The Waverley Project~Remaining~In~Play : Working Notes/Collages : Exploratory Project MA Interior Design

SPACE~SITE~INTERVENTION Through Performative Archaeological Methods.

A space has been created, allowing for a different construction of what may be significant in these circumstances, relative to objects found in association with each other. (Robert Williams, Disjecta Reliquiae The Tate Thames Dig)

Associations and coincidences that become meaningful (or are unearthed) within the context of the activity.

Erika Suderburg. On Installation and Site Specificity

The Waverley Project 2014, UCA  Farnham, Interior Design MA. 

Reading Apparatus 270926

The ceramic bodies have not arrived to resolve these earlier questions. They have arrived as another access point.

This earlier investigation into Waverley begins with a site, but quickly becomes something less fixed: a gathering of ruins, landscape, architecture, memory, images, books, pathways, interiors and imagined encounters.

The site becomes a palimpsest.

The ruin becomes an interior.

The interior becomes a proposition.

What was being gathered here was not yet ceramic, but the conditions through which a ceramic body might later begin to think.

Walking, archaeology, drawing, collage, architecture and reading become ways of entering the site without resolving it. The Reading Room appears as an ephemeral interior within the ruin; images and fragments begin to construct other possible spaces; the landscape becomes something to be read through movement and encounter.

Perhaps these working notes remain unfinished precisely because they were never meant to arrive at a finished architecture.

They remain~in~play.

And somewhere within that unfinished field, the ceramic bodies have yet to arrive.

spatial practice, spatial site~practice, architecture, interiority, landscape, ruins, palimpsest, walking, making, drawing, collage, image~body, reading, site-specificity, phenomenology, atmosphere, memory, gathering, architecture~image, Reading Room, Hortus Conclusus, Waverley Project, speculative learning, spatial correspondence,

THE WAVERLEY PROJECT, methodologies in the making.

This research and its design proposal are centred on the arts and the humanities and their ongoing function in our contemporary society. The emphasis of this inquiry is located by the spatial practices of architecture, fine art and performance. My project is a field event and symposium that would be able to host intellectual dialogues, lectures (TED) workshops, performative events and exhibitions. I am particularly interested the relational production of social spaces and the aesthetics of builtspaces, both historical and ephemeral. The proposed use of Waverley Abbey near Famham as a possible site and retreat for this venture is valid as it links a possible interdisciplinary territory of anthropology, archaeology, art and architecture. Tim Ingold (Making) Colin Renfrew (Figuring it Out) and others have for many years been researching and mapping this new spatiality.

What remains of Waverley Abbey and its sense of place are critical to the holistic and contemporary underpinning of this experiential event. Founded in 1128 it was the first Cistercian Abbey to be built in England. It is recorded that Cistercian life was initially based on manual labour and self-sufficiency, this was further supplemented by other activities like agriculture and brewing that enabled the abbey to support itself. Later over the centuries education and academia began to dominate the concerns of the abbey. The abbey was suppressed with its dissolution in 1536, although records show its activities were already at this time substantially diminished. The ruins and their site then enter into the imaginary realm through classic literature in the novel Waverley by Scott. Further on a pictorial reference from an engraving shows the ruins now incorporated as a fashionable landscape feature within the newly built Waverley Abbey House.

On a contemporary note Waverley Abbey has featured in a number of films ranging in genres from period costume dramas through to fantasy, together with post apocalyptic visions of dystopia. A recent film shoot required the construction of a sixty-foot tower made from internal scaffolding with a skin that recreated the adjacent ruinous fabric of this historic site.

Encountering the site is currently only manageable by foot; this short walk in the surrounding landscape sets up the sense of place and prepares our own subjectivities to its reception. It is in this expectation, this thinking in the landscape that the pastoral and educational aspects of the site become apparent. Currently access is only available through one directed pathway; a multiplicity of other access points and even other structures (bridges, earthworks and thickets) could begin to open up the spatial palimpsest already located at Waverley. What remains of the architectural fabric with its diminished interiors still grants a hospitality and refuge for both the body and the imagination. This activity opens up the experiential space of encountering ourselves through the enjoyment/entanglements of layered social space.

Waverley Abbey is a public monument in the custodian care of English Heritage. It can only be accessed by walking about a quarter of a mile from the limited parking spaces.

Waverley Site

Hortus Conclusus Sensing Spaces

Peter Zumthor, Hortus Conclusus 2011.

Directors’ Foreword: Julia Peyton-Jones, Hans Ulrich Obrist.

Zumthor’s architectural design practices consider each project in terms of a comprehensive and encompassing sensory experience. Looking at more than the physical fabric and form of the building, he often draws inspiration from memories of childhood experience. His projects aim to reference all aspects of sensory perception, addressing the relationship between the human body and the ways it may interact within the built environment. Many of Zumthor’s projects have been specifically noted for their thoughtful and evocative play on scale, colour, material and light in harmony with the buildings function and surroundings. (Peyton-Jones 2011: 9)

Using spatial practices as an inquiry into issues of “site” through architecture, art and performance.

What are the possible phenomenological assets of the site?

What remains of the interior spaces of the architecture and how much of the ruin has been submerged into the parkland setting?

How might these be explored and subsequently re-presented into the public realm?

A SITE BASED Symposium on ‘Making’ as experienced through the palimpsest of place.

Featuring the ‘Reading Room’ an ephemeral interior space, which gathers-up the experiential values of ‘Ruins’ and re-enacts them as a site to explore the architectures of images.

Library of Contents/Taxonomies Knots of Reference/Lines

Humanity, An Emotional History:

The Poetics of Space:

Architecture and Allegory:

The Psychoanalysis of Fire:

Existential Space in Cinema:

Natural History:

Sculpting in Time:

Land Drawings, Installations and Excavations:

The Physical Self:

Archaeology:

Making:

Politics of Rehearsal:

Palimpsest usage by Historians as a description, of the way people experience time. That is as a layering of present experiences over faded pasts. The production of augmented realities brought about by the melding of layers of material place with virtual representations.

Accumulated iterations of a design or site, evidence of the former use remains.

A kind of forensic science used to describe objects/things placed over one another to establish the sequence of events of an accident or crime scene.

The Concept of Palimpsest, a way of describing how generations alter the landscape.

Heidegger. Jung. Archetypes. Pottery

Architecture

Building Practices

The Everyday : The Jug.

The Dwelling Place : The Bridge Mediators for spatial experiences.

Libraries with research conduits for immersive and interactive cognitive mappings, allowing a praxis to enter the practicability of the everyday, a crafted philosophical inquiry, building new livelihoods.

Colour

Texture Surface Enclosures Voids

Sample Materials

Relationships through Localities/Mood Boards/Technical and Physical Details. Erasure  in  drawing  and  architectural  planning  (space  voids)  as  a  methodology  to superimpose multiplicities.

Erasing : Kirosan Observatory, Anti-Object, Kengo Kuma. Multiplicities and Memory, Peter Zumthor.

Learning  Spaces  as  a  performative  spatial  practice  through  a  process of tuning and minimising (Minimising, NO stage in the forest, Kego Kuma).

NAVIGATION AND CRITICALITY THE READING ROOM

ORGANISATION IN THE FIELD OF RUINS COMPONENTS, AGENTS AND ARCHIVES.

Categories of Architecture as Categories of Perception. Architecture and Nature.

Architecture as a reflecting/gathering of the phenomena of human nature/Nature.

The exhibition and research relationships around the nature of things.

The architecture provides a point of intersection between mass and its sublimation in imagery and thought, between immateriality and its reification. It allows apparent opposites to be seamlessly united - or parted again, at the whim of the weather god. (Building with Images, Herzog and De Meuron’s Library at Eberswalde)

Robin Evans. Translations from Drawing to Building

Figures, Doors and Passages

Essays and Other Texts (AA Documents 2)

The Social Condenser in Operation.

Five figures and a stature distributed evenly in its isotropic space-a picture of the socialized as opposed to the sociable.

Figures, Doors and Passages, Robin Evans. 1978 (Titled Image) Robin Evans (1944-1993) Historian of Architecture.

His writings covered a wide range of concerns such as society’s role in the evolution and development of building types, together with interests on architectural representation, aspects of geometry and modes of projection. Evans always drew on first-hand experience from direct observation to arrive at his insights. These insights ‘open up the way for alternative constructions of everyday reality-a reality, an architecture, which bears the traces, albeit invisible, of its own provisional circumstances.’(Mostafavi,Mohsen, Paradoxes of the Ordinary. 1997)

Peter Greenaway. Architecture and Allegory 

Gaston Bachelard. The Poetics of Space

The Psychoanalysis of Fire

Herzog and De Meuron. Natural History

Eberswalde Library (is both a concrete cube and a

pictorial skin)

Western Culture ‘Is a culture of blending and mixing substances until they are unrecognisable producing products fated to harden into a useless degenerative state in a dump or depot.’

Alchemy of Building using Images (Eberswalde Library).

Herzog and De Meuron have a sensitivity to irreversible, entropic processes. 

Since the 1980s Herzog and De Meuron have been actively working with an art praxis that has positively saturated some of the outer skins of their buildings with images. Herzog himself acknowledge that it is impossible for him to be able to art and architecture at the same time, and he comments that ‘there is no longer any need to express himself other than in architectural terms. ’

Beauty and Atmosphere/ Science and Art in Motion.

Dialogues of built works between sites of collection/classification and construction. Building on the threshold of tensions (human fabrications/craft and social interactions) between the material and the metaphysical, between evanescence and substance and illusion and specificity.

Much of Herzog and De Meuron’s practice has focused on museums and libraries, or represented other transformative ventures around winemaking and medicine.

Tony Fretton. The Architecture of the Unconscious Collective

Abstraction and Familiarity Buildings and Their Territories

The Lisson Gallery, London. 1991

This was a building that had more in common with the sculpture of Donald Judd and Dan Graham than with any known architectural tendency. Like that work , it is presented less as an object demanding scrutiny in its own right and rather as an instrument (Observatory, Kengo Kuma) that directs the viewers attention to their relationship with the wider world, (bdonline.co.uk, Tony Fretton’s Fuglsang Art Museum 2008/Ellis Woodman)

Library as a ‘type’ of spatial classification (architectonics) through visual vocabularies and working practices.

Derrida. GLAS

This ‘Anti-Book’ (see also Anti-Object, Kengo Kuma) stages a kind of linguistic battle between philosophy and literature as it creates playful interrogations/situations around the methodology of reading. Derrida cites and grafts from the works of Hegel and Jean Genet. The physical qualities of the book are arranged in such a way as to make it read like a collage open for subjective and subversive interpretations. Its boundaries and borders, paragraphs and spacings are constantly becoming merged as a fugitive entity. In fact GLAS has an excess of boundaries (The Postmodern) that seek to divide it up inside itself (Deconstruct). Its fragments (What Remains from its reading) offer multiple beginnings and endings (or maybe Openings and Conclusions, see Lefebvre).

Kate Whiteford. Land Drawings, Installations, Excavations (Fictional Archaeologies)

Colin Renfrew. Remote Sensing (Subtle Transpositions between media)

The whole landscape is a palimpsest of human activities: lines (See also Ingold) which experience has etched on the ageing face of the past. Landscape history. Where does history stop and art begin?

Peter Zumthor. Multiplicity and Memory

Thinking Architecture Atmospheres

Heidegger for Architects

Juhani Pallasmaa. The Eyes of The Skin

Identity, Intimacy, Domicile, the phenomenology of home. The Thinking Hand

• Russell Moreton
• visual art
• visual fine art
• spatial practice
• research creation
• ecology of experience

The Inner Room~Clay/Jug and the Primacy of Being : The Potter and The Philosopher, Coper/Heidegger.

15 March 2015

UCA Farnham.

Working Notes. Visuals and Text

Extracts from Waverley Project/Research Folder, MA Interior Design.

Clay and the Primacy of Being

The Potter and The Philosopher

Innerness and Defined Space

Manifesting the everyday crafts of life in a physical form.

Ceramic Assemblage : White Spaces/The Patina of Objects.

The Potter ( Hans Coper) and the Philosopher (Martin Heidegger),

Throwing, Building, Dwelling, Thinking.

Brian Clarke, Stained Glass, Sainsbury Centre.

The innerness of a ceramic vessel can be seen to be dealing with presences and absences, as like that of a building it can demonstrate the presence of its making and the absence of that same presence.

The Philosopher. Martin Heidegger.

Building Dwelling Thinking. 1951

Heidegger “resolutely romanticised the rural and the low-tech before, during and after Nazism, skating dangerously close to fascist rhetoric of blood and soil.”¹

Architecture can help to centre people in the world; it can offer individuals places from which to inquire for themselves. Heidegger felt that this was how architecture had been understood in the past, and that the insatiable rise of technology had obscured that understanding.

Heidegger interested on centring his qualities of architecture around those of human experience, to reintegrate building with dwelling, making the qualities of its inhabitation become part of the buildings authenticity to its locality.

This almost vocational unfinished architecture finds itself more at home with the ongoing daily life than any sort of finished product.”²

Contemporary architects of which Peter Zumthor is an exemplary example utilise and readily acknowledge the influence of Heidegger’s thinking. The inner spaces, the materiality and the locality are all directly traceable to traits found in Heidegger’s notion of the value of human presence and inhabitation.

Heidegger claims for architecture “the authority of immediate experience”³

As recorded in his most architectural writings.

The Origin of the Work of Art 1935/trans 1971

Being and Time 1927/1962

Art and Space 1971/1973

“To Heidegger, proper thinking was highly tuned to the fact of being and its traces. These traces, like our own shadow, the outline of the hills or the sounds of birdsong and stream, remain reminders of our miraculous presence,”⁴

Building locates human existence,

Heidegger “ believed that building was set out around human presence, configured by it but also configuring the activities of that presence over time”⁵

This almost vocational activity of building human presence it at the heart of what it means “to dwell”, the poetics of which form the phenomenological inquiry of Gaston Bachelard’s, Poetics of Space. Heidegger acknowledges that the inhabitants lives are in turn configured by the building.

Adam Sharr, notes that “for Heidegger, a building was built according to the specifics of place and inhabitants, shaped by its physical and human topography.”⁶

Heidegger on Thinking,

The forest track, the clearing, wandering from a starting point and remaining open to findings reached on the way, it could not be readily summarised or contained by a system. It was referential, mystical model that sought to promote the authority of being.

Heidegger on the Void at the centre of the Jug.⁷

Made from earth/clay/fire connected the human experience of earth and sky. Heidegger attributed sacred qualities to the jugs ability to give/to pour. Part of his fourfold cosmology of earth, sky, divinities and mortals. This “fourfold” represents Heidegger’s attempt at what he judges to be the most primary circumstances of existence, “ the inescapable pre-requisite of the world into which humans are thrown without consent (1962,164-168).

Mythic and mystical, far from the strictures of logical thinking.

Influences on the “fourfold”

Meister Eckhart/mystic theologian.

Lao Tse/eastern philosopher.

Friedrich Holderlin/poet.

George Steiner on the “fourfold” suggests it is a manifestation of an “ideolect” a personal language offered as universal.

Heidegger would refute this on the grounds that it is our technocratic conception of the world that is unhinged not his.

Heidegger: A mysticism that seems to border onto/into the realm of site specific art?

Waverley Project 2014.

Spaces and Shadows in Architecture, Defined Light and Volumes.

In Praise of Shadows. Junichiro Tanizaki

Architectural Voids/ Spaces only assessable whilst under construction, scaffolding and specific access points, maintenance and service corridors/rooms.

Kengo Kuma on “Ma” a void or pause, a rich emptiness, it can be created in many ways: through the

effect of light, or through attention to details.⁸

Being close to things, Heidegger on Nearness.

“The thing is not “in” nearness, “in” proximity, as if nearness were a container. Nearness is at work in bringing near, as the thinging of the thing,”(1971:177-178)⁹

This spatial complexity ( Critical Spatial Practices) suggests that we do indeed think through things, this is picked up by Tim Ingold in The Perception of the Environment (Essays in livelihood, dwelling and skill) 2000.

Also see, The Politics of Things/Immediate Architectural Interventions : Durations and Effects. Alres/Lieberman 2013.

On building a house. Ingold.

“The architect, then, conceives the lineaments of the structure, while the builder’s task is to unite the structure with the material”¹⁰

Simon Unwin defines architecture as “the determination by which a mind gives intellectual structure to a building”, whereas building is “the performance of physical realization”, of which “a building” is the product. (Unwin. Understanding Architecture 2007)

Inner Spaces/The Quiet Room

The Poetics of Space.

Gaston Bachelard.

An abode of intimate space, it is Blanchot's inner room.

Here everything is simpler, more radically simple.

The cell of myself fills with wonder.

The white-washed wall of my secret.

Pierre Jean Jouve, Les Noces.

Heidegger notes that “nearness is a fundamental aspect of human experience, and as such it can be experienced and appreciated through the tactile, cognitive and sociological familiarity of things”¹¹

It is a this relationship of nearness to the daily intricacies of living, being/becoming and dwelling that Heidegger’s philosophy is appropriated into architectural theory and practice. “Nearness thus becomes a function of immediacy : in that one is near to what one finds immediate, however far away it may be.”

For Heidegger, the definite characteristic of a thing (of a pot) is its possibility to bring people nearer to themselves, to help them engage with their existence and the fourfold.¹²

Heidegger attributed both the Jug and Buildings the potential to gather up and to be able to carry connotations of meeting and assembly, the jug and the building both have a corresponding void, that has the potential to contain/embody his preconditions of existence (the fourfold). This sensing space/void/Ma, can be reflected in the interiors of architecture and can be found within innerness spaces of objects.

The pot like the building participates in daily life.

This can be further theorised into the realm of building social spaces.

In Heidegger’s reasoning by using a table we are in effect constituting ourselves in the process of dwelling, by moving the table to accommodate the needs of its users, we are in effect turning the room back into a building.

Heidegger’s building and dwelling take place together over time, forming ongoing relationships with the world. Like the Potter in his Studio, these critical spatial relations inform both the working practice and the situation and biography of their making.

“Heidegger suggested that it was this disruption of relations between building and dwelling, rather than the production of houses, that remained the most important plight in the contemporary world”¹³

Piety of Thinking. 1976 (Piety for Heidegger listened to and facilitated the world around)¹⁴

Quietude : Allow and enabling what is already there.

Silence in Ceramics. Coper/Rie.

Clay and the Primacy of Being.

Studio Spaces.

The residents’ dwelling was recorded over time in the fabric of the building and the paraphernalia of their lives placed there.

For the philosopher , buildings are rich in insight, comprising a “workshop of long experience and incessant practice. 1971,161.¹⁵

Notes:

1 Adam Sharr. Heidegger for Architects.

2 Adam Sharr. Heidegger for Architects. 3

3 Adam Sharr. Heidegger for Architects. 3

4 Adam Sharr. Heidegger for Architects. 7

5 Adam Sharr. Heidegger for Architects. 9

6 Adam Sharr. Heidegger for Architects. 10

7 Adam Sharr. Heidegger for Architects. 30

8 Kengo Kuma. Sensing Spaces. Royal Academy of Arts. 2014, 65

9 Adam Sharr. Heidegger for Architects. 35

1⁰ Tim Ingold. Making. 59

1¹ Adam Sharr. Heidegger for Architects. 35

1² Adam Sharr. Heidegger for Architects. 35

1³ Adam Sharr. Heidegger for Architects. 43

1⁴ Adam Sharr. Heidegger for Architects. 45

1⁵ Adam Sharr. Heidegger for Architects. 71


Wallace Stevens :  Anecdote of the Jar/Vessel takes dominion/Edmund de Waal

Related 

Jackie Leven ; Clay Jug (The Mystery of Love is greater than The Mystery of Death)

• Russell Moreton
• visual art
• visual fine art
• spatial practice
• research creation
• ecology of experience

Photographic Ruins/Mixtures~Materials and Dissolutions : Sontag, Tarkovsky, Barthes.

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.

 Ruins are buildings which have lost their function and have turned into instruments for measuring

 time. 

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.