Art as a Spatial Practice.
Space folds : Containing "Spatialities around historicality and sociality"
"All that is solid melts into air"
Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels,
(Poetic observation concerning the constant revolutionizing of social conditions)
Perceptions now gathering at the end of the millennium. Spatiality, Robert T. Tally Jr. 2013
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BOUNDARIES AND JUNCTION POINTS
Lefebvre, The Production of Space.
Lefebvre in his chapter on Spatial Architectonics makes reference to the relationships established by boundaries and the relationship between boundaries and named places. These relationships promote significant and specific conditions or features to a space. This in turn results in various kinds of space. Lefebvre states that “every social space, then, once duly demarcated and oriented, implies a superimposition of certain relations upon networks of named places.”1
It is this superimposition of space that can within it demarcate other thresholds of experiences, within an existing demarcated space that interests me.
The act of “blocking in“ the dimensions of another space onto the floor of another create a temporal junction between a host space and a site within this host, a guest. This sets-up the notion of a temporal double occupancy held by the demarcation of a boundary and a site of proposal. This basic and temporal site marking could be said to have affinity towards some sort of anthropological marking, a territory. (Lefebvre defines anthropological marking as being at the stage when demarcation and orientation begin to create place and its social reality in archaic cultures)2. This activity also has associations with nomadic and agricultural-pastoral societies as they use paths and routes as spatio temporal markers or determinants.
Lefebvre acknowledges that geographical space created through the body, through routes which were inscribed by means of simple linear markings. These first markings, paths and tracks drawn into the landscape would become the pores through “which without colliding would produce the establishment of places (localities made special for one reason or another).”3Within my practice drawing is used to form sites which contain visual information, evidence of temporal activities and traces of actual objects. These territories within other territories create fields from with boundaries form material relations, differences. My drawings are inside the temporality of site I have instigated and yet they propose a territory and a surface of light years which could accommodate the temporality of terrestrial space.
Interestingly Lefebvre comments “there is no stage at which ’’man” does not demarcate, beacon or sign his space, leaving traces that are both symbolic and practical.”4
1 Lefebvre, The Production of Space, (London: Blackwell, 1991) page 193.
2 Ibid.,page 192.
3 Ibid.,page 192.
4 Ibid.,page 192.
SENSORY THEATRE
EX MACHINA, Robert Lepage
While Legage continues to pioneer the use of technology, his work is imbued with an intimacy and humanity that few can match. Edinburgh festival 2015
ABBATOIR FERME, Jan Fabre (Troubleyn, Performing Arts)
A SOMATIC ARCHIVE, of subjectivities whose perceptions and environments are going to change forever; like the particularities of the analogue trace in photography that is now becoming a distant experiential condition, an orphan extinct from the subjectivities of its originating culture/organism.
The Waverley Inquiry
A Theoretical and Somantic search amongst Ruins and Archetypes Historical Perspectives
Dwelling/Poetics Heidegger Archetypes/Symbols Jung
Flesh and Stone, Richard Sennett
Flesh and The Logic of Sensation, Deleuze/Bacon Contemporary Spatial Practices
Feminist Geographies The Posthuman
Posthuman thought inscribes the contemporary subject in the conditions of its own historicity.
Posthuman Subjectivity ,Rosi Braidotti LIGHT into SOMANTIC SPACES
Continuum and Chora (light and the shadow of chora)
Life expresses itself in a multiplicity of empirical act: there is nothing to say, but everything to do. Life, simply by being life, expresses itself by actualiizing flows of energies, through codes of vital information across complex somatic, cultural and technologically networked systems. (Braidotti, 2013:190)
De Architectura, Vitruvius
Architecture consists of order, arrangement, proportion or eurythmy, symmetry and decor, and distribution.
Arrangement as an “Idea” refers to the Aristotelian notion of “Image representation” as phaantasia a precondition to drawing, effectively occupying and revealing a space between being and becoming.
Contents List from a folder in the Theatre of Research Chora Body and Building
Space as Membrane
Chora (Exhibition) 1999
Lessons of a dream. Karsten Harries Concrete Blonde: Joanna Merwood
A probe into the negative spaces where mysteries are created. Surrealist Paris : Dagmar Motycka Watson
The non-perspectival space of the lived city Body and Building : George Dodds
Essays on the changing relation of body and architecture. Sphere and Cross : Karsten Harries
Vitruvian refections on the Pantheon Type Body and Building : Marcia f. Feuerstein
Inside the Bauhaus’s Darker Side
Desiring Landscapes/Landscapes of Desire. George Dodds A Tradition of Architectural Figures: Marco Frascari Interwining Metamorphoses : Germano Celant
On the work of Guiseppe Penone Space as a Membrane : Siegried Ebeling
Unlike a Library the Theatre of Research is a working space that creates and crafts both theoretical and practical objects, things and documentation. Its reason for being is to explore the praxis for creative narratives between the Arts and The Humanities. It attempts through performance, fine art and architecture to collage qualitative and diffractive dialogues into new relational discourses, the results of which become exhibited or staged as open workshops engendering praxis, publication and production. In its fledgling state it is seen as being part of a University faculty that has interests in the Arts and The Humanities. The possible linking with other establishments could be investigated. The working space becomes operational as a studio or laboratory that is engaged with full-time research led activities . Separate yet collaborative spaces and activities promote an environment for inquiry and personal development. The Theatre for research becomes a space that allows for the Post Production of ideas into new forms of social interaction. The theoretical merging with the practical into a relational narrative or methodology that enriches the practices of others, forming both new creative environments that can contain innovative ecologies that can question global perspectives.
INDEX OF IMMATERIAL ARCHITECTURES Jonathan Hill 2006
The Psychoanalysis of Fire. Gaston Bachelard 1964 (1938)
AIR
NATURAL FORCES
The Architecture of the Air (blurs the boundaries of architecture and nature) Loose spatial orders suggesting a fluidity of space, matter and use.
The experience of space was not a passive activity, nor was it considered to be pre dominantly retinal. Klein defines his subject matter ‘space’ as sensual, spiritual and an immaterial expanse in which the body is active and immersed; he sought to engage all the senses and to liberate the mind, body and imagination.
Quixotic Gestures that capture the experience and the engagement with natural forces. Klein’s architectural focuses on imprecise boundaries and inconsistent materials in active dialogue with the user.
Space through dialogue/movement defines the user
Most buildings make a clear distinction between the unpredictable natural forces outside and the predictable domestic spaces inside.
The Fireplace is unusual, therefore in that it is a natural force contained within the building.
The fireplace is also paradoxical in that if uncontrolled it threatens destruction of the home.
Evolving Atmospheres, Not Models
Architecture is the affect and its phenomena gained from the experience of the constructed form.
Architecture is a sensorial response to definitions of spatial arrangements. Architectures and their interiors can be infinitely re-imagined through interventions that might not noticeably alter their external appearance.
Materials and Place. The Secular Retreat. Zumthor and Heidegger.
Peter Zumthor acknowledges his knowledge and affinity with Heidegger’s writings, see Peter Zumthor, Buildings and Projects 1998,( Sharr,2007:91) In particular his Vais Spa is of particular note for the way in which Zumthor has created ‘evocative sequences of spaces’ within ‘its exquisite construction details’. (Sharr,2009:92)
‘Zumthor mirror’s Heidegger’s celebration of experience and emotion as measuring tools; he also emphasises sensory aspects of architectural experience. He notes that the physicality of materials can involve an individual with the world, evoking experiences and texturing horizons of place through memory.’ (Sharr,2009:92)
The measurement of a house through things that have sensual qualities, creating a memory of place, and its evocative measurement that can be choreographed through selective materials.
‘Flamed and polished stone, chrome, brass, leather and velvet are all deployed with care to enhance the inhabitant’s sense of embodiment when clothed or naked. The touch, smell and perhaps even taste, of these materials were orchestrated obsessively. The theatricality of steaming and bubbling water was enhanced by natural and artificial lighting, with murky darkness composed as intensely as light. Materials were crafted and joined to enhance or suppress their apparent mass. Their sensory potential was relentlessly exploited. With these tactics, Zumthor aimed to celebrate the liturgy of bathing by evoking emotions.’ (Shan,2009:95)
Zumthor comments about his architecture for the Spa at Vais.
‘In the bath there is a bit of a mythological sense of place, there are bits of theatricality, even the mahogany in the changing rooms looks a bit sexy, like on an ocean liner or a little bit like a brothel. They are where you change from your ordinary clothes to go into this other atmosphere. The sensual quality is the most important, of course, that this architecture has these sensual qualities. (Spier,2001:17)
He is trying to configure particular theatrical and phenomenal experiences in architectural form. It is only when the qualities of these prospective places emerge, can Zumthor begin to configure and design the particulars of the buildings construction.
‘The measuring of body and mind, the navigation by intuition and judgement which Heidegger makes sense in sparks of insight, these all become ways for designing, for imagining future places on the basis of remembered feelings. He feels that this process creates the contexts with which people will experience his architecture. (Sharr,2009:95)
The Spa at Vais was conceived to appeal to sensual instincts first, and then open itself up to interpretation and analysis, the spa should be tactile, colourful, even sexy to inhabit. (Sharr,2009:96)
‘Zumthor imagines experiences of the spa to be punctuated by things which evoke memories, which represent associations. He like Heidegger conceives of human endeavour in terms of traditions; Zumthor crafts spatial representations of those traditions by locating things in what he considers to be their proper place in time and history. Heidegger was also anxious to locate his farmhouse dwellers according to rites and routines longer than a life.’ (Sharr,2009:96)
Dwelling and livelihood, rites and routines, are all authenticated and located by design; the simple, sensual, primary and elemental associations that create traditions that both Heidegger and Zumthor can subscribe to. All help to root the spa in an agrarian view of the mountains that is associated with livestock and the necessities of shelter.
Zumthor shares with Heidegger ‘a sympathy for the mystical, claiming mythological qualities for moments in the spa’, and to champion’ the immediate evidence of experience and memory over that of mathematical and statistical data. ’(Sharr,2009:96)
‘ It seems that, for Zumthor, the Vais spa achieves his design intentions by locating rituals of dwelling in place with all the Heideggerian associations of those terms. By choreographing enclosure, mass, light, materials and surfaces, Zumthor sets up conditions from which he can propose a rich layering of place perceptions, by allow people to identify places through their bathing rituals and their associative memories.’ (Sharr,2009:96)
There is perhaps for Zumthor and other Heideggerian architects ‘the suggestion that design involves the choreography of experience’. He advocates a piety of building, of trying to develop a design in a away it wants to be, ‘of configuring physical fabric around real and imagined experiences’.
Heidegger notes of Western societies and their professional architectural regulations do much to ‘obstruct proper relations between building and dwelling by promoting buildings as products or as art objects’. (Sharr,2009:98)
Genius Loci: Towards a Phenomenology of Architecture. Norberg-Schulz. Presents an opportunity for people to achieve an existential foothold in the world. Norberg-Schulz notes that inhabitation as like a layer over the architecture. In effect the architect designs, the contractor builds, and only then do the inhabitants build and dwell.
Zumthor with particular reference to his Vais project likes to perceive his architecture and the things within it as becoming associated with traditions, perhaps these become re-enacted as rich, operative histories made in and for the present.
Steven Holl shares similar working methods with Zumthor, he to is influenced by phenomenology on his thinking. He makes watercolour sketches in perspective, as a means of choreographing experience, painting itself is an intuitive act, which opens up spontaneous and unintended design possibilities.
Drawing processes and mapping that can re-imagine the spatial possibilities of architectural experiences.
The Choreography of Experience. A Manifesto.
Being attentive to atmospheres, moods and sites.
Being concerned with the social and political geometries of human gatherings.
Being participatory to architectural tactics that enable informal gatherings.
Phenomenology and Politics.
Zumthor downplays the activeness of his role in design. The architect is keen to emphasise that he works instinctively with circumstances given to him. He claims a similar modesty in forming a rapport with site and locality. He is able to give the architectural idea a piety to become what it wants to be.
Heidegger’s problematic authenticity claims and the potential consequences of his romantic provincialism became more prominent in architectural debates about the merits of his model of building and dwelling.
Therefore ‘it remains a common assumption among architects that these positions are more or less in opposition. To caricature, phenomenology (at least in its Heideggerian incarnations) champions the value of immediate human experience over scientific, measurement and professional expertise, and tends to mytholize timelessness and situatedness. Critical theory, meanwhile, prioritises the political dimensions implicit or explicit in all human activities, and is opposed to monolithic claims of authenticity. (Sharr,2009:112)
Heidegger’s thinking, including that on architecture, is easily challenged from the perspectives of critical theory. The philosopher perceived the ‘essence’ of building and dwelling in authentic attunement to being, unapologetic about the tendencies of essentialism and authenticity to exclude people. His writings display little fondness for what he saw as the human distraction of politics. (Sharr,2009:112)
Heidegger’s work on architecture and, arguably, the architectural phenomenology which claimed him as a hero, has become a zero-sum game. Whatever it gives, its associations can also take away. Many architects and commentators have turned their backs on Heidegger in consequence although a few, including Zumthor, remain unswayed. (Sharr,2009:113)
Edward Casey, The Fate of Place.
Gaston Bachelard, Poetics of Space.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception.
When I gather together the animals, arguments, molecules, suggestions, forces, interpretations, sounds, people, and images of this study, one theme emerges. The modern story of disenchantment leaves out important things, and it neglects crucial sources of ethical generosity in doing so. Without modes of enchantment, we might not have the energy and inspiration to enact ecological projects, or to contest ugly and unjust modes of commercialization, or to respond generously to humans and nonhumans that challenge our settled identities. These enchantments are already in and around us.
Jane Bennett
Be not inhospitable to strangers
lest they be angels in disguise
Jackie Leven, The Dent In The Fender And The Wheel Of Fate
David Childers, Heart In My Soul
Camouflage/Aesthetics//Spatiality : Relating the individual to the environment
Grasping the complexities involved in our negotiations with the world.
Cognitive mapping within the aesthetic domain, locating the self against the otherwise, homogenising placelessness of contemporary existence.
Contexts:
Documentation , Practice-based research , Research , Studio practice
Artforms:
Drawing , Mixed media , Photography
OPEN TEXTS.
Allow readers to have multiple interpretations, they allow for the possibility of “determinations”.
Intertextuality fundamental concept “that no text much as it might like to appear so, is original and unique in itself. Rather it is a tissue of the inevitable , and to an extent unwittingly references to and quotation from other texts.”
SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY AND REFERENCES
Edward S. Casey, The Fate of Place (Berkley: University of California Press, 1998 )
Juhani Pallasmaa, Eyes of the Skin, Architecture and the Senses (Chichester: Wiley, 2005 )
Peter Greenaway, The Physical Self (Rotterdam: Boymans-van Beuningen Museum, 1992)
Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000)
J. G. Ballard, High Rise (London: Jonathan Cape, 1967)
David Wood, The Deconstruction of Time (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2001 )
Ian Buchanan, Deleuze and Space (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2006)
Vilem Flusser, Towards a Philosophy of Photography (London: Reaktion, 2000 )
Robert Cooper, Peripheral Vision: Relationality (London: Sage Publishing, 2005)
Jonathan Murdoch, Post Structuralist Geography ( London: Sage Publishing, 2006)
Markus Miessen, Did Someone Say Participate, an atlas of Spatial Practice (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2006)
Russell Ferguson, Francis Alys, Politics of Rehearsal (Los Angeles: Hammer Museum, 2008)
Elizabeth Grosz, Space, Time, and Perversion (London: Routledge, 1996)
Tracey Wan, The Artists Body (London: Phaidon Press, 2000)
Francois Dagonet, Etienne-jules Marey: a passion for the trace ( New York: Zonebooks, 1992 )
Colin Rowe, Transparency ( Basel: Birkhauser, 1997)
Avis Newman, The Stage of Drawing, Gesture and Act (London: The Tate Drawing Centre, 2001)
Giuseppe Penone, The Eroded Steps (Halifax: HMST, 1989)
Glen Onwin, The Recovery of dissolved substances ( Halifax: HMST, 1992)
Carolyn Bakargiev, Arte Povera (London: Phaiden Press, 2003)
David Green, Stillness and Time, Photography and the moving image ( Brighton: Photoworks, 2006)
Catherine Lupton, Chris Marker, memories of the future (London: Reaktion, 2004 )
Martin Amis, Times Arrow (London: Jonathan Cape, 1991)
Yve Lomax, Sounding the Event: escapades in the dialogue and matters of art, nature and time (London: I. B. Tauris, 2005 )
John Wood, The Virtual Embodied, presence, practice, technology (London: Routledge, 1998)
Lucy Bullivant, Responsive Environments, Architecture Art and Design { London: V&A, 2005)
Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space (Boston: Beacon Press, 1994)
Italo Calvino, Six Memos for the next millennium (London: Jonathan Cape, 1992)
Douwe Draaisma Metaphors of Memory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000)
Paul St George, Sequences: Contemporary chronophotography and experimental digital art ( London: Wallflower, 2008)
Hans Christian von Baeyer Information, The new language of Science (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2003)
Andrey Tarkovsky, Sculpting in Time (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1986)
Susan Broadhurst, Liminal Acts ,a critical review of contemporary performance and theory ( London: Cassell, 1999)
Eduardo Cadava, Words of Light (New Jersey: Princetown University Press, 1997)
Giuliana Bruno, Public Intimacy ( London: MIT press, 2007 )
Jeanette Winterson, Written on the body (London: Jonathan Cape, 1992)
Jane Rendell, Art and Architecture, a place between (London: I. B. Tauris, 2006 )
Thierry de Duve, The Definitively unfinished Marcel Duchamp ( Cambridge, mass: MIT Press, 1991 )
Always fascinated by the “return shelves” in a library, its like a barometer of specific activity, it holds within it occurrences and possibilities that are un-calculable to predict It concurs traits of other events/projects happening outside, it reflects those items of the libraries resource have been selected and those not. It is perhaps the curiosity, the reading between what is presented that prompts speculation and ultimately one forms/registers a subjectivity and an opinion based around ones own particular space of time. These shelves “sample” my potentialities amid a on-going field of relations of which I am part as my “returns” configure a new abstraction of data.
RESEARCH METHODOLOGIES:
Fluctuating networks of existential events.
Emergent state of continguences that create materials for relationality.
TRANSPARENCY: LITERAL AND PHENOMENAL. COLIN ROWE AND ROBERT SLUTZKY.
Space-time, simultaneity, interpenetration, superimposition, ambivalence. Transparency has a material condition that is pervious to light and air. Together with an “intellectual imperative” this has an “inherent demand for that which should de easily detected, perfectly evident, and free from dissimulation.”1 Transparency allows things to interpenetrate. Things can become masked and ambivalent by this superimposition but the things themselves remain authentic and unabridged.
Transparency can grant us a “simultaneous perception of different spatial locations.” These values of being able to interpenetrate simultaneously and thus create a potential threshold that is in a state of in-betweeness.
Transparency by its very nature confronts us with the contradiction of spatial dimensions. Contradictions that might require the physicality of the body to authenticate. There are also Contradictions centred on a linguistic transparency.
Transparency could become a site or form of temporal phenomena, granting some sort of deconstruction when viewed as a simultaneous multiplicity.
The interesting proprieties of transparency is its ability to have the quality of a substance ( glass, plastics, film, water) together with qualities we ascribe to it when we use it in the context of organisational systems. It is this literal and phenomenal spatiality that is infinitely relational. This relation allows us to invest transparency with a literal depth so as we can assume the phenomenal substance beyond it.
This sense of a spatial transparency is exploited as a filmic phenomenon, film directors by moving in and out of the framic reference of the camera, create within the mind of the viewer an illusion of a spatiality that is both transparent and virtual.
The use of transparency as a device to aid the spatial organisation of place in architecture is under investigation. Notions that “worksites” could be “assigned directional systems” which could help to engender relations of human enterprise and encounter.
The organizational transparency of the figure ground relation in architectural mapping creates a differentiation to the integral ordering of space. This opens up the possibilities of investigative ideas around poche (a drawing method showing material structure and space in relation to each other) poche is related to transparency by precise inversion (material and space).
Transparency can be used as a method of creating multiplicities through the device of superimposition.In so doing it creates surfaces that have mutuality by the nature of being able to be visually overwritten.
1.Colin Rowe and Robert Slutzky, Transparency: Literal and Phenomenal (Berlin: Birkhauser Basel, 1998),page 22.
ALLEGORY, MONTAGE AND DIALECTICAL IMAGE, JANE RENDELL.
This chapter, in Jane Rendell’s Art and Architecture, A Place Between, offers a number of possibilities for the interpretation of my current investigative research. In particular, her analysis of Walter Benjamin’s discussion on the temporal aspects of allegorical and montage techniques in works of art.1
Rendell cites Benjamin’s The Origin of German Tragic Drama,2 as having a particular form of a baroque theatre, where the temporal, and the corporeal body, meet the transcendental. Within the structure of these there plays a sadness of life represented as a “nature petrified in the form of fragments of death.”3
This notion of using objects as allegorical devices within the duration and place of an event, interests me.
This allegorical device within “Place” is further elaborated by Benjamin himself when he remarks, “allegories are, in the realm of thoughts, what ruins are in the realm of things”.4
This relationship with time and allegory could be performative and immersive. Benjamin notes baroque allegory to be “an appreciation of the transience of things, as well as an expression of sadness over the futility of attempting to save for eternity those things that are transient.”5 This expression could be rendered as a work of art. Joseph Beuys has used the device of vitrines that suggest the collection of relics from a museum. His work Sweeping Up 1972/85 is a vitrine containing contents originated from an “action” performed by Beuys. In this work the contents were collected after a political parade in Berlin. This work, on view in Tate Modem, has a sensibility of indexical residues suffused with almost alchemeric properties. The notion of a vitrine being able to carry a visual joke or pun is perhaps Duchampian. Peter Greenaway’s curated exhibition, The Physical Self6 explores these notions further, through static displays of both objects and human bodies presented in the context of a museum. Greenaway has in effect, attempted to use a museum setting to amplify the sense of retrospectective contemplation of our own temporality.
Rendell remarks on Benjamin’s interest in the dialectical image, explained as an image whose “moment where the past is recognized in the present as a ruin that was once desired.”7 The interesting thing is that Benjamin’s dialectical image is an “attempt to capture dialectical contradiction in an instant, as a visual image or object.”8 It is this dialectical threshold the “point at which thesis and antithesis converged”9 that could be utilized as a physical possibility (intervention) within a place. The clarification of ideas through interactions and contradictions through a performative exploration with an immersion with site might be made to occur. The uses, as noted by Rendell, of montage and Dadaist artwork in film, was admired by Benjamin for its shock tactics and are also associative with the notion of interventions whose purpose is to “interrupt the context into which it is inserted.”10 This idea of an intervention, could work as an emergent phenomena that sets up a sense of temporal dynamics in a location or place.
A number of contemporary artists have used a wide range of physical interventions with their particular dialogues with place. Jane Prophets, Conductor 2000 was a site specific response to Wapping Hydraulic Pumping station. Prophet utilized water and electro luminescent cables in her installation. Glen Onwins, As Above So Below 1991, was again a site specific intervention, utilizing black and white dyed brine, gypsum and coal with green light, all installed at Square Chapel, Halifax. Graham Gussin, Spill 1999, was a filmic work of a situation in which a disused commercial building was infiltrated by “fog” (dry ice).
The architect Rem Koolhaas has used an intervention device in the initial design, which produces an architectural structure that is inherently “weak”, then requiring a major structural intervention to be made to stabilize the building. This in turn re-scripts the building through chance and change and produces innovative and creative possibilities through contingences now made apparent.
To bring about some sense of conclusion regarding Benjamin’s dialectical image or rather its device of using “dialectics at a standstill” that create an intervention of retrospective contemplation, is Jane Rendell’s suggestion, taken from Howard Caygill, that Benjamin’s writing was part of the “speculative effort to discover and invent new forms.”11 This speculative nature promotes “moments where the viewer is required to act as critic and to engage in a slower time.”12 The interlocutor into a site could be said to be given the dialectical task of synthesizing/theorizing what has been “present”, with what has become emergent with their own encounter .This notion of both site specificity and open text is of interest.
Further potentials within “place” for an immersive engagement that might foster an “open reading”. This scripting of ones presence as an interlocutor amongst others could create a performative gesture. Like a drawing whose informative mark is just a starting point amongst others unknowable until the intimacy of the unfamiliar is breached, so the “place “ is inscribed or known by its initial un-familiarity.
1 .Jane Rendell, Art and Architecture: A place Between (London: I. B. Tauris,2006), page75.
2 .Benjamin, Origin of German Tragic Drama, translated by John Osborne (London: Verso, 1977).
3 .Ibid., page 178.
4 .Ibid., page 178.
5 .Benjamin, Origin of German Tragic Drama, translated by John Osborne (London: Verso, 1977),page223.
6 .Peter Greenaway, The Physical Self (Rotterdam: Museum Boymans-van Beuningen,1992).
7 .Jane Rendell, Art and Architecture: A Place Between, (London: I. B. Tauris,2006), page 77.
8 .Ibid., page 77.
9 .Ibid., page 77.
l0 .Jane Rendell, Art and Architecture: A Place Between (London: I. B. Tauris, 2006),page 78.
11 .Howard Caygill, The Colour of Experience (London: Routledge, 1998),page74-75.
12 .Jane Rendell, Art and Architecture: A Place Between (London: I. B. Tauris, 2006), pagel43.
Mise-en abyme “Play within a Play”
“A play within a play alludes to and explicates the plot of a larger play within which it is staged"
THE PHYSICAL SELF: PETER GREENAWAY,
MUSEUM BOYMANS-VAN BEUNINGEN ROTTERDAM.
Peter Greenaway’s work interests me with its playful and investigative attitudes to the visualization of dialogues around what he himself calls “the physical human predicament.”
His exhibition is centred on the interactions on the issue of “the physical human predicament” and the available “contents” of the place of its presentation. The situation and contents of the display of historical artefacts and naked human beings in glass cases are relational attempts to illustrate Greenaway’s sense of the dissimilarities between objects and human existence.
This work touches the territory of the allegorical. Walter Benjamin has said of the allegorical “allegories are, in the realm of thoughts, what ruins are in the realm of things.”1 This relation is embodied by the physical display of living human beings being firstly dislocated/annexed and then displayed as “an equivalent”, along side with that of the artefacts objectivity.
This shared proximity prompts, as does allegory notions of the transcendental, as to what of “the human”, remains from this objectivity. This presentation is not so dissimilar from a theatrical showcase, with elements of “baroque theatre” and objects from a personal taxonomy drawn mostly with haptic associations. Artefacts could be said to be “orphans” taken out of the ruins of place.
The museum becomes their adopted orphanage, a repositoiy, where they can be viewed scrutinized. Greenaway makes this comment about the inclusion of the human, “to put an unclothed body in a glass case, to load it with the expectations and connotations of a museum object, to be deliberately contemplated, is to make particular demands on a viewer to look and see, compare and adjudicate the sensitivities of the physical self.”2
MOTHER AND CHILD
AGE
MAN AND WOMAN
MAN
WOMAN
TOUCH
FEET
HANDS
NARCISSISM
1 Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, translated by John Osborne (London: Verso, 1977), page 178.
2 Peter Greenaway, The Physical Self (Rotterdam: Museum Boymans-van Beuingen, 1992), page 13.
The Poetics of Space : The house, from cellar to garret.
The significance of the hut.
