The Aesthetics of Garbage & Venetian Mirrors

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"

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

P170

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

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

Breaches, and Other Places

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

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

More After The Break...

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

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


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

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

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

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

Illustration of Mlle de Maupin by Aubrey Beardsley

Instead Gautier took the potentials embedded within the thrill that is elicited by a woman successfully occupying the role of a man, potentials which up until then had lain dormant, hidden behind the scandalous excitement and/or moral opprobrium surrounding the tale, and drew them out, unrolling each of them, giving them body through the unique structure, the independent voices, the confused desires, and almost unbearable atmospheres of the book.

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

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

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

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

Page 3

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

Page 20

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

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

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

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

P21

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

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

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

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

P23

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

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

P24

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

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

Extracts From Cezanne-Picasso Exhibition

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

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

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

Picasso said to Francoise Gilot

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

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

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

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Michael Callant

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

Adam Nathaniel Furman

Cildo Meireles -a Brazilian artist- recently had a retrospective at the Tate, in which there was an installation exhibited that consisted of a space created out of a range of boundary objects that we traditionally use to divide space up into demarcated zones that relate to an individual, activity, or group, these objects being banal units of separation ranging from wooden fences to metal grilles, bead walls, plastic shower curtains, railings and perforated walls, all united by the fact that their physical disposition would not allow you to pass over them, but would allow you to see through them: indeed the exhibit was called “Through”.
More After The Break...

Bad Taste: Applied, Reflexive and Camp

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Extracts from "Relational Aesthetics" by Nicolas Bourriaud

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Text Written For "Text Fields" installation "TF002"

Text Fields SITE

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

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

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

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

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

Next step TF003