TextBin

Emilio Ambasz Q&A

2012-01-07T16:11:00.001Z

LF: Is architecturedemocratic?

EA: Without a client who is enlightened and establishes ahigh standard for approximation, you don’t have good architecture. An architectis not enough; you need a client who establishes a high standard. That is whycommittees usually fail in obtaining good buildings. Lets say architecture isin the domain of royal democracies.

LF: ShouldArchitecture be democratic?

EA: Architecture has to solve a number of social problems,so if the social problems are solved, I don’t know how that makes it more orless democratic. I think that is a misuse of the word democratic. Democraticmeans a certain minimum common denominator. Even if it were a maximum commondenominator, it is still a common denominator –the key word is common.Therefore, if you want to create a new model for changing the present it cannotreceive the approval of the majority. It has to be a shock, it has to irritate,it has to be rejected, it has to be resisted if it has any value of inventioncontained within it. In time, if the innovation is understood, that prototypewill become a type, and, with time, the culture that turned it into a type willturn it into a stereotype. And onward and onward. When architecture isarchitecture, it is a prototype. When it is a building and you can make somemoney, it is a type. If you can make lots of money, it is a stereotype. Thehack architects work with stereotypes, the professionals work with types, andthe artists make prototypes.

LF: Spider, bee, orant. Which is the best architect?

EA: All three are unremarkable as such. A bee that alwaysmakes the same thing is a builder, not an architect. The spider that makes abeautiful web is a hunter, not an architect. The ant that keeps on carryinglittle leaves is an accumulator, but not an architect. Architecture means inventinga new habitat; those three don’t.

LF: Double envelope.Is the inside to be reflected in the outside?

EA: When I was a student I thought so. But I came to realisethat it was a surrogate for decision-making. If you don’t know what to do with the façade, you justproject the inside onto the outside. I think that the outside should be onething, because its outside, and the inside should be another. I am notinterested in single-minded images.

LF: Is the blob formalexcess or lack of form?

EA: The blob is a form in search of itself. It doesn’t knowwhat it is and so it is constantly changing. It is indecision carried through astate of confirmation, which of course is temporary. The context gives the forma certain meaning, then the context changes and the blob just remains there.

LF: Is architecturehiding behind technology?

EA: Many times technology is presented as architecture. Butarchitecture is both techne and poiesis. If not, it is not architecture.

..........................................................

The text above is an extract from the article '53 Questions, 265 Answers', by Luca Farinelli, featured in the fall 2011 edition (23) of LOG. The article is a series of interviews with identical questions posed to well known architects, including Bjarke Ingels, Peter Eisenmann, Steven Holl, and Thom Mayne, although Farinelly has interviewed many others in what is an ongoing project....

Rome

2011-12-07T07:10:00.001Z

What occurs on the scale of the individual building, namely what has been discussed earlier with regard to ruins: the erosion of form, mining and additions of later generations to existing material –also occurs at the scale of the city. Areas are either set down and evolve or are cut‐up, eroded and altered through the centuries –every change adding difference and variation to the spatial continuum of the city’s public urbanity. What in individual buildings is the delightful accretion of various scales, materials and tastes, becomes a powerful display of cultural evolution and its spatial corollaries throughout the ages when expressed at the urban scale. Because in Rome there isn't one definitively dominant attitude structuring the city’s form, but rather a congested layering of various structuring marks from conflicting eras, each area’s streets and squares jostle with each other, under each other, over each other

If one could cast aside historical lineage for a day, and view the city purely as space, colour, form and ideas, then we would have an opportunity to experience Europe in all its breadth and contradictions. By virtue of the sheer overwhelming weight of its physical history, Rome collapses in on itself as an Architectural singularity, it is the epicentre of the continent where the laws of time and space implode. Rome becomes all of history in one point, and because this is rendered spatially, in this place we walk outside of history and its shackles of one‐thing‐comes‐after‐another. We walk through something that more than anywhere else comes close to being the spatial embodiment, in all its time travelling, space defying, taste denying waywardness –of the human mind. Rome negates history.

Genius

2011-12-06T07:45:00.001Z

^Tower,Sant’ Andrea delle Fratte, Borromini (source)

Thereare explosive minds of the kind of unstoppable genius that can bring forthwhole worlds, that can render the content of their thoughts as communicable,experiential matter. The problem I have with this category of production isthat it can only communicate through experience. The observer is offered nomanner in which to discern the structure and order of the intellect and ideasthat are displayed before him: his only enjoyment is that of an impression, anemotion.

At the other end of the spectrum there are those whose control of theprocesses of their minds is so complete that their work takes on the form of aspatial summa through which one can wander whilst having principles and orderscrisply revealed to you. This type of space can also be phenomenally rewardingin the secondary, consciously intellectual sense, though it is invariablylacking in the rich ambiguity and delight present in the work of geniuses ofthe first order.

Occasionally one comes across something –a space, a canvas, a façade,a poem- in which there is either the two tendencies reconciled, or else the twoin visible conflict. In reconciliation one is offered the chance of seeing boththe growth of wild proliferation, the animal fertility of the human mind, andalso spelled forth its innate illogic, logic, law or precise form oflawlessness.

In conflict the two can provide a vital and exemplary spectacle ofthe creative construction, erosion, explosion and containment that occurs over timein the push and pull between the beautiful impetuosity of a wild and fecund wilfulness,and its internal death drive for clarity, communication, abstraction and awider relevance beyond the baseness of instinct, the latter annihilating theformer, and the former the latter, in an endless trauma of the internaliseddialectic. From this process fall the most pure artefacts of genius, spaces oftense equilibrium in which the impossible union of the subjective drive and theobjective imperative is achieved in the forced and final reconciliation of realspace.

Art in the Flatland

2011-11-02T07:51:00.002Z

Below is an extract from Herber Marcuse's "One Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society", a book in which the author analyses the mechanisms of technological and social normalization in the west which, while producing the image of choice and plurality through mass media, shopping and democratic histrionics, simultaneously and with clinical psychological efficiency, precludes any possibility for genuine critique and/or radically alternative modes of living. It was first published in 1964 and lays out a very exacting critique of the sort of capitalist realist society whose apotheosis, and greatest crisis we are currently experiencing. And yet still we are finding it impossible to imagine, let alone enact any alternatives, and this is precisely because of the many impoverishments and infantilisms that have atrophied our critical and imaginative faculties, from the reduction of language into a kind of positive capitalist newspeak (complexity, the non-functional, the un-popular are all excluded from the flatland of our language, whose most recent form is that of the tweet and most enduring that of the news presenter and the advertisement), to the rapid and total absorption of the arts (traditionaly the sanctified place of externality, condoned critique, and realm of the just-possible and imaginary) as functional cogs in the great mechanism of pacification. It is the arts as a place free from the relentless positivism of today's general society, a negative place, negative in the best sense, free from the pressure to do, to act, to produce, to buy, to perform, to tweet, to immediately construct thoughts as facebook status updates, it is the arts as a place where the lie is revealed at the core of everyone else's truth that the extract below touches upon. Obviously for the full force of the argument I recommend reading the whole book.

^Shoppers In Westfield, Shepherd's Bush, London (source)

The truth of literature and art has always been granted (ifit was granted at all) as one of a “higher” order, which should not and indeeddid not disturb the order of business. What has changed in the contemporaryperiod is the difference between the two orders and their truths. The absorbentpower of society depletes the artistic dimension by assimilating itsantagonistic contents. In the realm of culture, the new totalitarianismmanifests itself precisely in a harmonizing pluralism, where the mostcontradictory works and truths peacefully coexist in indifference.

Prior to the advent of this cultural reconciliation,literature and art were essentially alienation, sustaining and protecting thecontradiction –the unhappy consciousness of the divided world, the defeatedpossibilities, the hopes unfulfilled, and the promises betrayed. They were arational, cognitive force, revealing a dimension of man and nature which wasrepressed and repelled in reality. Their truth was in the illusion evoked, inthe insistence on creating a world in which the terror of life was called upand suspended –mastered by recognition. This is the miracle of the chef d’oeuvre;it is the tragedy, sustained to the last, and the end of tragedy –its impossiblesolution. To live one’s love and hatred, to live that which one is meansdefeat, resignation, and death. The crimes of society, the hell that man hasmade for man become unconquerable cosmic forces.

The tension between the actual and the possible is transfiguredinto an insoluble conflict, in which reconciliation is by grace of the oeuvre asform: beauty as the “promesse de Bonheur.”In the form of the oeuvre, the actual circumstances are placed in anotherdimension where the given reality shows itself as that which it is. Thus ittells the truth about itself; its language ceases to be that of deception,ignorance, and submission. Fiction calls the facts by their name and theirreign collapses; fiction subverts everyday experience and shows it to bemutilated and false. But art has this magic power only as the power ofnegation. It can speak its own language only as long as the images are alivewhich refuse and refute the established order.

…

^Arnold Bocklin's Isle of the Dead (+a number)

To be sure, alienation is not the sole characteristic ofart. An analysis, and even a statement of the problem is outside the scope ofthis work, but some suggestions may be offered for clarification. Throughoutwhole periods of civilization, art appears to be entirely integrated into itssociety. Egyptian, Greek, and Gothic art are familiar examples; Bach and Mozartare usually also cited as testifying to the “positive” side of art. The placeof the work of art in a pre-technological and two-dimensional culture is verydifferent from that in a one-dimensional civilization, but alienationcharacterizes affirmative as well as negative art.

The decisive distinction is not the psychological one betweenart created in joy and art created in sorrow, between sanity and neurosis, butthat between the artistic and societal reality. The rupture with the latter,the magic or rational transgression, is an essential quality of even the mostaffirmative art; it is alienated also from the very public to which it isaddressed. No matter how close and familiar the temple of cathedral were to thepeople who lived around them, they remained in terrifying or elevated contrastto the daily life of the slave, the peasant, and the artisan –and perhaps evento that of their masters.

Whether ritualized or not, art contains the rationality ofnegation. In its advanced positions, it is the Great Refusal –the protestagainst that which is. The modes in which man and things are made to appear, tosing and sound and speak, are modes of refuting, breaking, and recreating theirfactual existence. But these modes of negation pay tribute to the antagonisticsociety to which they are linked. Separated from the sphere of labour wheresociety reproduces itself and its misery, the world of art which they createremains, with all its truth, a privilege and an illusion.

In this form it continues, in spite of all democratizationand popularization, through the nineteenth and into the twentieth century. The “highculture” in which this alienation is celebrated has its own rites and its ownstyle. The salon, the concert, opera, theatre are designed to create and invokeanother dimension of reality. Their attendance requires festive-likepreparation; they cut off and transcend everyday experience.

^Kate and Will the Royal Couple depicted in 'Street Art' as Punk Heroes

Now this essential gap between the arts and the order of theday, kept open in the artistic alienation, is progressively closed by theadvancing technological society. And with its closing, the Great Refusal is inturn refused; the “other dimension” is absorbed into the prevailing state ofaffairs. The works of alienation are themselves incorporated into this societyand circulate as part and parcel of the equipment which adorns and psycho-analysesthe prevailing state of affairs. This they become commercials –they sell,comfort, or excite.

The neo-conservative critics of leftist critics of massculture ridicule the protest against Bach as background music in the kitchen,against Plato and Hegel, Shelley and Baudelaire, Marx and Freud in the drugstore.Instead, they insist on recognition of the fact that the classics have left themausoleum and come to life again, that people are just so much more educated.True, but coming to life as classics, they come to life as other thanthemselves; they are deprived of their antagonistic force, of the estrangementwhich was the very dimension of their truth. The intent and function of theseworks have thus fundamentally changed. If they once stood in contradiction tothe status quo, this contradiction is now flattened out.

But such assimilation is historically premature; itestablishes cultural equality while preserving domination.

…

Now this remoteness has been removed and with it thetransgression and the indictment. The text and the tone are still there, butthe distance is conquered which made them 'Luft von anderen Planeten'. Theartistic alienation has become as functional as the architecture of the new theatresand concert halls in which it is performed. And here too, the rational and theevil are inseparable. Unquestionably the new architecture is better, i.e., morebeautiful and more practical than the monstrosities of the Victorian era. Butit is also more “integrated” –the cultural centre is becoming a fitting part ofthe shopping centre, or municipal centre, or government centre. Domination hasits own aesthetics, and democratic domination has its democratic aesthetics. Itis good that almost everyone can now have the fine arts at his fingertips, byjust turning a knob on his set, or by just stepping into the drugstore. In thisdiffusion, however, they become cogs in a culture-machine which remakes theircontent.

3 Masterpieces of Late Twentieth-Century Design Theory

2011-08-20T17:22:00.000+01:00

1: Rossi's Inequality, aka the Architectural Memory Theorem

The minimum meaningful architectural configuration is greater than and irreducible to its geometric constituents.

2: Hejduk's Inequality, aka the Architectural Poetry Theorem

The minimum poetic architectural configuration is greater than and irreducible to architectural memories.

3: Eisenmann's Hypothesis, aka the Architectural Calculus Theorem

Minimum geometric, mnemonic and poetic configurations are special cases of a generalized calculus of form.

............................................................................

Text and images from Jeffrey Kipnis, Late Twentieth Century Design Theory, 1990
via Architecture's Desire, Reading the Late Avant-Garde, K. Michael Hays. MIT Press.

Material & Colour in Memphis

2011-07-17T14:22:00.003+01:00

Drawing For a Lamp, Michele De Lucchi, 1981

A few extracts from Memphis' 1982 publication, edited and written by Barbara Radice, in which the group's voracious, vast, and dizzying Iconophagic appetite -which indiscriminately took in symbols, signs and images from Kampala to Tokyo and Calcutta, and materials from anywhere, and of any kind- was served up as a banquet of exercises in the undermining and transgression of good taste, traditional idealist design values, and the calcified and unproductive relationships between the intellectual, the architect, the designer, fashion, industry, and consumer desire. Memphis claimed the full breadth of the sensual present (from Mc Donalds' plastic seating in Tallahassee, to a neon sign piercing the haze of a Kinshasa side-street) as the rightful property of whoever was without fear of its immense fecundity, and the domain of the feeling body as the legitimate recipient; and it was the designer whom they saw as being destined to orchestrate the intense, fun, colourful and liberatingly orgiastic union of the two.
..................................................
"As Sottsass said in an interview, “As we know very well, when you try to define the function of any object, the function slips through your fingers, because function is life itself. Function is not one screw more or one measure less. Function is the final possibility of the relation between an object and life.”"

^Carlton Sideboard, Sottsass 1981 source

Materials

The plastic laminate shock, besides opening up new perspectives in furniture design, paved the way for a series of reflections, revisions, and research into the theme of materials, their quality, their possible combination and matching, their semantic and cultural charge. As a result, materials have begun to be read, chosen and utilised not only as tools or supports of design (important as these may be), but as active protagonists, privileged vehicles of sensory communication, self-sufficient cells that cohabit the design without mixing, each cell with its own personal story to tell. Marco Zanini points out: “Hoffmann often used precious materials like mother-of-pearl to draw lines. They were lines of mother-of-pearl, but they were essentially lines. If we use mother-of-pearl, we use square miles of it, because it’s the mother-of-pearl that tells the story and not the line.” The Memphis designers have worked on materials in two senses: developing and using “aseptic”, freedom-giving materials that have not been consumed by institutionalised cultures, and putting them together with bits or pieces of cultivated materials “to see if something else can be done.” This, as Sottsass explains, is a phenomenon that very often repeats itself in history, for instance when barbarians with their “non-culture” invade civilised zones.

Every institutionalised culture possesses a very precise catalogue of signs, ordered and assembled to represent the most general meaning that can be given to that culture. This catalogue makes it possible to communicate certain situations, to express certain things and not others, and everything is okay as long as a culture is still growing, fermenting and expanding. But when a culture reaches the point of boredom, when one begins to want to say other things, and especially when, according to Sottsass, “one is not able to say the things one thinks must be said,” then a “change of air” is necessary. New supports must be found in the “no-man’s land” of germinal cultures, where signs still have a sexy charge, a bittersweet flavour, and arouse shivers of surprise or pleasure because they still stagger in a kind of prenatal limbo, because no-one has yet charged them with symbols and meanings, because, as De Lucchi says, “you don’t relate them yet to anything or anybody and you can project new possibilities onto them right away.”

In addition to plain or patterned plastic laminates, the Memphis catalogue of “aseptic” materials includes many other industrial products: printed glass, zinc-plated and textured sheet metals, celluloids, fireflake finishes, industrial paints, neon tubes, coloured lights bulbs, and so on. In the Memphis context these materials lose their high-tech connotations because they are never quoted as technological symbols but as textures, patterns, colour, density, transparency and glitter. They are immediate and directly sensual. Moving in this freedom-giving context, which appeals more to physical qualities than to the intellect, Memphis designers have even succeeded in revitalising cultivated, traditional, and familiar materials. Marble, for instance, is used in irreverent forms that do not correspond to recognised uses of that material, or it is taken out of context by coupling it with aluminium, fiberglass, or fireflake paints.

Many materials have been thrown off balance, stretched, and deformed to the point of becoming unrecognisable. Once a perplexed British journalist, stroking a bookcase in natural polished briar (used alongside a yellow and green snakeskin laminate in the same piece of furniture, Sottsass’ Beverley) sighed, “fantastic, it looks like plastic.”

Actually, the problem isn’t to make one thing look like another, nor to make it look like itself: whether it is marble that looks like plastic, plastic that looks like wood, or plastic that looks like plastic is of little importance. For Memphis designers the problem of truth and authenticity, and vice versa, the problem of fake, doesn’t exist. What matters is the image, the design, the final product, the figurative force, the communication. As with many pupils of Buddha, all Memphis designers seem convinced that “reality” as an absolute doesn’t exist, or if it does exist, it is what is. The free and easy, anarchic, and unrestrained use of unforeseen and unforeseeable materials, the combined use of heterogeneous, cheap and expensive materials, of rough and smooth textures, of opaque and sparkling surfaces, tend in the end to turn a piece of furniture into a complex system of communication. It becomes a small metaphorical novel, a story of volumes and surfaces, of signs and groups of signs, of their different flavours, and of the inner changes they undergo in order to appear in strange, attractive combinations and create new expressive circuits. What’s more, this linguistic earthquake has definitively altered the traditional image of formal coherence and compactness, laying the foundations for a future, more flexible and sophisticated stylistic syntax.

Gabon, Nathalie Du Pasquier, 1982. source

Colour

Prior to Memphis, there was no colour in furniture. With a few exceptions the idea of furniture as a centre of colour didn’t exist in the West. European furniture, on the whole, is made of “matter;” colour comes into play only as a detail in mother-of-pearl, ivory, or bronze inlays, and in marble intarsia works. Even the exceptions are few and far between: the extremely tenuous, lacquered colours of certain eighteenth century Venetian furniture, the black and white lacquers of certain Viennese furniture, tiny details of colour in Jugendstil furniture, and naturally De Stijl, where primary colours alone are used in an ideological manner. In De Stijl, as later in the Bauhaus, colour is chiefly “structural;” it emphasises the way the furniture is built. Rietveld’s “red and blue” chair, when it was designed in 1917, was not red and blue at all; the colour was added after 1919, apparently at Van Doesburg’s suggestion.

In Memphis, colour has never been an ideological vehicle. It does not exemplify building processes, nor does it sink its roots in stories of chromatic symbolism; it may be indirectly provocative, but it is above all a matter of linguistics. Introduced together with decoration in the software of design, colour is one of the active ingredients of the complex messages transmitted by the furniture object. It works as an enzyme to catalyse chemical reactions, it generates nervous impulses that open new doors of logic in the brain, it is a sort of perceptive jogging, an aerobics for lazy or drowsy sensory cells. Like jogging it requires commitment, determination, measure, enthusiasm, faith, and patience, and to serve a purpose, it must be used well.

Colour in Memphis is never “added.” As with decoration it is born with the design, forming an integral part of the structure. It alters the object’s molecules. It works as a mass, as an intrinsic feature of a certain form and volume. It is always a pigment and never a patina. “For this reason,” explains Michele De Lucchi, “there are no dominant colours or background colours in Memphis.” Memphis colour does not work through the set of relations of a chromatic system, but through proximity, as in the East (from India to Persia) or in Matisse (who learned colour from Oriental painting). The juxtapostition of colured masses, amterials, and volumes, like little taps on a tuning fork, make the whole colour vibrate, creating resonances, dissociations, even linguistic reverberations that respond from afar. Sottsass calls them “long distance correspondences.”

Memphis didn’t just bring colour into the game, but made sure to play it as a winning card; Memphis colour isn’t only sensational because it is there but because it is new-made.

Sottsass syas: “Anything that is tamed by culture loses its flavour after a while, its like eating cardboard. You have to put mustard on it or take little pieces of cardboard and eat them with tomatoes and salad. It’s a lot better if you don’t eat cardboard at all.”

At Memphis very little cardboard has been eaten. Memphis colour, especially that of the early days, is devoid of cultural references. It is hard, disjointed, shrill, totally toneless and free of chromatic laxity. It is flat, literal, without suggestions. It doesn’t live on reverberations and depth like most ancient colour, which is almost always allusive; nor is it related to the polished abstractions of De Stijl. Its chromatic quality doesn’t even resemble that of oriental colour, which often is equally intense, sharp and showy, but soft, very soft, sweet and sensual, full of joy and drenched with flavour. Memphis colur is comic-strip colour (De Lucchi, Bedin), plastic coloir, hot dogs, sundaes, artificial raspberry syrup colour (Peter Shire). It is washed-out, cheap gouache colour (Zanini), ridiculous colour (Sottsass), naïve colour (Sowden), third-world colour (Du Pasquier). In any case, whether it is picked up in California, the lower Mediterranean, Africa or Brianza, it is motel colour, suburban colour, five-and-dime colour.

The principle holds true in most cases, almost always. But colur in Memphis follows no fixed pattern or rigid guideline. Instead, as Zanini points out, it is “a changing shade of existence,” and as such even inside Memphis some slight changes have occurred. In three years of experimentations and experience the garish, funny, somewhat childish tones of the early days have been rounded off, harmonised, and classicised, just as the forms have become less ramshackle, less redundant, and simpler, with sharper, more self-assured, crystalline contours. Marble pieces (in coloured, veined, baroque marble) have come into being, and after a while black also appeared –a plastic black with an imitation marble finish, or a black gloss black, used as a dull mass along with shining aluminium, chrome plate glass, and fireflake. The suburbs are making their way into the heart of the city.

Asked about the origins, motives, and goals of this silent metamorphosis, Sottsass sighs and says that you cant go on doing the same things all your life, the explains: “I’ve always looked for nonculturised colour in the colours of children, and I’ve always drawn a blank because nobody understands this way of treating colour. Nobody understood that the problem was to look for colour in areas that no one had worked on. Anyway, that’s the way it was. Now that we have been through that experience and got rid of our inhibitions, so to speak, we can do almost anything we want. We can even allow ourselves a more cultivated, more sophisticated colour, because we know how to use it in a loose, detached way as though it had no links with any culture.”

As always the basic idea in Memphis is to shake off the conditioned routine and recover fresh energy, to follow the logic of the moment, to look at things always from new points of view, and examine every new possibility. Light or dark, pale or saturated, bright or dull, Memphis colour may be a matter of chance or necessity, of work or pleasure, never a problem.

...........................................................

You can find Memphis, Research, Experiences, Result, Failures and Successess of New Design here.

LIFESTYLE

2011-06-08T18:37:00.003+01:00

^Image by Ilona Dorota Sagar

Below is the text for a video collaboration with Ilona Sagar currently showing as part of the Visionary Trading Project in Hackney. The film weaves a quiet montage of constructed and documentary scenes from around London Fields and Broadway Market, together with a voiceover that tells a tale spoken through a collage of buzzwords taken from advertising material for new housing developments in the area.

......................................................................................

This is our stage; We are the set; It’s nothing without us.

It’s vibrant when we’re here, and when we’re here we’re buzzing.

We look distinctly contemporary, and each look we get is spectacularly new.

We are dynamic creatives, well-adjusted living, clean, modern, simplicity.

We shine, clean and new, breath-taking flagships-of-ourselves,

The bespoke measure of our many, fashionable attributes,

bustling with world-class, real friction.

III

Nostalgic-chic is the vintage-new, and we want unique,

Disconnect of brushed-steel, 24-hour, red-brick- heritage. Plucked and fragrant.

A pure and natural, home-baked-innocence,

With graceful proportions, and superb specifications.

We have distinctly-dramatic, spectacular- tranquillity,

Superbly packaged identity-specifications, and lush-green dramatic-schemes.

Pioneering bespoke-culture of bright-young- things,

With our bucolic, cosmopolitan-chic. Watch us, watch you.

We are energized products of renowned, home-made, elegant cafes,

and i-phone-footage catwalk-parades, in understated, state-of-the-art.

It’s more than a feeling.

We glide dynamically, into edgily-packaged, genuine, cosmopolitan-debt,

featured in urban-village-galleries and ethnic-sweatshop-global-magazines,

from the unrivalled-creative-glamour of emptied traditions.

VII

We are the newly-arcadian-creatives, buzzing with world-class pastoral-technology-specifications, many fashionably homemade café-utopias, radical cosmopolitan-innocence, spectacularly-tranquil avant-garde delights, and brand-new flagship-heritage.

We are quick with the seductive anxiety of non-stop 24-hour-reinvention, and vibrant-contrasting exhaustion, running, endlessly-perfect bright-young-things with the burden of internationally-renowned-bodies, wearing breath-taking, cutting-edge, and distinctly-urban-culture.

We are acting the bespoke-measure of our many trend-setting spontaneous-designer-initiatives, and watching the buzz in urban-village-galleries that multiply our organic-corner-shop bike-repair-innocence, until the dynamic-creative-mechanism is too anxiously-energized with chic lifestyles and each look we get is exhausting and we feel, genuinely feel, spectacularly, really spectacularly, breathtakingly, dramatically – a u t h e n t I c

RESTLESSNESS

2011-06-04T08:08:00.002+01:00

^source

22 August

It is quite disastrous, Wilhelm: all my active energies have been cast down into restless listlessness, and I can neither be idle nor accomplish anything. My imagination has deserted me, my feeling for nature gone, and books nauseate me. Once we are lost unto ourselves, everything else is lost to us. I swear there are times when I wish I could be a day labourer, simply in order to have something to look forward to in the day ahead, a sense of purpose, hope. I often envy Albert when I see him up to his ears in paperwork, and I fancy I should be content if I were in his position! I have repeatedly been on the point of writing to you and the minister, applying for the embassy appointment which you assure me I would obtain. I too believe I would do so; the minister has a long-standing regard for me, and has often urged me to devote myself to some business; and for one brief hour I am on the brink of going ahead. But then, when I consider it anew, and the story of the horse that grew weary of freedom, had itself saddled and bridled, and was ridden into the ground occurs to me –I do not know what to do. What is more, dear friend! May not my yearning for change be a restless impatience within me, which will pursue me everywhere?

.........................................................

Diary extract from the Penguin Classics edition of Goethe's "The Sorrows of Young Werther"

NOTRE-DAME de PARIS

2011-05-09T16:22:00.003+01:00

An essay I wrote (in imitation of certain art historians whose style I was at the time in love with) on Scholasticism and Aesthetics in the development and legacy of the Cathedral of Notre-Dame de Paris. Tutors were Irénée Scalbert and Dr Timothy Brittain Catlin.

CLICK HERE for the PDF

RHYTHM

2011-05-06T08:07:00.002+01:00

^Glassblowing Workshop, Portland, Oregon (source)

“The substance of the routine may change, metamorphose, improve, but the emotional payoff is one’s experience of doing it again. There’s nothing strange about this experience. We all know it; it is rhythm.”

-Richard Sennet, The Craftsman

Richard Sennett’s book The Craftsman is a call to appreciate and value the kind of creative labor that once dominated in the craft trades, and which he points out is still alive and well in disciplines as varied as Linux code-writing and mobile-phone development.

Sennett does not advocate a return to an economy of pre-industrial manual work, instead he analyzes and explains how certain core elements, which were involved in these professions, made them intrinsically fulfilling and meaningful to those working within them. He explains that the distinction between conceptual inspiration and the act of making is an artificial, and recent one. It is a workplace separation that tends to generate an unhelpful stratification between ‘unskilled’ inflexible production lines, and ‘creative’ but unengaged researchers and developers.

Alternatively, Sennett suggests treating the act of making as a creative endeavor, where research, design and development can occur at the same time as developing the manufacturing process. This not only motivates the designer/maker to have a deep personal connection with the work, but opens up the possibility for mistakes, dead-ends, and tangential explorations within the framework of the process. These mistakes and dead-ends are positive inefficiencies which are necessary for the process to throw up unexpected opportunities and breakthroughs. And for these positive inefficiencies to occur, be understood, overcome and harnessed, there needs to be the space and time for the maker to repeat their process again and again, developing their own personal rhythm. In the same manner that pianists practice repeatedly, until the core skill of playing becomes instinctive, allowing them instead to focus on variations, emphasis and mood within each repetition, so the maker engages initially through repetition with the core skills of his process until they are second nature, by which time the act of repetition is thrown open to become an active field of experimentation, a generative rhythm—adaptive and evolving—of exploration and innovation.

It is when the repetition of work becomes the rhythm of craft that any form of labor can become creative, meaningful and fulfilling.

....................................................

NB, this post was initially published in The BiBlog

BEST

2011-05-02T10:00:00.003+01:00

^George Best with Miss World Mary Stavin. source

"Below is an extract from Chapter5 -Truth, Virtue and Objectivity- of Terry Eagleton's After Theory (I highly recommend it). Via the case of the footballer George Best, Eagleton puts forward an argument against judging the personal ethics and morality of one's trajectory in life through the lens of any form of goal-oriented, utility-driven set of values. As humans, we are not means to an end, unless death is our sole purpose in life, and, like Sennett in The Craftsman, he asks that we not only look ahead to results and achievements, but inwards to the process of life & living, crafting our actions and social relations to best fulfill and embody our values, and not just our desires.

....................................................................................................

"Take the well-known story about George Best, perhaps the finest footballer in history until alcoholism brought him low. Best the ex-footballer was lounging in a five-star hotel room surrounded by caviar and champagne, with a former Miss World lounging amorously beside him, when a member of the hotel staff entered, weighed down with yet more luxury goods. Gazing down at the supine star, he shook his head sadly and murmured: ‘George, where did it all go wrong?’

The joke, of course, is that one would hardly claim that life had gone wrong for a man with such a lavish lifestyle. This is how Best tells the story himself. Yet the hotel worker was right: Best’s life had gone wrong. He was not doing what it was in him to do. He was certainly enjoying himself, and might even in some sense have been happy; but he was not flourishing. He had failed at what he was supremely equipped to excel at. It is true that his life was probably more pleasurable than it had been in his footballing days, when he was constrained to break off nightclubbing from time to time in order to train. It is not that he had been happier as a footballer in the sense of enjoying himself more, though he managed to enjoy himself enough for a whole league of players even then. Nor is the point that his post-footballing lifestyle actually brought him a great amount of suffering, apparently confirming the evangelical view that the dissolute always get their comeuppance. It is rather that he had ceased to prosper. His life might have been happy in the sense of being opulent, contented and enjoyable, but it was not going anywhere. The casual greeting ‘How’s it going?’ suggests something morally significant. Best had come unstuck as a human being. Indeed, one suspects that he used to tell the story so gleefully partly as a way of disavowing the fact.

But where are human lives supposed to be going? They aren’t, after all, like buses or bicycle races; and the idea that life is a series of hurdles which you must leap in order to attain a goal is just the punitive puritan fantasy of scout masters, major-generals and corporation executives. What had come unstuck in Best’s life was not that he was no longer achieving, but that he was not fulfilling himself. It was not that he was no longer piling up goals, silver trophies and salary cheques, but that he was not living, if the pun may be excused, at his best. He was not being the kind of person he was able best to be. Indeed, he was actively out to destroy it. The post-footballing dissipation, as the sniffier commentators tended to call it, was perhaps a substitute way of trying to achieve. Best was now desperately scrambling from one starlet or bottle to another, in a grotesque parody of winning more and more matches.

Throwing up his football career, even if it was getting difficult to carry it on, could be seen in one sense as a courageous rejection of the success ethic. It was a recognition, however bleary-eyed, that life was not a matter of goals, in every sense of the word. Best was now free to enjoy himself, not live as some kind of self-entrepreneur. In another sense, the frenetic high living was a shadow of exactly that. The emptiness of desire replaced the hollowness of achievement. For both ways of life, the present is fairly valueless. It is just a bridge to the future, which will turn out to be just the same. How Best might genuinely have enjoyed himself would have been by carrying on playing football. It would not have been pleasant all the time, and there would no doubt have been times when he felt discontent; but it would have been how he could best thrive. Playing football would have been the moral thing to do.

Perhaps what helped to bring Best down was the fact that he was not able to play football just for its own sake. No footballer can, in a sports industry which is about shareholders rather than players, artistry or spectators. It would be like a hard-pressed commercial designer imagining that he could live like Michelangelo. To live a really fulfilling life, we have to be allowed to do what we do just for the sake of it. Best was no longer able to play just for the delight of it, and turned instead from delight to pleasure. His hedonism was just the other side of the instrumentalism he chafed at.

The point about human nature is that it does not have a goal. In this, it is no different from any other animal nature. There is no point to being a Badger. Being a Giraffe does not get you anywhere. It is just a matter of doing you Giraffe-like things for the sake of it. Because, however, human beings are by nature historical creatures, we look as though we are going somewhere –so that it is easy to misread this movement in teleological terms and forget that it is all for its own sake. Nature is a bottom-line concept: you cannot ask why a Giraffe should do the things it does. To say ‘It belongs to its nature’ is answer enough. You cannot cut deeper than that. In the same way, you cannot ask why people should want to feel happy and fulfilled. It would be like asking what someone hoped to achieve by falling in love. Happiness is not a means to an end.

If someone asks you why you do not want to die, you might reply that you have a trilogy of novels to finish, or grandchildren to watch growing up, or that a shroud would clash horribly with the colour of your fingernails. But it would surely be answer enough to say that you wanted to live. There is no need to specify particular goals. Living is enough reason itself. There are certainly some people who would be better off dead; but those that would not do not need a reason for carrying on. It is as superfluous to explain why you want to live as it is to explain why you don’t enjoy being nuzzled all over by buzzards. The only problem is that something which is or should be valuable in itself, like living, does not seem to need to end. Since it is not instrumental for something else, there is no point at which we can say its function is fulfilled and its purpose over. This is one reason why death is always bound to appear arbitrary. Only a life which has realised itself completely could seem undamaged by it. And as long as we are alive, there is always more self-realisation where that came from.

The idea of fulfilling you nature is inimical to the capitalist success ethic. Everything in capitalist society must have its point and purpose. If you act well, then you expect a reward. For Aristotle, by contrast, acting well was a reward in itself. You no more expect a reward for it than you did for enjoying a delectable meal or taking an early morning swim. It is not as though the reward for virtue is happiness; being virtuous is to be happy. It is to enjoy the deep sort of happiness which comes from fulfilling your nature."

....................................................................................................

From After Theory, Terry Eagleton, Penguin (26 Aug 2004)

ISBN-10: 0141015071
ISBN-13: 978-0141015071

JUPITER

2011-04-27T09:10:00.006+01:00

^source

Below is a little play-within-a-play extract from Raymond Queneau's wildly creative 1932 re-imagining of Descartes Pensees as a novel (in this book instead coming to the repeated conclusion "I think, therefore I get myslef into a load of crap and a world of mirages"... think Burn After Reading), set in the petit-bourgeois Paris suburbs, "Witch Grass" was his literary debut, the version of which quoted here being currently published by New York Review Books Classics, was translated by Barbara Wright, and is available to buy here on Amazon. See here for an earlier post on Queneau and Perec.

...................................................................................................

"Marcheville, some thirty miles from Torny, the industrial centre, is more like a large village than a small town; a peasant population, a few bourgeois, among whom are the lawyer and his dog. The lawyer’s dog is a white poodle, answering to the name of Jupiter. Jupiter is highly intelligent; if his master had had the time, he would have taught him arithmetic, perhaps even the elements of formal logic, fallacies and all. But his various pursuits have obliged him to neglect Jupiter’s schooling, and he only knows how to say woof woof from time to time and sit on his behind to get a lump of sugar. However, though there may be some doubt as to the extent of his learning, there can be nothing but admiration for the care he takes of his person. Shorn like a lion, he swaggers about within a radius of fifteen yards of the notarial house. At any greater distance, enormous beasts, jealous of his elegance, menace him with their vulgar, ill-bred fangs.

On this particular morning, Jupiter’s habits are upset; so are those of the lawyer and his family. Everyone is restless, and dressed in black. Forsaken, Jupiter goes to sleep in the hall. A person with a small suitcase in his hand comes in; woof woof, says the poodle intelligently; the lawyer, who has lost his collar stud, comes down in his shirt-sleeves. Good morning, good morning, he seems to be saying; Jupiter shows his approval with his tail and gets a smack on the thigh for his pains. Then another meussieu arrives, a very tall, very fat one. The greetings start all over again; Jupiter wants to take part in the palaver, but the tall-an-fat person treads on his toe nails. Owch, owch, says Jupiter, and goes and hides under a chair. The meussieus talk with restraint and compunction, like the day of the little boy’s first communion. Eulalie brings some coffee. Maybe there’s a chance of a lump of sugar. Jupiter sits up and begs, but he realises from the uninterested looks of the meussieus that he’s put his foot in it. This isn’t the moment for playing the fool. He goes over to the door to get some air; so far and no farther, because Caesar, the Butcher’s dog, is watching for him out of the corner of his eye.

The meussieus start walking. He follows at their soles. Caesar is close behind. They get to a house that Jupiter knows well; it belongs to an old lady who’s generous with her sugar. The old lady isn’t there; there’s a meussieu dressed up as a widow, it’s true, but that’s not the same thing. The meussieu in petticoats starts singing, accompanied by two little boys dressed up as girls whom Jupiter recognises only too well as being the bullies who, last Sunday, tied a corned beef tin onto his stump of a tail. Then they take a great big packing case out into the street; he goes and has a sniff to see what it is; it smells of the old lady. A kick in the rib teaches him to respect the dead.

With the big packing case being towed in front, and the crowd following behind, the ensemble makes its way toward a garden surrounded by walls and planted with huge great stones sticking up at right angles. Jupiter runs up and down and is amazed that his master, who’s usually in such a hurry, doesn’t try and get in front of the big box; he’s walking slowly, leading the way, with the young man with the suitcase and the tall, fat meussieu.

At the entrance to the garden, Jupiter’s heart misses a beat; he’s just noticed Caesar waiting for him, with an ominous look. So it’s advisable not to stray too far from the blackened bipeds. Everyone has come to a standstill around a hole. In the middle of the gathering, the man-woman mutters a menacing song; the bullies wave steaming teapots. Two professional drunks lower the box into the bottom of the hole. Then the guests toss in drops of water. Jupiter is losing interest, and he wanders off and goes scrounging from grave to grave; but, just behind that of Madam Pain, that most worthy lady whokept her idiot daughter in seclusion for fifteen years, he finds himself muzzle-to-ass with Caesar. This encounter gives him wings; he gallops, he flees, he decamps; he jumps onto a mound of loose soil, near his master; the soil is loose, as we said, it crumbles, and Jupiter tumbles, in a cloud of humus and compost, onto the grandmother’s coffin. Some people burst out laughing; other’s exclaim: How shocking! And a few murmur: Putrefaction! The lawyer let out a kind of strident shout, his personal roar of laughter, and then recovered his dignity. But he wasn’t going to forgive Jupiter.

That evening, the young man said to the poodle, as he handed him a lump of sugar:

“Will they put a chin-strap on you when they bury you?”

“Woof woof,” says the other, who hasn’t understood a word.

The next day Jupiter is hanging at the end of a rope, because he has assailed the dignity of the dead and of the living.

...................................................................................................

RELICS

2011-04-19T11:25:00.004+01:00

RELICS by Marcel Proust

"I have bought up all of her belongings that were put on sale -that woman whose friend I would like to have been, and who did not even condescend to talk to me for a few minutes. I have the little card game that kept her amused every evening, her two marmosets, three novels that bear her coat of arms on their boards, and her bitch. Oh, you delights and dear playthings of her life, you had access -without enjoying them as I would have done, and without even desiring them- to all her freest, most inviolable, and most secret hours; you were unaware of your happiness and you cannot describe it.

Cards that she would hold in her fingers every evening with her favourite friend who saw her getting bored or breaking into laughter, who were witnesses to the start of her liaison, and whom she threw down to fling her arms round the man who thereafter came every evening to enjoy a game with her; novels that she would open and close in her bed, as her fancy or her fatigue bade her, chosen by her on impulse or as her dreams dictated, books to which she confided her dreams and combined them with dreams expressed by the books that helped her better to dream for herself -did you retain nothing of her, and can you tell me nothing about her?

Novels; she dreamt in turn the lives of your characters and of your authors; and playing cards, for in her own way she enjoyed in your company the tranquillity and sometimes the feverishness of intimate friendships -did you keep nothing of her thoughts, which you distracted or filled, or of her heart, which you wounded or consoled?

Cards, novels, you were so often in her hands, or remained for so long on her table; queens, kings or knaves, who were the still guests at her wildest parties; heroes of novels and heroines who, at her bedside, caught in the cross-beam of her lamp and her eyes, dreamt your silent dream, a dream that was nonetheless filled with voices: you cannot have simply let it evaporate -all the perfume with which the air of her bedroom, the fabric of her dresses, and the touch of her hands or her knees imbued you.

You have preserved the creases left when her joyful or nervous hand crumpled you; you perhaps still keep prisoner those tears which she shed, on reading of a grief narrated in some book, or experienced in life; the day which made her eyes shine with joy or sorrow left its warm hues on you. When I touch you, I shiver, anxiously awaiting your revelations, disquieted by your silence. Alas! Perhaps, like you, charming and fragile creatures, she was the insensible and unconscious witness of her own grace. Her most real beauty existed perhaps in my desire. She lived her life, but perhaps I was the only one to dream it."

extract from NOSTALGIA by Marcel Proust

"Desire makes all things blossom, and possession makes them wither away."

MEDIOCRE

2011-04-05T18:02:00.003+01:00

^Peckham, South London (photo by author)

Thankfully, most of our lives are played out through a chain of objectively unimportant, low level events that are on the whole unremarkable in the grand scheme of things, quotidian. In the same way, we tend to grow up, live, work, fall in love, have families, and fade away in entirely ordinary, run-of-the-mill architecture, built stuff that gets the job done, that holds in the heat and humidity in the local pool, and manages to pass planning because it has a gable roof and red brick façade, stuff that answers similar questions in similar ways in a million different variations from Perth to Plymouth.

If you took a picture of any of this low level architecture that fills Britain, the image would present a depressingly mute mediocrity, nothing but the complete factual averageness of the building or space which, if of recent vintage would no doubt end up, to howls of anguish, on Bad British Architecture. But Architectural photography severs the container from what it contains, it shows the aesthetic failure, but not how that failure is really a triumph.

It is precisely these places’ anonymity, their almost total lack of outstanding independent qualities, that ramps up the value of any uniqueness that does exist to such a degree, meaning that we become like archaeologists digging for clues, constructing local significance from minute fragments of singularity that are gathered slowly, over time. It takes longer to become attached to places so messy and banal, their qualities are not handed to you on a Haussmannian plate, one must work for it. And everyone does, instinctively, attaching their memories cumulatively to slight peculiarities, like the unusually large traffic island where the ice cream van sits vampiricaly, opposite the school, or the incredibly narrow gap between two wings of the sports centre, that is just the right size for kids to squeeze between to sneak a smoke, or a snog. Memories which gradually fill the most mediocre of piles with magic, memories which we all tot-up, and that cling to apparently inhospitable places and thrive there, generating an ambient, splendidly subjective beauty, a beauty which only stands out in its greatest relief when the objects of architecture sink, or rather rise, into glorious mediocrity.

....................................................

NB, this post was initially published in The BiBlog

FANCY

2011-03-24T10:00:00.001Z

^Building, Matteo Thun, 1983

We can’t help who we are attracted to, we have no control over which person draws our eye in the tube carriage, just as we are not always in control of our thoughts, they wander off without us to whatever takes their fancy, day dreaming precisely at the moments when we should probably be concentrating, working on something. It can be irritating being turned back into a lusty teenager through no desire of your own, or drifting off unprompted into puerile, fanciful worlds of escape in your head, but on the other hand it is those moments when something truly singular sparkles into life.

It is in those moments that our rational minds briefly lose control of our waking instincts, momentarily relinquishing authorship over our thoughts, letting our bodies and our intuition guide us. It is right then, if we pick up a pen or a pencil, and use all the skills at our disposal to take our flight of fancy seriously and frame it, capturing it, that we can extract from the ebb and flow of our daily lives — always so concerned with satisfying the judgments of others — a pure cross section of ourselves, a distilled fragment of subjective creation.

The sketch and the Capriccio, the former capturing the fleeting structure of an idea as it passes by, the latter being the flesh added to its bones, the full flight of fancy, the private and passionate love affair between the artist/architect and his imagination, drawn out and expanded into vignettes of autoerotic intensity, which if pursued with enough zeal begin to stand on their own as inspirational artifacts, intriguing specimens from the intimate obsessions of our fertile minds. It is in the caprice of our fancy — the beautiful face we cannot stop staring at, the ideal place we keep trying to imagine — drawn out and expanded, that we will find the coming together in one space, in one scene, compressed, of the very subjective ground of our anterior architectural instinct.

....................................................

NB, this post was initially published in The BiBlog

Roll Over & Differentiate My Data Sets Baby.....................................................Patrick Schumacher & Some Old School AA-Speak

2011-03-09T23:05:00.001Z

^annotation in personal copy of LOG21 by blog author

“This is not something I am dogmatically imposing, I’m just observing that I, my friends, my students, naturally adhere to these principles without fail. Their hand would fall off rather than draw straight lines. Is anybody here drawing a triangle, a square, or a circle? Ever again? No!”

“you will always work with laws, with rule-based systems of differentiation. These can be applied meaningfully, for instance, in the adaptation of facades to create an intelligent differentiation of elements. You can do this by taking data sets like sun exposure maps and make them drive an intelligent differentiation of brise-soleil elements, which are scripted off the data set. But you can also apply this sort of technique to urbanism. We’re talking about urban fields, about the lawful differentiation of an urban fabric according to relevant data sets.”!

“You can always identify where the rigid forms still persist, where there is still too much simple repetition, where there are still unrelated elements. You can always ask for further softening, further differentiation, and further correlation of everything with everything else. There’s always more to script and correlate to intensify the internal consistency and cross-connections and resonance within a project and to a context. It’s a never-ending trajectory of a project’s progression. The intensification of relations in architecture reflects the intensification of communication among all of us, everyday and with everything.”

Extracts from "Parametricism And the Autopoiesis Of Architecture" by Patrick Schumacher in the winter 2011, 21st edition of Log magazine, published by AnyoneCorporation, & edited by Cynthia Davidson

Frivolous & Serious Play

2011-03-06T12:43:00.002Z

^drawing of Wonderwall, New Orleans, 1982-1984 (dismantled)

Extract from Charles W Moore's essay "The Yin, The Yang, and The Three Bears"

"Buildings, I have insisted for a long time, can and must speak to us, which requires that we grant them freedom of speech, the chance to say things that are unimportant, even silly, so when they are grave or portentous we can tell the difference. I have taken it as my particular mission to emphasise the light and sunny moments. I’m calling some of my projects Frivolous and Serious Play; I think the two are not inimical, and that both can be joyous."

^Wonderwall, New Orleans, 1982-1984 (dismantled)

Collapsed Time in Collected Space

2011-02-27T18:26:00.004Z

Scene in the Antique Dealer's collection, taken from Honoré De Balzac's philosophical novel "The Wild Ass's Skin", where he outlines the uncanny and alluring effect of a multitude of collected objects -not yet divested of historical allusion or meaning, nor icily institutionalised- contained in a small, compressed private space, and set upon by an eager imagination.
.......................................................................................

Extract From "The Wild Ass's Skin"

At first site the showrooms offered him a chaotic medley of human and divine works. Crocodiles, apes and stuffed boas grinned at stainless glass windows, seemed to be about to snap at carved busts, to be running after lacquer-ware or to be clambering up chandeliers. A Sevres vase on which Madame Jaquetot had painted Napoleon was standing next to a sphinx dedicated to Sesostris. The beginnings of creation and the events of yesterday were paired off with grotesque good humour. A roasting-jack was posed on a monstrance, a Republican sabre on a medieval arquebus. Madame du Barry, painted in pastel by Latour, with a star on her head, nude and enveloped in cloud, seemed to be concupiscently contemplating an Indian chibouk and trying to divine some purpose in the spirals of smoke which were drifting towards her.

Instruments of death, poniards, quaint pistols, weapons with secret springs were hobnobbing with instruments of life: porcelain soup-tureens, Dresden china plate, translucent porcelain cups from china, antique slat-cellars, comfit-dishes from feudal times. An ivory ship was sailing under full canvas on the back of an immovable tortoise. A pneumatic machine was poking out the eye of the Emperor Augustus, who remained majestic and unmoved. Several portraits of French aldermen and Dutch burgomasters, insensible now as during their lifetime, rose above this chaos of antiques and cast a cold and disapproving glance at them.

All the countries on earth seemed to have brought here some remnants of their sciences and a sample of their arts. It was a sort of philosophical midden in which nothing was lacking, neither the Red Indian's calumet nor the green and gold slipper of the seraglio, nor the yatogan of the Moor, nor the brazen image of the Tartar. There was even the soldier's tobacco pouch, the ciborium of the priest and the plumes from a throne. Furthermore, these monstrous tableaux were subjected to a thousand accidents of lighting by the whimsical effects of a multitude of reflected gleams due to the confusion of tints and the abrupt contrasts of light and shade. The ear fancied it heard stifled cries, the mind imagined that it caught the thread of unfinished dramas, and the eye that it perceived half-smothered glimmers. Lastly, persistent dust had cast its thin coating over all these objects, whose multiple angles and numerous sinuosities produced the most picturesque of impressions.

To begin with the, the stranger compared these three showrooms, crammed with the relics of civilizations and religions, deities, royalties, masterpieces of art, the products of debauchery, reason and unreason, to a mirror of many facets, each one representing a whole world. After registering this hazy impression, he tried to make a choice of specimens he enjoyed; but, in the process of gazing, pondering, dreaming, he was overcome by a fever which was perhaps due to the hunger which was gnawing at his vitals. His senses ended by being numbed at the sight of so many national and individual existences, their authenticity guaranteed by the human pledges which had survived them.

The longing that had caused him to visit the shop was satisfied: he left real life behind him, ascended by degrees to an ideal world, and reached the enchanted palaces of ecstasy where the universe appeared to him in transitory gleams and tongues of fire; just as, long ago, the future of mankind had filed past in flaming visions before the gaze of Saint John of Patmos.

A multitude of sorrowing faces, gracious or terrifying, dimly or clearly described, remote or near at hand, rose up before him in masses, in myriads, in generations. Egypt in its mysterious rigidity emerged from the sands, represented by a mummy swathed in black bandages; then came the Pharaohs burying entire peoples in order to build a tomb for themselves; then Moses and the Hebrews and the wilderness: the whole of the ancient world, in all its solemnity, drifted before his eyes. But here, cool and graceful, a marble statue posed on a wreathed column, radiantly white, spoke to him of the voluptuous myths of Greece and Ionia. Oh, who would not have smiled, as he did, to see upon a red background, in the fine clay of an Etruscan vase, the brown girl dancing before the god Priapus and joyously saluting him? Facing her was a Latin queen lovingly fondling her chimaera! The capricious pleasures of imperial Rome were there in every aspect: the bath, the couch, the dressing-table ritual of some indolent, pensive Julia awaiting her Tibullus. Armed with the power of Arabian talismans, the head of Cicero evoked memories of republican Rome and unwound for him the scroll of Livy's histories. The young man gazed on the Senatus pupulusque romanus: the consul, the lectors, the purple-edged togas, the fights in the Forum, the plebs aroused to wrath. All this filed past him like the insubstantial figures of a dream.

Then Christian Rome became the dominant theme in these presentations. One painting showed the heavens opened and in it he saw the Virgin Mary bathed in a cloud of gold in the midst of angels, eclipsing the sun in glory, lending an ear to the lamentations of the sufferer on whom this regenerate Eve smiled gently. As he fingered a mosaic made of different lavas from Vesuvius and Etna, in imagination he emerged into sun-drenched Italy: he was an onlooker at the Borgias' feasts, he rode through the Abruzzi, sighed after Italian mistresses, worshipping their pale cheeks and dark, elongated eyes.

Espying a medieval dagger with a hilt as cunningly wrought as a piece of lace, with rust patches on it like bloodstains, he thought with a shudder of mighty trysts interrupted by the cold blade of a husband's sword. India and its religions lived again in an idol dressed in gold and silk with conical cap and lozenge-shaped ear-flaps folded upwards and adorned with bells. Near this grotesque figure a rush mat, as pretty as the Indian dancer who had once rolled herself in it, still exhaled the perfume of sandalwood. The mind was startled into perceptiveness by a monster from China with a twisted gaze, contorted mouth and writhing limbs: the creation of an inventive people weary of unvarying beauty and drawing ineffable pleasure from the luxuriant diversity of ugliness.

A salt-cellar from Benvenuto Cellini's workshop brought him back to the bosom of the Renaissance at a period when art and licence flourished together, when sovereign princes found diversion in torture and prelates at Church Councils rested from their labours in the arms of courtesans after decreeing chastity for mere priests. He saw the conquests of Alexander carved on a cameo, the massacres of Pizarro etched on a match-lock arquebus, the wars of religion -frenzied, seething, pitiless- engraved on the base of a helmet. Then the charming pageantry of chivalry sprang up from a Milanese suit of armour, brightly furnished, superbly damascened, beneath whose visor the eyes of a paladin still gleamed.

For him this ocean of furnishings, inventions, fashions, works of art and relics made up an endless poem. Forms, colours, concepts of thought came to life again; but nothing complete presented itself to his mind. The poet in him had to finish these sketches by the great painter who had composed the vast palette on to which the innumerable accidents of human life had been thrown in such disdainful profusion.

GLUTTONY

2011-02-07T07:51:00.002Z

^Mr Creosote, Monty Python's "The Meaning Of Life"

“How are your steaks, tonight?”

“Our steaks, sir, are if I may say so quite simply superb. Only the choicest cuts of beef, carefully selected and even more carefully aged, cooked to perfection as perfection is defined by your instructions, served with your choice of potato and vegetable and richly delicious dessert.”

“Sounds scrumptious.”

“Yes.”

“I’ll have nine.”

“Pardon me?”

“Bring me nine steaks, please.”

“you want nine steak dinners?”

“Please”

“And who, sir, may I ask is going to eat them?”

“You see anybody else sitting here? I’m going to eat them.”

“And how on earth are you going to do that, sir?”

“Well, gee, let’s see, I think I’ll use my right hand to cut, tonight. I’ll put pieces into my mouth, I’ll masticate, acidic elements in my saliva will begin breaking down the muscle fibre. I’ll swallow. Et Cetera. Bring ‘em on!”

“Sir, nine steaks would make anyone sick.”

“Look at me. Look at this stomach. Do you think I’ll get sick? No way. Come here –no, really come around and look at this stomach. Let me lift up my shirt… here. See how much I can grab with my hand? I can’t even sit close to the table. Have you ever seen anything so hugely disgusting in your whole life?”

I’ve seen bigger stomachs.”

“You’re just being polite, you just want a tip. You’ll get your tip, after you’ve brought me nine steak dinners, with perfection being defined as medium-rare, which is to say pink yet firm. And don’t forget the rolls.”

“Sir, this is simply beyond my range of experience. I’ve never served any one individual nine simultaneous orders on my own authority. I could get in horrible trouble. What if, for example, you have an embolism, God forbid? You could rupture organs.”

“Didn’t I say look at me? Cant you tell what I am? Listen to me very carefully. I am an obese, grotesque, prodigal, greedy, gourmandizing, gluttonous pig. Is this not clear? I am more hog than human. There is room, physical room, for you in my stomach. Do you hear? You see before you a swine. An eating fiend of unlimited capacity. Bring me meat.”

“Have you not eaten in a very long time? Is that it?”

“Look, you’re beginning to bother me. I could bludgeon you with my belly. I am also, allow me to tell you, more than a little well-to-do. Do you see that building over there, the one with the lit windows, in the shadow? I own that Building. I could buy this restauarant and have you terminated. I could and perhaps will buy this entire block, including that symbolically tiny Weight watchers establishment across the street. See it? With the door and the windows so positioned as to form a grinning, leering, hollow-cheeked face? It is within my financial power to buy that place, and to fill it with steaks, fill it with red steak, all of which I would and will eat. The door would under this scenario be jammed with a gnawed bone; not a single little smug psalm-singing baggy-skinned apostate from the cause of adiposity would be able to enter. They would pound on the door, pound. But the bone would hold. They’d lack the bulk to burst through. Their mouths and eyes would be wide as they pressed against the glass. I would demolish, physically crush the huge scale at the end of the brightly lit nave at the back of the place under a weight of food. The springs would jut out. Jut. What a delicious series of thoughts. May I see a wine list?”

“Weight Watchers?”

“Garcon, what you have before you is a dangerous thing, I warn you. Human beings act in their own interest. Huge, crazed swine do not. My wife informed me a certain time-interval ago that if I did not lose weight, she would leave me. I have not lost weight, as a matter of fact, I have gained weight, and thus she is leaving. Q.E.D. And A-1, don’t forget the A-1.”

“But sir, surely with more time…”

“There is no more time. Time does not exist. I ate it. It’s in here, see? See the jiggle? That’s time, jiggling. Run, run away, fetch me my platter of fat, my nine cattle, or I’ll envelop you in a chin and fling you at the wall!”

“Shall I fetch the maître d’, sir? To confer?”

“By all means fetch him. But warn him against getting too close. He will be encompassed instantly, before he has time to squeak. Tonight I will eat. Hugely, and alone. For I am now hugely alone. I will eat, and juice might very well spurt into the air around me, and if anyone comes too near, I will snarl and jab at them with my fork –like this, see?”

“Sir, really!”

“Run away for your very life. Fetch something to placate me. Im going to grow and grow, and fill the absence that surrounds me with the horror of my own gelatinous presence. Yin and Yang. Ever growing, waiter, Run!”

“Right away, sir!”

“Some breadsticks might have been nice, too, do you hear? What kind of place is this, anyway?”

………………………………………………………………………..

Extract from “The Broom Of The System”, David Foster Wallace, Abacus (7 Aug 1997)

SYMMETRY

2011-02-04T11:10:00.004Z

^Order 12 Latin Bi-Square as used by Georges Perec

In 1947 Raymond Queneau wrote 99 short descriptions of the same pair of unremarkable events: a man was seen on the ‘S’ bus having a run-in with another man, and was then seen again later that day at the Gare St-Lazare. Each description was written in a different style, following its own set of specific literary rules, with the effect that the scene is transformed completely in each instance, as if imagined or remembered through the lens of a hundred diverse minds. In 1969 Georges Perec began a project in which he chose twelve places in Paris where he had either lived or had attached certain memories to. He then proceeded to write descriptions of two of these places each month, one written at the place as an objective description, the other written from memory. He slipped these into sealed letters together with photos of the locations, taken by a friend. Each year he repeated the task, taking care to follow an algorithm based on a Latin bi-square, so that each place was described during a different month to the previous year, ensuring that the same pair of places was never described in the same month. This was continued for twelve years, until each place had been described twelve times as both an objective list of elements and as a collection of thoughts and memories.

Both writers belonged to Oulipo, a group for whom the constraints and formal logic of poetry and mathematics were “encouragements for inspiration, so to speak, or else, in a way, aids to creativity”*. Around these frameworks the tangle of events, narrative and language could grow in wild profusion while the core would remain as an elegant plan. The productive play against rules was nothing new, what was unusual was how these writers consciously played with the rules themselves, creatively reformulating the structure of their medium each time they began a new project. Their techniques ranged in complexity from the simple structure of Queneau’s exercises in style, effectively a ten by ten grid with an equivalent numerical array, so that one can mirror any grid location to any other with total correspondence (except the one empty square, precisely positioned to destabilize its total internal symmetry), to the twelve sided Latin bi-square that ordered Perec’s archiving of fact and experience, in the form of time, embodied by the Gregorian calendar.

At every node, in each of these structures, the writers unified numerical differentiation and equivalence with the complex and psychological effects of memory and form. While the grid of identical units in Queneau’s array are all interchangeable, their transformation through the filter of perception and style rendered them entirely unique and totally asymmetrical. Perec’s square — divided according to units of time and space — is transfigured by his recollections and the atemporal nature of memory, which weaves a network of new correspondences across the boundaries laid out by his framework. It is precisely the power of the related patterns created by this intermingling and overlaying of objective mathematical clarity and subjective effect, each time generated anew, with novel and surprising consequences in every Oulipian tract, that offers up a richer definition of symmetry. Rather than being described only in terms of abstract geometric and numerical reflectivity, this form of correspondence dynamically binds the structure to the effect uniting co-ordinated language with its phenomenal, subjective counterpart in the world of memory and experience.

......................................................................................................

* "Letters, Numbers, Forms: Essays, 1928-70" by Raymond Queneau, translated by Jordan Stump. University of Illinois Press (October 15, 2007)
NB. Post originally published in The Bi-Blog

GRACEFUL

2011-02-01T07:35:00.005Z

Graceful, 19C Samson Reproduction of an 18C original by the London Porcelain Factory of Bow

The expert at the auction house told me how you are supposed to be holding something that must have broken off a long time ago — a cauldron or a flame — but it simply cannot have been that your maker had wanted you to stay that way. If you had indeed once been holding something, then whoever made you must have placed it in your hands as a trial, a challenge for some future owner to come forward and avail you of your burden. Your arms are far too elegant and relaxed, your posture far too languid and flowing, your limpid expression and rosy flesh far too untroubled to have ever been meant for any sort of exertion. The likes of you are intended for nothing but a soft and diaphanous easiness, a perfect absence of conflict, like the sleeping face of a baby, or the slow caresses of enamored lovers. And if whatever it was you were holding was meant to tell a story, or convey a moral, then it must have weighed you down even more than the few grams of its clay, darkening the crimson of your cape with arduous meanings. Whoever it was, before you came into my possession, that had the grace to free you of your flame or pot, and whatever moral imperatives it came laden with, emptied you of content and set you floating slightly off from the ground, weightless, dancing ever so slightly. The way you are now must be what your maker had intended: a little embodiment of that mindless perfection of ease which we all secretly yearn for, that elegance which comes from the triumph of the body over its troubled interior, that quality we refer to as divinely bestowed since it releases you from the burden of the intellect, and which positively affirms the subject on which it has been bestowed as being that celestial thing, Graceful.
...................................................................................................
This text led to the Graceful-Gif trilogy. Episode one, two, and three, over on HandBin

NB. Post originally published in The Bi-Blog

.............SATURATED SPACE .............. ..........research cluster proposal..........

2011-01-28T08:46:00.003Z

What follows is an application I submitted together with Antoni Malinowski, Chiara Nosarti and Hugo Spiers, to the AA for a Research Cluster in their next round of year and a half long research grants. We would be working together with the Courtauld, UCL, and hopefully the Wellcome Trust, with whom we would like to develop the project in any case if we do not receive a positive response from the AA in March.

...................................................................................................

CHROMATIC DISCOURSE

“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, odourless, and colourless may be said to be true, beautiful and good.”

The Eloquence of Colour Jacqueline Lichtenstein

CONTEXT:A Since Plato’s opposition of image to reason, defining image as antithetical to logic, and the consequent antagonisms of rhetoric vs. discourse, painting vs. drawing, and colour vs. form, there has been a consistently strong iconoclastic, de-saturating, purging tendency within Western thought and Architectural discipline. It is a line of reasoning that pits superficiality against depth: a moral analogy masquerading as a logical opposition. Depth is idolised as pure, abstract, white, difficult to grasp, serious and linguistic, while whatever is sensual, eloquent, colourful and essentially non-linguistic is ridiculed as superficial, cosmetic, vulgar, indecent, and even pornographic. That which bypasses the rational mind, and operates directly on the senses is demonised and feared for the potency of its power, and ultimately subordinated by its exclusion from “serious” discourse. Colour in Architectural discipline and theory is necessarily affected by this traditional categorisation, with its legitimacy, although never its power, in perpetual doubt. Through the research of this cluster we will begin the process of re-evaluating and restructuring the frame of this apparent contradiction. The cluster will seek to develop a set of spatio-chromatic methodologies, and form them into a combined figure of complementarity, rather than subordination or opposition, with theoretical and scientific discourse.

“You recognise these joys: to feel the generous belly of a vase, to caress its slender neck, and then to explore the subtleties of its contours. To thrust your hands into the deepest part of your pockets and, with eyes half closed, to give way to the slow intoxication of the fantastic glazes, the bursts of yellows, the velvet tones of the blues…”

Journey To The East Le Corbusier

CONTEXT:B Architecture has a multitude of interfaces through which it can engage its occupants. The most immediate and direct of which is through that most highly evolved of our perceptual apparatuses, the eye, whose language is that of light, spoken in a vocabulary of chromatic combinations. Reflected off an inexhaustible range of environments and materials, colour, in all its forms, is the architect’s first and most consistently powerful line of atmospheric influence. As techniques of fabrication, and new modes of materiality proliferate in the arena of Architectural production, a whole new set of possibilities are arising for the orchestration of an unprecedented level of spatial richness. At the same time colour is beginning to be rediscovered as an area of interest in Art theory, as well as in neuroscience and neuroesthetics. With the process of design, fabrication and discussion as the linear core around which to weave these various bodies of knowledge, the Cluster (explained below) will seek to generate and document creative feedback loops between each set of viewpoints (those of four design teams, art theorists & historians, and scientists), with influences and reconsiderations reverberating in both directions.

ARCHITECTURE’S HUE

FOCUS:FRAMEWORK The Cluster seeks to reintegrate spatial colouration back into the working methodology of Architecture and Academic discourse, providing the starting shot, and groundwork for further work in the area. This will be done through a process of design, debate and experimentation organised around a few key events. A Seminar will collect knowledge and frame the area of investigation. Four teams, two consisting of designers and a scientist, and the other two designers and a theorist, will develop and build a set of saturated spaces, coloured objects and environments. The scientists and theorists will form the initial core of the Cluster staff, whilst the design teams will be selected based on a body of work and a proposal that shows a practical and clear engagement with the topic, whilst at the same time expressing a distinct and singular approach to experimentation in the subject. These will be exhibited, and events around the exhibition will be used to propose further ambitions for larger scales of research. A concluding publication will not only summarise the cluster’s experiments, but provide a space for texts setting out the importance of, and possibilities for colour in contemporary architecture, ending with a set of visionary proposals questioning the role of the medium in society today, and what its manipulation could potentially produce across all scales.

SEMINAR:WORKSHOP An initiatory seminar and workshop will bring together specialists from the three fields of Colour Theory, Science, and Architecture to share thoughts and knowledge on the subject of Colour as an instrumental tool and subject of inquiry in Architectural space. The current status of expertise in the topic will be broadly laid out and introduced to the Association as a specific area of debate. It will be approached simultaneously as an Historical, culturally embedded protagonist in the development of Occidental notions of Space; as a Phenomenological device of Spatial manipulation and poetic tool; and as an objective object study in relation to the human body, its physiology and responses, and hue and texture themselves as responsive molecular constructs. The seminar will feed directly into the creation of four interdisciplinary design teams, two of which will work in collaboration with a scientist, and the other two a theorist. Two teams will be invited by the cluster, and the other two will be selected based on an open competition.

BRIEFS:COMPETITION Following the seminar workshop a summary will be drawn-up, roundly circumscribing the issues raised in discussion, and concluding with a set of categories for investigation in relation to materials and fabrication, design, theory and analysis. These will be formulated as a set of four Briefs, intended as catalysts for one of four interdisciplinary teams to build on each. Two teams will be invited by the Cluster, whilst the other two will be selected through an open competition that will call for ideogrammatic proposals to explore the subject in an immediate and effective way through material experiments and physical constructions. Each group will need to have a specific palette of materials and fabrication techniques that they wish to engage with, and they will all be asked to work at two scales, that of the object, and that of the enclosure, both of which are to relate intimately to the human body, and remain relatively consistent to its dimensions.

DESIGN:RESEARCH Based on the theme of the group, the scientist in the team will formulate specific question in relation to colour and space for the design element to explore, and the design side will equally formulate questions for the scientist to research. The designers will be required to generate speculative explorations, stories, as well as their concrete space and object, elaborating on the group theme and the questions set by the scientist, while the scientist will construct the framework for experiments based on the designers’ questions that will be carried out on the items they have fabricated. While there is a clear dualism here, it is intended that the two sides will work symbiotically, discussing and evolving through each stage from the formulation of the questions through to the development of the tests and the spaces, each adding their clear areas of expertise towards a common experimentation.

BUILD:TEST:EXHIBIT The fabricated colour-spaces, the process leading to their design and build, the equipment used to test them, the findings and conclusions by each of the teams, and comments, musings and responses from the Colour Theorists will be the material used for an exhibition of the Cluster’s work in Progress. Artists and writers will be invited to respond to the work in their own fashion, adding a layer of subjective interpretation and impressions to the body of design intention and objective experimentation. This will be an opportunity to reach productive verdicts about the approaches of the teams, of the material gathered by everyone involved and how that material and knowledge related, informed and transformed into the actual spaces, and in turn, how those spaces are subjectively received. The exhibition will ultimately act as the basis for the positing of a second generation of questions, further to those that generated the work on display, a series of interesting avenues which could be travelled down at wildly different scales, in completely different contexts.

SUMMARISE:SPECULATE:PUBLISH The Cluster aims to conclude with a publication summarising and describing the topic, and the cluster’s processes and research, a publication which itself will conclude with a large body of propositional speculations on the potential places, spaces, materials and uses led to by the second generation questions. These will be produced through a collaboration by all members of the cluster, that will produce a spectrum of speculative and conceptual propositions, at all scales, ranging from the poetic to the practical, the urban to the microscopic, material to digital, all extending out from the ideas and techniques explored during the course of the cluster.

ADDICTION

2010-12-26T15:31:00.005Z

^Image From "Up" The movie source

Everything has to change all the time as quickly as possible, so that we buy more in ever more creative ways so that we don’t even know that we are buying anything anymore, no we’re helping Djiboutian fisherman and Fijian forests and making our kids cleverer with Omega 3 in their margarine and an iPhone for their app store, just constantly adapting, running around frittering our energy away making social signs and advertising revenue on Facebook and re-tweeting tweets about a demo against Phillip Green’s tax evasion so that he’ll know to brand himself as an ethical investor and good citizen in the future, eating dietary chocolate that makes you shit yourself instead of digesting it and carefully shopping around in vintage stores to make sure we don’t look like we are a part of this no, we are unique, but we’re not and millions of square meters of the spaces we exist in are not really there, they’re really shares and loans that are hedged sold bought and repackaged around the world to the tune of $4Tn a day, gutting Amsterdam and Paris and London but cleanly so that the scene is still intact like some Herculean act of Taxonomy, their facades still there even though their insides are enacting the implosions and explosions of banks and funds like Pruitt-Igoe on a hyper fast unreal real whatever loop, a permanent crisis so that we are all glued to the rise or fall of the value of our houses because they aren’t homes that we live in they are dirigibles we can fall from, pumped full of capital they need all that $4Tn dollars a day to keep them floating, our plastic working, keep us up here tweeting like sparrows about books that are like faces and trying really hard not to panic when we realise that we can’t stop, can’t imagine what it might be like if it all stops and, but that the party’s gone on too long and everyone’s exhausted but we still want more and it might in fact all end and it’s too big to think about, our mascara is smeared and we are having panic attacks and constant high level terror threats and cravings without quite understanding why or what for anymore, and we don’t want to anymore, we want help, but there isn’t any, there’s only the last lonely resort of an addict beyond saving up there in an attic or downstairs in a cupboard, in the bathtub or the living room armchair, for real, with a tie, or a piece of rope, or some uppers and downers, or if in Switzerland or the US, perhaps a gun, messily staining the walls and ceiling, for real, really, in a house that for that split second, or minute, will, momentarily, ecstaticaly, come crashing to the ground and be just that –really- and nothing else, totally divested, and intimately: your home.

Reflective Nostalgia

2010-11-24T08:55:00.001Z

^Sphinx, by M.Shemyakin, St Petersburg source

The second excerpt from Svetlana Boym's "The future of Nostalgia". The first here.

Reflective Nostalgia: Virtual Reality and Collective Memory

"Restoration (from re-staure –re-establishment) signifies a return to the original stasis, to the prelapsarian moment. The past for the restorative nostalgic is a value for the present; the past is not a duration but a perfect snapshot. Moreover the past is not supposed to reveal any signs of decay; it has to be freshly painted in its “original image” and remain eternally young. Reflective nostalgia is more concerned with historical and individual time, with the irrevocability of the past and human finitude. Re-flection suggests new flexibility, not the reestablishment of stasis. The focus here is not on recovery of what is perceived to be an absolute truth but on the mediation on history and passage of time. To paraphrase Nabokov, these kind of nostalgics are often “amateurs of time, epicures of duration,” who resist the pressure of external efficiency and take sensual delight in the texture of time not measurable by clocks and calendars.

Restorative nostalgia evoke national past and future; reflective nostalgia is more about individual and cultural memory. The two might overlap in their frames of reference, but they do not coincide in their narratives and plots of identity. In other words, they can use the same triggers of memory and symbols, the same Proustian madeleine pastry, but tell different stories about it.

Nostalgia of the first type gravitates toward collective pictorial symbols and oral culture. Nostalgia of the second type is more oriented toward an individual narrative that savours details and memorial signs, perpetually deferring homecoming itself. If restorative nostalgia ends up reconstructing emblems and rituals of home and homeland in an attempt to conquer and spatialize time, reflective nostalgia cherishes shattered fragments of memory and temporalizes space. Restorative nostalgia takes itself deadly seriously. Reflective nostalgia, on the other hand, can be ironic and humorous. It reveals that longing and critical thinking are not opposed to one another, as affective memories do not absolve one from compassion, judgement or critical reflection.

Reflective nostalgia does not pretend to rebuild the mythical place called home; it is “enamoured of distance, not of the referent itself.” This type of nostalgic narrative is ironic, inclusive and fragmentary. Nostalgics of the second type are aware of the gap between identity and resemblance; the home is in ruins or, on the contrary, has been just renovated and gentrified beyond recognition. This de-familiarisation and sense of distance drives them to tell their story, to narrate the relationship between past, present and future. Through such longing these nostalgics discover that the past is not merely that which doesn’t exist anymore, but, to quote Henri Bergson, the past “might act and will act by inserting itself into a present sensation from which it borrows the vitality.” The past is not made in the image of the present or seen as foreboding of some present disaster; rather, the past opens up a multitude of potentialities, non-teleological possibilities of historic development. We don’t need a computer to get access to the virtualities of our imagination: reflective nostalgia has a capacity to awaken multiple planes of consciousness.

^ "Der Berg" installation in the Palast Der Republik, Berlin, two years before its demolition to make way for a reconstructed Palace that was on the site prior to WWII source

The virtual reality of consciousness, as defined by Henri Bergson, is a modern concept, yet it does not rely on technology; on the contrary, it is about human freedom and creativity. According to Bergson, the human creativity, élan vital, that resists mechanical repetition and predictability, allows us to explore the virtual realities of consciousness. For Marcel Proust, remembrance is an unpredictable adventure in syncretic perception where words and tactile sensations overlap. Place names open up mental maps and space folds into time. “The memory of a particular image is but regret for a particular moment; and houses, roads, avenues are as fugitive, alas, as the years,” writes Proust at the end of Swann’s Way. What matters then, is the memorable literary fugue, not the actual return home.

The modern nostalgic realises that “the goal of the odyssey is a rendezvous with oneself.” For Jorge Luis Borges, for instance, Ulysses returns home only to look back at his journey. In the alcove of his fair queen he becomes nostalgic for his nomadic self: “Where is that man who in the days and nights of exile erred around the world like a dog and said that Nobody was his name?” Homecoming does not signify a recovery of identity; it does not end the journey in the virtual space of imagination. A modern nostalgic can be homesick and sick of home, at once.

As most of the stories in this book suggest, the nostalgic rendezvous with oneself is not always a private affair. Voluntary and involuntary recollections of an individual intertwine with collective memories. In many cases the mirror of reflective nostalgia is shattered by experiences of collective devastation and resembles –involuntarily- a modern work of art. Bosnian poet Semezdin Mehmedinovic offers one of such shattered mirrors from his native Sarajevo:

“Standing by the window, I see the shattered glass of Yugobank. I could stand like this for hours. A blue, glassed-in façade. One floor above the window I am looking from, a professor of aesthetics comes out onto his balcony; running his fingers through his beard, he adjusts his glasses. I see his reflection in the blue façade of Yugobank, in the shattered glass that turns the scene into a live cubist painting on a sunny day.”"

Restorative Nostalgia

2010-11-22T08:06:00.004Z

^Reconstructed Cathedral of Christ Our Saviour, Moscow source

The first excerpt of two laying out the two entirely incomensurable and often confused forms in which contemporary nostalgia manifests itself -Restorative and Reflective- the one dangerous and easily abused, unconscious and easy to accept, the other profoundly complex, personal and requiring active contemplation and engagement, and ultimately hugely rewarding. Both extracts are from Svetlana Boym's deeply inspiring and thorough book "The Future of Nostalgia", in which she takes Nostalgia as an intrinsic and inescapable condition of moderinty, set only to increase in potency in the years to come, and sets about breaking it down into its component parts, its various appearances, sinister and beautiful, and states the case for positively engaging with it as a key to understanding and in a way, enjoying, our fantastically unstable 21st century Human Condition. It was my best read since, and the best possible Architect's addendum to "In Search Of Lost Time", and was also strangely similar, but far more precise and ambitious than Nicolas Bourriaud's The Radicant, in which Bourriaud posits an artistic form of nomadic rootlessness, in which artists engage in creating their own micro-narratives of belonging in a life-long, international trajectory, positing the artistic project as one of a perpetualy Reflective, and transformational Nostalgia.

.........................................................................................

Restorative Nostalgia: Conspiracies and Return To Origins

"Two kinds of nostalgia are not absolute types, but rather tendencies, ways of giving shape and meaning to longing. Restorative nostalgia puts emphasis on nostos (returning home)and proposes to rebuild the lost home and patch up the memory gaps. Reflective nostalgia dwells in algia (aching), in longing and loss, the imperfect process of remembrance. The first category of nostalgics do not think of themselves as nostalgic; they believe that their project is about truth. This kind of nostalgic characterizes national and nationalist revivals all over the world, which engage in the anti-modern myth-making of history by means of a return to nationalist symbols and myths and, occasionally, through swapping conspiracy theories. Restorative nostalgia manifests itself in total reconstructions of monuments from the past, while reflective nostalgia lingers on ruins, the patina of time and history, in the dreams of another place and another time.

To understand restorative nostalgia it is important to distinguish between the habits of the past and the habits of the restoration of the past. Eric Hobsbawn differentiates between age old “customs” and nineteenth century “invented traditions”. Customs by which so-called traditional societies operated were not invariable or inherently conservative: “Custom in traditional societies has a double function of motor and fly wheel… Custom cannot afford to be invariant because even in the traditional societies life is not so.”

On the other hand, restored or invented tradition refers to a “set of practices normally governed by overtly or tacitly accepted rules and a ritual of symbolic nature which seeks to inculcate certain values and norms of behaviour by repetition which automatically implies continuity with the past.” The new traditions are characterized by a higher degree of symbolic formalization and ritualization than the actual peasant customs and conventions after which they were patterned. Here are two paradoxes. First, the more rapid and sweeping the pace and scale of modernization, the more conservative and unchangeable the new traditions tend to be, Second, the stronger the rhetoric of continuity with the historical past and emphasis on traditional values, the more selectively the past is presented. The novelty of invented tradition is “no less novel for being able to dress up easily as antiquity”.

Invented tradition does not mean a creation ex nihilo or a pure act of social constructivism; rather, it builds on the sense of loss of community and cohesion and offers a comforting collective script for individual longing. There is a perception that as a result of society’s industrialization and secularization in the nineteenth century, a certain void of social and spiritual meaning has opened up. What was needed was a secular transformation of fatality into continuity, contingency into meaning. Yet this transformation can take different turns. It may increase the emancipatory possibilities and individual choices, offering multiple imagined communities and ways of belongingthat are not exclusivelybased on ethnic or national principles. It can also be politically manipulated through newly recreated practices of national commemoration with the aim of re-establishing social cohesion, a sense of security and an obedient relationship to authority.

Cultural identity is based on a certain social poetics or “cultural intimacy” that provides a glue in everyday life. This was described by anthropologist Michael Herzfeld as “embarrassment and rueful self-recognition” through various common frameworks of memory and even what may appear as stereotypes. Such identity involves everyday games of hide-and-seek that only “natives” play, unwritten rules of behaviour, jokes understood from half a word, a sense of complicity. State propaganda and official national memory build on this cultural intimacy, but there is also a discrepancy and tension between the two. It is very important to distinguish between political nationalism and cultural intimacy, which, after all, is based on common social context, not on national or ethnic homogeneity.

^93metre high statue of Peter The Great in the Moskva River, built 1997 source
National memory reduces this space of play with memorial signs to a single plot. Restorative nostalgia knows two main narrative plots –the restoration of origins and the conspiracy theory, characteristic of the most extreme cases of contemporary nationalism fed on right-wing popular culture. The conspiratorial worldview reflects a nostalgia for a transcendental cosmology and a simple pre-modern conception of good and evil. The conspiratorial worldview is based on a single trans-historical plot, a Manichean battle of good and evil and the inevitable scapegoating of the mythical enemy. Ambivalence, the complexity of history and the specificity of modern circumstances is thus erased, and modern history is seen as a fulfilment of ancient prophecy. “Home”, imagine extremist conspiracy theory adherents, is forever under siege, requiring defence against the plotting enemy.

[...] Nostalgia is an ache of temporal distance and displacement. Restorative nostalgia takes care of both these symptoms. Distance is compensated by intimate experience and the availability of a desired object. Displacement is cured by a return home, preferably a collective one. Never mind if it’s not your home; by the time you reach it, you will have already forgotten the difference. What drives restorative nostalgia is not the sentiment of distance and longing but rather the anxiety about those who draw attention to historical incongruities between past and present and thus question the wholeness and continuity of the restored tradition.

Even in its less extreme form, restorative nostalgia has no use for the signs of historical time –patina, ruins, cracks, imperfections. The 1980s and 1990s was a time of great revival of the past in several projects of total restoration –from the Sistine Chapel to the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour in Moscow- that attempted to restore a sense of the sacred believed to be missing from the modern word."

A Little Person Up There In The Crane

2010-11-18T11:06:00.007Z

Over the past decade I’ve been living around more than my fair share of large construction sites, and I’ve enjoyed their cranes' sudden appearances, their elegant slow movements for a couple of years, and then their equally sudden disappearances as the hoardings come down around the brand spanking new building they helped to construct. The way they hover delicately over the weighty assemblage of static material below them, engaged on tight sites in a slow, precise and controlled choreography in the sky above the building so as to deliver bundles of material without knocking into each other, somehow without being swayed too far by the wind, and without damaging anything, or anyone below. And up there in the little cabs, like the minute brains of a stick insect, are the crane operators, heroic and alone, who I only ever saw as the sites would shut operations for the day, and probably in response to an alarm in their cabs, or a call on the mic, the cranes would come to a halt, frozen in position, and they would all descend simultaneously from their cabs, level by level down ladders on the insides of the cranes’ far too slimly proportioned structure, taking breaks at the same landings on their way down, perhaps as a prescribed precaution, until they disappeared from the view of anyone outside the site’s hoardings, either to have a cup of tea and discuss the day’s more exciting moments, or else to run on home. The first entry on this blog, back in 2008 was a retelling of the impact that the cranes on the site of Renzo’s Central St Giles had on me, on a freezing cold night, together with the sheer battlements of that project’s clustered cores. I'd thought it magnificent, and as his multi-coloured confection opens its doors to its unexciting content, and as its beautiful construction process passes into memory, I have a crane that has appeared, right in front of my bedroom window, in the last week. No soaring beauty to this crane, but I did notice that I can almost make out how the man inside might look, his proportions, and that there isn’t a toilet up there, and the operator doesn’t leave the cab all day. On further research Ive learned that they are either magnanimously handed piss pots by the firm to urinate in, or they have to improvise something along those lines, of the mineral-water screw-top kind id imagine, which they keep with them all day, no doubt handling them carefully as they descend in said orderly fashion as the site closes. The operator facing my room also seems to have a computer up there, and, wondering if there are any forums for discussion and socialising on the net used specifically by the class of 4000 lonely crane operators around the country who could no doubt do with a bit of company (this new crane is the only one on site), I rummaged around and found the trailer of what looks like a beautiful film here, and a discussion forum, from which are some snippets below, direct from those who get to live a distinctly alternative, and fascinating London High Life:

Forum Discussion Started With A Member’s Poem:

never mind the b*ll*cks!!!!!!!!!!

When the jib slews still,
the magic moment arrives,
its free slew button time,
and now for the climb.........down down down wheeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee away home,
no more b*llocks,
no more lifts,
F*** you and ,
yer horrible concrete.
no more radio babble,
its motoring time,
its 12 hours at least,
before I have to see,
those knobjockeys again,
and they see me,
so give me steak and chips,
ya ba*stards,
and F*** off till tomorrow.
I wrote this little poem for your pleasure or scorn, as you can see its poetical scope is limited,rather akin to a gorilla with Parkinsons trying to play a violin with a hammer. Sorry.

Forum Discussion About Accessing The Net In Crane Cabs:

Writer 1: just wondered who else sits up their crane with the laptop plugged into their mobile surfin the worldwide between lifts??or maybe ya poached your connection from a nearby wireless con.???
made a great table to sit the old laptop out of me info screen +operations manual...

Writer 3: was on job in dublin on the quays, was on relief one day, went up tc 2, christ like bloody comet up there.........laptop, digi radio, lcd tele and ps2. I kid you not.

Writer 4: i worked for elliotss on dublin quay and had my laptop tv radio play station kettle irish broadband and loads of of other s*** pluged into two 4 sockets come out of one lol f*****g best job in the world.

Writer 7: I brought up me mobile DVD player and I could'nt see a fooking thing on the screen with the light in the cab,maybe you'll see a bit if you put a magazine over it but its very uncomfortable,less you put up curtains all round the cab,would'nt say the foreman would think that was suspicious, hehehe,thought it was'nt worth a w*ank,is it not the same for laptops????????

Writer 8: i bought an 8in lcd tv from amazon.co.uk.it cost approx £70 with postage.
its got the 35+ channels from freeview.you can also use it as a freeview set top box at home (i think)
its an 8in x4 tech .
im in london and have been impressed with the quality of the picture from the aerial.
below is the model spec.
X4-TECH SOL8 DVB-T TV Silver

Forum Discussion About Difficult Cranes:

Writer 1: Anybody hate their crane ??????? ehhhhhhhh?????? anybody like to give it a good kicking?? cant quite figure out the timing ?? horrible slew brake?? cab that shakes to F*** every time you look at the levers ??? small and uncomfortable cabs ??? ehhhh??? anyone like to break off the levers and chew em before hurtling them out the window??

Writer 4: There was a haunted Jaso crane in Dublin that still operates that I for one hold up my hands and say that I still dont know what the F*** was going on there,I could'nt conquer it at all, it was certainly haunted as it had a mind of its own and made the strangest noises ever , not ya run of the mill crane groans but horrible fooking screeching all day, when trolleying back the trolley would suddenly get a massive bump and shake the whole jib like F***,when slewing as I came to the mark it would stop as normal and then suddenly the whole jib would violently shake sending the load beserk making me look like a tw*at driver,I dont know whether it was a violently deranged slew brake with a mind of its own or what and I dont give a F*** either long as I never see that crane again,nice vertical ladder it had up to it too,lovely, I felt numb driving home after driving that bas*tard and had to lie down a horrible horrible cu*nt of a crane,I hope they fooking cut it up with giant skill saws and melt it down into gates or fenceposts or something,anyone else got a crane they hate ??????????????

Writer 13: when it comes to comfort you cant beat a saez insainly small cab, a fixed seat off a site dumper. no form off adjustment so you can have a decent kip oh and the only way to get in the cab is to clime over said seat. and not forgeting dead man on the levers that make your fingers bleed keepin the ba****ds up.apart from that not a bad crane

Forum Discussion About Summer Heat In A Crane:

Writer 1: not looking forward to this summers heat.i hate the heat when you are up crane.winter is the best, you feel cold nock the heat up one in the summer you feel hot you feel like hitting someone .
can anybody tell me why there is no aircon. NO I WILL TELL YOU THEN
i rang my boss two years ago when it was hot 51 degrees in the cab ,site managers told me to come down the crane it was so hot.
my dear boss said its just another reason for drivers to refuse to climb the crane when it stops working.like when you have no heat .which is true because if i had no heat the site has no driver.but come on the summers are getting hotter and iam getting fatter i need cool air ...
anybody else find summer stressfull please tell

Writer 4: Luckily some cabs heaters can be set to cold, but your dead right there aint nothing worse than sweating like a *astard on a hot Summers day up a cab, even with all the doors and windows open its horrible, except for those celestial moments when a cool breeze blows over the entire cab,like Nigella Lawson just breathed on yer , oooooooooooooooooooo, ,on days like this one feels like a lion after a heavy feed that wants to lie down,its Spring now anyway, wont be long before the sellotape and news papers will be going up on the windows to keep out that sun.

Writer 6: Top tip lads - Get yourselves one of those beaded car seat covers. Nothing like it for promoting air flow in the crack of doom on those hot summer days

Writer 9: that hot summer a couple of years ago, the site my bruv was on put a water cooler in his cab!! freezing cold water on tap! bloody brilliant. What is the score with heat?? soon as i am out of juice i am down for a refill or get the good old slinger to bring some up. He gets a shock when he sees me sat in my skiddies looking like a porn star!!

Writer 10: Gives me cause to wonder Merlin what can you imagine would be the most uncomfortable outfit you could wear for a days driving?????????? I think a pair of pinch tight jeans (the type that chokes yer knackers like a python curling around a rat) with a hand knitted heavy jumper with no t-shirt on underneath and marching boots with gimp leather face mask and ear muffs the size of dinner plates, anyone else got anything they can think of, the more ridiculous the more we will respect you.

Writer 12: HOW ABOUT CLOGS OVER THICK HIKING SOCKS, DOUBLE PAIR, CHAIN MAIL TROUSERS WITH SACKCLOTH UNDERNEATH, MONGOLIAN TRIPLE FUR JACKET OVER A DONKEY JACKET WITH AN ARAN UNDERNEATH ,DOUBLE MONKEY HATS WITH A COLDSTREAM GUARDS ARMY HAT ON TOP,ZORRO FACEMASK WITH THICK FIFTY PENCE GLASSES ON,MIFFS MADE OF RUBBER FOR THE HANDS WITH A WEIGHTLIFTERS BELT AROUND YER WAIST ASWELL AND A PAIR OF HUGE FAKE PLASTIC PARROTS GLUED TO YER SHOULDERS!!!!!!!!!!

Are you a narky *astard of a driver ,ready to be a source of abuse and grief at slightest oportunity ? or are you a nice driver willing to help anyone to get through the day easy before you go home ? this special quiz trys to answer these questions, answer A , B or C, collect points and see how you get on at the end..........................

Q.1 Whilst walking to the canteen a member of site management innocently cracks a joke about drivers pretending its too windy, do you................
(a) Laugh lightly and continue on yer way with yer sensible lunch in yer bag and sit down .
(b) Firmly but not rudely tell him that the wind speed is obove the recommended limit and your hands are tied on the matter.
(c) Grab him in a choke hold till his face turns blue, the banksman rushes in and manages to persuade you to stop.
*******************************************************
Q.2 A self erecter driver has inadvertently slewed into yer path dropping off some shutters, do you
(a) Wait for him to slew outta the way, you drove them before yerself and know that its hard enough driving on the ground sometimes.
(b) Ask him to slew outta the way as soon as the load is down.
(c) Scream down the radio to get that fooking pile of sh*ite outta the way quick smart or there'll be trouble.
*****************************************************
Q.3 A scaffolder relizes that he wanted the stillage over another ten metres to the left, do you ..............
(a) Say no probs into the radio, cheerfully slewing another ten metres left.
(B) Remark to the banksman that them scaffloders are always changing their minds whilst bringing it over.
(c)Slam it down on the slab where it is shrieking like a maniac for them all to F*** off.
***********************************************
Q.4 A load of Romanians are doing the pour on the concrete, they want you to follow them around so that they dont have to rake it all over the place , do you.................
(A) Diligently jab the levers ,controlling the skip smoothly travelling where they need the concrete.
(B) Wave yer hand to them saying yes but mutter under yer breath that they are letting the concrete out too fast and to give yer a chance to adjust.
(c) F*** THEM !!!
****************************************************
Q.5 Its starting to get a liitle windy but not too serious, do you..............
(a) Keep an eye on the windclock and be extra cautios in case someone hurts themselves.
(b) Tell the banksman that its getting a little windy,we can keep working but no shutters you are both in agreement.
(c) Block up, radio off , you use this opportunity to ring up yer Missus and tell her you fooking hate her or get stuck into yer porn.
************************************************
Q.6 The foreman who is actually a sound head and well liked by the crane staff walks into the craneys hut on the break, do you...............
(a) Shout alright mate with all the other lads and ask him does he want a cuppa as their is still twenty minutes left.
(b) Give a reserved hello and be friendly watching what yer say though ,as he is management and you have to watch what yer say.
(c) Stare at him when he says hello saying nothing with a look that would give Charles Manson the creeps.
***************************************************
Q.6 A fumbling but friendly safety officer calls a toolbox talk for the craneys and banksmen, do you................
(a) Sit there with the rest of the lads outlining safety concerms that you feel need to be addressed, but listening to everyones point of view aswell.
(b) Sit there and laugh at the corny jokes it'll all be over in a while, you've been driving twenty years and know bettre than most.
(c) Sit there fuming for no particular reason suddenly bursting out with an unintelligible rant about how the brickies are all *unts and noone understands F*** all in this kip, kick over a couple of chairs on the way out.
*****************************************************
Q.7 Another craney comes over the radio asking you to slew left please as he just wants to get a couple of blocks in, you havent even got a load on yer ropes and have'nt done a lift in hours, do you.............
(a) Say no probs mate slewing outta the way in moments giving each other a friendly wave as yer do so,
(b) As obove.
(c) Shout "listen yer *unt, I'm the Daddy on this site , the big crane does'nt have to give way so BO*LLOCKS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
*****************************************************
Q.8 The banksman makes a small series of mistakes during work, he is not at it too long and apoligizes, do you..............
(a) Remember when you were banking and the mistakes you made and carry on regardless.
(b) Your a bit annoyed but as we've said yer know better, yer driving twenty years for Petes sake.
(c) Yer up in Wormwood Scrubs prision, the judge gave you a whole life tariff over what yer did, (gulp)
*******************************************************

Q.9 Whilst walking to the canteen a harmless but annoying brickie makes a silly comment about not getting his lifts, do you...............
(a) Say "sorry mate, but we really are quite busy, but I shall do my best for you after the break,cheerio".
(b) Inform him that the crane is busy and if he has a problem to address it to the crane co ordinater, yer not being smart with him yer just telling him whats going on.
(c) Use yer army training to trip him up and jump on top of him brandishing a bowie knife up to his throat gibbering incoherently that yer gonna cut his fooking gizzard out, a banksman starts pleading "no mate , leave it, its twenty fooking yers mate, for fooks sake calm down man".
******************************************************
Q.10 Yer walk into the pub across the road on Friday evening where all the drivers and banksmen are, do you..................
(a) Shout hello and pull out yer money buying around for everyone quicksmart.
(b) Just sit down with yer cash and buy a round for the banksmen that you know yerself.
(c) Pull yer wages outta yer pocket and sniff the fresh crisp notes as if it were Nigella Lawsons's scants before ordering two pints, one for yerself and one for ermmmmmm yerself before sitting down and getting drunk pi*ssing everyone else off with yer rude banter.
****************************************************
If most of yer answers were A or B yer a sound head who likes an easy life with no probs,yer there to earn a living and no more......................

If yers answer were mostly C , yer a belligerent *astard who gives noone a chance,yer only happy when yer being a *unt, anything sets you off, its like driving a lorry load of nitro gylicerine around a stock car track on a good Saturday, CHILL OUT !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Makeup, Or The Tyranny Of Truth: Extract from J. Lichtenstein's "The Eloquence of Colour" #2

2010-11-15T18:38:00.005Z

The Three Graces By Peter Paul Rubens, Museo Del Prado Madrid

Click here for the previous extract "The Lasciviousness of Delivery"

MAKEUP

"Deceitful makeup spread over paintings with an adulterous talent"
Hugh of St Victor Didascalion

"Ornament may be necessary to Beauty, but too much ornament ruins nature and truth. Thus we might sum up an aesthetics that dominates throughout the Middle Ages and to the Classical Age, and from which our discourse has never really departed. This principle, as we recall, implies a distinction essential to all metaphysical aesthetics, which allow the separation of the wheat from the tares, the distinction of ornament from make-up. Used to excess, ornament becomes makeup and dissimulates the truth instead of bringing it to light. This rule applies to discourse as well as painting. In the first case, it concerns the din of words, indulgence in metaphors, and overabundance of tropes, accused of masking things and obscuring the purity of the idea. In the other, it has as its target the brilliance of colours that are criticized for hiding the figure, for burying the drawing and corrupting its effectiveness.

Metaphysics has always taught the secrets of cosmetics that apply indiscriminately to language, the image and the face. The same knowledge offers a delicate way to highlight the structure of a face by thinning the eyebrows, defining the mouth, shading the eyelids, or hollowing the cheeks; the subtle ability to shade a concept, underline an idea, illuminate an opposition; or the skill to tone down a line or a colour in a drawing. In each case, the prescription is the same: ornament must not be seen but must make its object visible, it must show without showing itself. The difficult techniques of makeup clearly confirm the ancient saying that art must always remain invisible. If a faint shadow transforms and eye into a glance and thus marks the passage from insignificance to existence, makeup that is too lavish, by contrast, takes on the unreality of a mask.

The constant warning against the dangers of artifice whose effect is not self-effacing, the continual distrust of ornament that shows itself as such instead of hiding, attests to a fear that tradition consistently upholds. It is a profoundly ambiguous fear, expressing the simultaneous and conflicting fear of being deceived and desire to be deceived. For artifice, accuse of trapping the subject in a web of culpable seduction and illicit pleasure, is also asked not to display itself or reveal its own procedure. If artifice indeed deceives, then art is obliged to be doubly deceptive, as if the victim’s ignorance legitimated the artifice and art shed its guilt at the very moment that it became a lie rather than a simple ornament. Perhaps aesthetic pleasure is philosophically acceptable only if it is born, not of seduction, but dupery.

Most of the difficulties raised by the question of artifice, indeed, stem from the fact that it always conflates two very different problems: that of deception, which concerns the objective and perceptible effects of artifices, and that of the deceiver, which has to do with the moral investigation of intentions. The analysis of art’s effects falls back onto that of the ends that the artist sets for himself in artistic creation. Such an operation tends to omit the aesthetic question proper, since it uses psychological and moral categories that apply to the subject-painter to interpret the object-painting. On the contrary, in distinguishing the artist’s sincerity from art’s deceptions, Roger de Piles shows his intent to dissociate the two perspectives. When he defines the essence of painting as deception, this notion has no moral implications. It does not claim to judge an intentionality but a perceptible effect. The psychological analysis to which it refers does not involve the relations between artist and art but those between a painting and its viewer. The fact that art depends on artifice does not warrant the conclusion that its character is more deceptive.

Paradoxically, a purely aesthetic position like that of Roger de Piles is the only one that can avoid moral criticism, since its asks artifice to show itself, that is, to show how it deceives. But we have already encountered this paradox in the analysis of rhetorical representation. To throw the accusation of deception back onto philosophers, Quintillian had only to show that eloquent discourse, based on effects alone, was never deceptive, unlike philosophical discourse that claimed to be the discourse of truth. Roger de Piles’ procedure for turning all the prudish critiques of the artifice of coloris back onto their authors is analogous. He affirms that artifice in painting is not deceptive, since it presents itself to the eye as an object of delectation. It is not a deception but an effect of deception that the viewer enjoys only if the deceptive effect dissolves as soon as it acts on him. In this sense the aesthetic experience, unlike the image often given of it, is inseparable from the movement of reflexivity that characterizes consciousness. It demands an instantaneous reflexivity and an especially sharp wit, since conscious processing must occur at the same instant that the perceiving subject vacillates. Here, the reflexive distance implies not detachment from the object but rather recognition of its seductive charms; the gaze no sooner recovers from its surprise than it delights in the object that has captivated it. Critics accuse painting of being a deception on the pretext that it is only an appearance. But this is precisely the point: it is but an appearance of deception, a lie that deceives only the naïve who do not know how, or do not like, to look; a deception that does not really deceive, since it shows itself. On the contrary, when artifice hides, then it becomes truly deceptive in the moral sense of the term –a blatant falsehood.

Such is the paradox underlying most discourses that set forth rules in the art of cosmetics. They use a logic of truth whose ultimate reference and sole criterion is nature. Naturalist thought, by refusing to grant the pleasures of artifice the slightest legitimacy, forces artifice to disguise itself as nature… Nietzsche says that art’s illusions, unlike those of science, philosophy or religion, are not lies because they do not try to pass for truths but present themselves simply as what they are…To ask art to hide itself obliges art, in a sense, to pay homage to nature. A referential logic of truth thus replaces an aesthetic approach to seduction. And his obliges art to become what metaphysics has always claimed it was: a deception of the subject, a lie about reality."

A Red Rubber Band On the Pavement

2010-11-06T13:20:00.003Z

^source

Freedom Of Information Request To Royal Mail by Steve Woods, 10 December 2008:

Dear Sir or Madam,

I cannot help noticing that all the streets round my area of Bristol are frequently littered with the rubber bands used to collate bundles of post for mail deliveries. In the light of this could you inform me:

1. How many elastic bands - in terms of either numbers or weight - does the Royal Mail procure and/or consume per year?

2. How many postal delivery workers have been fined or successfully prosecuted for dropping litter (i.e. the said elastic bands) in the last year for which records are available?

3. What steps are being made by the Royal Mail to stop such littering and to recycle elastic bands?

Yours faithfully,

Steve Woods

………………………………..

Royal Mail Group Limited Reply 12 January 2009:

Dear Mr Woods,

Re: Freedom of Information Request

Thank you for your request for information by e mail received on the 10th December 2008. We can confirm Royal Mail holds this information. In your request you specifically asked for:

1. How many elastic bands - in terms of either numbers or weight -does the Royal Mail procure and/or consume per year?

For the last three years, the number of rubber bands used by Royal Mail was:

2007/8 871,695,000

2006/7 825,750,000

2005/6 753,480,000

2. How many postal delivery workers have been fined or successfully prosecuted for dropping litter (i.e. the said elastic bands) in the last year for which records are available?

Royal Mail Group has not been served with a fixed penalty notice or prosecuted for a littering offence under the Environmental Protection Act 1990 arising from the discarding of elastic bands. Royal Mail Group would

not necessarily become aware of such action being taken against individuals. However, we are not aware of any delivery officer having been prosecuted for littering when discarding elastic bands.

3. What steps are being made by the Royal Mail to stop such littering and

to recycle elastic bands?

Royal Mail re-uses many millions of rubber bands each year and bands are generally re-used within delivery offices and mail centres. We remind our people about the benefits of re-using bands and also ask them not to discard them after use.

Royal Mail uses millions of rubber bands each year because they are very useful when it comes to sorting and delivering the mail. Unfortunately, given the quantity that we use it is inevitable that some rubber bands will be dropped by mistake. The vast majority of our people are hard working and conscientious but, and as with any labour intensive organisation, errors will occasionally happen. Issues concerning the environment are very important to us, in particular those of street cleanliness and recycling. The rubber bands we use are specifically designed to be more biodegradable than the normal brown rubber bands and this is intended to lessen the environmental impact.

Going forwards we have a number of process reengineering initiatives that should reduce the volume of elastic bands we use in our operation:

• collection reengineering

• customer traying

• Reengineering mail handling equipment

If you are dissatisfied with the handling of your request you do have a right to request an internal review, in which case please write to the Head of Information Compliance, Royal Mail House, Company Secretary's Office, 5th Floor, 148 Old Street, LONDON, EC1V 9HQ. An internal panel will then review the request, and you will be advised of the outcome.

If, having requested an internal review by Royal Mail, you are still not

satisfied with our response you also have a right of appeal to the

Information Commissioner at:

Information Commissioner's Office

Wycliffe House

Water Lane

Wilmslow

Cheshire

SK9 5AF

Telephone: 01625 545 700

www.informationcommissioner.gov.uk

Yours sincerely,

Marie Teasdale

Freedom of Information Case Officer

Company Secretary's Office

"Her Chambre Bleue" at The Hospital Club

2010-10-28T15:49:00.003+01:00

A performance of two discrete but simultaneous parts by Ilona Dorota Sagar with text and spoken word by me, that was performed last friday. Dancers dressed in blue moved around the space (a bar and socialising space in a relatively exclusive members club in Covent Garden, London) blocking people's paths, dividing the crowd, slipping between and under people, and splaying themselves along the walls, bar and carpet; at the same time four actors dressed anonymously approached people as if they were acquainted, and eagerly told them one of the three pieces of text below, which weave together the space of the Hospital Club and its furnishings, together with the Salon of Mademoiselle De Vivonne in the Hotel de Rambouillet, and all of its refined luxury. The first texts are the initial version prior to a collaborative rewriting and editing with Ilona, and the second set are the final scripts that were spoken on the night. You can see a short video of some of the event here over on HandBin.

Version 1:

Don’t mind them, or rather do, but only so much as you might mind a well-positioned crystal chandelier or framed piece of art… let them be in the periphery, like a thought that reminded you of something, but you can’t remember of what, or like a smell that takes you somewhere precise and vivid, but nowhere that you can actually place… or rather I think it is them that are trying to remember all of it for you: each time they line up and their legs lift in unison it looks like they might have once been at a ball, an evening that they cannot quite recall, and whenever their arms lift out and they lean forwards it’s like they are trying to recollect the movements of a formal greeting, a movement of decorum, but, poor decorative things that they are, they can’t quite bring it all back to mind, and little do they seem to realise, poor dolls, that it’s the Prussian summer-evening-sky-blue of their leotards, and the gold smeared on their lips, which is what they are trying to grasp. It is the Chambre Bleue, and its sparkling gilded domes, the dances and discussions with little flutters of tiny pouting lips which they think they can find here, somewhere in this room, but they don’t even remember what they are looking for, poor souls.

…

Cobalt blue, Azure, deep and dazzling all at once don’t you think, particularly when they dance around with it like that, so much ease in their movements, but it really isn’t that easy, what they’re doing, they just make it look like it is, a lot of training you see, the kind of training that used to be expected in places like this, one couldn’t just say what came to mind, it had to be said beautifully, one needed wit and no little charm, now they don’t even open their mouths, and that blue, it wasn’t always just a pleasure to look at, it was a deadly game Cobalt was, named after a German sprite, an angry little gremlin that lived in the mountains and hated visitors so much that the Arsenic in the Cobalt mixture would eat away at the miners’ feet, and tear apart their lungs, but it looked beautiful on the canvases on the walls of all the Salons, and on the hemlines of dresses, and on letters that they would write to each other in intrigue that would look blank until they were heated and their slanderous words would appear by candle-light, blue lines written beautifully about the blue room, hard work and dangerous though it was.

…

I have a little vignette to paint for you, it’s helpful you see, an instruction on these dancers, and their delicate moves. It’s a scene, an atmosphere, you see, that they are repeating, again and again. They speak as one, dance as many, and they have a nose for luxury, I tell you they can always sniff out what is genuine and what is not, they have an eye for elaborate artifice and no patience for dreary imitation, in you and me, whoever they come across, and they let you know. Somewhere past, in a room like the inside of a rock of Lapis Lazuli, somewhere between the Tuileries gardens and the Louvre, four men approached them in greeting, hoping for a dance to a fashionable minuet, and, like judges at their own court of subtle suggestion they delivered their verdicts by hand and foot and mouth for everyone to see: Leg up and hand outstretched they delightedly say “Monsieur, I am honored to present you my most humble respects in this dance”; leaning to the left with their hands pointing up they respectfully twitter “Monsieur I am your most humble servant, follow me”; shoulders slouched and falling to their left they politely retreat with “Monsieur, I am honored to greet you. Perhaps another time”; and finally, in the presence of ill-concealed pretension and failed elegance, collapsing into one another they say with ice “Hello, Monsieur”.

Version 2 (as performed):

Don’t mind them, or rather do, but only so much as you might mind a well-positioned crystal chandelier or framed canvas… let them be in the periphery, let them recede into the background like the splashing of a water feature in a hotel lobby, like the pantone hues of polyester resins mixed with stone dust, imposters, masquerading as travertine, onyx, marbled alabaster, and in the corner of your eye they become grandiose facades impervious to rot or tedium, they become bold statements that flatter your presence with the paper thin grandeur of Faux Bois and brocaded polyester, thin veneers and fragile illusions that wrap you, and a select other few in attenuated adoration, raised above the mundane and cradled in the reassuring glow of purchased luxury. Catherine de Vivonne is here. In every lavish soft furnishing and carefully chosen surface. I think it is that space between the dancers and the designer detailing that is trying to remember it all for you: Her salon, that perfectly formed private world, The hidden arrangement between her daybed and the wall of her alcove. As each arm lifts out and they lean forwards, it’s like they are trying to recollect the movements of a formal greeting, a movement of decorum, but, poor decorative things that they are, they can’t quite bring it all back to mind, and little do they seem to realise, little dolls, that it’s the Prussian summer-evening-sky-blue of their leotards, and the gold smeared on their lips, which is what they are trying to grasp. It is the Chambre Bleue, and its sparkling gilded domes, the dances and discussions with little flutters of tiny pouting lips which they think they can find here, somewhere in this room, but they don’t even remember what they are looking for, poor souls.

…

Cobalt blue, Azure, deep and dazzling all at once don’t you think, particularly when they dance around with it like that, so much ease in their movements, but it really isn’t that easy, one couldn’t just say what came to mind, it has to be said beautifully, one needs wit and more than a little charm, now they don’t even open their mouths. they are mute, and encased in a moving form of restraint and decorum. It’s not something that can be learned, or even easily taught, this honnetete, a code, a way of dancing, greeting, joking, talking, in fact for us conversation is a sacred art, it is the medium through which the group, our group, develops its sense of style, its taste. Look at them fluttering in the background, decorative and decorous at once, all blue and gold, delicate like the soft blue-green colour of ancient Chinese porcelain, whose name Celadon was once conjured up by them, together in a conversation at the Hotel de Rambouillet. As was their habit, inventing words, and painting things with them, as well as with spectacular pigments, saturated and dripping as Catherine de Vivonne’s Salon, Royal Blue from top to bottom, and the first grand colour of The Queen of Mecklenburg-Strelitz’s dress, as luxurious and decadent as the velvets and cashmeres strewn over their divans and chaise-longues, lying lazily in corners after their exhausting and exotic journeys across half the world, from the hands of Kashmiri merchants, a role now passed down to the elegant sways you see here that are so becoming, made from rayon instead of cashmere, and having passed through container ports and delivery trucks instead of Caravanserai and Clippers. There is Plywood here too, as well as MDF, drywall and chipboard, synthesised materials that strain every atom of their amalgamated substance to reach back, simulating gestures towards the past and backwards through history, in a delicate and precarious state of imitation denial.

…

I have a little vignette to paint for you, it’s helpful you see, an instruction on these dancers, and their delicate moves. It’s a scene, an atmosphere, you see, that they are repeating, again and again. They speak as one, dance as many, and they have a nose for luxury, I tell you they can always sniff out what is genuine and what is not. They have an eye for elaborate artifice and no patience for dreary imitation, in you and me, whoever they come across, and they let you know. Somewhere past, in a room like the inside of a rock of Lapis Lazuli, somewhere between the Tuileries gardens and the Louvre, sat the Marquis de Rambouillet, holding court in a dress the colour of the sky, with blue blood coursing through her veins, always with a keen eye to the rarity and refined allure of everything her guests would say, wear, or carry, diligently watching for the sumptuous pleasure of an even more exceptional and precious fabric, jewel, colour, or phrase, and the sensuous thrill of refined novelty it would suffuse in her Chambre Bleue, layering it with a coating of velveteen grandeur, a layering of unique and unobtainable refinement that has hardened over the years into a veneer, a fragile and thin emulation of the Marquis and her guests’ discernment and grandeur. The desire to belong is steeped in the same exclusivity, only its manifestation is played out in emulsion wall paint, ply and replica chandeliers, a manufactured sumptuousness which whispers the desire to act out social gatherings of a grander era, a time that bathed in the glow of a reassuringly singular and bespoke luxury.

The Graveyard And The Morgue: Spaces of Signification

2010-10-12T10:14:00.001+01:00

"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."

From “The Painter of Modern Life” by Charles Baudelaire

I was harsh on those impeccable places of cultural commodification and serial exchange that are embodied in black boxes and white cubes. They are a form of divine reduction, an elemental abstraction that cuts ruthlessly to the core of their structural purpose. They proudly proclaim the point at which economy can –so far- go no further in its demands for the reduction and conflation of space, and time, into uniform, measurable, quantifiable, and statistically relative units, units before which goods and value can be consistently registered and transferred. They analogise and mark the precise threshold beyond which traditional space, with its already tenuous grip on relative function, simply implodes in on itself as everywhere actually does become the same, and all goods, all forms of observation and exchange, all events, are available at any time and in any place. The reason they are so numbingly devoid of qualities is that they are the banal precipice, the very terminal point, of physical space constructed by man. They are the exact moment before it disappears, and so they are etiolated to almost nothing, for that is what they are destined to become: nothing. Their contract with what they contain is almost completed, and they will disappear.

Morgue of the Middlesex Hospital, London, prior to demolition, 2008

I was unfair to call their disposition a ‘Morgue of Spatial Utility’, a description tinged with what could be seen as a disrespectful attitude. However I would like to point out that a Morgue is a fascinating place, it is a purgatory of the flesh, a stretch of time in which a body has lost its soul, but has yet to be conferred to memory, yet to be commemorated, and concluded, with any ceremony or symbol. It is a place of irreducible human vessels. It is the place where we are essentialised to a level of absolute classical (or modern) simplicity which could never have been achieved when intermingled with the complexities of life, and will never be possible again either in the mirror image of life that is the graveyard, or in the extinguishing nothingness of permanent oblivion. I see this as a severe significance, with its own beauty, but hateful and provocative to those like me whose sensibilities yearn for something more voluptuous and full of life, but they are nonetheless infinitely preferable in their rigor to the towering collapse of expectation, and muddy indistinctness that arises when a desire for uniqueness, for rebellion, in all its naivety, meets with its opposite, and produce a bastard offspring.

Since Im now in the habit of using places of the dead to analogize my point, lets move on to the graveyard in search of an alternative to those monochrome boxes. They are feeling all the more stifling for their apparent triumph and superiority.

Recoleta Cemetery, Buenos Aires

Morgues may be fascinating, but I would be transfixed with a clinical terror if I were ever caught in one alive, perhaps not feeling dissimilar to how I am so often withered by the interiors of galleries. Cemeteries however, with their tombstones poking up all over the place, profusion of strange symbols from every period and walk of life, inexplicable formal concoctions animated by the love with which they must have been considered, I have always found to be most inviting. They simply force your imagination, no matter how flabby and asthmatic from inactivity, to start playing with all their suggestive concoctions, which is why they drew me so often at a young age to sit amongst their tumbling ivy at dusk, crouched atop their largest tombs, the ones closest to collapse, in order to make up long and meandering, nonsensical but riveting stories.

Where the morgue is the tight abstraction of the classical cube, skeletally containing the human body as enabling container devoid of life, the graveyard is, in its best examples, a specular landscape of flourishing symbols, each conveying nuanced impressions of individual cultural calibrations. It is the opposite of the morgue, it is all the material associated with the fleetingness of style and personality, of longing and affectation, frozen for perpetuity. The morgue relies on its lack of signifiers in order to emphasize the structurally essential nature of what it contains, whereas the cemetery does the opposite, implying and representing the very thing that it does not contain (the personality, the loved one), through the fleshiness of its signs.

If, like me, you see the truth in what Baudelaire says in the extract above, then perhaps the profusion of the cemetery is preferable to the essentialism of the white cube (sorry, morgue). It at least provides more material for the imaginary gland to metabolize. And even if it is not entirely preferable, if there is still love for the clear equations, and clarified relationships of the box, then I don’t think it would be outlandish to say that it might at least hold more value together with the cemetery than alone, might form a productive correlation as complementary opposites. That the qualities of both might frame the two poles of a way to judge spaces and how they perform seems reasonable.

Pere Lachaise Cemetery, Paris

The one for the mathematician architect longing after universal transcendence minus experience, the other for the architect who wants to partake in that unstoppable and divinely comic attempt to touch beauty, or truth, or simply what lies inside each of us, that contingent and protean thing we often call style and fashion, the manifestations of our transcendent human subjectivity: a wonderful affliction, that affects thinking as much as material display, thank God. An affliction whose itching unease is catalogued as frozen moments, in miniature form, in our graveyards, is rendered grandly and slowly in our cities’ buildings, and is displayed raucously every day (but never for more than a day, a week in the same state) in the clothes on the backs of everyone in our streets.

Black Box White Cube

2010-10-10T08:31:00.001+01:00

Those black boxes and white cubes;

those abstracted vacuums pumped free of any contaminating atmosphere;

those manifest vacancies scattered around our cities in perfect seriality;

those ideal formulas of neutralised tensions, of disregarded imbalances

are spatialised formulas of a completely vacuous religiosity,

of comprehensive operational performance.

In them Architecture has reached the conclusion of its long journey in pursuit of performance, it has arrived at the stage of pure and total utilisation and finds that it has erased itself, that in its pact with the theatre and the gallery it has reduced itself to being a negative, a lack, an absence. And it is this thin skin of effacement that both sublimates Architecture and traps Art in a contract of suspension, a collusion in which Drama and Art is frozen in its own ludicrous morgue, captured in the placeless stasis of the black box and white cube's nowhere, and in which Architecture willfuly obliterates itself in the ghostly reflection (black or white) of its own ultimate achievement.

The Aesthetics of Garbage & Venetian Mirrors

2010-09-15T19:11:00.001+01:00

A tract taken from an early chapter in Michel Tournier’s “Gemini”, in which the main character, the owner of a refuse disposal company who revels in the amphibious contradictions of his lifestyle, being variously an elegant and precise gentleman of impeccable manners, and a gutter-licker who believes that “there is no such thing as a good, or bad smell”, elaborating the oceans of connoisseurship and delight that come from the discerning analysis and appreciation of the body’s and the city’s most unspoken of and rejected parts, from the rubbish tip to the young vagrant’s anus. It is never a matter of good and bad, but a matter of degrees, potencies, combinations and allusive affect, effectively extracting any moral or hygienic layer that may have been involved in judgement, and replacing them with a pure compound of sensory aesthetics.

Similarly contrary is his position with regards to consumer society, whose rapid turnover of goods, and infinite chain of manufactured copies destined for the trash heap, he finds ludicrously beautiful, since as he says below, he sees in every remove away from the mythical-illusory aura of an original object, a correlative increase in the vigour of artistry, sees a clear and honest reflection of the world’s state, of the complexity of human production and its edifice of mirrors perfectly encapsulated in its own detritus. The Ouroboros of capitalist progress, of innumerable productions, reproductions and recombinations, that hurtles round in circles feeding on itself in a protean helix, sheds its skin as it replicates itself, and it is the compounded layers of these skins that he spends the book digging through, managing the gases these remains produce, and describing the delicate differences manifested in each city within its dumps, as well as the marks history’s ruptures leave in these pits of sediment, mountains of dead dogs shot after they were left by Parisians escaping the advance of Hitler’s army and all.

Sitting here in 2010, our world has become strangely similar to his rubbish tips, where time gives way to space and all objects and sequential events collapse into a compressed simultaneity as we hopscotch ever faster across and around our own history, picking up whatever we wish from wherever within the accumulating tip that swells underneath us, copies having proliferated to the point where there is, brilliantly, no such thing as an original, and all evaluation rests (like Tournier’s character with his clear qualitative system and mythology of rubbish, sex, and society that accumulates the most unexpected objects, and boys) on the act of engagement with whatever is appropriated by that person, or that group, and how actively they manage to weave it into a new chain of significance.

The Aesthetic of The Dandy Garbage Man from Michel Tournier's "Gemini"

“The idea is more than the thing and the idea of the idea more than the idea. Wherefore the imitation is more than the thing imitated, because it is the thing plus the effort of imitation, which incorporates the possibility of reproducing itself, and so of adding quantity to quality.

That is why in the matter of furniture and works of art, I always prefer the imitations to the originals, imitation being the original encapsulated, possessed, integrated and even multiplied –in short, considered and spiritualized. The fact that imitations are of no interest to the general run of collectors and enthusiasts, and may also have a very much lower commercial value than the originals, is only an additional advantage in my eyes. For that very reason society will have no further use for it, and it is destined for the rubbish heap and so fated to fall into my hands.

Since it does not contain a single genuine object –except perhaps for my collection of sword sticks- my home in Paris is entirely made up of the second-rate. I have always dreamed of elevating it to the third-rate, but if there are such things as imitations of imitations they are so rare, and doomed to perish so quickly from the fourfold contempt of the idiot mob, that I could furnish my house with them throughout only by going to immense trouble. Nevertheless, I have found, in a modern furniture shop called Le Bois Joli in the Rue de Turenne, a cane chaise longue copied from a West-Indian model which itself was obviously inspired by the Recamier-style sofas of the Empire period. Also I have on my desk a glass Buddha whose twin brother in old crystal I once saw in an antique shop: the dealer assured me it was modelled on the life-sized statue of the Buddha of Sholapur. But these are exceptions. To multiply them and give myself a setting raised to an ever higher degree –for there is nothing to stop one going from the third-rate to the fourth-, fifth-, and so on –would take a time and patience I can only spare for another purpose. The truth is that I am not really interested in things or in decoration or collecting. They are all too static, contemplative and disinterested for my eager, restless temperament.

After all, what is rubbish but the great storehouse of things multiplied to infinity by mass production? The fancy for collecting originals is altogether reactionary and out of date. It is in opposition to the process of production and consumption which is gaining momentum in our society –and whose end is the rubbish dump.

In the old days everything was an original, made by craftsmen to last forever. Its destruction only came about by accident. When it was worn out the first time it became second hand goods (this was the case even with wet clothes). It became an heirloom and worth repairing endlessly.

Nowadays things are said to be worn out, useless, and are thrown away more and more quickly. And it is among the rubbish that the collector often comes to look for it. He rescues it, he takes it home and restores it, and finally gives it a place of honour in his house where its qualities can be displayed. And the rescued object, rehabilitated and glorified, rewards its benefactor a hundred time over. It imbues his house with an atmosphere of subtle peace, discriminating luxury and good sense.

I can understand this kind of activity and its charms well enough, but I take a different view. Far from trying to arrest the process of production-consumption-disposal, I pin all my hopes on it since it ends at my feet. The refuse dump is not an abyss in which the object is swallowed up but the repository where it finds a home after successfully passing through a thousand ordeals. Consumption is a selective process aimed at isolating the really new and indestructible aspect of production. The liquid in the bottle, the toothpaste in the tube, the pulp in the orange, the flesh of the chicken are all eliminated by the filter of consumption. What is left is the empty bottle, the squeezed tube, the orange peel, the chicken bones, the hard, durable parts of the product, the elements of the inheritance which our civilization will bequeath to the archaeologists of the future. It is my job to see to it that they are preserved indefinitely in a dry and sterile medium by means of controlled dumping. Not without getting my own excitement, before their inhumation, from the infinite repetition of these mass-produced objects –the copies of copies of copies of copies of copies of copies and so on.”

^crowds entering San Marco on raised platforms during aqua alta

This extract below caught my eye since together with Inigo Minns and Marco Ginex, I had recently been writing up an aborted proposal for a design unit, whose main thrust had been about taking the tourists, and the hotels of Venice and attempting to reconfigure their relationship with the city, so that they became tools through which the city would once again begin to alter and evolve. Our starting point had been the recognition of Venice as a “city of images”, whose very fabric and existence was predicated on its constant consumption by people of innumerable cultures over many centuries, and that this had been in the past an immensely productive tension, and could once again be. Tournier here comments on the specular nature of Venice, and how tourism is an inseparable part of Venice’s singularity, and enhances it, rather than neutralising it.

From Unit Proposal "The City As Souvenir""Venice is generally seen by architects as being frozen in a state of irremediable decay, hovering on the edge of an elegant death while flaunting itself to the world for tourist dollars. But since time immemorial it has been Venice’s famous attractiveness, its seductive allure and conscious manipulation of its own projected image, that has not only kept it alive, but assured its cultural vibrancy and flair. Once the first stop on the Grand tour during which travellers arrived to engage in cultural discourse, and in acts of creativity which affected the town and the way it was seen; the vast majority of contemporary visitors now engage in ‘holiday trips’, short visits dominated by vision during which tourists passively experience the city as a collection of images, through the consumption of sights, as sightseers.

Operating on the fault-lines between projection and reality, and visitor expectations and economic fact, hotels are the architectural type which best analogises the rich set of potentially productive conflicts being played out on the city of Venice. Thriving on the allure of the city’s picture-postcard ideal, they are already a massive urban phenomenon which tries as best it can to efface itself in order to better maintain the illusion of an ‘authentic’ urbanity for sightseers, a fabricated image which their ubiquitous presence belies. Celebrating these underlying ambiguities, the unit will harness the powers of tourism and its hotels as interpretive and generative tools, bringing cultural exchange, discourse and creativity back into the heart of Venice’s image, tourism industry, and architecture. We will design hotels that are transformative urban entities which reconfigure the manner in which the city sees itself, tectonic tools that will combine the leisure of sightseeing with the action of sightmaking, transforming the material body of the city itself in the process."

Venetian Mirrors from Michel Tournier's "Gemini"

“I watch herds of visitors crowding after a guide, who holds aloft a flag, an open umbrella, and enormous artificial flower, or a feather duster as a rallying point. This crowd has a certain originality. It is not a bit like the one that winds through the lanes of Mont St Michel every summer –which is the only comparison I possess- nor, I suppose, like the ones at the pyramids of Giza, at Niagara Falls, or the temples of Angkor Wat. To define the character of the Venetian tourist. Point number one: Venice is not profaned by this crowd. The thing is that the high spots for tourism are, unfortunately, very often places originally dedicated to solitude, to prayer or meditation. They stand at the junction of a spectacular or desert landscape and a vertical spiritual line. Hence the frivolous, cosmopolitan crowds nullify the very thing that has brought them there. There is nothing like that here. Venice is fulfilling her eternal role in welcoming the gay, colourful –and what is more, rich!- flood of foreigners on holiday. The tide of tourists ebbs and flows in a twelve-hourly cycle, too fast for the liking of the hotel and restaurant owners, who complain when they see the morning’s visitors go away in the evening with no profit to the trade, since they manage to bring their own packed lunches with them. But this crowd does not mar a city dedicated through the ages to carnivals, voyages and commerce. It is an integral part of the immemorial spectacle, and the two little red marble lions outside the basilica bear witness to it, their backs worn away by fifty generations of children, come from the four corners of the world to ride on them. In its funny way, it is like a childish version of St Peter’s foot, worn away by the kisses of a thousand years of pilgrims.

When the tourists have had enough of wandering about the narrow streets, the churches and museums, they sit down at a café terrace and look –at other tourists. One of the tourist’s principal occupations in Venice is to watch himself in a thousand international avatars, the game consisting in guessing the nationality of the passer-by. This proves that Venice is not merely a spectacular, but also a specular city. She is so because she is mirrored in her waters and her houses are built on nothing but their own reflections. She Is so, too, because of her fundamentally theatrical nature, by virtue of which Venice and Venice’s image are always presented simultaneously, inseparably. Truly, there is enough there to discourage any painter. How can one paint Venice when it is a painting already? There was Canaletto of course, but he was not the foremost of Italian painters, far from it! On the other hand, there can be no other place in the world on which so much photographic film has been used up. Because the tourist is not creative, he is a born consumer. The images are given him here at every step and he copies them left and right. Moreover, the subject of his snapshots is always himself, in front of the bridge of sighs, on the steps of San Stefano, in a gondola. The tourists’ “souvenirs” of Venice are so many self-portraits."

"Degrees Of Enclosure"

2010-02-07T16:50:00.001Z

Below is the text I wrote for a film that will be showing during the "Architectural Playgrounds" show at the Ron Arad Retrospective in the Barbican Galleries later this month. The artist making the film, Ilona Dorota Sagar, invited me to the barbican in December for a walk around the project, in order to discuss, as we walked, our ideas about, and feelings toward the complex. For me the place drips with personal sentiment and nostalgia from memories of spending time there as a kid, visiting and staying with friends who lived in one of the blocks. Many of the corners in that sprawling place take me back to a state of mind where things, places and forms were alive with alot more potential excitement than they are now (breaking and entering, pouring water and throwing impromptu flying-contraptions from various high-places, wading through ponds and comandeering whole floors of empty parking seemed the 'obvious' reasoning and purpose behind the barbican's complexities), and the feeling is particularly pronounced in its architectural manifestation there, since the spaces which that childish level of playfulness had the luck to be set free in were so unusual, so un-london. For Ilona the place had an other-worldly grandeur and theatricality that she found inherently cinematic, dripping with utopian scenography in an otherwise grittily down-to-earth city of pragmatic urbanism, always suspicious of idealising. The text and film evolved from that, with Ilona collaborating further with a dance troupe and a narrator to bring body and life to the space and words. See the film here.

Degrees Of Enclosure

These places know what has happened. These columns carry within them a certainty that is as great as the number of stones and pebbles out of which they were made.

It might be the creeping strata of concrete sediment in which everything has happened. The constant, weighty pressure that has been accumulating pieces, debris from whatever has passed through it and broken into action against its walls, carrying it along and pressing it into itself.

It might be the empty spaces where anything might yet happen. Spaces that sneakily slip everywhere, in between walls and ceilings that by all means seem to want to press them out from between themselves. Miraculous spaces of potential, hemmed in, populated only by sparsely used furniture, voices and footsteps from elsewhere.

The miracle of life breathes in from other places, where someone else’s voice, some other place’s whistling wind and mechanical grinding fall together, and are caught here, eddying around each other, by pressing folds of architecture. They catch and mix, and deepen as they reflect through the grottoes of aggregate and cement, and the further they travel from their origin, the more the beams and corridors begin to provide mouths for them, speaking their faint echoes from between themselves.

If you listen there is the reflection of a song that ricochets endlessly, and faintly; and if you find yourself watching here, you are also being watched. What you are doing here has been predetermined, and what you are seeing is for your eyes alone.

There is a choreography between the sky and the deep basement, and between what has come before and what is definitely coming after. Along and under, through and between here there is a mile long, and fifty metre deep performance that is playing itself out with measured slowness.

There are roles that require the duration of industrially refined bronze, and of bricks fired at 1800degrees, roles that speak of permanence and age and heat, of deep passions and embedded energies that play themselves out over millennia, imperceptibly.

There are roles filled by carpets and cedar parquet, that explain the script by the sound they make as they are walked over, gently revealing a narrative of passing stories and intents that softly moves the plot forward, event by event, day by day.

There are roles that only last one act, never to be repeated, and are made of painted MDF, chipboard and veneer. They attach themselves to the brick and the stone, covering them up, and shouting their lines over them with bravura colours and graphical banners, only to be torn down and taken away as quickly as they came.

Then of course there are the walk-in roles, the extras who make the sounds and add the movement, the characters for whom the performance is put on, and without whom the epic choreography would grind to a halt. Their parts have been predetermined, and it is for each one of them that the bronze, the brass, the brick, the concrete, the parquet and the carpet are always waiting for, waiting to talk to, and perform with.

It is all whispers from elsewhere that this place speaks to you; all frozen, embedded stories of actions that it is storing underneath you; and all performances of a slowness that can only be architectural that it asks you to take part in. It is always asking to be talked to, walked through, watched and taken time over, always slowly, and always in a deep nostalgia that comes from knowing that it has become unobtainable in its very presence.

It is all winding nowheres that go everywhere, and which look down through inexplicable holes and staircases on somewhere elses, whilst looking up at mountainous brown deposits, of unfathomable proportions, held up in the air for unknowable purposes, and across at vast plateaus of tiled pavements sliding over and into each other.

This is a surreal play on the city, a magical story about space which was somehow never meant to come real: each cliff of sandblasted concrete is a chapter about some monstrous character with a bizarre but tender tale, and each passageway that leads nowhere has a secret world to which it leads, if only one would know the three secret words.

It is all mystifying sophistry, abstruse ramblings rendered into a concrete world that somehow, through some series of unbelievably fortuitous events, no doubt as strange as the place they resulted in, was created in a city that demands its every inch to fulfil a practical purpose. Somehow, in this great city of emphatic clarity and clear purpose, lies an abundant and vast grotto of equivocal ambiguities, and imaginative digressions.

Artist: Ilona Dorota Sagar

Narrator: Joel Sams

Dancers: Georgina Hay, Aneta Hymka, Elizabeth Streeter, Elaine Thomas

The piece will be on show at the "Architectural Playgrounds" Exhibition, at the Ron Arad Retrospective, Barbican Galleries.

The Piled-Up Exoticism of Flaubert's Carthage

2009-11-05T17:07:00.000Z

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

2009-10-25T09:20:00.000Z

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

2009-10-11T18:49:00.000+01:00

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.

More After The Break...

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.

2009-10-05T21:38:00.000+01:00

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

2009-09-14T07:31:00.000+01:00

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

2009-09-05T11:43:00.000+01:00

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.”