to pass over them, but would allow you to see through them: indeed the exhibit was called “Through”. The name is a telling point in that the potency of the experience to be gained from traveling through that space was not from the fact alone that these barriers guided one’s movements because of their proscriptive restriction of direction, their nature as reins on free action, nor singularly from the way that they allowed the eye to travel through the various divisions, and see other people trapped in their own routes somewhere nearby, each partially veiled by the barriers; but it is precisely the interaction between these two contradictory tendencies which heightens the degree to which one experiences the voyage through his labyrinth. It is a profoundly human relationship which activates desire, enlivens the imagination, and creates an observer out of a subject, a relationship that begins with a restriction, a separation, the removal of something –a person, a space, an event, other people in a gallery, nothing- from the list of things that one might meet, interact with or go into, and is followed by the form of that separation, which if transparent, or perforated, or fenestrated, allows for a curiosity which would otherwise move elsewhere to focus in on that which has been kept from it, to seize on whatever information can be glimpsed through whatever “throughs” have been offered to the excluded individual. It is a situation which shows fragments of things which cannot be known in completeness, and are therefore transformed into formal vessels, willing shapes onto which the observer can project his speculations, speculations which occur in the first place because the lack of contact forces the imagination to cross a bridge to the ‘things seen’ in an attempt to understand them, an act which most probably would not have occurred if those things seen were right next to us, not kept away from our potential interaction, and thereby rendered quotidian, known through the dumb assumption of knowledge brought about by contact. We are stopped, something is shown to us, something which at any other moment we would not have noticed, but since we cannot approach it we desire to know it, we cannot know it so we observe it, speculate on it and imagine it, and in the end may get to know it better than any object that had been freely within our realm of interaction. That is all from the viewpoint of the outsider, but Meireles also added a tank full of Transparent fish, a shocking biological inversion of the standpoint of those visiting the exhibition, willing them to see what being enclosed by such barriers, protected by them, can engender both in us humans as well as in animals: the incredibly gentle strip tease that can grow out of a position of safety, here encapsulated by these little creatures that in the act of hiding themselves –and so protecting themselves- have rendered their very structure, the essential material of their metabolic existence open to whoever will look with more than a passing glance. The converse of these barriers, and their ramping-up of the intrigue of difference and separation, is another function of their relative transparency: the situation in which the combination of their both framing and protecting that which they divide and enclose, creates a sense of security, an assuredness on the part of those kept apart, and allows them, in their security, to reveal themselves more totally to the gaze of others, and so, like the Fish, it is their complete appearance which is also their complete defence.

Now, that particular installation is very important to me as it manages to figuratively and phenomenally set out so many of the issues which for me are relevant in an architect’s, or at least my, relationship to the wider urban context, especially a supposedly “open” one.

There is a certain violence which I feel has been done, and is being done, from two directions, to the kaleidoscope of inside-outside, subject-object, them-us, you-me, relationships which fill our cities (relationships which enrich all of us by providing difference, relief from flatness, and are terribly fragile in their spatial form): one, from the standpoint of the specificity of place in relation to micro-cultures, the expansion of spatially homogenising places of consumption, mainly the supermarket in Great Britain, de-socialise daily activities, simultaneously extracting the potential for the habitual and repetitive reinforcing of shared identities for sub-groups in an area, while at the same time removing the urban and architectural equivalents of Meireles’ fences from around their routines, often both forcing a hardening of attitudes to all the “others” which they are forced to have far too much contact with, as well as a retreat into a more insidious form of separation, which, in being constantly in full sight, is forced to take refuge in a total lack of openness and display, a complete hardening of public attitude, and a total lack of engagement. The same is true of our new breed of urban super-shopping malls, like the mind-bogglingly vast Westfield in Shepherd’s Bush, a machine that seems precisely calibrated to unwind the complex knots of identities woven around it in the fabric of West London, reducing them to a thin and smooth surface of hidden and self-repressed depths, flattened with consent by the shoppers under the convenient, glitzy, and deceptively inclusive undulations of its proto-Fuksas roof. When I say deceptively inclusive, I am not referring to the illusion that these large units of urban economics are public spaces -everyone knows that they are not- and the security guards and CCTV cameras at their doors attest to it; but rather that there is a more insidious form of exclusion which is engendered by these places, an exclusion which self-generates amongst the shoppers and commuters, a form of total separation which comes from the removal of all forms of boundaries, separations, and all of the freedoms and intriguing situations that those divisions allow for. In opting into these spaces, communities, individuals, and small interest groups which may have revealed themselves, perhaps initially only through activities and events, but later through the spatialisation, the architectural separation and framing of their presences, retreat inwards, excluding the very socialized identities and personal presences which a Meireles world would have so sensitively teased-out, and unraveled for display, through forms of enclosure that would have concurrently described, and revealed. Places like Westfield and Sainsbury’s, by their giant, indiscriminate and inclusive frames, exclude -through a contract of self-oppression demanded by any inclusion in such an agoraphobic blanket of openness- the very natures of those who pass through them, both individual and shared. All that is left is the nostalgic symbolism of clothing, covering the vacant rigidity of a suspended sociality. A more apt fish tank would be one full of a few Puffer Fish, and some Lion Fish, bristling with a nervous anxiety at their entirely Open surroundings.

The second act of generalized violence comes from the public sector, and has come to form a latter-day Dogma in that realm, a dogma which springs from the anxieties that the previously mentioned machines of economic homogenization produce, and seeks to allay them by proposing that as a contemporaneous counter to the flattening effect of these places -in which exchange occurs only on the quantitative level- a form of content-integration, a sort of integration of suppressed identities (which bristle silently, invisibly and violently against each other while standing in line at the local Tesco) can be achieved, an accomplishment which would complete, in depth, the project of uniform openness, and reductive integration, that is only partially achieved -with simmering flaws- on the level of economic exchange. This is the Dogma of Community Integration and Cultural Dialogue, a national programme in which there is finally no space left for divergence; in which ‘communities’ are forced to brand their identities and posit their cultural exchange and integration value, in order to be recognized as valuable members of society. This is an interior openness more pervasive and dangerous than that demanded by the market, since it is a demand posited as a precondition for participatory citizenship.

Mission Statement Taken from the UKGOV website “Communities and Local Government”

“Our aim is to build thriving places where a fear of difference is replaced by a shared set of values and a sense of purpose and belonging. We want to make sure that everyone in each community benefits from diversity, and we recognise that this means promoting similar opportunities for all. Our challenge is to build these stronger communities in times of rapid change.

We are reducing perceptions of race discrimination and leading the work on creating more cohesive communities, tackling racism, extremism, promoting inter-faith activity and a shared sense of belonging.

Delivery of this agenda is dependent not just partnerships with other government departments, but with the wider communities, community organisations, public and private sector.”

Currently there is little scope for the delicate calibration of routine -or the private, or group- appropriation of partially enclosed spaces folded into, and within, a fluctuating city of partially seen entities; there is only place for a flood of sublimated signals floating in complete openness, and this is only rendered more thorough and socially obligatory through the effective collusion of government in the pacification -via policies of dialogue and community building to which much local funding is tied- of the underlying tensions that this situation brings about.

In terms of whether I am positive or negative about the future, I would have to say I am relentlessly positive, but then that is my biological predisposition. However I do believe that the situation I have just layed out is a dying one, a sort of apogee of a situation coming to a terminal point, and I am quite excited, as I sense that the “Meireles World” which I adumbrated through my experience of Through (rather than his reasons for making it) –a world of infinite degrees of calibrated separation and openness; revelation and desire; enclosure and observation- is one which will be coming about soon, with the explosion of the previous state’s monolithic machines of reduction and institutionalized dialogue. New technologies of design and rapid, ecological fabrication; technologies of individuated creative content-production; atomized market-places; Long-Tail dispersal of information; will all, perhaps, lead to an urbanism in which we can be free of either the need to bear-all in a state of constant, static openness, or the requirement that we identify with one classified cultural group whose contents are pinned and shared in a dialogue of public pacification. Perhaps there will be a place for individuals, and group entities -which last for whatever period- to build shifting narratives and non-ethnic identities, set within related spaces which navigate and transform the city in an sublime kaleidoscope of degrees which march interminably, and at every scale, in the protective and complex space between the fearful agoraphobia and lowest common denominator of total Openness and dialogue, and the ossified meaninglessness of complete separation and enclosure.

Bad Taste: Applied, Reflexive and Camp

There is Taste that is bad because it is defined by people who conform to or are active within a given taste (taste here being distinct from sensibility, since many tastes can together form an epochs overall sensibility), and define their taste as good in opposition to an antithetical taste which they call bad (such as the successions of nouveau-rich aesthetics from New York to Houston to Dubai and Moscow which are dogmatically classed as bad taste by those who posit their own styles as being all moderation, restraint and hence “good taste”).

This type of bad taste is externally applied to an uncapitulating group and I guess I would call ‘Applied Bad Taste’.

Then there is Taste that is entirely aware of the boundaries of a particular given group that defines in one place and time what constitutes Good Taste, and defines itself entirely within a liminal zone around these boundaries. Unlike Applied Bad Taste -which exists on its own and only has judgements projected on it externally from Good Taste, this form of Bad Taste is self conscious of its relationship to Good Taste and controls the way it is seen by carefully controlling the distance it goes towards the outer reaches of what Good Taste considers a part of itself… but the key is that it will always return either to the boundary line or back within, because this form of bad taste (which is the one which can handle shock and horror so effortlessly) is internal to Good Taste, is a part of it and performs the role of constantly checking where it ends, and so maintaining its integrity as a unit as it changes through time. These arbiters of Bad Taste are Aristocrats and have a privileged Aesthetic role in society.

This type of Bad Taste acts internally on its own group and I guess I would call it ‘Reflexive Bad Taste’.

Then of course there is that field full of earnest and overabundant inventiveness that is something like the fecundity of nature coming out in plastic, velvet, rhinestone and lace. Namely a taste which is entirely the opposite of the Aristocratic and controlling role of Reflexive Bad Taste, but which also performs at the edges; here Good Taste is not tested to breaking point, but rather multiple tastes are grown in a fecund profusion of uncategorisable inventions and styles which surround good taste like fields or forests used to surround cities, providing unending material for any future alterations or innovations within Good Taste itself. This Taste is precisely too heterogeneous to be a taste at all, and is therefore looked at but not seen in its entirety by Good Taste’s homogeneity, and can only be understood in tiny parts at any one time.

This type of Bad Taste is Nature coming out through our hands and in our Garages, is by necessity heterogeneous, self-sufficient and EARNEST, and is obviously ‘Camp’.

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These areas that are often dismissed when encountered visualy as being in Bad Taste, and when they are present in the work of an artist or architect who uses them knowingly is always assumed to be intended ironically, these three realms of creativity are always present in everything I do –to varying degrees- and interest me greatly: from the vast, explosive, and joyous release of Camp genius when it encounters vast wealth, from Versace to Cavalli, all the way to the shit-eating murderous sexuality of Salo, and back again to the suburban streets of outer london and all the innumerable “minimalist”, “roman”, and “classic” living rooms occupying the train-set terraces and semis. I want Camp to be present because for me it is the effusive joy of creation, the human instinct to multiply itself and its beauty out into the space around it in a celebration of existence… unquestioningly taking flight in the pleasure of doing; Applied Bad Taste (for me here refering specificaly to the Nouveau Riche aesthetics whose ends is luxurius differentiation. There are many others but I am interested in this instance) is the saturation of art with money and power, and it is glittering, dangerous and full of overripe potential. I am interested in it… when I saw Cavalli’s boat day after day in the harbour, while making all the right sounds with my mouth to my friends about how vulgar it all was so that we were all in communal agreement, my head was furiously imagining what was going on on board, what kind of conversation were happening, what did it look like, how dearly I would have loved to be on it! And Reflexive Bad Taste is like a touch of Tabasco… there is no need to smother all the other flavours by shocking the palate with an overtly unpleasant taste, but it adds so much to the whole if there is that piquant kiss, that cheeky and unexpected position.

Extracts from "Relational Aesthetics" by Nicolas Bourriaud

These are from a wonderful collection of essays/articles, of which "Towards a policy of forms" was the one I found the most arresting. More Bourriaud extracts to follow in the coming months.

P20
Gordon Matta-Clarke or Dan Graham’s work cannot be reduced to the “things” those two artists “produce”; it is not the simple secondary effects of a composition, as the formalist aesthetic would like to advance, but the principle acting as a trajectory evolving through signs, objects, forms, gestures… the contemporary artwork’s form is spreading out from its material form: it is a linking element, a principle of dynamic agglutination. An artwork is a dot on a line.

P26
Transitivity is as old as the hills. It is a tangible property of the artwork. Without it, the work is nothing other than a dead object, crushed by contemplation. Delacroix wrote in his diary that a successful picture temporarily “condensed” an emotion that it was the duty of the beholder’s eye to bring to life and develop. This idea of transitivity introduces into the aesthetic arena that formal disorder which is inherent to dialogue. It denies the existence of any specific “place of art”, in favour of a forever unfinished discursiveness, and a never recaptured desire for dissemination.

P36
So through little gestures art is like an angelic programme, a set of tasks carried out beside or beneath the real economic system, so as to patiently re-stitch the relational fabric.

P67
On the other hand, we can say that art creates an awareness about production methods and human relationships produced by the technologies of its day, and that by shifting these, it makes them more visible, enabling us to see them right down to the consequences they have on day-to-day life. Technology is only of interest to artists in so far as it puts effects into perspective, rather than putting up with it as an ideological instrument.

P78
The future of art, as an instrument of emancipation, and as a political tool aimed at the liberation of forms of subjectivity, depends on the way artists deal with this issue. For art, no technique or technology is a subject. By putting technology in its productive context, by analysing its relations with the superstructure and the layer of obligatory behaviour underpinning its use, it becomes conversely possible to produce models of relations with the world, heading in the direction of modernity. Failing which, art will become an element of high-tech deco in an increasingly disconcerting society.

P95
And what if real style, as Deleuze and Guattari write, were not the repetition of reified “making” but “the movement of thought”? Guattari contrasts the homogenisation and standardisation of types of subjectivity with the need to involve the being in “heterogenetic processes”. This is the primary principle of mental ecosophy: articulating particular worlds and rare life forms; cultivating per se differentness, before moving it over into the social.

P103
Based on Oscar Wilde’s formula, modernity is the moment when “it is not art imitating life, but life imitating art”… Marx is headed in the same direction, by criticising the classical distinction between praxis (the act of self-transformation) and poesis (the necessary, servile action aimed at producing and transforming matter). Marx thought, on the contrary, that “praxis moves constantly into poesis, and vice-versa”.

For “the only acceptable end-purpose of human activities,” writes Guattari, “is the production of a subjectivity that is forever self-enriching its relationship with the world.”

P104
The poetic function, which consists in re-forming worlds of subjectivisation, possibly would not have any meaning if it, too, were not able to help us to negotiate the “ordeal of barbarity, mental implosion, and chaosmic spasm which are taking shape on the horizon, to turn them into riches and unforeseeable pleasures”…

P107
Aesthetics
An idea that sets humankind apart from other animal species. In the end of the day, burying the dead, laughter, and suicide are just the corollaries of a deep-seated hunch, the hunch that life is an aesthetic, ritualised, shaped form.

P111
Form
Structural unity imitating a world. Artistic practice involves creating a form capable of “lasting”, bringing heterogeneous units together on a coherent level, in order to create a relationship to the world.

Image
Making a work involves the invention of a process of presentation. In this kind of process, the image is an act.

Inhabiting
Having imagined architecture and art of the future, the artist is now proposing solutions for inhabiting them. The contemporary form of modernity is ecological, haunted by the occupancy of forms and the use of images.

P114
Style
The movement of a work, its trajectory. “The style of a thought is its movement” (Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari)

Text Written For "Text Fields" installation "TF002"

Text Fields SITE

TF002 is an exploration of the liminal zone that lies between the kind of quotidian space through which one walks everyday, the sort of enclosure that captures our habitual trajectories -a corridor, a staircase- and the words, the name, the noun, the ‘text’ which denotes that space, signifies it, and categorises it in our minds. Between the thing that denotes, and the experience of what it represents.

‘The Corridor’ is an emphatically mental construct of a definite article and a name, it is an open container of 11 letters which has the ability to encapsulate any number of individual associations, from the memory of hospitals, to the endless labyrinths of nightmares, to -in this case for those involved in the gallery- warm conversations and grandiose discussions about art, and the curation of small exhibitions. The space itself, with its awkward little skylights and concrete floor, is a resolutely physical construct, a passive collection of impressions of cold and warmth, light and dark, echoes and silences, and dirt and colour, all of which are taken up and sensually experienced in any number of ways by each person who passes through it; whether it is the concrete sucking the warmth out of the thin soles of their plimsolls, freezing their feet, or the light from the sunny day outside as it slices the path into pieces through the skylights, and leaves the space disorientating and difficult to navigate.

It is the subjective apprehension of those letters which is a concern of typography. The delicate and calibrated adjustment of the form of the word, of the text, that subtly manoeuvres the tone in which the associations which the word conjures up are received; a form of design in which the scope of subjective mental impressions to which a word may lead – whether hospitals and labyrinths or drinks and openings- are decorated, coloured and unified by a typeface. Where the typographer deals with the subjective experience of the ‘text’, the spatial designer deals in the analogous act of organising the elements of enclosure, in order that they provide a framework for similarly indeterminate, and individual experiences of the object of design -whether they frame and unify the feeling of freezing feet and the disorientation from shafts of blinding light, or the annoyance of having to crouch underneath something and squeeze past people in the impossibly tight space.

TF002 is an act of design precisely positioned between these two complementary practices, an act in which those involved have explicitly attempted to draw the cerebral and associative qualities inherent in the nature of typefaces and text, out into the physical and material space of architecture; and inversely to draw the sensual and impressionistic nature of designed space into the arena of the partially constructed thought. These qualities from the two practices -the qualities from the two which were closer to a relationship of mutual reciprocality between the experience and reading of the space, and its design- were extracted, leaving behind any approach which formed an overtly explicit description of how the space should be read, or experienced. This meant that embodied in the process through which the group arrived at the form of the installation (the formulation of a three dimensional font, the writing of the name of the gallery in space, and the subsequent simulation of that name’s explosion within the gallery, and its freezing and materialisation at a moment of ambiguous eloquence) is a critical distancing from any form of declamatory object-hood on the side of the architecture, and a positioning away from any conclusive declamation of meaning by text from the side of typography. The fact that the research project is called Text Fields and not Text Space or Built Text, is precisely because the group want to create immersive environments of indeterminate origins and ambiguous meaning, in which the usual roles of the various design professions lose their central, fixed functions and roles, and begin to bleed into one another in a field of uninterrupted mental and physical figures and impressions, whose valification lies dually in the freedom of the subject from dictated readings (more towards fields of connotation), and the liberation of the designer from isolated categorisation.

The goals are broad and ambitious, and TF002 is the first built step in the exploration of these themes. It is the first 1:1 physical manifestation of the group and its discussions, and through its realisation has helped to summarize and bring together the issues, and how those issues might be transfigured into a spatial field, something which through the feedback the group has received from the installation, TF002 seems to be doing well.

Next step TF003

Extract from Proust's "The Fugitive"

p535
"When I wrote them, the sentences of my article were so weak compared to my thought, so complicated and opaque compared to my harmonious and transparent vision, so full of gaps which I had not managed to fill, that reading them caused me to suffer, they had only accentuated my feelings of impotence and an incurable lack of talent. But now in forcing myself to become a reader, if I delegated to others the painful duty of judging me, I was at least able to wipe the slate clean of what I had intended to do, by reading what I had done."

Opinion, and Extracts From Erwin Panofsky's Idea, A Concept In Art Theory

In true Panofsky fashion the book hops in and out of Neo-Platonism, Aristotelianism, Scholasticism, and many of their recombinations and reformations from the high renaissance through to Neo-Classicism, in search of the chain of transformations undergone by the notion of the Idea in art, from its restriction of art to the world of shadows, to its glorification of art as matter enlivened by thought, to its role as weapon in the battle between the subjective and the objective, and even its use in the overcoming of such an opposition in the chasing of its origins back to the groundlessness of divinity. His narrative chain is impressive and fun, however I cannot help but be disappointed that after his recounting of all the fights and debates and dialectics over the centuries which have invigorated artists and artistic production, from the squabbling camps of the Caravvagisti naturalists and the Mannerist stylists, to the oppositions of the Impressionists and Expressionists, that after citing so much colourful material and debate that has arisen from the cyclical return of these recurrent themes, he seems to draw a line under the whole investigation, under all those themes, placing his narrative in the trash-heap of futility, as if it were a failed scientific experiment whose very subject had proven itself worthless and unsuitable for investigation. He wrote that “To recognize the diversity of these solutions and to understand their historical presuppositions is worthwhile for history’s sake, even though philosophy has come to realize that the problem underlying them is by its very nature insoluble”, and in so doing once again brings down philosophy’s heavy and blunt axe onto the nape of art’s soft neck, paternalistically pointing out to art that its energetic dialogues are pointless, that all they need to do is to look at the divine Kant and see that there can be no ground for artistic perception outside of itself, that there can be recourse neither to a pure nature nor to a transcendental “thing-in-itself”, that oppositions like that between “idealism” and “naturalism” are illusions of illogic, dialectical antinomies that have arisen from a misunderstanding of the origins of artistic perception; and so the debate is closed. The oppositions of subject-object, nature-style, systematization-intuition, etc are all passionate phantasms over which so much intellectual energy has been wasted, the interesting residue of which just so happens to be the voluminous and eminently inexplicable mass of sculpture and painting that silently sits in its museums, tormenting the likes of Panofsky in their wordlessness, but which he cannot ignore, and so after convicting the reasons behind their production as being guilty of epistemological inadequacy, he must simply catalogue the sculptures and the ideas behind them like a good botanist cataloguing a species doomed to extinction, and so having noted their existence, having marked their irrelevance, he closes the book on the vainness of art.

How would a writer feel if a theorist came and declared that philosophy had discovered the insolubility of the problem underlying the nature of literary invention? That all the discussions between writers as to the nature of factual history and fictional representation, of style and content, of reality and truth, were all silly disagreements based on their inability to see that the problems themselves had been misplaced, that they were locked in endlessly circling dialectical antinomies? I would think that he might be rather perplexed at the nature of ideas in writing being posed as a problem that should be solvable, that such a notion was as laughable and arid as being told that while people can discuss as much as they like about whatever they so please, it is all pointless because the sum of all their debates cannot be resolved into a proof that concludes a philosophically framed problem. There seems to me to be a misunderstanding about the oppositions in art-production, in that I do not think their value lies in their ability to compose in aggregate an elegant answer to any of the problems they present (which is what many an art theorist seems to look for), or even that their connections in time should be logical enough to form a coherent history, rather it seems to me that their value lies in the quantity and quality of the artistic phenomena they engender; that the amount of investigation they demand be justified not by their quality as resolvable equations, but by the strength and vigour of the pursuit after an unachievable goal which they inspire in the artists pre-occupied with their ideas. And the reason that certain oppositions and questions keep coming back in various forms, and keep inspiring generation after generation of artists to produce, is not that they are logically interesting and eminently given to discursiveness, but that they are representative of various facets of human nature, perfect mirrors and justifications of all the various shades of character-types in the pool of humanity (the ‘rigorous’ types disposed first to systematization and then ‘the scientific’, and the ‘spiritual’ types first to the idealistic and later the absolute, etc etc); and just as (I pray) the diversity of civilisation will never implode to a point where all is in agreement with all else, but will rather remain abundant in human archetypes which subtly shift in combination from person to person and generation to generation, so artistic discourse will continue to be rich in discussions and disagreements which are as rich and inspiring, but also as repetitive and unchanging, as the nature of human character itself.

P31
Plotinus says:
For he who contemplates physical beauty must not lose himself therein, but he must recognise that it is an image and a vestige and a shadow, and he must flee to that of which it is a likeness. For if one were to rush forth and to grasp for truth that which is only a beautiful reflection in the water, then the same thing will happen to him that happened to the one about whom a meaningful myth tells how he, wanting to grasp a mirrored reflection, vanished in the depths of the waters; in the same way, he who holds on to physical beauty and will not let go of it, will sink, not with his body but with his soul, into the dark abysses, horrible for the mind to behold, where he will languish blindly in Orcus, consorting with shadows there as he did here.

Thus the Platonic attack accuses the arts of continually arresting man’s inner vision within the realm of sensory images, that is, of actually obstructing his contemplation of the world of Ideas [relevant passage not included in this extract, see p30]; and the Plotinian defence condemns the arts to the tragic fate of eternally driving man’s inner eye beyond these sensory images, that is, of opening to him the prospect of the world of Ideas but at the same time veiling the view. Understood as copies of the sensory world, works of art are divested of a more elevated spiritual or, if you will, symbolic meaning; understood as revelations of Ideas, they are divested of the timeless validity and self-sufficiency which properly belongs to them.

P39
Scholasticism in general, just like Plato, showed far less interest in the problem of art than in the problem of the beautiful, much more compelling because of its amalgamation with the problem of the good.

P50
[Alberti’s Treatise] differs from earlier literature of art by no longer answering the question “how to do it?” but the quite different and thoroughly unmedieval question “what abilities and, above al, what kind of knowledge enable the artist to confront nature with confidence whenever he is required to do so?”
In its attitude toward art the Renaissance thus differed fundamentally from the Middle Ages in that it removed the object from the inner world of the artist’s imagination and placed it firmly in the “outer world”. This was accomplished by laying a distance between the “subject” and “object” much as in artistic practice perspective placed a distance between the eye and the world of things –a distance which at the same time objectifies the “object” and personalizes the “subject”.

P63
It is clear from what has been said that the “subject-object problem” was now ripe for a basic clarification. For as soon as the “subject” is given the task of obtaining the laws of artistic production from reality by his own effort instead of being allowed to presuppose them above reality (and above himself), there necessarily arises the question of when and for what reasons he is justified in claiming to have these laws correct. Yet –and this is particularly significant- it was only the definitely “Mannnerist” school of thought which first achieved a basic clarification of the problem, or at least consciously demanded it.

P65
The concept of the “Idea” was already transformed into the concept of the “ideal” during the renaissance. This stripped the Idea of its metaphysical nobility but at the same time brought it into a beautiful and almost organic conformity with nature: and Idea which is produced by the human mind but, far from being subjective and arbitrary, at the same time expresses the laws of nature embodied in each object, achieves basically the same thing by intuitive synthesis that Alberti, Leonardo, and Durer had tried to achieve by discursive synthesis when they summarized and systematized a rich material, gained by observation and approved by expert judgement, into a theory of proportion: the perfection of the “natural” by means of art.

P79
[Mannersists] rejected both the flowing freedom of baroque space and the lawful order and stability of Renaissance space, and created instead even severer restraints precisely by means of planarity. In a similar way the avowals of artistic freedom co-existed –not too peacefully- with the dogma that artistic creativity could be taught and learned, that is, that it could be systematized. Perhaps this dogma received very special stress precisely because it was feared that otherwise art might be threatened by subjective arbitrariness.

P88
At the end of his book Zuccari interprets the term disegno interno as an etymological symbol of man’ssimilarity to God (disegno = segno di dio in noi), and he celebrates it as the “second sun of the cosmos”, the “second creating Nature”, and the “second life-giving and life-sustaining world spirit”

P123
Durer:
He who has done much measuring will develop his own Augenmass (ie intuitive sense of proportion); he who “has filled his mind full” by much Abmachen (ie reproducing nature from life), will accumulate a “secret treasure of the heart”, from which he can pour forth what he “has gathered in from the outside for a long time”.

P124
Ideas normally provide a guarantee of objective validity and beauty in the work of art; with Durer however, their proper function is to ensure originality and inexhaustibility in that they enable the artist to pour forth “always something new” from his mind. The theory of Ideas, which here almost take on the character of inspirations, serves to support that romantic conception of genius that recognizes the mark of true artistry not in correctness and beauty but in an unending plenitude that always creates things unique and things that never existed before.

Positive and Negative Creativity

The post in which I revisited an old text talked about a form of heaviness, a solid presence which I often feel weighing down from somewhere just antecedent to my thoughts, a presence which, when it has coagulated a certain amount of units of pure subjectivity around itself, forms a dense intuitive singularity of a ripeness which is impossible to ignore, a pungent and pendulous fatness which imposes itself on every waking thought like the distinct and material urge to empty one’s bowels, except insisting on its release through the hands via the intellect rather than the anus via the intestine. This urge to release what has been metabolised in the mysterious organ that is the brain is the result of the bodily digestion of external reality, the by-product of the process by which the brain consumes that which is external to itself and assimilates it as part of its being, a necessarily continuous nourishment that keeps the mind full of a fresh sense of reality as it loses the present to the vagaries of memory in an uninterrupted stream, forming a mental analogue to the materially essential and unceasing replenishment of our cells by consuming physical matter from the world around us. The processes themselves are metabolic and vital, one for physical health and the other mental, and while both continually replenish their respective realms they conversely create superfluous material which must be excreted as it does not constitute a functioning part of the body, superfluous material which makes its presence felt in the gut, and the mind. The build-up of this by-product of existence and engagement with the surrounding world might have become intolerable for me, might have been a great source of pain if I had not been fortunate enough in life to have had my hands and thoughts introduced to -and trained in- the transubstantiation of mental figure to physical matter, a skill which has allowed me to not only rid myself of these accumulations, which I imagine would otherwise have clogged up my primary apprehension of things outside of myself, but to even begin refashioning small segments of the world around me in consonance with the intuitive and internal process of mental metabolis, in other words the release of this superfluous material now brings me not just the relief of excretion, but also the pleasure of creation.

I have become somehow intimate with the exigencies of the natural functioning of both the stomach and the mind, and have become relatively adept at procuring both food and stimuli that will make me at once feel reasonably healthy and adequately engaged and productive, rendering these biological systems generally predictable, predominantly stable, verging on the habitual. Unfortunately, permeating every stage of the metabolism of both my mind and body, there is an unstable element, a tenacious and inscrutable presence which destabilises the placid equanimity that would be so pleasantly balanced without it. I hadn’t thought about it much recently, preferring to stare into the wine-glass rather than into its entirely specular face, but a brief conversation on the terrace at the AA, and my attempt to be truthful rather than phatic, led me to think a little about its impact on my production, and by association my life. Asked how (or why, I cannot remember which) I was so continuously ‘creative’, I replied phatically that it was because ‘I enjoy it’, vaguely justifying the ease and emptiness of the response to myself via the narrow connection of its positive verb to the slow, quiet and broad pleasure to be extracted from the metabolic, biological creativity I enjoy so much; and while usually such vague justifications are satisfactory this one was clearly insufficient in that the question had been asked about the quantity of my creativity, its incessancy rather than about any quality, and the slow form of production with its occasionally heavy moments of fecundity which I was referring the ‘I enjoy it’ to is not one that produces anything in great quantities at all, it is something entirely else that fills in the gaps between those moments of weight and substantiality, something totally different in kind that forces a certain pace to hands that would otherwise perhaps be helping others or working to make money. It is that other thing which needed to be referred to, and I could not reconcile it to ‘I enjoy it’ because –and this struck me rather heavily at that moment- there was no pleasure contained within my recollection of it whatsoever, it was entirely devoid of delight, or of enjoyment. Rather than emerging painlessly from within me, than being products of a harmony between body and intent, the majority of works I produce are artistic palliatives; not independent sources of joy or pride, but manifestations of a repeated and desperate desire to be rid of an implacable, vicious and mercurial substance which corrupts and agitates every part of my nature that it touches. When I am trying to rest and relax it inserts itself into the gap between the silence and my enjoyment of it, disrupting any germinal relationship between the two by taking the form of an immaterial and shapeless anxiety, an anxiousness which drives me into the arms of books and drink in search of other forms of silence; when I am trying to enjoy an entirely innocent and enjoyable meal it sinks into the delightful union of nature and pleasure that is the transcendental heart of dining, and corrupts it, distorting the balance between hunger and enjoyment so that hunger grows so frantically unstable, so hysterically nervous, that the best that can be hoped for from meals becomes not delight, but relief from a monstrously enlarged hunger; and when I am trying to work, trying to do anything that is not within the orbit of a creative activity, the greater the time spent away from making things, the more items of artifice that I feel I should have made in the preceding interval, the smaller the value that seems appended to me, the further my internal self-estimation falls towards the crushing point of worthlessness, and it is the feeling of proximity to that point of nothingness which agitates a yawning terror and drives me wildly back into production, clawing feverishly drawing by drawing, design by design back from the brink of nothingness. Works produced under these circumstances are definitely not positives, not items of pleasure with value in themselves, they are instead negatives, momentary reliefs from the terror of worthlessness whose value lie in the absence of an unpleasant feeling, the lack of a troubling agitation. They are artistic analgesics, and form a potent medicine in the cabinet of calmatives that habit has developed to give me respite from that one same devilish toxicity, that selfsame noxiousness that is always there in the smooth integers of my personality, ready to crack them into unrelated and selfish fractions; that unitary disruptor which is the ticking heart of that terrible anxiety I always find in silence, that monstrous starvation I have to face in meals and the awful descent into worthlessness I cannot avoid if I am not producing.

It would not be true to say that everything I do is tainted in this way, since there is always the genius of that silent metabolic process which continues to consume reality, reaffirm existence and excrete singular beauty; it is a genius which resides in a place that lies behind and before the areas where anxiety and agitation inject themselves, a position which allows those positive, natural and pre-neurotic creative acts to develop and occur simultaneously with those negative ones whose aim is palliative. And the two have even fed each other’s ability for self-realisation, in that the relentless drive to assuage the ego’s perpetually diminishing self-worth through production has always had the positive consequence of forcing the hands to learn new techniques, hone old ones, and broach new mediums, skills which in turn have helped in the creative excretion of the residual build-up of mental metabolis, helped in the formation of natural, positive, complete, and joyful objects of creation.

And so if asked the question again of how or why I am so constantly creative, while I cannot in good faith reply that it is because ‘I enjoy it’, I equally would not be able to say that it is only because ‘I want to avoid torment’, my reduced and lazy reply would simply have to be ‘because it pre-occupies me entirely’.

Extracts from 'The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays' by Charles Baudelaire

These are all taken from ‘The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays’. Reading them was easy and enjoyable since most of the ideas set out and discussed by Baudelaire in this book overlap with my own prejudices to the point where the reading of it was like spending an evening with an artist friend who is passionate, repressed and indignant about all the same things as you, and the time you spend together flies past in discussions containing only varying insights around consonant opinions, never a disagreement whether fundamental or contingent, just enraptured complicity…

P3
In contrast to the academic theory of an unique and absolute beauty; to show that beauty is always and inevitably of a double composition, although the impression that it produces is single -for the fact that it is difficult to discern the variable elements of beauty within the unity of the impression invalidates in no way the necessity of variety in its composition. Beauty is made up of an eternal, invariable element, whose quantity it is excessively difficult to determine, and of a relative, circumstantial element, which will be, if you like, whether severally or all at once, the age, its fashions, its morals, its emotions. Without this second element, which might be described as the amusing, enticing, appetizing icing on the divine cake, the first element would be beyond our powers of digestion or appreciation, neither adapted nor suitable to human nature. I defy anyone to point to a single scrap of beauty which does not contain these two elements.

Stendhal [] approached the truth more closely than many another when he said that ‘Beauty is nothing else but a promise of happiness’

P8
The child sees everything in a state of newness; he is always drunk. Nothing more resembles what we call inspiration than the delight with which a small child absorbs form and colour. I am prepared to go even further and assert that inspiration has something in common with a convulsion, and that every sublime thought is accompanied by a more or less violent nervous shock which has its repercussion in the very core of the brain. The man of genius has sound nerves, while those of a child are weak. With the one, Reason has taken up a considerable position; with the other, Sensibility is almost the whole being. But genius is nothing more nor less than childhood recovered at will –a childhood now equipped for self-expression with manhood’s capacities and a power of analysis which enables it to order the mass of raw material which it has involuntarily accumulated.

P9
The genius of childhood –a genius for which no aspect of life has become stale.

That only too difficult art –sensitive spirits will understand me- of being sincere without being absurd.

The spectator is a prince who everywhere rejoices in his incognito.

P12
By ‘modernity’ I mean the ephemeral, the fugitive, the contingent, the half of art whose other half is the eternal and the immutable.

This transitory, fugitive element, whose metamorphoses are so rapid, must on no account be despised or dispensed with. By neglecting it, you cannot fail to tumble into the abyss of an abstract and indeterminate beauty, like that of the first woman before the fall of man.

P13
In short, for any ‘modernity’ to be worthy of one day taking its place as ‘antiquity’, it is necessary for the mysterious beauty which human life accidentally puts into it to be distilled from it.

P32
Evil happens without effort, naturally, fatally; Good is always the product of some art. All that I am saying about Nature as a bad counsellor in moral matters, and about Reason as true redeemer and reformer, can be applied to the realm of Beauty. I am thus led to regard external finery as one of the signs of the primitive nobility of the human soul.

P33
Fashion should thus be considered as a symptom of the taste for the ideal which floats on the surface of all the crude, terrestrial and loathsome bric-a-brac that the natural life accumulates in the human brain: as a sublime deformation of Nature, or rather a permanent and repeated attempt at her reformation. And so it has been sensibly pointed out (though the reason has not been discovered) that every fashion is charming, relatively speaking, each one being a new and more or less happy effort in the direction of Beauty, some kind of approximation to an ideal for which the restless human mind feels a constant, titillating hunger.

P49
The whole visible universe is but a store-house of images and signs to which the imagination will give a relative place and value; it is a sort of pasture which the imagination must digest and transform. All the faculties of the human soul must be subordinated to the imagination, which puts them in requisition all at once.

P51

I spoke a moment ago of the remarks of certain bricklayers. By this word I wish to categorize that class of heavy and boorish spirits (their number is legion) who appraise objects solely by their contour, or worse still, by their three dimensions, length, breadth and height –for all the world like savages and rustics. I have often heard people of that kind laying down a hierarchy of qualities which to me was unintelligible; I have heard them declare, for example, that the faculty that enables one man to produce an exact contour, or another a contour of supernatural beauty, is superior to the faculty whose skill it is to make an enchanting assemblage of colours. According to those people, colour has no power to dream, to think or to speak. It would seem that when I contemplate the works of one of those men who are specifically called ‘colourists’, I am giving myself up to a pleasure whose nature is far from a noble one; they would be delighted to call me ‘materialistic’, reserving for themselves the aristocratic title of ‘spiritual’.

P66
‘I remember very well (he [Eugene Delacroix] used to say sometimes) that when I was a child, I was a monster. The understanding of duty is only acquired very slowly, and it is by nothing less than pain, chastisement and the progressive exercise of reason that man can gradually diminish his natural wickedness.’

P107
Truth has nothing to do with Song. Everything that goes to make up the charm, the grace, the irresistible fascination of a Song would only take away from Truth her authority and power. Cool, calm and unimpassioned, the demonstrative mood rejects the gems and flowers of the Muse; it is thus the absolute opposite of the poetic mood. Pure intellect has as its goal Truth, Taste informs us of the Beautiful, while the Moral Sense teaches us Duty.

P124
To find a critic turning into a poet would be an entirely new event in the history of the arts, a reversal of all the psychical laws, a monstrosity; on the other hand, all great pets naturally and fatally become critics. I pity those poets who are guided by instinct alone: I regard them as incomplete. In the spiritual life of the former a crisis inevitably occurs when they feel the need to reason about their art, to discover the obscure laws in virtue of which they have created, and to extract from this study a set of precepts whose divine aim is infallibility in poetic creation. It would be unthinkable for a critic to become a poet; and it is impossible for a poet not to contain within him a critic. Therefore the reader will not be surprised at my regarding the poet as the best of all critics.

Poetry exists and asserts itself first, and then gives birth to the study of the rules.

P137
As far as art is concerned I admit that I am no enemy of extravagance; moderation has never seemed to me to be a sign of a robust artistic nature.

P150
Observe also that it is with his tears that man washes the afflictions of man, and that it is with his laughter that he sometimes soothes and charms his heart; for the phenomena engendered by the Fall will become his means of redemption.

P153
Laughter is satanic: it is thus profoundly human. It is the consequence in man of the idea of his own superiority. And since laughter is essentially human, it is, in fact, essentially contradictory; that is to say that it is at once a token of an infinite grandeur and an infinite misery –the latter in relation to the absolute Being of whom man has an inkling, the former in relation to the beasts. It is from the perpetual collision of these two infinities that laughter is struck.

As humanity uplifts itself, it wins for evil, and for the understanding of evil, a power proportionate to that which it has won for good.

P195
Those artists who are the most inventive, the most astonishing and the most eccentric in their conceptions are often men whose life is calm and minutely ordered. Several of them have had the most highly-developed domestic virtues. Have you not often noticed that there is nothing more like the perfect bourgeois than the artist of concentrated genius?

P200
The toy is the child’s earliest initiation to art, or rather for him it is the first concrete example of art, and when mature age comes, the perfected examples will not give his mind the same feelings of warmth, nor the same enthusiasms, nor the same sense of convictions.

Revisiting An Old Text

I wrote this a couple of years ago as a cathartic exercise through which I wanted to give form to, while also venting some frustrations, questions and feelings that I was struggling with. Every few years I reach a point at which, after slowly making my way through a few important experiences in life, and digesting their lessons; a few books that in time have proven to be sufficiently consonant with my character for them to be penetrated by my understanding, but differing in class from my habitual thought by a distance of enough extent to broaden my view of things; and a few sensual encounters of such immediacy and thoroughness, such full and uncontrollable occupation of my sensibilities, that they seem to indicate an undeniable predilection residing somewhere in the very material of my nature; after a few such moments, after these events have begun coalescing into one intermingled entity, pressing into each other with complete disregard towards contradictions and differences, the point is reached at which they together develop a mass, a weight and heaviness whose presence imposes itself on me in the form of an agitation, an anxiousness, an awareness of an uncomfortable presence that is not a part of the routine pattern of my thoughts, and that can only be lightened by attempting to describe it in words. And when a moment of fullness like this happens to arrive at a time when I am deeply frustrated, unable to actively pursue any ideas because of some external obligation or restriction, which was what happened at the time I wrote the text below, on its way out the thought tends to get mixed up with a quantity of desperation which lends it a pompous air, delivered through sweeping statements and vast generalisations. I usually try to avoid large and exposed abstractions, preferring to focus on small slices of reality, a significant minority of whose factors can at least be partially described, but I guess that when I am feeling confined and claustrophobic there is something terribly liberating about the incredible openness, the huge and vague and arrogant imprecision of the strident, but ungrounded declamation. At any other time the idea below would probably have unrolled itself through the description of a specific incident, or two, the nature of which would be comfortably analogous to the thoughts I wished to convey; but here the incident became the entire narrative thread of my life, and the thought was forced into the role of analogue for that thread, effectively imbuing a simple idea (the desire to design along the edges of sincerity, authenticity, tastefulness etc) with the rather heavy job of carrying me forward, of continuing the thread of my narrative into some exciting and open future, a role which looking back looks implausible, and clearly required the backing of all the fiery imagery that the text is so full of. But whether it is a plausible text now isn’t at issue, in fact reading it after all this time it seems very flimsy and transparent. What struck me, and where the text’s relevance lies, is in the disparity between its apparent puerility (a quality I find in most of what I write when re-visiting it), and the massive effect it had on my creative production over the two years that followed. I wrote a lot of things after this text, many of which were clearer, more grounded, more precise; many of which were formed in that same strange way in my mind, synthesizing out of a nebulous cloud of experiences; many of which led to the creation of interesting works; but none of which had a part to play in the genesis of every single piece of work in that entire time-span in the way this one did; none of which held an energy which could propel me to take up the pencil, mouse, camera or brush to a degree so opposite to the objective quality of the writing itself. But as I see it -and the reason why the work had such an long half-life- the causal relationship does not lead from the strength and quality of the text as detached object to the amount of creative energy released; but rather directly from the amount of singular emotional investment, and the level to which that investment has embedded itself within the birth of the idea to the amount of creative energy released. Sometimes an idea happens to be piggy-backed-on by a moment of personal re-orientation, and regardless of the inherent value of the idea, the chance union of the two (inflammatory language, vast abstractions an all) creates a constructive engine, a kernel of energy which can feed the flame of many following activities. I have only passed through three such chance unions, the first being an awfully long –and just awful- poem through which I faced a certain unwanted orientation of mine, and set the ground for three years of paintings and drawings; the second being a story through which I acknowledged the comfortable tyranny of habit, and set the scene for two years of stories and spaces which searched for a calibrated balance between the fearful grip of routine and the beauty of the quotidian; and this, the third, in which I adumbrated the edges of the topics of authenticity, sincerity and meaning, topics which I am still teasing out in whatever I do. Together they form a sort of ‘cloud of points’ that define the edges within which I roam.

……………………………………………………………………………………………

The Brain is Wider Than the Sky

The brain is wider than the sky,
For, put them side by side,
The one the other will include
With ease, and you beside.

The brain is deeper than the sea,
For, hold them, blue to blue,
The one the other will absorb,
As sponges, buckets do.

The brain is just the weight of God,
For, lift them, pound for pound,
And they will differ, if they do,
As syllable from sound.

Emily Dickinson

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“Children Find everything in nothing. Men nothing in everything.”
Leopardi

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Plenty of very real things happened in 1982: planes crashed, ships sank, Israel invaded Lebanon, Argentina invaded the Falkland Islands (or ‘Las Malvinas’), and the USSR invaded Afghanistan. A lot of people died: and that is without mentioning all the proxy wars that were keeping everybody south of the equator clutching their Uzis and Kalashnikovs close to their chest, in case of the very real need of protecting themselves from some marauding warlord or other, intent on murdering their political and ethnic enemies at will in the name of ‘freedom’ or ‘brotherhood’.

A lot of very real events, and these events were keeping everybody on their toes like never before thanks to an innovation of two years before: twenty four hour news service. On June 1, 1980 Ted Turner’s CNN news channel began telling us all about everything sensational that was going on in the world at the time, in real-time, in film, in colour, with flashy graphics, with music full of gravitas and tension, with live satellite link-ups to whatever region in the world was host to whatever awful trauma, cataclysm, or crisis happened to be most thrilling at that given moment. No longer was there the filter of opinion and distance inherent in print, which had up until that point maintained news as something more literary and imaginative -something worked into by the reader and accessed via a level of effort; even tabloid articles require readers to paint the scene of their rhetorical rants in their heads. Now news became immediate. The power of the image, the power of belief that is forced upon us when we see something rather than have something described to us meant that doubt began to creep out of the presentation of events; or rather that it was precisely because it seemed that it had become presenting rather than recounting: subjectivity seemed to have been replaced by a visceral objectivity.

But at the same time as it seemed that people were gaining access to the reality and the immediacy of events around the world, the medium itself was creating a schism. A major difference between the mediums of television and film and that of print and the still image is that with the former one cannot peruse at will, there is no potential for idly accessing some areas in depth and glancing over others, one cannot create the order in which one absorbs; these are qualities Inherent in mediums whose form is static but whose content is dynamic (print etc). With television a stream of images is presented which, by virtue of the gullibility of the eye satisfies the viewer, and because of the necessary quantity of images, of stories, of events (the news channel maintains its reputation by “bringing you the news as it happens, where it happens” and there is a lot of news to keep up with), and the lack of ability of the viewer to be able to slow down the stream and focus in any way, all images become equal, they become flattened in terms of the affect that they have on the viewer. With CNN, form became dynamic and content became static: more and more events, but less and less message, less and less content, just constantly changing places, faces and things. But with one overpowering cumulative effect: a vague, general, but extremely strong sense of unease (well what else when we are confronted with continuous disaster?).

So plenty of very real things happened in 1982, but they started to seem less real, more immediate visually, more worrying, but less independent and discrete to people living with access to Ted Turner’s new channel. Why 1982? My apologies, but I had to pick a year and it happens to be the one into which I was born: that being an event which although I am sure never made it onto CNN, was pretty important for me.

So I was born, and being born into a business-oriented family, (the new generation of people for whom all the places in the world were like the news stories in CNN: flashing past each other with such rapidity that they merged into something new) the aforementioned channel was forever flickering in the background -it was the wallpaper to fights about haircuts and holidays, school results and infidelity. But until reasonably late I was unaware of the arrival of its cultural twin, of its beautifully decked-out sister.

A year after CNN, on the first of August 1981 (as everyone in my generation knows) MTV was launched by Warner Entertainment. Sputtering into existence with few viewers, it soon became to pop-culture (which for my generation became Culture) what CNN was to politics and current affairs. Novelty reigned supreme here as well. A heady combination of music, fashion, dance and graphics began to swirl so violently that people not only got swept up in it, but began to live it: where the news convinced the viewer of gravity through image, MTV created whole identities, created exciting genres of what one could be. These identities, like news stories, were originally taken up from the surrounding culture, and having been stripped of any content, were transmitted as novelty to the waiting viewers: but as the speed of necessary change increased, as the appetite for shiny newness grew (because when something is devoid of content it only lasts as long as it seems fresh, exciting, and then its hollowness eats outwards and it must be discarded), so the surrounding culture became insufficient… identities (complex images) needed to be fabricated. This tendency was exemplified by Madonna, a singer whose initial record in 1982 (woohoo, again!) began a prolific career in which, marching from identity to identity in rapid succession she mined the past, the future, every type of music, every type of clothing, and almost as many beliefs, in unending combination to constantly keep herself interesting and new. She is the epitome of massively dynamic form whose dynamism itself stems from its static -or rather here, almost entirely nullified- content. Madonna is however exceptional in personifying the system, there was a danger in her very existence: by virtue of her being the same person and whirling through all these identities, she revealed the way in which the cultural machine works, and a fundamental motor which keeps it working is either suspended disbelief, or genuine belief in each of these passing images and identities. Madonna’s existence and success screamed out that every identity is just part of an unceasing, cascading collage. However, rather than instilling any doubt by virtue of her success, her ‘type’ moved people on from believing their whole youth in one identity (punk or New Romantic etc), or simply enjoying the cascade discreetly as if watching the news, to themselves believing in one thing after another after another after another… themselves dressing one way after another, themselves being one thing after another, like Madonna going from Bohemian-Gypsy to Punk-Antoinette to Disco-Baroque to Skater-Rap to Folk-FuckYou-Mod to NewAge-Rave etc, and being each of these things in earnest. Just like the news service elevating each event to extreme crisis and therefore dissipating all events and leaving only a ‘sense of unease or fear’, so MTV elevated every passing persona to the heights of adulation, and thereby dissipated persona itself, leaving only a generalised and widespread ‘sense of lost identity,’ which itself drove us all to seek the next persona more desperately.

And this brings me to a confused teenager. By the time I was fifteen I had for a while been making the mistake of earnestly believing in either the eminence or the superiority of whatever groups I had been in or whatever music I had been listening to; I had made the mistake of taking the news and current affairs to heart and being in continual mourning for half the world; and by the time all my sympathy had been eaten up by the thirty seventh war or the fiftieth natural disaster, by the time all my youthfully ardent passion had been frittered away on espousing one image of myself or another (skater, raver, art-knob, queen), by that time, with all that lost energy which could have been focused on something of content, I became tired, bored, apathetic. The flow of images had eaten up my energy and I was left doubting if indeed anything that had been held up to me by my peers and by our media was meaningful at all, whether anything could hold anyone’s attention for more than a millisecond, could genuinely affect them, and whether if indeed it did affect them, whether it could do more than just batter them repeatedly like some bully with ADHD.

Towards the end of my schooling, when all of my friends were disappearing off to Africa, South America or India, to find out who they truly were (I guess they were all like me: seeing the world through a lens that could observe nothing but surfaces, and, aware of the fact, desperately searching for a way in which to see more), I happened upon architecture: it seemed so solid, so sturdy, its books seemed to spit and shout and scream with real war cries, and if not that then they seemed to confidently speak of eternities, of understandable systems, essentially it all seemed reassuringly old fashioned and ideological: it seemed real. So for a period I stepped out of the confusing torrent and was convinced in turn that function=truth, form=rehabilitation, structure=craft, digitalisation=complexity, complexity=nature, one after another -not all being mutually exclusive- but rather quickly beginning to cancel each other out. I had been taken in by the seductive combination of simple answers and concrete outcomes: where previously the images on the television wreaked havoc with my heart by virtue of the gullibility of the eye, now I had been convinced by all of my senses together. How can something as material, as real, as concrete as a building -a space- in any way not have substance to it? A building seemed like such an irrefutable presence (you don’t only look at it, but can touch it, smell it, hear it), such an incredible act of human will and ideas manifesting themselves in the physical world that all the vapid reasonings used to define their genesis were things to be forgiven, to somehow be believed in and apologised for because they led to the holy grail of the manifestly physical. But what was the significance of being manifest physically?

Just as before I had been taken in by form. Here it had seduced me more completely by a smattering of specious arguments that tarted it up just enough that one could allow oneself to give in to credulity. But just as after a certain number of images, so after a certain number of physical specimens one loses that credulity: I had been so desperate for content and realness that I had not seen that empty arguments masquerading as content are even worse than none at all, and that even something physical can be eaten from the inside out by hollowness. Outside of architecture there was the force and power of locomotion, of incessant flashing change, of novelty, newness and excitement to distract from the emptiness of everything; architecture -with its plodding gait- was not only without this placebo, but encumbered by arrogant moralising (“you won’t save your soul just painting everything white!” cried Sottsass against this). Even as their work is swept up and used as just-some-more-fuel in the world of images, even as architects are benefiting from being presented as novelty, they somehow continue to see through a lens that stuffs their work full of ‘principles’.

After searching for meaning for so long, after being duped so many times, after realising that what the eye sees is not any kind of rounded reality, that the physical and tangible doesn’t’ necessarily mean the substantial, that form isn’t identity; after searching for so long it was just a swapping of gaze from one side of the equals-sign to the other that provided so much material of substance, so much richness and meaning that I would never be left wanting for the rest of my days. With the news-channels, the individual event no longer matters, it is the cumulative effect which is important, just as with MTV and pop-cultural programming, also advertising (the individual advert doesn’t’t have so much significance, it’s the cumulative effect, the need to fulfil oneself through products), and so on. The meaning is the cumulative. The meaning, the content is the requisite social mechanisms that keep our society more stable and contented than any combination of state and church could ever achieve: people are kept busy, kept forever distracted, kept eternally desiring by an exquisite, beautiful, complex and ultimately serene (when seen from this angle) nothingness, emptiness.

And then there is pleasure. One can sit back and enjoy the most fabulously ornate, embellished, complex and busy construction of artifice that man has ever seen. Relish the adverts and music videos as they flutter past like they were delicate butterflies, savour the current political crisis like you would a distant thunderstorm, delight in the latest exhibition as you would waking up and seeing the city covered in snow: because this colourful, floating edifice of ours is a para-monde, a new reality, supplementary to that of nature but very much springing from it. And just as one can revel in the meaningless comings and goings of nature (the way that lights falls, the vagaries of the weather, the dawdling of animals, the ever fascinating behaviour of people in the streets etc), just as one can be kept busy by the infinity of trivialities in the immediate world around us; so we can enjoy the world of images, the great construction of man. We do not question what we see in nature because we do not doubt its essential realness, we accept it all as equally significant, we allow ourselves the luxury of assigning meaning to the things and happenings that we see, we allow our minds to seize on it all as material which we appropriate to construct our own little metaphorical narratives; and if one sees our meaningless world of novelty in this way, it becomes a continuous joy to watch, it becomes a vast mine of material from which one can construct as many narratives and forms as one could ever want. With this liberation of all that form by realising and being aware of its meta-content (/meaning), and separating all its manifestation therefrom, we enter the realm of the sculptor given infinite subjects and inexhaustible stone.

So real things still happen, only each of them has an extravagant twin in the mirror-world of our Culture. Each event has its own ‘Joanna-on-the-weekends’ to its James. Susan Sontag describes the appreciation of this specular world as being the ‘Camp’ sensibility and describes how she is “strongly drawn to Camp, and almost as strongly offended by it.” She realises that “One is drawn to Camp when one realises that “sincerity” is not enough. Sincerity can be simple philistinism, intellectual narrowness.” Being drawn towards a certain sensibility, being able to understand its logic, she has not yet managed to see the possibilities inherent within it. It draws on and enjoys frivolity, but is not frivolous in itself. As a New York liberal she also cannot reconcile herself to the fact that “Camp taste is by its nature possible only in affluent societies, in societies or circles capable of experiencing the psychopathology of affluence,” but she also points out that “Camp taste is a kind of love, love for human nature.” What I am trying to describe in this essay is not entirely the same as Sontag, it is however something of its Siamese twin, sharing a deep well-spring of continuous amazement as its shared heart.

There is the enjoyment of this artificial world, and there is the freedom to use all its wealth of form, but then there is the difficulty of dealing with great wealth… as a creator, as designer, what does one do with this embarrassment of riches? Memphis, a collaborative design group formed in February 1981 attempted to tackle this head on by plunging into the flow. From the very beginning, being hyper-aware of what they were dealing with, they decided to access and utilise all the energies of what they called popular culture’s “embryonic languages” and forms, to explode orthodox design’s “expressive poverty”. They hoped to lay the foundations for “a future, more flexible and sophisticated stylistic syntax” by being as “enthusiastic, explosive, exalted, elated, as striking as neon in a tropical night.” They managed to capture something of a moment in the world around them, but from the beginning they recognised that they could do no more. From the initiation of the project they were “all sure that Memphis furniture will soon go out of style,” they “saw the fact of being a fad, of moving a la mode and comme la mode as a sign of great vitality,” they went into the experiment seeing their own creations, seeing “Memphis objects, like fashion, [as] purely tautological, [as] ‘immoral.’” Essentially they were intrepid intellectuals dipping their toes into the water to test its temperature. They tremulously began to start formulating a way in which thoughts, speculations, constructions, and content can deal with dynamic form. Even as they denied it, statements like: “Memphis has taken the first step towards the recomposition of an open and flexible design culture that is aware of history, conscious of consumption as a search for social identity and of the object as a sign through which a message is conveyed,” reveal their serious goals. The solution that they arose to, and which itself (as they had predicted) became just a fad, a flash in the reel of images, was formulating each unit of design as something unique and fresh: constructions composed of different elements which when smashed together spoke dynamically to people through their senses, which through a shocking combination of kitsch, loudness and sophistication powerfully conveyed a feeling, an impression. The trade-off was that although they had managed to genuinely start harnessing and exploring the creative energy of what they called ‘marginal culture’ and ‘consumer society’, they were ultimately swallowed by it and swept away; their unique and fresh objects stood alone and empty in the glare of time with only their sensual impressions, their surfaces as guardians. From the beginning they treated Memphis as an experiment, their designs were “anti-ideological”, empty of content and so destined to be swept away and only left as colourful flotsam. They made the mistake of thinking that not being ideological meant that one could only be consciously devoid of content (and cerebrally grappling with form). Like Sontag with her attraction and horror towards Camp, their whole experiment was tinged with the ambivalence of designers seduced by the world around them, but unable to reconcile content with form in vicious flux (the very mention of morality and their work being “immoral” seems to place them within a framework where they were Satanists, devoid of the moralizing prerogative of politicized designers, pissing with colour and pattern on the Sacramental Bread of the Neo-Modernists’ righteous whiteness), and so they only dealt in form.

Coming rpidly to the age where I will be spat-out at the world and be allowed to begin dropping material objects from the confusion of my thoughts, I thought it pertinent to begin framing a general problem for myself and anyone who would like to come along for the ride. If one goes beyond that immediate earnestness where gullibility forces us to take everything at face value; if one saves one’s energy for relevant problems and releases enjoyment and imagination to feed upon the rest; if one takes the turn beyond meaninglessness and sees that there is meaning -only that it is manifest in the cumulative; if one recognises that our wedding-cake world is in no way in contradiction to nature, and reality; if one is stuffed full of ideas and is unsated by simply standing back and enjoying, then it is a good moment to add a new layer to design culture, to access the possibilities of another turn in perception already in motion. We are in a world of incandescent, cataclysmic form, at the heart of which sits the meta-content of systemic distraction/pacification/production. Memphis dabbled in the furnace of dynamic form and was gloriously incinerated, now, there are extended and multiplying possibilities for creating forms of dynamic content, of setting in motion meanings that tumble and crash and explode in turn just as rapidly. One can already mindlessly watch the forms fly-by like so many pigeons in the park, but what of more? what of the possibility that just as every real event has its fabulously decked-out but vacuous twin, so every fabulous twin should have its own fabulous inverse: its own incandescent personality, its own garlanded meaning? It would be madly chaotic, and is becoming so as amongst the hundreds of thousands of blogs and tweets and websites and empty but re-appropriated shops, there are emerging overlapping clouds of new meanings and content fashioned from and in response to, but not in the same nature as -of a higher and more complex construction than- anything that could have been forged under the first generation of digitized media. As a trained architect and someone fascinated with the nature of meaning, with the lull in rapaciousness that we are seeing now, but with the continuing march of our powers to represent, communicate and create, I am looking forward to a bonfire worthy of the intellect as well as the senses, a potentially delirious vessel which in parts is spectacle, but as a whole could be deeply real: dynamic-form and dynamic-content. As a designer I look forward to the opportunity to make something, to make things that are more complex, more rounded than ever before, things that are not unitary but must exist in a rich and ambiguous multiplicity, that are at once floating somewhere at the end of the Long Tail, in someone’s pocket, on youtube, on a phone, in a zine, in print, and perhaps even -possibly, one day- occupying a plot in a street (a plot that will be filled by infinitely more than just a physical presence…).

Extracts From Dave Hickey's "The Invisible Dragon, Four Essays On Beauty"

These are taken from Hickey's Four Essays on Beauty, his other masterful collection "Air Guitar, Essays on Art and Democracy" seems to have either flown from my shelves or been eaten by one of my beastly proportioned Architecture tomes. If I find it I will post some extracts. Click here for a great talk he gave at Frieze 2007.

When he writes "Therapeutic Institution" Hickey is refering to art institutions that are usualy government funded and do not have to negotiate in any way with the market.

P57
"I would suggest that, far from ameliorating the artist’s radical, infantile wishes, the rhetoric of beauty politicizes them, makes them publicly available, and proposes them in fact as social options. Further, I would suggest that Reichsminister Goebbels understood this, as did Alfred Barr, and Stalin –and that none of them was particularly sanguine at the prospect.
This is not to say, of course, that art is just advertising, only that art, outside the institutional vitrine of therapeutic mystery, is never not advertising and never apolitical. Commodity advertising and pornography only define the limiting conditions of art’s project, its objective and somatic extremes, but they participate, just like the real thing, in that accumulated shifting, protean collection of tropes and figures that comprise “the rhetoric of beauty”."

P58
"We can, for instance, distinguish between the “the most beautiful image” that simply enfranchises the most people, and the “most effective beautiful image” that valorises the most preposterous (oops, problematic) content to the most people for the longest time. Raphael’s Maddona of the Chair would qualify here, for its having exquisitely valorised the “iffy” doctrines of the incarnate word and the virgin birth to generations of Catholics worldwide who should have known better."

P61
"Our relationship to images authorised by beauty is now distinct to our relationship to images authorised by the therapeutic institution, and radically so. And this is no less the case when a single image undergoes a shift of authorisation, as anyone who has loaned work to a museum exhibition can tell you. Visiting that work can be like visiting an old friend in prison. It is a distinctly different image, hanging among a population of kindred offenders, bereft of its eccentricity and public franchise, yet somehow, on account of that loss, newly invested with a faintly ominous kind of parochial power."

P62
"Sadism is about nature and power. Masochism is about culture and, ironically, the law. Finally, sadism deals with the imposition of “formal values” and the cruel affirmation of “natural law”, and masochism focuses on deferred sublimity and the vertiginous rhetoric of trust. As a consequence, Deleuze notes, “the sadist is in need of institutions,” and “the masochist of contractual relations.”
The analogy I wish to draw here is blatant. The rhetoric of beauty tells the story of the beholder who, like Masoch’s victim, contracts his own submission –having established, by free consent, a reciprocal, contractual alliance with the image. The signature of this contract, of course, is beauty. On the one hand, its rhetoric enfranchises the beholder; on the other hand, it seductively proposes a content that is, hopefully, outrageous and possible. In any case, this vertiginous bond of trust between the image and the beholder is private, voluntary, a little scary, and since the experience is not presumed to be an end in itself, it might, ultimately, have some consequence.
The experience of art within the therapeutic institution, however, is presumed to be an end in itself. Under its auspices, we play a minor role in the master’s narrative –the artist’s tale- and celebrate his autonomous acts even as we are off-handedly victimised by their philosophical force and ruthless authority. Like princes within the domain of the institution, or jailhouse Mafiosi, such works have no need of effeminate appeal. And we, poor beholders, like the silly demimondaines in Sade’s Philosophy of the Bedroom, are presumed to have just wandered in, looking for a kiss, so Pow! Whatever we get, we deserve –and what we get most prominently is ignored, disenfranchised and instructed. Then told that it is “good” for us."

P64
"Nothing redeems but beauty, its generous permission, its gorgeous celebration of all that has previously been uncelebrated."

"As Shaw pointed out, institutions collapse from lack of funding, they do not die from lack of meaning. We die from lack of meaning."

Mark Leckey, Carey Young, A Couple of Juries and Nicolas Bourriaud

I wrote the extract below (after the dotted line) for another blog-thing about a month ago after having been to see Mark Leckey (last year’s Turner Prize winner) give a ‘performance’ at the ICA. I didn’t post it here because it was only meant to be a springboard for a discussion about the uses of narrative within the unit I am attending at the AA, but Ive been thinking alot about the performance, and the thoughts it brought up, since reading about the aggressive responses that Nicolas Bourriaud’s exhibition (and accompanying theory) on the Altermodern at the Tate (Alter?)Modern have been receiving from the British press. He is apparently being called everything under the sun (thank you Momus for the lowdown), but a lot of the criticism seems to revolve around his stance supposedly 'not being subversive', and the quality of not being subversive seems to be being unquestioningly allied most often with adjectives like ‘boring’, ‘conservative’, ‘passé’, ‘flaccid’, ‘indulgent’ and ‘meaningless’, which I guess means that if you are subversive you are exciting, rebellious, fresh, erect/vigorous, tough and meaningful. Upon reading this I was transported back into the quivering me that had stood before his panel of critics at several university project presentations last year, and had been left speechless and unable to respond to two types of question; those aimed at revealing the ironic positioning which they assumed must be lurking behind the work, a distancing tool that would transform what I had made from a dangerous act of will and convention, into a knowing wink of elevated connoisseurship between the critics and the maker who would treat the material as an archive of objectified elements digested and commented on, but ultimately external to himself; and then there were the comments and suggestions which demanded that the work “do” something, that if it were not an ironically framed catalogue, then it needed to be a biting and subversive form of satire, it needed to fundamentally question, reveal, rupture and transgress the conventional frames of accepted meaning in which it operated, whether that be done through exaggeration or parody. I was designing a ‘church’ at the time, and I had no interest whatsoever in either being subversive, satirical, or of being critically detached from my material like some sort of post-critical anthropologist. I was eagerly, and rather joyously ploughing my way through the velvety sea of Catholicism, collecting strange specimens as I went, putting them together in my wunderkammer, studying them, forming slow and deliberate conclusions as to their origin, meaning and nature, and attempting to fashion their equivalents, their replacements, their genetically transformed progeny using all the tools at my disposal. It was like the reverse of discovering advanced alien technology and trying to replicate it with our backward capabilities: I was sitting at my desk everyday with these ancient constructs, trying to resuscitate them with a word processor, 3dimensional scanning equipment, STL printers, CNC mills, modeling programmes, image processing software, and DV cameras. I couldn’t reproduce what I found and instead strange things happened. The wunderkammer began to come alive with velvety androids and bionic spirits, and I was constantly exhilarated by their presence and as they multiplied I tried to trace their history, frame their existence, and build a space for them. I wasn’t in any way, at any point, thinking of undermining the places from where all those ideas and items had come; but I was also not blind to issues inherent in the subject (religion in this case, specifically Catholicism), and learnt as much as possible about them, and included them in the creative process as an integral part of life, as a part of any activity that the human hand puts itself to, a part that is natural and normal and not to be ridiculed whether it be a tendency towards formalized tradition, strict dogmatism or ritual condemnation. I could not answer those questions because they were looking for the revelation of an end towards which I wasn’t moving, in fact I was going somewhere very different, trying to get to a place that I am now seeing hidden inside more and more people as I get older, somewhere equal to, but separate from, the stance of ironical distance (questioning?) or the critical attack of a subversive intelligence, a place of positive construction, a gathering together rather than a tearing apart, an immersion rather than an observation. Mark Leckey seemed to be doing it, Carey Young was talking about it (as I saw it) at a conversation at the ICA a few months ago on ‘Institutional Critique’, and she said something quite lovely. There were two men and a woman next to her, two critics and a philosopher, who talked a lot and spun beautiful webs of theory around the notion that the duty of an artist is to be critical, radical, revolutionary and political. They all lamented the lack of such powerful artistic activities in today’s scene, to the point that they were arguing with each other as to why this wasn’t happening (never questioning whether such activity was or was not the desired outcome of artistic energy), even becoming so roused as to stop looking at each other while directing stingingly bitchy attacks at their opponents via the audience. When it finally came time for the only artist on the panel to talk, she (Carey Young) showed some videos of businessmen reciting lines in an empty office, a business lady sitting on a couch remembering advertising slogans about creativity, and as they concluded there was a palpable feeling in the room that this artwork was risible, that coming after the whole preceding argument they were precisely the kind of art that the philosophers had come into the room to deride: they didn’t undermine, they didn’t subvert, they didn’t even precisely question, they were simple and ambiguous and their indistinctness was only exaggerated by Ms Young’s refusal to talk very much about them. But she was confident, and as the conversation once again spiraled away from her towards Karl Marx and modes of production, she became agitated when one of the men on the panel used her work as an example in one of his arguments, and interjected asking firmly that if her work was to be discussed she should be allowed to position it correctly.
She explained that she understood the issues they were discussing perfectly well (summing up eloquently in two sentences what they had been ranting about for an hour), but her work was not aiming to achieve anything related to those issues. It was more about illumination than revolution, and since she was confronted by the blank faces of the other three on the panel, she proceeded to elucidate her interests with an example. When going to the Police protest outside Whitehall last year in which the British Police were demanding a pay-rise, or else would strike, she was totally taken aback by the moment when a series of Police cars drove past the protest in what would normally have been a threatening movement, but instead of being shouted at or jeered or even just ignored, were followed by a huge and spontaneous wave of cheering that followed them down the road like a Mexican wave. I found the example to be a revelation, especially following the elaborate asphyxiation of the previous discussion, a liberatory hole through which she offered the audience a way of seeing things, and while maybe being fully aware and even critical of what is going on, looking for and finding the positive poetics in a given situation which sheds new light on it with a searching sensitivity rather than a cutting abstraction. The other three on the panel looked at her the way a parent would look indulgently at their child, after they had said something amusing but stupid and irrelevant during an adult’s dinner. Quite a few posts back I quoted Cildo Meireles, and I’ll repeat it here: "In some way you become political when you don’t have a chance to be poetic. I think human beings would much prefer to be poetic." The rest of the panel were definitely not in a poetic mood. I have not seen Altermodern, I hope to see it next Sunday, but somehow I get the feeling that Bourriaud is walking in a place that many critics don’t understand either. From what I have read he is trying to forge positive roads and an expansive new framework for current creative endeavours, and whether the exhibition is boring or not, those extreme critical reactions against it make me want to see it far more than I ever would have otherwise. And incidentally I read less aggressive, but similarly dismissive (boring, dull, empty etc etc) reviews of Mark Leckey and the Turner exhibition in general last year. If art is getting more boring, how come I am enjoying it more?

I just want to add that the day before the Leckey performance, I had been on Windmill street to pick up an old Majolica frame into which I had had a mirror put, when I noticed a man standing on the edge of the pavement calmly surveying the street with a slightly theatrical stillness. Without thinking, I had stopped and looked at him, which I quickly realized was rude -and compromising if the man noticed, so I quickly scuttled off wondering what he had been doing. Was he being filmed, or just waiting for a cab and feeling very good about himself, and so watching the road in a quiet and lordly manner? I found out that evening, just before the start of the show, that Mark Leckey lived on Windmill street, and as he came out onto the stage I realized that it had indeed been him. He had just won the Turner prize and so I am guessing he had every reason to be looking at things, even the street outside his front door, with new and excited eyes. I haven’t seen him since, but I always imagine him there, still and slightly comical, in the corner of my eye as I am walking down Windmill Street.

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Originally posted on AAIS group:


Yesterday I had the pleasure of attending an event in which Mark Leckey presented a display that veered between a university lecture, a magic show, a fringe play put on by eager but underfunded students and a poetry reading; it was a choreography of representational types that was simultaneously generalised and diverse, as were the issues with which they dealt, namely the magic and power of representation itself and its indefinite expansion. He tied together discreet historical artifacts (from Felix the cat, the Long Tail Theory, to the Cloud Server and the Linked Lonely Individual) whose unique and objective place in history he explained with the verve of a scientist, but whose resonance and potency we were made aware of by the manner in which he linked them with each other in an unbroken chain of hypnotic reasoning. Incommensurate items from our shared history; incommensurate forms of representation; each standing apart discreetly and emphasised as separate units, whether by the use of momentary black-outs, sound effects or shifts in position on the stage, an aggregate in every respect the show’s various parts, its various bits of technology and pieces of theory were pulled up into one complete figure (like the various moods and opinions, unrelated and incoherent, which we nonetheless accept as a person, as resolved by virtue of being in a human body), into the monotonous voice, the affable normality of Mark Leckey, pulled up into a personal narrative which while always proffering facts as bait for our credulity would instantly pull them back into its own subject’s trajectory, dragging the audience along with him. It was the slow, quiet strength of his subjectivity which left me pleasured, the way that he drove through all the facts and forms of display with due attention and seriousness, but ultimately pulled them along with him in a considered interpretation, in an interpretation which did not get caught in any web of structural proofs for any of its facts or parts, but also managed not to, in fact didn’t get any where near an ironical rift between a constructed work and its distanced narrator who knows the piece to be just one of many possible interpretations: it seemed as though Mark Leckey was being EARNEST. Of course he is no doubt aware of the multiple nature of interpretation and of truth, but as he so beautifully stated at the beginning of the ‘show’, (something along the lines of…) “there was something magical about the change of an image from one medium to another, a kind of transubstantiation, for me at least, and I’ve been obsessed with it ever since,” in other words he knows it to be his obsession, but he takes it seriously, he creates his narrative with an un-dogmatic belief which he attempts to share as best he can, but which he will never impose nor become critically distanced from. In the same monotone, at the end of the hour-long presentation, Leckey leaves all facts behind, lets go of all references and begins to speculate on an intriguing world which is the resolution to the Nth degree of his narrative’s tangent: it is a strange and wild proposition, but because it was delivered in the same voice, by the same hairy man, it fits.
I mention Leckey’s lecture-thing here because it ties into a way of dealing with narratives that transcends the post-modern paralysis of an infinite fragmentation of identity and markets, under the only possible unity of capital; as in the only possible narratives being that of a universal and disembodied rapacity, or of describing an infinitesimal sub-genre/group on its own. He deals with forces of the most general kind, but instead of assuming the impossibility of constructive critique and falling back into a satirical or ironical mode, he seems to assume the possibility of a poetic embedded in the system, of an archaeology, a gathering together of facts and theories aimed not at solutions or critique but rather at creating an acceptable and even beautiful mythology which offers a way of connecting back to real events via a journey through the system, a constructive, liberatory narrative through it, rather than a stinging and bitter commentary.

Fragments from a Sketchbook

A couple of things I quite like that I found on skipping through an old sketchbook:

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We don’t shatter, we foam our edges away
and retreat inwards to our pencils,
pens, keyboards and brushes.

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When paragons proliferate, paradigms federate,
and something distinctly human begins to emerge.

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In certain places, objects made by man over the centuries have the quality of geography. In these places architectural-tectonics acquire the nature of the residue of plate-tectonics: namely they achieve that state where in total stillness, inanimate material embodies the exertion of force on colliding matters. In the public steps by San Pietro in Vincoli in Rome (which make their way under a large group of buildings), there is such an instance, one felicitously reached through a process of aggregation and demolition: a process which usually ends in collage-like spaces but there, in the distorted, broken, replaced and remade strata of its ceiling and walls, something entirely more massive is at work.

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[about the Campidoglio]
Sometimes things are crushed too close together, others merge, still others are simply too big or too small. Boundaries are used as expressive foils against which elements can react to create impressions of solidity, hyperactive syncopation, compression etc etc

Character II

I should probably mention, after my brother thought that I was both a girl who sees animals everywhere and an insanely finnicky aesthete who has no real friends, that these characters are not me... I just wrote them for some background to a short film Im doing. Ill post that on HandBin when its done.

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Having lived on his own since leaving the home of his parents as a teenager he had become somewhat fastidious in his habits, a tendency only exacerbated over the past few years as the orbit encompassing his daily environment had been intentionally reduced, flat by flat, job by job, supermarket by supermarket, until the range of all potentially unexpected inconveniences was contained within a comfortably restricted radius of ten walking minutes from his place. He had trimmed the frayed edges of his activities in a similar manner, controlling their number by excluding those whose content involved a high proportion of unpredictability; whether that be the innumerable and often unavoidable encounters that occur in nightclubs, or the too often inadequate, and quite randomly bestowed attentions paid to hygiene in the hotels and bed and breakfasts of this world; it was these moments which saw the volatility of chance scratch violent marks on the pristine surface of a life he had been busily polishing, perfecting and preening down to its smallest details, down to the meticulous pairing of complementary shades of gray and their fabric’s subtly contrasting weaves, down to the diaphanous aroma of Polianthes Tuberosa scent and Bergamotte oil that filled the space immediately around him, down even to the pruning of his friends and colleagues into a small but vigorous collection, which neither cared too much to be any imposition on his privacy, nor was entrepreneurial enough to seek out and search for more interesting and rewarding relationships. This scrupulous and highly developed aesthetic sensibility with which he diligently governed his life had also taken the form of a system of ethics based on the precedents of his own experience, a moral code of unquestioned value against which he would mercilessly judge his own every action and decision; he never spared himself the harshest of self imposed verdicts and their punishments of ever increasing habitual and aesthetic sedulousness, punishments which sunk him further and further into the tyranny of a regimen so uniquely structured that he soon reached a point where everybody else, every other person he came across -no matter how clean or polite or well turned-out- was nothing but a seething hoard of flagrantly ill-considered mistakes, a living manufacturer of repulsive flaws. His entire method of judgment meant that when spending time in the theatre, the cinema, a lecture, or any other intimate environment with other people, the upturning of a collar, the odour of cheap fabric softener, the uncontrolled wispiness of a haircut, the unwieldy handling of a gaudy shade of mascara, the continuous twitching of an errant lip, the maker’s label flipping out the neckline at the back of a t-shirt, the red and dripping nose of someone with a cold, all shocked him as fully as would someone masturbating in the auditorium for anyone else: he rarely managed to pay attention to what was happening on screen or on stage as his agitated gaze was inevitably pulled through the crowd’s flagrant rudeness, its total lack of decorum, and while he would have instantaneously purged himself of any such deviant ugliness as that which surrounded him, deep inside, under a sharp line of righteous indignation, lay the fascination of a voyeur, the unthought envy of the man who sees that other person masturbating in the aisles, and although full of horror, nonetheless wishes at his very core to be able to cast aside his values and be in that person’s place. Without his realizing it, in the flawless excellence of his routine, it was the appended and entirely un-excellent anomalies of the stuffy and jumbled atmospheres of West-End theatres and the closeness of underground Odeons that maintained a tether attaching him unconsciously, vicariously, voyeuristically, but surely, to the rest of humanity.

Character I

She has long since stopped spending entire weekends at what were once called squat raves, but she has nevertheless retained from these events a slight perspectival obliquity, an instinctive way of seeing things, in this case animals, that are not inherent in the people she is looking at and talking to, as if they were actually innate within them somehow. A precocious consumer of amazingly human-looking animal cartoon characters from an early age, even completely falling for the lusciously maned and youthful Simba (of Lion King fame) at one point, she had always been used to seeing human characteristics in animals, whether it be the sensitive soul expressed in the sad eyes of her dog or the gormless credulity so obviously expressed in the rolling eyes of a drooling cow; but it took a particular mix of specific narcotics on one particular night in a rave for her to have this tendency inadvertently reversed. Apart from the air around her being apparently filled with small, crawling black creatures, she noticed, or rather couldn’t help but be utterly taken aback by everyone around her being animals, or maybe not quite animals, but at least as having such strong characteristics of certain creatures that they were somewhere between the two –beautiful animals with human form and language, and they were beautiful, as beautiful and beguiling as all those animals which had been transformed by human characteristics in all the Disney films she had cherished so long before, but there, in that room full of crawling black things, her mind had inadvertently reapplied the magic of analogy back into her world, back into her almost-adult, increasingly magic-less existence. Whether stimulated by narcotics or not, and increasingly not as time moved on, the appreciation of her human surroundings was enriched and partly guided by the resemblances she found between every combination of jaw line, eyes and nose -or any other mix of body parts- and her exotic index of animals and their characters; the two bringing separate qualities which together forge for her evocative wholes which would have been impossible through bare observation.

People Watching

The night before last I was sitting somewhere in the middle of the orchestra stalls –the lowest area of seating- in the Royal Opera House, reading the cast-list and listening to the struggled breathing of a large man next to me when the lights dimmed and the entire audience began to clap. The clapping began slowly like a breeze running through the crowd, making the throngs of elegant individuals rustle with a sound somewhere between the wind in a forest and a distantly falling cascade, not as sharp as it usually sounds because the space was so large and because nobody was clapping to any precise cue, there was nothing happening on stage, the applause had emerged from within the audience while the hall was in semi-darkness, with nothing to see but itself and as I looked up at this moving blanket of sound I saw innumerable people rising up, away from me in every direction, stacked on top of each other until they disappeared behind the glistening ceiling, but below it they were as decorative in their clapping as the gilding was in its shimmer, and everybody was facing me; in the quasi-light before the opera, this encrusted waterfall of people seemed to be clapping for me and I couldn’t help but let myself go for a second and be filled with the expansive glamour of attention, be irradiated with the elating energy of a thousand pairs of eyes: for a brief moment, because of the combination of the extrusion of an elongated horse-shoe plan and my position in its pits, I felt a touch of the basic form of celebrity in all its seductiveness, I felt how the simple accumulation of individual attentions on one person can have the sublime force of standing frozen in joyous, exultant terror in front of a vertiginous Andean precipice.

Boxes in operas and the theatre rarely have the best view, and often have severely obstructed views, but this was irrelevant since their primary role was not to provide a perfect place from which to see the performance -the optimal place to see the stage- rather they were meant to be the perfect place from which to be seen, to be stages in their own right, and also from where to have the perfect view of the audience. The event being performed on stage was often just the funnel through which a kaleidoscopic display of dress, decorum, judgemental observation, social critique and good old people-watching would be brought together in one place and time; it was the packaging in four dimensions which contained the sparkling bitchiness within its two or three hour limits, and it was this coruscating display of interchanging glances and asides within the audience which was for what the architecture was designed, both to be its container in three dimensions and its catalyst in form: from the over-articulation of every protruding element within the auditorium which framed the miniscule and multiple exchanges within the audience more elaborately than any exchange between them and the stage, to the overall layout with its considerable care for sightlines leading in any other direction than the stage. The space of the audience as a self-observing and self-celebrating social spectacle was codified within the architecture and layout of many of our older performance spaces, and while most of them are no longer loci of any kind of social relevance, like archaeological sites they retain pungent remains which can be picked for clues: their architectures worked for, and with, more material than the performances they hosted and while the endless iterations of Carmen and Rigoletto, the silences of abandonment or the thumping of a nightclub surround the crumbling or pristinely renovated stucco and gilding, there are whole milieus of strange and distant fashions, hairstyles, predilections, conversations, hatreds, jealousies and allegiances whose existences tenuously cling to the present with every unnecessary chandelier that has survived their abandonment, with every pointlessly plush surface populated with irreverent putti that has been left uncovered.

I am embarrassed and thrilled every time that I go to the Queen Elizabeth Hall when during the performance I turn around in my seat to look behind me at the encyclopaedic grid of faces rising away in its huge, dark space; embarrassed because I am standing out like an incorrect calculation in a vast spreadsheet, denuded and alone, and thrilled because there are so many people, and they are endlessly interesting and I want to see them, exchange glances with them, study them furtively but in full sight, experience the performance differently depending on their reaction, hate some of them because they are elated and I am frowning and the show is just stupid… I once saw a tutor from my old university when doing this, sitting with his arms around a student of his from whom, the moment he saw me, he withdrew his arms and enacted a comical attempt to hide his face from view. He immediately ran out as the lights came on.

My Synagogue is large and split into two levels, the upper level rising steeply away from its banisters in tiers, and curving around the floor below to create an unusually accentuated Edwardian amphitheatre full of women and girls with large bobbing hats populating the brightly lit second floor, and suited men with small white shawls crammed in rows beneath, talking to each other with furrowed brows and serious glances which place the atmosphere there somewhere between the boardroom and the Gentleman’s club. The men are arrayed in subterranean solemnity in full sight of the women who look down on them, pointing and talking to each other and about the level beneath in such a way that the boys and men can tell not only who they are talking about amongst the huddles suits –the seating is bought by subscription and only rarely alters, meaning everybody knows who is being talked about- but also what they are thinking and feeling, since the women are all set in full view and relief by the progressively raised tiers of seating which isolates them into gesticulating tableaux. Everybody is seen by everybody else at every moment, and very soon after each sermon the observations made within the amphitheatre are shared, tested, confirmed or disputed when overall opinion assembles in the Synagogue’s lobby to noisily conclude its cultural verdicts on the evening’s “horrors”, “he should be ashamed”s and “she is really taking it very well”s, before spilling out into the street to go back to their respective dining rooms, armed with more than enough material for a good meal’s hearty and denunciatory conversation.

Extracts from Book3 of The World as Will and Representation

Considering how much Schopenhauer loved Hegel:

"The height of audacity in serving up pure nonsense, in stringing together senseless and extravagant mazes of words, such as had been only previously known in madhouses, was finally reached in Hegel, and became the instrument of the most barefaced, general mystification that has ever taken place, with a result which will appear fabulous to posterity, as a monument to German stupidity."

Im going to put some of his thoughts on the positioning of aesthetic perception right next to Hegel's :0)

If I can figure out how to make links-as-words, be sure to click one and read up a little on the Principle of Sifficiant Reason.

Chapter 34
Raised up by the power of the mind, we relinquish the ordinary way of considering things, and cease to follow under the guidance of the forms of the principle of sufficient reason merely their relations to one another, whose final goal is always the relation to our own will. Thus we no longer consider the where, the when, the why, and the whither in things, but simply and solely the what. Further, we do not let abstract thought, the concepts of reason, take possession of our consciousness, but, instead of all this, devote the whole power of our mind to perception, sink ourselves completely therein, and let our whole consciousness be filled by the calm contemplation of the natural object actually present, whether it be a landscape, a tree, a rock, a crag, a building, or anything else. We lose ourselves entirely in this object, to use a pregnant expression; in other words, we forget our individuality, our will, and continue to exist only as pure subject, as clear mirror of the object, so that it is as if the object alone existed without anyone to perceive it, and thus we are no longer able to separate the perceiver from the perception, but the two have become one, since the entire consciousness is filled and occupied by a single image of perception. If, therefore, the object has to such an extent passed out of all relation to something outside it, and the subject has passed out of all relation to the will, what is thus known is no longer the individual thing as such, but the Idea, the eternal form, the immediate objectivity of the will at this grade. Thus at the same time, the person who is involved in this perception is no longer an individual, for in such perception the individual has lost himself; his is pure will-less, painless, timeless subject of knowledge.

Chapter 36
Whilst science, following the restless and unstable stream of the fourfold forms of reason or grounds and consequents, is with every end it attains again and again directed farther, and can never find an ultimate goal or complete satisfaction, any more than by running we can reach the point where the clouds touch the horizon; art, on the contrary, is everywhere at its goal. For it plucks the object of its contemplation from the stream of the world’s course, and holds it isolated before it. This particular thing, which in that stream was an infinitesimal part, becomes for art a representative of the whole, an equivalent of the infinitely many in space and time. It therefore pauses at this particular thing; it stops the wheel of time; for it the relations vanish; its object is only the essential, the Idea. We can therefore define it accurately as the way of considering things independently of the principle of sufficient reason, in contrast to the way of considering them which proceeds in exact accordance with this principle, and is the way of science and experience. This latter method of consideration can be compared to an endless line running horizontally, and the former to a vertical line cutting the horizontal at any point.

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Whereas to the ordinary man his faculty of knowledge is a lamp that lights his path, to the man of genius [Schopenhauer here refers to a specific definition of genius as the inclination towards the apprehension of pure, ungrounded knowledge described above] it is the sun that reveals the world.

He [the poet] knows the Ideas perfectly, but not the individuals. Therefore it has been observed that a poet may know man profoundly and thoroughly, but men very badly; he is easily duped, and is a plaything in the hands of the cunning and crafty.

Extracts From Hegel's "Lectures on Aesthetics"

“The beauty of art presents itself to sense, to feeling, to perception, to imagination; its sphere is not that of thought, and the apprehension of its activity and its productions demand another organ than that of scientific intelligence. Moreover, what we enjoy in the beauty of art is precisely the freedom of its productive and plastic enegrgies. In the origination, as in the contemplation, of its creations we appear to escape wholly from the fetters and rules of regularity.”

“We would exchange the shadowland of the idea for cheerful vigorous reality. And lastly, the source of artistic creations is the free activity of fancy, which in her imagination is more free than nature’s self. Not only has art at command the whole wealth of natural forms in the brilliant variety of their appearance, but also the creative imagination has power to expatiate inexhaustibly beyond their limit in products of its own.”

“And on the other hand seeing that art is what cheers and animates the dull and withered dryness of the idea, reconciles with reality its abstraction and its dissociation therefrom, and supplies out of the real world what is lacking to the notion, it follows, we may think, that a purely intellectual treatment of art destroys this very means of supplementation, annihilates it, and reduces the idea once more to its simplicity devoid of reality, and to its shadowy abstractness.”

Taxi Fun

Bin
London has changed alot in the past decade, and while I don’t agree with those who opine that the very “soul” of the city has been lost (I refer here to the kind of Londoner who doesn’t begin his diatribe without first thoroughly scrutinizing your origins through your accent, clothes, composure and physiognomy, in order to ensure he is not wasting his breath on an uncomprehending outsider), I can at least see that in their terms, with their definition of “spirit” and “soul” as being general concepts of local kinship based on shared prejudices, each of which constellate around levels of affluence and their specific urban locations; that indeed if this is what constitutes the genuine life of a city for some people, then for them London has indeed been radically emptied of reality, of “soul”, shaken-up and rendered incoherent and unintelligible. Passing through a field of inexplicable and alien phenomena, from tapas bars to cafes with outdoor seating, to the raucous cacophony of languages, to the spectacular array of uncategorisable fashions; those who find themselves searching for a consistent set of images -groups of markers indicating a social distinction- become utterly lost in an assemblage of discrete particulars that is so vast and shapeless, so uniformly unfamiliar that for them it is impossible to determine any of its edges, let alone its constituent parts. In this case the city can take on a menacing aspect for someone who had called it home, for the person who had shared it in the past with other (never entirely dissimilar) people that had clustered together to form a finite number of discernable groups. There may have been rivalry, aversion, even contempt between the groups; but every member of each was equipped with a conventionalized understanding of the other, a set of defining characteristics based on origin, language, labor and wealth that provided a reasonably accurate, reasonably extensive abstract of their role in the city. Whether in covetous fascination, contempt or pure hatred there was a unity spun of mutual recognition, an exchange of affirmations hidden in reciprocal condemnations and stereotypes; there was a dialogue of parts which was constantly reaffirming the identity of the city as a whole, reminding its inhabitants that they were cells in functioning organs which, over-and-above any differences between them, preformed together to maintain the life of the city. To someone who had been imbedded in this experience of London, in this world of newspapers, vocations and football clubs, of utter equilibrium between balanced parts, of the total absence of the unknown, of the absolute constancy between appearance and prejudice; to someone rooted in that London -in the mechanics of the tabloid- this city that has befallen them must seem like a terrifying cancer eating away at those healthy organs which comprised his society, a freakish growth of horribly malformed biological matter, caked together in a pulsating mound of uncontrollably proliferating cells. There is too much difference for any form of shared sereotypification let alone dialogue, too many degrees of transition between classes, too many incommensurable systems for anyone to be able to span them all, to recognise their own place by seeing other people in theirs: there are no clear divisions, no clear parts, and no clear functions, only the blur of a film in fast-forward. Or rather I would like to say there is a blur for some, but for others there is the abundance of a nature in full fertility, in ripe luxuriance, in all her feminine fullness. For some the essence of London (its “spirit” and “soul”) was a combination of repetition and predictability on the level of exchange between a finite number of groups, and the grounding of them in a clear spatial order around the city; for some that is what made their home legible, what made urbanity comfortable, and the diluting of this order by a burgeoning multiplicity of groups, habits, behaviours and ethnicities has left them floating with no reference point, feeling like outsiders in a place that has no “soul” anymore. And so I am guessing that maybe for some this beautiful Babylon, whose multiplying forms I find it so difficult no to see as the arrayed breasts of the Ephesian Artemis, swollen with succour for the aesthetically undernourished, may see instead the heaving corpse of an organism to be mourned. Although there is always much to remember, to miss and perhaps recall with nostalgia, when it come to the people who occupy this vast area of ground (as opposed to the volume of buildings which they occupy, and the mass of institutions they empower), I find it impossible to mourn. Wouldn’t that be a mourning the object of which is not dead, and which one nevertheless has to occupy each day, from morning til night? Would that not render you as totally exterior to the very thing you had belonged to, and still exist within? It would be a conscious rejection of urbanity for the simply reason that its state had changed, a willfully inflicted impoverishment because nothing could be recognised, a forcing of oneself into the position of an outside outsider without realizing that there is now a fellowship of outsiders. It seems like a form of unpleasurable masochism whose presumably uncontainable and explosive anxiety was directed at me yesterday, in the form of a cabby who became progressively more aggressive towards me, finally kicking me out of his taxi in the middle of Portland Place, about 5minutes after I had referred to the West End as “Central”. After asking what country I was from, then exactly what part of London I lived in, what age I was, what I studied –after these attempts to situate the strangeness of my terminology (he had never heard the term “Central” used instead of “West End” before) in origins suitably alien had failed, he shattered both our composures by desperately demanding that I should (especially as an “original” Londoner, as if a species in its own right) stick to what all Londoner’s can understand: that the West End is the West End, will always be, and should therefore be referred to as such, and that by calling it by a different name I was doing violence by him, was excluding him. I mentioned that unofficial or rather everyday words and names change as much as people do, from generation to generation, place to place, and reflect taste and style and convenience, and that there can be more than one word or name for something, and that often the meanings they refer to are slightly divergent (stupidly I tried to explain that “Central” generally refers to Zone 1 of the tube, which includes but is not itself the “West End”), and so there was no need for him to be upset: our two terms were commensurable. He demanded I admit that London is his London, and can be no other way, that everything is static: I suggested he write a definitive dictionary/encyclopedia for London, and that I would make sure to read it before meeting him next time, so as not to misname anything or mention anything that doesn’t really “exist” in his city, and so not upset him. At that point I was deposited into the street opposite a lovely façade by Robert Adam.

Santa Cecilia

Bin
I remember being cold and wet; or rather I remember peering down roads looking for a façade resembling the one described in our guide-book, and all of those streets down which I peered being mute, empty and smothered in a blanket of the exact shade of grey that I associate with Novembers in London and not afternoons in Rome, afternoons which I always assume to be vivid and flagrant in their nudity, tense in tight congregations of yellows and reds half hidden by their own shadows but given so much more weight thereby. For a Londoner ‘grey’ is not an adjective that can be applied to something, it is not a descriptive term of appearance but an essential quality that touches on every aspect of that in which it has been discovered; grey as a colour is in London what gives sustenance to all other impressions, it is the primordial root of a civilization whose only true reference before itself, and anterior to itself is the atmosphere produced between the liquid slate of the Thames and the unrelenting ceiling of clouds. For a Londoner grey is a condition of existence in all its breadth, and that is why I cannot trust my memory when I say I remember being cold or wet, because before I can recall those impressions I remember the streets being grey, and the strength of that image would have opened up a rupture in those streets in Trastevere through which they would have been soaked in damp, and chilled by the wind pouring in from a London ever-ready to inhabit all the colourlessness in the world. And it was Rome, my bright city that wears its age so lightly -how could it have been as I remember, it must have been some confused clouds on their way to Ostia who placed themselves there to distract me in my recollections; but nevertheless, there was a lack of Roman colour and volume in the streets that day as we were looking for a church with a famous sculpture. Marco desperately needed the toilet and so I remember when we finally came across the entrance to the church there were a few shops in front of it, none of which (for future reference) had publicly accessible toilets. This famous sculpture by the brother of Carlo Maderno is of a martyred saint (the patron saint of musicians), a beheaded lady whose martyrdom is indicated by a crevice around the back of her neck. This is gently made the centre of ones attention as the body is laid out in a horizontal figura-serpentinata whose most concrete point of inflection is precisely at the back of the neck, precisely at the moment where the potentially somnolent curve of her body which faces the viewer turns and rotates in a movement that is clearly not one of life, leaving the features of the martyr turned away from us. It is a statue of violence but it is elegant and perfectly poised, it is harmonious but not idealised and inhuman, it effects pathos but is in no way dramatic. I remember being momentarily impressed and perhaps having briefly pondered the simultaneous opening of her curving torso, outpointing arms, and the closing of her thoughts, her face looking away to somewhere not of this world; but I had completely forgotten about her until yesterday, I had forgotten her name and her church. She was Santa Cecilia, she was a wealthy noblewoman of the divine city, her church now was her house during her life, she was ordered beheaded by the prefect Turcius Almachius in 230 for being a christian. The order was carried out unsuccessfuly, and with a mutilated neck she lay dying for three days in that very house. In the midst of inconsolable grief, but in an elevated serenity on the shores of her infinity she began to sing. In Cecilia the conjunction of extreme violence and her corporeality, of excrutiating physicality and its contemplating consciousness -when given enough time to know for itself the trajectory it was tracing- produced music, produced song, lyric, rhyme; at the moment of closure she didn’t make statements or talk but she sang. Like the immediateness of the odor of saintliness she released the vapour of aesthetics, she exhaled the all-forgiving and all-forgetting balm of that which unravels fear and regret, that which passes through the fortresses of inclement minds because it is not of the same plane of existence, it is not aware of even the possibility of barriers. From little lips came the massive affirmation of the Lyrical as the incandescence of life, of the Musical as the turning point around which rotate all oppositions. I had forgotten all of this until I read the poem below by WH Auden, and then not only did I remember her, but that statue grew warm and began to hum quietly in echoes and I reclaimed it as a measure of affirmation; that crevice at the back of her neck became the infinitely broad line where emptiness and dissilusion become exultant; the repose of her body became loud passions extinguished in quiet melodies and her hands pointed out not at the observer and his space, but at her words in songs that are drifting through the centuries. Through the poem Auden imbues the statue with a heavy profundity which echoes its form perfectly; his poem draws lines which extend exactly from its creamy silhouettes, and spreads their presence through other dimensions and spaces in a movement which pulls Cecilia’s story up into it and recomposes the poem, story and sculpture (for those who know all three) into an impression that reverberates around every mode of appreciation. But then of course the poem is glorious and fecund and better left undescribed, so that it may be felt the more. I am going to rome in a week and I am going back to the church of Santa Cecila.



Song for St. Cecilia’s Day
WH Auden

I
In a garden shady this holy lady
With reverent cadence and subtle psalm,
Like a black swan as death came on
Poured forth her song in perfect calm:
And by ocean’s margin this innocent virgin
Constructed an organ to enlarge her prayer,
And notes tremendous from her great engine
Thundered out on the Roman air.

Blonde Aphrodite rose up excited,
Moved to delight by the melody,
White as an orchid she rode quite naked
In an oyster shell on top of the sea;
At sounds so entrancing the angels dancing
Came out of their trance into time again,
And around the wicked in hell’s abysses
The huge flame flickered and eased their pain.

Blessed Cecilia, appear in visions
To all musicians, appear and inspire:
Translated daughter, come down and startle
Composing mortals with immortal fire.

II
I cannot grow;
I have no shadow
To run away from,
I only play

I cannot err;
There is no creature
Whom I belong to,
Whom I could wrong.

I am defeat
When it knows it
Can now do nothing
By suffering.

All you lived through,
Dancing because you
No longer need it
For any deed.

I shall never be different. Love me.

III
O ear whose creatures cannot wish to fall,
O calm of spaces unafraid of weight,
Where Sorrow is herself, forgetting all
The gaucheness of her adolescent state,
Where Hope within the altogether strange
From every outworn image is released,
And Dread born whole and normal like a beast
Into a world of truths that never change:
Restore our fallen day; O re-arrange.

O dear white children casual as birds,
Playing among the ruined languages,
So small beside their large confusing words,
So gay against the greater silences
Of dreadful things you did: O hang the head,
Impetuous child with the tremendous brain,
O weep, child, weep, O weep away the stain,
Lost innocence who wished your lover dead,
Weep for the lives your wishes never led.

O cry created as the bow of sin
Is drawn across our trembling violin.
O weep, child, weep, O weep away the stain.
O law drummed out by hearts against the still
Long winter of our intellectual will.
That what has been may never be again.
O flute that throbs with the thanksgiving breath
Of convalescents on the shores of death.
O bless the freedom that you never chose.
O trumpets that unguarded children blow
About the fortress of their inner foe.
O wear your tribulation like a rose.

Two Women

Bin
In another of Meireles’ installations I was leaning across a farm gate, looking through a metal grille, which was apparently attached to a plastic shower curtain just to the left, at a large oblong tank of water containing fish whose transparent flesh left their skeletons revealed, and who in their obliging movements composed themselves as a dynamic diagram in flesh of the suspended fences, meshes and windows that surrounded them. They offered biological proof, an inverted evolutionary recapitulation of the interdependence between the defensive mode of disappearance, and the tender unselfconsciousness of the unwittingly revealed; in hiding their flesh they disclosed the fragility of their bones. Through this figurative allusion the entire collection of permeable barriers –all of which are so familiar to us- acquired the characteristics of artifacts, the expansive quality of objects from which we can inductively touch a universal instinct. The people in the work were walking on shattered glass that crunched under their feet, and they, we, were staring -half in confusion half in pleasure- at the anthropological residue of our innately human and biological drive to materially conceal and divide; but at the same time, through the fish, the floor, the dispensation of planes and transparency and blue-ish light, Meireles shifts the focus from the explicit motivation of defense and abnegation of contact to its usually unnoticed corollary; that is the heightening of the potency of visibility; the increase in value of permeability; the ramping up of diverging instincts encompassed in artifacts that are the manifestations of this tension. Each artifact of separation, each item of division exaggerates the pleasure of seeing through, of the denouement of space; and just as I was perched on the gate, looking through the installation at the skeletal fish, I was submerged, inundated by the words of one woman to another. They had both slipped out from behind the shower curtain, and -as they both looked back to where my over-avid gaze was directed- one exclaimed “Oh look, I love that! I do love water features. You know how I love my water features… that’s just lovely, isn’t it?!”. I love them too, and yes, it was.

Extracts from "The Eloquence of Colour"

These are yummy morsels from PartI of Jacqueline Lichtenstein's meticulous exploration of the history of the French Enlightenment's liberation of Colour from its tangle of externally mis-applied classifications. I guess PartII will follow when there is a little more on the blog to balance out Mme Lichtenstein's presence...

P4
For colour is the material in , or rather of, painting, the irreducible component of representation that escapes the hegemony of language, the pure expressivity of a silent visibility that constitutes the image as such

P18
The true fine wit praised by Ariste: judicious and delicate reasoning. And this delicacy of wit is expressed in a very particular kind of knowledge that spans knowing, sensing and seeing. Neither a concept nor an affect, not a perception, and yet all of these at once, it is a certainty felt but not demonstrable, an obviousness accompanied by no proof. It is a knowledge that depends on eyesight and manifests as a feeling, that senses the vantage point for accurate perception. This delicacy of wit that infallibly places an individual at the right distance from the object of contemplation –neither too close nor too far away- has all the characteristics of visual judgment.

Intuition is the capacity to discern the infinitesimal differences existing between things that are apparently confused in nature, realities indiscernible to mathematical minds seeking clear, obvious and palpable principles.

P42
Moral puritanism and aesthetic austerity, along with resentment and old, stubborn, and underhanded desire to equate drabness with beauty, thus make their righteous alliance and take delight in a constantly reiterated certainty: only what is insipid, odorless, and colourless may be said to be true, beautiful and good.

P43
[Painting] does not present us with an illusory appearance but with the illusion of an appearance whose very substance is cosmetic. Unlike other forms of adornment, this one does not exceed reality by adding ornaments that mask its nature: it takes its place by offering an image whose nature is entirely exhausted in its appearance, a universe that is the pure illusory effect of an artifice.
In denaturalizing appearance, painting thus realizes the essence of ornament that consists in being without essence. It is like an adornment from which nature is absent, makeup whose colouring does not merely correct the faults of a face but invents its features and gives it a form, a garment that cannot be taken off without pulling off the skin, an originative metaphor.

P75
Cicero repeats time and again: eloquence is not born of rhetoric but the other way around. True rhetoric does not come from wordmongers who put together treatises for those who naively believe that technique alone will allow them to speak with eloquence. It comes from orators who most often write down their speeches only after delivering them.

P83
If the charms of enunciation are the marks of the rhetorical and thus deceptive character of an individual’s words, the absence of charm becomes the indubitable sign of truth. To the sophists’ seductive persons and sparkling words, philosophers must then oppose an expression whose dreary pride and tedium present themselves as signs of the highest wisdom, and speeches whose repellent form lays claim to unfathomable depth.
Defined differentially, rhetoricians and philosophers are compelled to take on the negative attributes that each assigns to the other. The characterization strips rhetoric of all legitimacy and abandons it to the reprehensible pleasure of a seduction, condemning its effectiveness while recognizing its force. As for philosophy, the definition affords it an indisputable eminence and at the same time deprives it of any power, drawing truth as the unpleasant and unseductive image of a pale and dull negation of pleasure. Placed by Plato within a single frame in a scene where they respond to each other as complementary figures, rhetoric and philosophy take up their positions at the poles of ever-deceptive pleasure and necessarily bleak knowledge.

P103
The choice and frequent use of such metaphors and comparisons, which define beauty essentially from the viewpoint of health, show the extent to which most aesthetic judgments are determined by moral evaluations, that is, based on criteria borrowed from nature, not art. The most striking evidence of this overlap of moral and aesthetic values comes from the way in which the various figures of femininity –chaste or indecent, virtuous or corrupt- constantly offer up metaphors for the faults and qualities of eloquence.

P106
Forced to balance precariously between pleasure and reason, rhetoric has always found itself trapped between an ornamentation whose brilliance is suspected of lending discourse a purely sophistic seductiveness and an austere philosophy whose somber gleam threatens to deprive rhetoric of the means necessary to assure its effectiveness.

The courtesan and the prostitute always appear as emblematic figures of the culpable temptation of a pure pleasure to which art, when unable to save itself from the dangers of its own power, succumbs.

P111
The traditional place of the image necessarily affects our perception of its power. Its legitimacy is still in doubt though its importance is not. To rid ourselves of such a contradiction we would need to abandon traditional hierarchies and reach a complete reevaluation that allowed a relation between the visible and discourse in terms of complementarity and not subordination. All these relations weave into the weft of their history image and language as complementary figures that an archaic gesture has torn apart. More than rival sisters, they resemble separated lovers haunted by a desire for the unity of an origin perhaps forever lost, each seeking in the figure of the other the missing part of the self. As if this other’s absence were the heart of all representation.

Cildo Meireles Exhibition

Bin
A series of lines on millimeter graph paper that is slightly off white and grubby, aged and used, bearing the effort expended on it in graphite bruises; lines that are separated into the three which extend out to the edges of the paper, which pull in three directions away from the ageing surface; and the others, poised in the space marked out for them by the three like a startled nocturnal animal, stand together with a fragile unity which threatens to collapse under the gaze, a unity which coheres into objecthood out of the corner of the eye, but which is demure and unsure of itself under direct observation, ready at any moment to dissolve back into the mathematics of two dimensions. This first small impression was repeated along the wall of the first room in the exhibition as a series of searches, as an attempt to adumbrate an ineffability hidden between the grid and surface of these sheets of paper, the denuding spotlight of the axes x y and z, and the incredulous eye of the observer. Like a row of unfamiliar taxidermic specimens frozen in glass cases, the exposed lines in each display were either huddled, slumped or erect, individually summarizing a possible characteristic of this postulated ineffability, and together laying out its contour. The attempt seems absurd, the medium unforgiving. He is trying to find something within the framework of geometrical axioms that is different in kind and not just degree; he is trying to find meaning in the brutality of facts; he is trying to find sensitivity in the insensible and he does it with an essential earnestness which is disarming. These searches consist of so few lines that they bring to mind the first attempts of a schoolchild at drawing in “space”, and it is precisely this innocence that disarms; it seems as though Meireles has had Euclid’s system explained to him by his teacher, taught to him as a hermetic and preordained reality external to his existence, and whereas the other students picked up their pencils to draw cubes and planes, Meireles stared at the page, troubled. How could this be called space? It all existed before him, before any of them, it allowed for nothing which was not inherent in its logic, nothing which was not a predictable output of a limited set of factors; it was a frozen solid, impenetrable and the precise opposite of what his senses told him was space. There was no room for anything but itself. Forced to participate in the class, forced to accept the axioms and inscribe points and lines in the solid space of reason, he nonetheless looks for some room, for a place where something unexpected might occur, something not entirely predictable and wholly inherent in the system: and so we are gifted these half-formed creatures, the embryos of a poetic instinct struggling to be born, trying to find room for itself in a grid of answers. Meireles continues this search on other pieces of the same type of paper, but swaps the axes for a floor, two walls and wainscoting; and by doing this -with the use of some colour pencils- transforms the specific potential for entombment embodied in Euclid’s geometry into a generalised scenario of existential enquiry. The questions began to form themselves in the clarity of the classroom, where the subject found its object and injected itself into it, producing results which now spill into the everyday, which escape from the nowhere of Euclid to the ubiquitous somewhere of the corner of a room. By substituting the axes for walls Meireles transfers his search within the structure of 3dimensional space into a search within the structure of habit; into the earnest and childlike efforts of someone who sees and will not accept the solid impenetrability of the quotidian, just as he couldn’t that of geometry. The meager resources of the point and line left Meireles with only enough material to form unstable speculations; here he is digging through a postulate necessary to the space of our habits -that rooms have corners, and corners are corners- and finds rich material resonant with familiarity and association through which he fashions remarkably comprehensible and lucid results. The walls, the floors, the wainscotting fold, gently lean or suddenly fall away at an angle, each time vividly encompassing the potential for a moment of respite, a touch of interpretation, an infiltration of the banal with the ineffable. By the last of these pages, by the time you turn around to look at the one-to-one installation in which four of these have been materialised as testaments to a sort of unflinching positivity, an indefatigable resolution to interbreed incompatibilities; by the time you walk around them Meireles has primed you, sensitized you through a set of small drawings for the breathtaking series of shared contemplations which thankfully, for once, take you far away from the unbearable Euclidean vapidness of the Tate Modern.

Cildo Meireles:
“In some way you become political when you don’t have a chance to be poetic. I think human beings would much prefer to be poetic.”
This is what separates so many artists and poets from those that write about them.

In all the works on display Meireles finds ways of opening up possibilities, unseen potentials, he brings questions to light, he flicks the surface of normality and makes it undulate strangely; and in all of the works except Mission/Missions (How to build a Cathedral) he brings things to our attention by taking away from them some of their usual clarity, and by doing this opens up room to move and think in. Which is why when I read this part of Isaiah Berlin’s “Final Retrospect”, I felt compelled to include it, as it seemed to maintain, although far apart, at least a parallel trajectory to Meireles’ work.

Isaiah Berlin
Extract from “Final Retrospect”
“Since the natural sciences are perhaps the greatest success story in the whole history of mankind, it seems absurd to suppose that man alone is not subject to the natural laws discovered by the scientists, (That, indeed, is what the eighteenth century philosophes maintained). The question is not, of course, whether man is wholly free of such laws –no one but a madman could maintain that man does not depend on his biological or psychological structure or environment, or on the laws of nature. The only question is: Is his liberty totally exhausted thereby? Is there not some corner in which he can act as he chooses, and not be determined to choose by antecedent causes? This may be a tiny corner of the realm of nature, but unless it is there, his consciousness of being free, which is undoubtedly all but universal –the fact that most people believe that, while some of their actions are mechanical, some obey their free will– is an enormous illusion, from the beginnings of mankind , ever since Adam ate the apple, although told not to do so, and did not reply, ‘I could not help it, I did not do it freely, Eve forced me to do it.’”

Hare Krishna

Bin
I noticed a lady. She was wrapped in so many bulbous crumples and twists of fiery-coloured fabric that it seemed as if what could be seen of her body was being held up by its overabundant density, that the almost equally creased protrusions of her hands, feet and face were where all the reds and browns and purples and golds folded into each other, to become a deep and warm shade which contained all of the rainbow surrounding it in dense creases; lines of skin that were more like billows of dyed fabric compressed together under some titanic force, and granted life and expression as if this were an oriental Golem, formed of the luxuriance of colour and pattern rather than the penury of the earth. Looking back, I think I had seen her before -perhaps many times- but there had never been reason for her to be separated from the street, to be given a form and pulled out from the bas-relief which froze either side of that road into an unquestioning, unproblematic and mutely comforting doorstep to my Soho. I must have glanced at her for longer than is considered a glance, and a small wrinkled hand emerged from within, borne by a bright yellow variant of material, generally concealed perhaps in order to celebrate with its appearance any willed engagement with the world outside her folds. There was a book in the hand, she might have been smiling, and as the hand rose it followed me, I think with her face as well, around their soft supporting pillar. I noticed that the book was one of those offered for free by the Hare Krishnas, of which she was one, outside of whose little muffled restaurant she stood, and I looked away from her, speeding up with agitation and feeling compromised; in the slight extension of a glance, in a handful of steps, an isthmus had momentarily risen above the waves of habit to connect me with a precious atom of strangeness, and even before I could savor it I was rudely robbed of its charm by a little book that brought both me and the lady offering it back to the banal and tense reality of the city’s hassled and its hasslers. She hadn’t come up to me -like those violent teenagers decorated in symbols of incommensurably sincere charity- and shattered the penumbra around my privacy with the brutality of feigned conversation, in fact I don’t believe she had even looked at me; but I felt that her poetry, her mystique had been nothing more than a silent version of such intrusive conversation, an entreaty in colour, that her verbose body of clothing was intended for passers-by as an orchid uses its luminous veins to call in insects. I began relegating her to the category of urban nuisances, to the same universal space occupied by charity-touts, free-newspaper purveyors, proselytizers and survey-workers; and she would have disappeared into that general abstraction forever -along with the Krishnas- if she hadn’t broken the silence, hadn’t called gently out to someone who I had not been in a decade. Ten years ago I had been atomized through the mechanisms of puberty, and whereas that which is supposed to comprise one’s character –the set of notions and values that govern behaviour- was for me just a gas, exterior to my body and susceptible to any noxious breeze that came its way; my body however -although it had changed unalterably a few years before- was relatively stable, and became the image in the mirror to which I clung while my immaterial properties remained protean; which was why I was so deeply affected every time I was mistaken for a girl, which happened frequently. The validity of my reference was undermined: if people couldn’t even manage to grasp to which fundamental human binary my body belonged, was it perhaps not less fixed than I had wanted it to be? Every time I was referred to as a girl, as madam, as “your daughter, sir”, the effort required to reclaim my body, to convince myself of its solidity once again was minutely heroic. I had forgotten that this used to happen, and as I was moving away from the lady and I heard her call “Madam”, I was stopped by one of those shifts in perception which crack open the container in which we have sealed the impressions of a particular period in our past; the cacophonic rush drowned out the dominance of my present self, it filled me with imprecise feelings of anger, confusion and freshness which were less real emotions than treasured belongings to which feelings had been attached, and which I had lost and forgotten about. I didn’t immediately understand what had been given to me by the Hare Krishna, all these treasures had fallen on me from a great height, and I was immobilised under their weight; all I could do was to turn around and walk back to her, ask what she had said, be confirmed in what I had heard and stumble off. Across Oxford Street, step by step, the glittering presents she had presented me with from within my own past began to reveal themselves, one by one; the deafening noise in turn softened, fell apart, and pulled itself back together again to gently sing some sort of internal lullaby. It had all been packed up and locked away for a reason, all these feelings had been difficult to manage when they were new; but now I was glad that they had been given back to me, that after time had turned them into relics to contemplate rather than obstacles to be overcome, this magical woman had found the one word which could penetrate through the clotted indifferences of my mind. As I turned these objects over in the intuitive gaze of the daydream, I couldn’t help but feel as if something childishly superstitious had come-true, that the woman was some sort of witch, that she knew what would entail from her utterance and had purposely transformed me, that despite my copious, disorderly and impossible to miss smear of facial hair, she had projected the word regardless of my sex because her intention was to bring about the effect in which I am still reveling. It is just a fancy which I know to be beyond possibility, but despite its impossibility, the small section of street where the real and the fanciful occurred has since stood out in abundant relief, has retained the colour of the incident, or rather the existing place and its colours have come alive with the shape of the incident. I don’t know what Hare Krishnas do, what they believe in or their history; what I do know is that their sad smiles, the pale pastels which make it look as if their walls, food, clothes and face-paint together constitute a unified figure, the tired struggle of their chanting that emanates everyday from a window somewhere above their restaurant, and which occasionally expands and alters Oxford Street with its presence; all these things that I do now know, since I have started looking, since one of them called to me as if I were not a man; all these things have stained the pallid relief that had been Soho Street like paint stains a canvas, forever turning its bare surfaces, walls and glass from mere unobtrusive material into a transparent display of life.

Relative Strength, Extract from 'Two Concepts of Liberty'

The very desire for guarantees that our values are eternal and secure in some objective heaven is perhaps only a craving for the certainties of childhood or the absolute values of our primitive past. ‘To realize the relative validity of one’s convictions’, said an admirable writer of our time, ‘and yet stand for them unflinchingly is what distinguishes a civilized man from a barbarian.’