Tarkovsky uses to four pre Socratic elements, fire , air, water and earth, together with their various mixtures and dissolutions, smoke, rust, clay, mud, slime and dust. He also records time by its action on things its erosion, and its scars. Tarkovsky affirms ruins are buildings which have lost their function and have turned into instruments for measuring time.
Ruins have a special hold on our emotions because they challenge us to imagine their forgotten faith.
The architecture of illusion, of securities built by the imagination and memories.
A city is composed of different kinds of men, similar people cannot bring a city into existence.
Aristotle, The Politics.
Flesh and Stone : The Body and the City in Western Civilization. Richard Sennett.
Heidegger's Topology : Being, Place, World. Jeff Malpas.
RUINS : Documents of Contemporary Art. Brian Dillon.
J. G. Ballard : A Handful of Dust. 2006.
Tacita Dean : Sound Mirrors. 1999.
The Memory Of Place : A Phenomenology Of The Uncanny. Dylan Trigg.
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ROLAND BARTHES MYTHICAL SPEECH, LANGUAGE-OBJECT:
PLINY THE ELDER: NATURAL HISTORY, translation H. Rackham 1952. BOOK 35
Origins of Painting (XXXV, 5).
The question as to the origin of the art of painting is uncertain and it does not belong to the plan of this work. The Egyptians declare that it was invented among themselves six thousand years ago before it passed over into Greece—which is clearly an idle assertion. As to the Greeks, some of them say it was discovered at Sicyon, others in Corinth, but all agree that it began with tracing an outline round a man s shadow and consequently that pictures were originally done in this way, but the second stage when a more elaborate method had been invented was done in a single colour and called monochrome, a method still in use at the present day.
Plastic art. Early stages. Butades and others. (XXXV, 43).
Enough and more has now been said about painting. It may be suitable to append to these remarks something about the plastic art. It was through the service of that same earth that modelling portraits from clay was first invented by Butades, a potter of Sicyon, at Corinth. He did this owing to his daughter, who was in love with a young man; and she, when he was going abroad, drew in outline on the wall the shadow of his face thrown by a lamp. Her father pressed clay on this and made a relief, which he hardened by exposure to fire with the rest of his pottery; and it is said that this likeness was preserved in the Shrine of the Nymphs until the destruction of Corinth by Mummius.
Roland Barthes states in his text titled Myth Today in Mythologies that “myth is a system of communication that is a message.” And that it “allows one to perceive that myth cannot possibly be an object, a concept, or an idea.1” Put simply it is as Barthes confirms” a mode of signification, a form.” The interesting thing about myths is the fact that this “mode of signification” is then assigned to a form. It is onto this form that further conditions are then placed and the form then becomes loaded with historical values, and conditions of use that will reintroduce it back into society.
Barthes acknowledges that “mythology can only have a historical foundation, for myth is a type of speech chosen by history: it cannot possibly evolve from the “nature” of things.2” Myths therefore have particular qualities as Barthes assigns them as being created from a “semiological chain which existed before it.” Their historical situation is such that it forms their first contextual space which is simultaneously placed in the present. This creates a sense of a portal or window into a mythological space of reflection, whilst at the same time acknowledging our immediate surroundings. The myth appears like a projection from these historical origins and has the ability to illuminating itself and the moment into a contemporary mythical experience. Barthes illustrates the myths ability to attach itself to any material that can arbitrarily become endowed with significance by stating.
It can consist of modes of writing or of representations; not only written Or representations; not only written discourse, but also photography, Cinema, reporting, sport, shows, publicity, all these can serve as a support To mythical speech. Myth can be defined neither by its object nor by its Material.3
Barthes denotes myths as having three components, the signifier, the signified, and the sign. Myth having been created by used materials has “a second-order semiological system.” Barthes clarifies this by stating” that which is a sign (namely the associative total of a concept and an image) in the first system (signifier and signified becomes sign) becomes a mere signifier in the second.4” The raw materials that make up mythical speech, its very language, rituals and objects are all “reduced to a pure signifying function as soon as they are caught by myth.5” The myths ability is that it is able to project language as an language-object that can be reconstituted by our contemporary sensibilities into mythical language .
Barthes again notes that the important issue here is that myth wants to see these “raw materials” only as “a sum of signs, a global sign, and the final term of a first semiological chain. “ Barthes further states that it is this “final term” that will become the “first term of a greater system.” Myth is stationed in a historical situation yet their reappropriated content is able to be projected into the anthropological situation that surrounds us. Barthes recognizes that “myth shifts the formal system of the first significations sideways.” It is this almost lateral shift that gives myths their complexities within what appear to be concise simplifications. They appear to be able to just inhabit the very surface of things, creating associations that can arise almost indiscriminately.
Barthes states that myths are derived from a speech chosen by history. Mythical speech appears both like a notification and like a statement of fact. Barthes quotes “Mythical speech is made of a material which has already been worked on so as to make it suitable for communication: it is because all the materials of myth presuppose a signifying consciousness, which one can reason about them while discounting their substance.6”
Myth has something of an imperative message woven around its character which can exist in any space or time; it also has an inherent contingency that allows its message expediency. This notion that myths exist on a material that presupposes a signifying consciousness gives them their complexities when we re-examine the material which the myth adheres to.
Barthes philosophical perceptions surrounding myths could seem to have an affinity with the notion of the photographic negative. Both share a sense of a historical situation, onto which other signs of signification can be placed on their representation. They both have the ability of projection or rather the ability to be used to project language-object narratives. All of which makes them synonymous with bringing the past into the present. Myths and negatives seem to surround their reinterpretation with a feeling that they are auguries brought from another time to confirm or question values. Strangely the projected values of the negative have something of a mythical resonance, the evidence however of the negatives materiality a known origin casts exactitude of death. Myths don’t have and don’t require this witnessing origin. The notion of a photographic projection that marks a material surface in the situation of an installation is perhaps as far as photography can aspire to the sense of myth.
Barthes in Camera Lucida comments on what he terms “flat death” whilst contemplating pictures of his mother shortly after her death.
The horror is this: nothing to say about the death of one whom I love Most, nothing to say about her photograph, which I contemplate with out ever being able to get to the heart of it, to transform it. The only “thought” I can have is that at the end of this first death, my own death is inscribed; between the two, nothing more than waiting; I have no other resource than this irony, to speak of the “nothing to say.7”
Barthes comment on his inability to transform the exactitude of his mother’s image with its sense of “an asymbolic death” perhaps illustrates the differences between the mythic language and photography? Does the exactitude in the representation of the photographic image petrify and simultaneously create an imperious sign of a future death? The mythical sense of some semblance left in some old photographs seems to be in fact, that some mythical language has not been totally terminated by the exactitude and witness of the photographic process. Myths on the other hand as noted by Italo Calvino in Six Memos for the New Millennium, possess “concise exactitudes of details yet creative reception in their telling.” This “creative reception in their telling” is what sets them far apart from the petrifying gaze of photography, they are in fact more gesture and act, and myths are re-drawn as living experiences. This further quote by Calvino sums up the magical quality inherent in mythological language.
I know that any interpretation impoverishes the myth and suffocates it. With Myths one should not be in a hurry. It is better to let them settle into the memory, to stop and dwell on every detail, to reflect on the without losing Touch with their language of images. The lesson we learn from a myth lies in the literal narrative, not in what we add to it from the outside.8
1 .Roland Barthes, Myth Today, A Roland Barthes Reader (Reading: Vintage, 1993), page 93.
2 .Ibid., page 94.
3 .Ibid., page 94.
4 .Ibid., page 99.
5 .Ibid., page 99.
6 .Ibid., page 95.
7 .Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida (Reading: Vintage, 2000), page 93.
8 .Italo Calvino, Six Memos for the Next Millennium (London: Jonathan Cape, 1992), page 4.
Moreton, Russell. The Daughter of Butades. Winchester School of Art 2008
Susan Sontag, on photography
Photographs are, of course, artefacts. But their appeal is that they also seem, in a world littered with photographic relics, to have the status of found objects, unpremeditated slices of the world. Thus, they trade simultaneously on the prestige of art and the magic of the real. There are clouds of fantasy and pellets of information.
Susan Sontag examines photography’s relationship to art via conscience and knowledge. Her analysis done before the advent of digital photography embraces the notion of the negative, the witnessing document. The picture may be distorted but there is always a presumption that something exists or did exist.
Her probing phenomenology into photographic practice and the way it influences our perceptions are based on monochromatic film images. She reads the photographic image as an image taken from reality, but recognizes the attitude and sensibilities of the photographer, in the portrayal of that reality. She recognizes the camera’s ability to democratize all experiences, by translating them into images. She recognizes that photographers are haunted by tacit imperatives of both taste and conscience. They produce undiscriminating, promiscuous and self-effacing interpretations of the world.
Sontag recognizes the aggression of the photographers capture, and its ability to subvert by freezing time segments and replaying them dislocated from their original experience. Sontag also notes that taking photographs has setup a chronic voyeuristic relationship to the world, which levels the meanings of all events through the camera.
Photographs can also refuse experience simply by the limited nature of looking for the photogenic image. The camera has become a compelling interface between ourselves and what we encounter.
To take a picture is to have an interest in things as they are in the status quo remaining unchanged. It is to be in complicity with what makes a subject interesting.
The camera records subjects considered disreputable, taboo and marginal. Sontag notes Times relentless passage and photographs as a pause of evidence, Together with the camera’s ability to turn people into objects that can be symbolically possessed.
She recognizes the inherent pathos in .objects being photographed, and the compulsion to take photographs. Sontag realizes the photographic recycling of reality, acceptable as a daily activity in our consumer society.
Photographs do not explain themselves, they just acknowledge.
A photographic contemplation dislocated from its original moment of reality, and as such allows thought not tied by cause and effect of that moment.
Tarkovsky, Sculpting in time/The architecture of the image
The architecture of image explores both architecture and cinema through the notion of existential. Cinema projects experientially images true to life, whereas architecture attempts to frame both human existence and the human condition as it inhabits space. The poetics of image Andrei Tarkovsky illustrates this director’s ability to use architectural settings to evoke and maintain a specific mental state in the viewer. They illustrate the poetic potential of space and light. Tarkovsky is able through images of space matter light and time to evoke the experience of being reflected by the metaphysical nature of the poetic situation. Tarkovsky emphasizes the importance of the singularity of experience, because of this perhaps his images resist interpretation, a sort of poetic riddle to distance them from any conventional reading, yet maintain their sense of flight. His images derive from a sense of a poetic logic/filmic phenomenology interwoven into a situation out of equilibrium.
He creates a constellation of associations and possible meanings and utilizes space for emotional impact. There is a sense of imprinting, acknowledging the unseen space, he achieves this by giving the viewer a sense of spatial awareness of the situation not of visual realization, and he creates a mental sensation of the environment.
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