#imaginary architectonic

[fashionbooksmilano]

Nomata Minoru / Continuum

Joseph Constable, Nomura Shino

Cooperation White Cube

limArt Co Ltd, Tokyo 2023, 182 pages, 22,5x28,5cm, ISBN 978-4-991313806

euro 52,00

email if you want to buy booksinprogressmilano@yahoo.it

Over the past four decades, Minoru Nomata has developed a lexicon of imaginary architectonic and topographical forms to create paintings that transcend specifics of time and place. This book presents a grand overview of his visionary works, which combine the familiar with the mysterious and the heroic with the haunting. It is especially the forms of construction – structural beams, frameworks, tarpaulins, and netting – that are the hallmarks of these fantastical architectures. Notions of the picturesque and sublime combine in Nomata’s later paintings, where the structures seem increasingly fragile, with reduced material volume, greater height, or wrapped in tendril-like scaffolding.

20/02/24

[doshmanziari]

Deedlit in Wonder Labyrinth

A curious fact about the Metroidvania genre, if you will permit it to in fact be a genre, is that, despite the influences accorded to Symphony of the Night on the Castlevania side of things, very nearly none of the games cast as such -- and by now there are hundreds -- have been interested in consciously modeling their look on SotN. Depending on what portions you’re examining, the 2018 release Timespinner might be one such rare example; although, to my eyes, it most often resembles an imaginary title released near the end of the Super Nintendo’s lifespan: certain rendering techniques and palettes are there, but the overall effect has a sort of glossy compression and grotesque meandering which I would sooner associate with Hagane. That I’m making this observation is not meant to be a critique of the genre. It could, however, be developed into a general critique of the sort of pixel art which has tended to make its way into finished works since the boom of “indie” productions. One could quite rightly say that the majority of this material pulls from a needlessly small pool of titles released on the NES and SNES, with the more obviously labor-intensive stuff often appearing to derive from (or at least have the most similarities to) the Amiga’s heavy-hitters and the adjacent demo scene.

Anyway, my intent with laying these things out is to draw attention to Team Ladybug’s 2021 release, Record of Lodoss War ~Deedlit in Wonder Labyrinth~, which, besides achieving a quality of visuals full of skilled rigor yet appearing effortless, is probably the closest anyone has gotten to SotN’s style since its release -- including the handheld titles produced by Koji Igarashi. Each of Team Ladybug’s prior games, like Pharaoh Rebirth and Shin Megami Tensei: Synchronicity Prologue, has demonstrated a similar excellence; but I think it was only upon Touhou Luna Nights where one could sometimes get a simultaneous sense of potential proximity to Castlevania and a slight move away from the smooth and cutely organized precedent set (and mostly still occupied) by Cave Story. With Deedlit, most people will, I assume, first seize on Deedlit’s sprite for a comparison, since it is blatantly based on Alucard’s. I would also note the abundance of particulate effects. The environments are the most significant, though. While a degree of flatness and sharp outlining has been maintained, the impression of depth and dimension to the surroundings -- both their details and the recessing of layers -- has greatly increased. This balance reaches back not only to Symphony of the Night but also to its canonical precedent, Rondo of Blood, which had a persistent, punchy aesthetic of sharply measured out tiles set against a number of stark backdrops with zones of pure black. SotN itself had sections illustrating this: examine, for example, the Marble Gallery’s lowest room.

The first screenshot above is one good condensation of the elements I tend to associate with Symphony of the Night’s places. For a broad point of comparison here, I might refer to the Colosseum or Olrox’s Quarters; for a specific one, maybe the Outer Wall’s leftmost vertical room with a hung figure. Here are a few of the elements which come to mind: 1) a definite shapeliness to each room, achieved by a contrast between the floors/walls/ceilings and the backdrops; 2) a careful partitioning of the background details, organized according to the foreground arrangement(s); 3) strong shadows alongside the walls and ceilings; 4) angled railings and staircases with visibly serrated contours; 5) borders’ screen-hugging extremities being much darker than the rest. In enumerating these elements, I’m not saying that they are always present no matter where you look in SotN (the fifth item, for instance, isn’t that common from area to area; yet, when it is present, it is notable), but rather that their appearance here and there creates a stylistic continuity which we can, in a way, reverse engineer as a guiding aesthetic.

The second and third screenshots I’ve included for how visibly they delight in the room-shape. For the second, it approximates a W shape, its middle an ogee arch with lips dividing shaft from dome. Note the inclusion of unnecessary but equally delightful structural anomalies: the two outward-thrusting platforms held up by colonettes and topped off by trussed posts. For the third, note the cavetto-like underside to the projection beside Deedlit, which creates a kind of minor shelter; and the way that the arched ceiling to the right has a supple continuity -- the border’s line moves straight down and then curvaceously bends to the right. This quality, although brought out by the inverted castle (and bypassed in what is now a boring and bored tradition of dismissing a “lazy” and “inconvenient” quantitative supplement), is not specific to Symphony of the Night. I’ve mentioned it because the level design of these games is, in my opinion, at its best when it is, to an extent, formally inexplicable, prone to yielding to miniature architectonic fantasies and wordlessly evocative therein. Deedlit makes it especially distinct through its “silver-lined” surfaces and darkly receding cutaways.

I really don’t have much else to write here at the moment and would prefer to leave it to other people, perhaps those familiar with the terminology for pixel art, to do a better job of explaining this and that visual similarity. I just wanted to jot down some loose thoughts and hope that it might kick-start similar and more developed comparative considerations for readers.

[spaceintruderdetector]

Dark Matter: Towards an Architectonics of Rock, Place and Identity in Brasilia's Utopian Underground  2007

https://archive.org/details/DarkMatterTowardsAnArchitectonicsOfRockPlaceAndIdentityIn/mode/2up

Brasilia's inhabitants have experienced both shame and pride in living in a city without the traits of emblematically Brazilian cities like Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo, and Salvador. Brasilia's traditions are still in the process of consolidation, and its identity is being forged for the first time. Its rock music production in the 1980s gained Brasilia the title "Capital of Rock," and rock has played a central role in the search for and expression of a place-based identity in Brasilia. Yet just as the Brasilia experience does not figure into narratives of brasilidade (Brazilian-ness), rock has not been regarded as authentically Brazilian. In a nation where music is arguably the most potent producer of culture, this invisibility has deep implications.

With the current underground rock scene in Brasilia as my focus, I parse the concept of place into elements that can be analyzed to understand what gives a place its identity and then trace ways rock has been influenced by Brasilia and ways rock musicians have contributed to making Brasilia the place it is. Using the metaphor of dark matter, I argue that rockers are carrying out Utopian work, that rock has opened a space for a subject position not traditionally celebrated in the Brazilian imaginary, and that Brasilia should have a place in narratives of brasilidade.

[architectuul]

FOMA 32: The Ephemeral In Postwar Italian Society

If the precariousness of the Italian economical situation during the 1950’ was suffocating a series of social and political tension, during the 1960’ a new growth has brought to light a series of internal friction that will rapidly change the country. 

Estate Romana in Basilica Di Massenzio (1977) | Photo via The Walkman

Years of Lead, as there will be defined later, has marked the whole 1970’ as a period of political terrorism. A series of civil massacre has characterized the life in the bigger Italian cities, a constant fear has brought seclusion and distance. Theatre of this nefarious events, the cities will become places to be avoided.

Alberto Burri, Teatro Continuo Milano (1973) | Photo via La repubblica

First issue for the Italian cultural panorama was to reconsider cities as spaces of life: urbanity will be reinterpreted as space for cultural activities. In 1973 the Teatro Continuo of Alberto Burri has been open to the public: a 17x10 m concrete basement created a horizon at the centre of the prospective linking the Castello Sforzesco and Arco della Pace, six steel wings will composing a free scenography. An expression of a new democracy and freedom in art, a new intention in the use of public space. Several experimentation will follow. A year later, Achille Bonito Oliva will propose in Rome an exhibition of contemporary art in Luigi Moretti’s parking of Villa Borghese. The choice will implicate strong considerations about art status and consumption. 

Villa Borghese Parking Lot in Rome (1974) | Photo Christina Ghergo

Parking in Villa Borghese by Achile Bonito Oliva and Luigi Moretti (1974) | Photo via Archivio Sartogo

But it is with the phenomena of Estate Romana, with it first edition during the summer of the 1977’ that a clear cultural strategy emerged. Renato Nicolini, head of roman culture department, with the support of Giulio Argan, mayor of the city, will open the gates of the Basilica di Massenzio in order to propose an intense series of cultural proposition. The intersection of high and low culture and the re-use of a forgotten and abandoned monument of the city will be the key of the success for the cultural program. 

The 25th August of that year the projection of the film Senso by Luchino Visconti will open the festival that will attract on the street’s thousand of people. Thanks to the great success of the first edition the festival has been repeated for several times and has always work as a platform of remarkable experimentation.

Exhibition of Contemporanea, Villa Borghese 1973/74 | Photo Archivio Sartogo

Particularly interesting has been the edition of the 1979’. Nicolini, with the collaboration of two young architect’s, Franco Purini and Laura Thermes, for the first time tarted spreading around the city. Through four different spot an imaginary space called Parco Centrale has been delimited. 

Four spots of Parco Centrale in Rome by Renato Nicolini, Laura Thermes, Franco Purini (1979) | Photo via Polinice, Fondazione Maxxi and BMIAA

Incredible architectonical interventction has created a chain of cultural events around the city, involving abounded symbols of urbanity and generating new flows of life on the streets. What surprise is the preciseness and clearness of the position of Nicolini’s Estate, a political compromise able to create a-political and a-classist event. Other trial of the same year, as the Festival dei Poeti di Castelporziano, organised by Simone Carella, attracting more than 20 thousand people, will just become a manifesto of the extreme left cultural program, participating to the ideological war present at that time.

Festival dei Poeti by Simone Carella in Castelporziano, (1979) | Photo via Archivoluce and Culturamente

The Ephemeral, word used later to describe this precise cultural intention, has been conceived as the only possible answer to the complexity of the Years of Led. Political compromise among the lefts of the time, reaction to the fears of the cities or platform of culture diffusione the whole has to be first understood as potential of deep changes of society through something limited in time, making according to Michel Seuphor “The ephemeral [..] Eternal”.

—

#FOMA 32: Jovan Minić

Jovan Minić (Krusevac, Serbia, 1994) studied at Accademia di Architettura di Mendrisio (Switzerland) and at Mackintosh School of Architecture (Glasgow School of Art, UK). In 2019, he graduated at AAM with honours with prof. Quintus Miller. In 2015-2016 he worked in Genova (Italy) at Francesca Torzo Architetto practice. During the last year, he has investigated under the supervision of prof. Christoph Frank the connections between architecture and semiotic, relating it to the context of Yugoslavian monumental heritage. He has curated different exhibitions during the last Milano Fuorisalone editions. 

[perkwunos]

Not only do I feel what I myself experience, but I also feel what the other experiences. I am inside myself, inside my body, inside my space-time, with my own value-system and, simultaneously, I share in the spatial-temporal architectonics and axiology of others, as though endowed with the gift of ubiquity. This is the word’s ubiquity, ubiquity of thought and of the word. Man is not a thing; as such he does not answer to the “barbarian notion according to which a man cannot be in two places at once” (CP 7.591). “A word may be in several places at once . . . ; and I believe – Peirce adds – that a man is no whit inferior to the word in this respect” (CP 7.591).

…

… The subject becomes conscious of its personality through the same mechanisms with which it becomes conscious of others. Both processes are characterized by dialogism.

Given the common characteristic of being made of words and the condition of internal and external otherness, the difference between the self and the other, as in the case of two distinct people, does not in itself obstacle the possibility of understanding and responsiveness to the feeling and thought of the other. Access to the other of myself is not essentially different to access to the other from myself. The I is not only I for the self, but also I for the other. This is structural to the idea that the I has of the self, such that the I’s identity forms in the relation with the other. Vice versa, the other is not only the other on its own account, but the other for self; not only the effective other, but also the imaginary other; not only the other from self, but also the other of self – the self that maintains its otherness with respect to interpretations, identifications, and to self-consciousness, coming to awareness, all of which engage and constitute the I/self.

Insofar as man is a sign, a word, the boundaries of the I/self are not defined once and for all. They are not delimitable if not relatively to dialogic encounter with other signs and subjects: what we call “experience” cannot belong to the I/self considered in isolation:

. . . we know that man is not whole as long as he is single, that he is essentially a possible member of society. Especially, one man’s experience is nothing, if it stands alone. If he sees what others cannot, we call it hallucination. It is not “my” experience, but “our” experience that has to be thought of; and this “us” has indefinite possibilities. (CP 5.402)

Rather than the “personality”, the “personal self”, the “individual self” understood as a self defined and finalized once and for all, Peirce theorizes a self interconnected with other selves. The finite self, the “personal self” is an “illusory phenomenon”, even if a good dose of egocentrism leads one to believe in the possibility of separating oneself from the other and to the extent that one believes this, the conditions are created for such delusory isolation. In reality, as results from the principle of continuity, or synechism, every point in the semiosic flux is connected with every other, such that the I/self cannot be totally split and isolated from the other. …

The communitary aspect of self is not extrinsic. The self does not enter into contact with others as a unit, preestablished and predefined. As sign material the I/self is internally, structurally dialogic, a community of dialogically interrelated I/selves (CP 5.421).

Susan Petrilli, Man, Word, and the Other

[beautyatlowtemperatures]

The Orphan's Dining Palace

1

The technological innovation of antibiotics disrupted the imaginary of the Schatzalp Sanatorium turning it into a hotel. Ever since then it remained a historic building. This project aims to perform a possible dialogue between the Hotel Schatzalp in Davos with its environment, rendered through the narrative of two characters and its relationship. Nostalgic and corrupt, obsessive and liberating describes the fictional love story that wants to challenge the way cultural objects are disposed in the Swiss alpine city of Davos today.

2

From myth to brand - The Orphans Dining Palace

Davos promotes itself as a place of health and retreat, yet today it is known as the city of innovation and research. In between this tension the Hotel Schatzalp serves as an experimental object to re-articulate its relationship to the city. That is where the narrative comes into play: The love story is the one between Wine and Milk, Dionysus and Apollon, the host and the parasite. As the concierge of the Schatzalp one of the two characters knows the locos inside and out. A Pinot Noir lover, a collector, a hunter and a seeker is waiting for someone to disrupt his daily routine. A Media Person, an orphan, a disruptive thinker wanders through the world, posting and sharing her drives and obsessions on social media without any vision where to stay next. His fascination towards her and the collected hidden objects of her parents, move him to build a very unique Dining Palace to catch the orphans attention. From myth to brand: With south-facing orientation, sunny balconies, large luminous halls the old sanatorium of the Schatzalp once attracted the high society of Europe with an innovative cure for tuberculosis: The very place where her parents passed away.

3

The Orphans Dining Palace consists of two main forms of communication. The two authors of this project switch between the role of actors while on stage and the role of directors when on backstage. The stage of the play is a social media platform. On stage the actors stay in character and follow the script of the narrative. The avatars play out a dialogue which consists of a constant reaction of posts and comments on the social media platform. Their emerging relationship engenders the architectonic formulation. She loves to talk in text and images, he loves to react in text and model. On backstage the narrative is being revised with the voice of the directors, conducing this very catalogue. The aim is to achieve a healthy relationship at all levels and all scales: CHARACTERS - DISHES MENU - CHAMBER - FACADE - GARDEN - CITY - WORLD

[genderassignment]

Borderland Creatures: Lise Haller Baggesen & Iris Bernblum at Goldfinch

Installation view of I am the horse, Goldfinch, Chicago. Photo credit: Daniel Hojnacki. Left: Iris Bernblum. Pretty baby 3, 2018, spray paint on photo. Right: Iris Bernblum. Pour, 2018, paint on wall, dimensions variable.

Gender Assignment Guest Blogger, Matt Morris

This is a story of biopower and biosociality…those bitches insisted on the history of companion species, a very mundane and ongoing sort of tale, one full of misunderstandings, achievements, crimes, and renewable hopes. (1)

To begin, rest assured that in my epigraph above, Donna Haraway writes ‘bitches’ in reference to dogs designed to service breeding and the interests of humans. However, it occurs to me how language demonstrates its potential to transmigrate across species (a system that is itself, language), and marks out a contentious zone in which femininity is denigrated, and the fact of our animal-ness is charged with a capacity for social abuse and enforced disparities across gender and race. Language is appropriated, and then reappropriated in common parlance, how one might clap back, confirming, ‘Yes, I’m that bitch.’ One wonders, and the wondering is overwhelming, at the intricacies of how language and organism and the institution of gender have been made to conspire in obfuscating life’s interdependencies. Haraway goes on to remind readers that to consider companion species is not only to account for pets, but also the plant- and animal-based foods we consume, cellular genetic modifications, products with less obvious origins among the living (horses, glue, etc.), and techno-hybrid aspects of contemporary life. The challenge to grasp either the particulars or scope of this paradigm is certainly an (intentional) effect of power. That artists Lise Haller Baggesen and Iris Bernblum succeed at finding starting points to contemplate these entanglements by revisiting the much-maligned genre of ‘horse art’ mostly relegated to the sphere of female adolescence is both novel and moving. In the years I’ve known both artists’ practices, I’ve come to trust that neither are squeamish around topics that are often avoided as much because of how easily they are dismissed as for how problematic they prove to be in their deconstruction. Motherhood, passé disco, unicorns, bucolic landscapes: both artists brave themes that even many other feminists avoid. Their exhibition I Am the Horse now on view at Goldfinch in Garfield Park proves to be écriture feminine (2) équestre par excellence.

If we reside in an oft-unacknowledged natureculture system, Baggesen and Bernblum’s art manifests naturecultureculture, at turns instinctively poetic, strategically conceptual, activist, collaborative, whimsical, and stark. Through paintings (on canvas, on photographs), photographic documentation of playful activations of sculptures (objects that are themselves also on view elsewhere in the space), projected video, drawing, and two audio soundtracks, both artists weave Borromean knots through Lacan’s imaginary and real.

(Why would I invoke such an old model of describing experience and consciousness as Lacan, when Baudrillard’s postulations decades ago of a madness of simulations detached from the real seem to be reaching new climaxes of surreal if not unbearable proportions in our present day? I’ll admit, I’m desperate to find means of surviving even thriving, and it’s in my personal bias that I find Lacan useful. It’s certainly a mere mirage of organization, but as with the ‘horse art’ I’m pondering here, it offers me some manageability with which to encounter immense entanglements with which I am otherwise inundated. I am struggling with being in the world, sometimes struggling to even face exhibition openings like this one about which I write. I’m searching for how to be—ethically, aesthetically, politically.)  

Lise Haller Baggesen. Refusenik on the beach, 2018, Photographic transparency, lightbox. Image courtesy of the artist

It’s in this present state that I feel such affinity for Baggesen’s Refuseniks, a series of costumes that propose hybridity for their wearers (across individuals, across species), by combining structural aspects of jockey shirts and horse blankets, often with multiplied arm holes and equine-shaped hoods. Refusenik (double wearable), 2017, is a melancholic confection draped in the gallery space, possessing all the pluralism of Rei Kawakubo and the lightly floral palette of Dirk Van Saene. In the accompanying photographs, we see these garments not only worn by people and horses alike, but also behaving architectonically, pitched into tents redolent of the Snoezelen-room-inspired immersive installations of Baggesen’s earlier work.

Make. Believe. Dress. Up. Pause to consider these words and phrases while observing Baggesen’s photographs of Refuseniks in the wild. The lightbox Refusenik on the Beach, 2018, shows a figure swimming offshore like an island-bound pony or a mermaid. These scenarios are acted out as conscious performative disengagements from dominant narratives that taxonomize and restrict across gender, age, and species. These works are efforts in conscious play, what psychoanalyst Ernst Kris termed ‘regression in the service of the ego,’ following on the pronouncement of becoming that names the exhibition. I am the horse.

Installation view of I am the horse, Goldfinch, Chicago. Photo credit: Daniel Hojnacki

What’s regrettable and even misguided within the literature that expounds on the bonds between women and horses—and by this, I’m speaking of a body of discourse inclusive not only of psychoanalysis and other modern modes of theory production, but also more expansive treatments of mythology and lore—is that these relationships are nearly always supposed as a substitution for women oriented toward men. The method of using a virgin to attract a unicorn so it may be caught and its horn severed and used for its healing properties is all misdirection: it seems clear to me that this narrative mostly prepares young women to be penetrated by virile conquests. The unfounded rumors of Catherine the Great’s lust for equine copulation follows on her wresting control of the Russian empire from her mentally ill husband. In her case, her strength of will that surpassed the men with whom she was attached and surrounded had to be distorted into bestial proportions in order to maintain a culture organized around male domination. A nebula of dildonic hobby horses, penis envy, the introduction of women riding side-saddle as early as the 14th century as a means of protecting their virginity if not also their decency—horses gallop through all sorts of conceptualizations that would portray women’s sexuality as vulnerable and in need of protection, and also a site of lack, a cavity designed to be filled. It would seem that across the literature that characterizes women’s relationships to horses, men can’t help but recast these attachments as metaphoric pussy grabbing of a most intimate order, territorializing the horse’s body as a prosthetic extension of their own desire and dread and anger (read: misogyny) to control women and their object choices, erotic or otherwise. This is a consuming violence further materialized by the litany of ways that the unchecked, unexamined, privileged marker of ‘men’ is scripted with an entitlement to possess whatever the holder of that sign wishes to possess, to possess and then destroy, and the absolute conviction held within that position that any alternative narratives produced within the culture is metaphoric to them.

It is against this violence and the symbolic order that reifies it that Bernblum and Baggesen act. Upon entering the exhibition, Baggesen’s audio piece, Stallion, 2018, is played on white headphones beneath one of several lightbox photographs in the exhibition that show her piecework Refusenik garments used in tropical landscapes. The sound piece is a sort of audio guide, as if a didactic for a museum collection—a format for working that recurs across Baggesen’s oeuvre and shows how her research operates across writing and studio production. The audio speaks to The Lady and the Unicorn tapestries in Paris’ Musée de Cluny, noting possible symbols for virginity, chastity, and maternity within the textiles’ imagery, with frequent departures into lullaby-like singing and theoretical proposals such as: “’Our selves’ are not located within ‘ourselves’…but are a function of it and vice versa, and personhood is acquired, along with ‘soul,’ gradually and suddenly….” From the start, the logic of this exhibition proceeds counter to any linear theory of development in which a monolithic subject is constituted.

Iris Bernblum. Pretty baby 2, 2018, spray paint on photo. Image courtesy of the artist and Aspect/Ratio Gallery, Chicago

Also from the start, the titular horse in both artists’ projects is haunted by a spectral unicorn. In Bernblum’s Pretty baby 3, 2018, a mottled horse is photographed in black and white. Where a unicorn’s horn might emerge from its head, the artist has sprayed the print with a hazy, glowing pink paint. Is this the body from which her ten-foot-tall unicorn horn-cum-lightning rod Struck, 2016, was removed? While the image conjures fantasies both telepathic and amputating, the action of it as an object—the spray of paint that Bernblum repeats across numerous works—belongs to a nouveau réaliste mode of painting that recalls Niki de Saint Phalle’s Shooting Pictures of the 1960s. The pigment dispersions and drips in Bernblum’s paintings—on photographs, paper, and for Pour, 2018, down the gallery wall itself—are jouissance gestures held at an ambiguous point of rupture, appearing to spill forth, but understood as applied onto the bodies (of horses, of gallery-institution) depicted. This, I have come to feel, is the zone in which Bernblum and her audiences are held—threshold spaces, subtle but provocatively suspenseful, with all the erotic, energetic potential of bodies together pressing into the moment of her artwork. She commands an art herstory that swells from Benglis’ ejaculated spills and Judy Chicago’s spray-painted ‘flesh gates,’ ‘cunts,’ and ‘Great Ladies’ works. Here is one of the linkages between artistic praxis and the horse bodies that roam through the exhibition: these painterly forerunners pushed past pictorial illusionism into the expressive potential of material itself, understood simultaneously through being looked upon (imaginary) and acted with (real). So too, it would seem, do horses. History of science scholar Laurel Braitman notes in her research of how animals are thought about within human culture, "Horses and…unicorns—these are all borderland creatures; gateway animals to other worlds," she says. "They help us imagine wonderful other ways of being in the world,” of harnessing one’s own power and potential for transformation. (3)

Lise Haller Baggesen. Grown up Refusenik, Copenhagen, October 2017, 2017. Photographic transparency, lightbox. Image courtesy of the artist

The efforts of these two artists sensitize their audiences to the means by which such transformative tools are restricted from use by their situation into early periods of development that are made difficult to access, through stigmas of some sort of arrested adolescence and the assigned roles and responsibilities of adulthood. The assembled artworks, the excursions they document, and the desires they manifest act against capitalist time, the work shift of the laborer, the demands on the time of mothers and working mothers, the imposition of a before and after of sexual awakening. Baggesen’s Grown-up Refusenik, Copenhagen, October 2017, 2017, shows an upright figure standing beside a clear-eyed horse named Nellie. One sees a graying beard along the jawline of the figure, whose head is otherwise masked by a pink horse hood. If not for this fanciful headpiece, this image might recall the other tradition in horse art, the status-symbol equestrian portrait that came to prominence in the 16th–18th centuries of European painting. As it is, one is left to quietly rethink the conceptual divisions upon which our political, economic, and ideological systems depend. What if the hierarchies of speciesism are toppled, and with them, the metaphors that would organize all women’s attachments as preludes or parallels to their being dominated by men? What it the right-wing accelerationism’s tenuous reliance on regulated, linear time might be disrupted in order to gain access to modes of play and being that have been restricted to childhood? What if we breathe, as Bernblum’s two-channel video work breathes, or we make space to catch our breath amidst what feels like a world on fire? What if we explore unbridled, libidinal release that transgresses borderlands? Because, interestingly, Baggesen and Bernblum work into and from facets of écriture féminine that are not essentialist in defining a category of womanhood, but even, as Wittig proposes would “destroy the sexes as a sociological reality if we want to start to exist.” Optimistically, she invites forms of becoming beyond a binary: “To refuse to be a woman, however, does not mean that one has to become a man.” What if, in refusal, we become unicorns?

End Note: I’ve decided that for my series of contributions to Gender Assignment, I want to attach to each essay a selected perfume that I’ve worn through most or all of the drafting of these texts. This can be traced back to my use of perfume in my own art practice, as well as conversations around sensitivity and wellness related to scent that I’ve shared with my host and editor here, Mel Potter, as well as the artists and subjects of this and other forthcoming texts. For this first essay, I have written within a cloud of Mon Musc a Moi, released in 2015 by A Lab on Fire, designed by Dominique Ropion. This scent opens with quick bursts of bergamot and peach blossom before wrapping a sugary heliotrope-vanilla in wet-fur musks. The perfume house recently renamed the scent Messy SexyTM Just Rolled Out of Bed, and it strikes me that the former name possesses an introspection and reticence that is perhaps in keeping with this exhibition, while its updated moniker casts the scent into a narrative tinged with male-gazey sexual-objecthood that may be more salable, but belies some of the poetry of the scent.

Matt Morris is an artist, writer, and sometimes curator based in Chicago. He analyzes forms of attachment and intimacy through painting, perfume, photography, and institutional critique. He has presented artwork at Adds Donna, The Bike Room, Gallery 400, The Franklin, peregrineprogram, Queer Thoughts, Sector 2337, and Shane Campbell Gallery in Chicago, IL; The Mary + Leigh Block Museum of Art in Evanston, IL; The Elmhurst Art Museum in Elmhurst, IL; Fjord and Vox Populi in Philadelphia, PA; The Contemporary Arts Center, U·turn Art Space, Aisle, and semantics in Cincinnati, OH; Clough-Hanson Gallery and Beige in Memphis, TN; Permanent.Collection in Austin, TX; Cherry + Lucic in Portland, OR; The Poor Farm in Manawa, WI; with additional projects in Reims, France; Greencastle, IN; Lincoln, NE; and Baton Rouge, LA. Morris is a transplant from southern Louisiana who holds a BFA from the Art Academy of Cincinnati, and earned an MFA in Art Theory + Practice from Northwestern University, as well as a Certificate in Gender + Sexuality Studies. In Summer 2017 he earned a Certification in Fairyology from Doreen Virtue, PhD. He is a lecturer at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and a contributor to Artforum.com, ARTnews, Art Papers, Flash Art, Pelican Bomb, and Sculpture; and his writing appears in numerous exhibition catalogues and artist monographs.

1. Haraway, Donna. The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness. Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press, 2007. Print, p. 5.

2. <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Écriture_féminine>

3.  Quoted in Davia Nelson and Niiki Silva’s “Why Do Girls Love Horses, Unicorns and Dolphins?” All Things Considered. National Public Radio, February 9, 2011. <https://www.npr.org/2011/02/09/133600424/why-do-girls-love-horses-unicorns-and-dolphins> 

[ucmeteora]

Metonymy

Elizabeth and her architect

Act one: Limitation and Resistance

E: All the old houses crumble and new ones rise. (1) My potential Existence won’t be victim to decay. In the grid of infinite sameness, content must be constantly added to this stem space to give it meaning. (2)

A: Thats why you need this vessel for your brand.

“In a world that incessantly consumes images, in a constantly expanding metropolitan culture, in a universe whose buildings are no more than a few of the infinite number of figurative and informative dwellings that surround us, there nonetheless exists the architectonic event. This event is like an extended chord, like an intensity at an energetic crux of streams of communication, a subjective apprehension offered by the architect in the joy of producing a polyphonic instant in the heart of the chaotic metropolis.” The “radical desolation” of weak architecture, “a groundlessness emerging out of the singularity of an event,” has “nothing to do with a lack of ability to manifest the conditions of the contemporary culture. Quite the contrary. This weakness is precisely the architectonic manifestation of the condition of contemporary culture.” (3)

E: Thus you’re not saying that only the body explains what is obscure in the mind. To the contrary, the mind is obscure, the depths of the mind are dark, and this dark nature is what explains and requires a body. Nothing obscure lives in us because we have a body, but we must have a body because there is an obscure object in us. (4)

A: Exactly, The essence of an image (or a body) is that it should be taken for reality and equally reality can shape the image, and pass itself off as having the same substance and meaning. Without disturbance or rupture, perception can continue the dream and fill in the gaps, bringing confirmation to all  that is precarious in it and allowing it to accomplish its work. If illusions could appear as real as perception, then perception too could pass itself off as the truth, undeniable and visible. (5)

E: An image which must facilitate direct understandability! In this sense, this other architecture can be regarded as an architecture of resistance—resistance against the predictability of the traditional comprehension of architecture; resistance against the conformity supporting the status quo between institutions and the living environments; resistance against the cynical fear of imagining alternative possibilities in architecture and its visions of a better future; and resistance against the solely commodified and partial comprehension of architecture. (7)They don’t care for the world they enjoy. This situation, this state of affairs is grave and unbearable. We shall invent a new way of life; We shall have to construct another whole world from the ground up. It shall be built, it shall be created! (6)

A: I am willing to follow this peculiar thought line of yours for a while longer (8) as long as we can grab that beyond burger now.

Act two: Authority and Narcissism

E: I’m in love with myself. (I) regard narcissism as the central imaginary relation of human relationships. What crystallized analytic experience around this notion? Above all, its ambiguity. It is in fact an erotic relationship, all erotic identification, all seizing of the other in an image in a relationship of erotic captivation, occurs by way of the narcissitic relation and it is also the basis of aggressive tension. (9)

A: Who, with such instantaneous confidence, was recognised as mad? (10)

E: Don’t kid yourself, honey! You’re not building a house for a madwoman, what you’re building is me:

We speak of our 'self' only in virtue of these thousands of little witnesses which contemplate within us: it is always a third party who says 'me'. These contemplative souls must be assigned even to the rat in the labyrinth and to each muscle of the rat. Given that contemplation never appears at any moment during the action  since it is always hidden, and since it 'does' nothing (even though something is done through it, something completely novel)  it is easy to forget it and to interpret the entire process of excitation and reaction without any reference to repetition  the more so since this reference appears only in the relation in which both excitations and reactions stand to the contemplative souls.The role of the imagination, or the mind which contemplates in its multiple and fragmented states, is to draw something new from repetition, to draw difference from it. For that matter, repetition is itself in essence imaginary, since the imagination alone here forms the 'moment' of the vis repetitiva from the point of view of constitution: it makes that which it contracts appear as elements or cases of repetition. Imaginary repetition is not a false repetition which stands in for the absent true repetition: true repetition takes place in imagination. Between a repetition which never ceases to unravel itself and a repetition which is deployed and conserved for us in the space of representation there was difference, the for itself of repetition, the imaginary. (11)

A: It is necessary to be outside ideology … to say: I am in ideology’. In architecture, interpellations are being imposed at three different levels: firstly, through the disciplining process (institutions, boards, academia, publications, clients, the market, and so on); secondly, by the architectonic objects produced, which create a ritual, constantly reinforcing how architecture should be understood; and finally by the instruments that architects use, such as perspective or computational techniques, which both frame and produce facts. Architecture does not simply present ideologies as facts, as if it were lying; it actually transforms ideologies into social facts. The Prince complex (or, the architectural unconscious) the theory of history has only recently tried to overcome the chronicle of the princes by means of a history of the masses, the everyday life and the concrete conditions (not just what lies on the wave crest, but the enormous forces of movement in the depth of the sea). Nevertheless, architectural imagination is still trapped in narcissistic histories of ‘Princes’. Machiavelli’s book The Prince creates an intellectual device for political practice to counter ‘fortuna’ (the conjecture) in order to rule, thus demanding ‘negativity’ and ‘objectivity’ (virtú) to control the randomness of the future. By doing so, Machiavelli was not inventing the prince per se. What he revealed was the representational character of this practice. (12)

E: Rather, (my) meaning unfolds as (my) viewers participate in the social situation (I) ha(ve) orchestrated. (13)

A: The noblest are certainly those who are entrusted with the supreme Authority and Moderation in public Affairs. (14) For this Reason I would have the Temple made so beautiful, that the Imagination should not be able to form an Idea of any Place more so; and I would have every Part so contrived and adorned, as to fill the Beholders with Awe and Amazement, at the Consideration of so many noble and excellent Things, and almost force them to cry out with Astonishment: This Place is certainly worthy of God! (15) Thus the buildings design will have an attractive appearance, its unimpeded entrance, utility, and the walkway around the cella, authority. (16) And, in (my) opinion, age will give a temple as much authority, as ornament will give it dignity. (17)

Act three: Resurrection, Interaction

E: By slow degrees a special authority takes shape within the ego; this authority, which is able to confront the rest of the ego, performs the function of self observation and self criticism, exercises a kind of psychical censorship, and so becomes what we know as the ‘conscience’. The existence of such an authority, which can treat the rest of the ego as an object – the fact that, in other words, man is capable of self observation – makes it possible to imbue the old idea of the double with a new content and attribute a number of features to it – above all, those which, in the light of self criticism, seem to belong to the old, superannuated narcissism of primitive times. Yet it is not only this content – which is objectionable to self criticism – that can be embodied in the figure of the double: in addition there are all the possibilities which, had they been realized, might have shaped our destiny, and to which our imagination still clings, all the strivings of the ego that were frustrated by adverse circumstances, all the suppressed acts of volition that fostered the illusion of free will. (18)

A: Freedom is thus not freedom from a Master, but the replacement of one Master with another; the external Master is replaced with an internal one. (19) It acts as a (partially) autonomous, and spatially, structurally, programmatically, and visually homogeneous whole which is never completely autonomous due to its integration to a network system. (20) Mentalities of cooperation, social exchange, and interaction are, through the order of the urban, to be elicited and maintained. (21) The framing of communicative interaction is the societal function of both architecture and design. (22) But what about visual, sensory, and aesthetic interaction? (23)

E: The strategy seems, to “derive from the ‘organic’ demand for the integration of space and structure; and, as fulfilling this demand, the building becomes a single, complete, and self explanatory utterance.” (24) Freed of all normative impediments, of all questions of realization or production, the creative imagination can identify itself with global consciousness. Prospective aesthetics is the vehicle of man’s greatest hope: the collective liberation of humanity. The socialization of art represents the convergence of the forces of creation and production toward a goal of dynamic synthesis and technical metamorphosis: it is through such restructuring that man and reality find their true, modern face, that they become natural again, having overcome all alienation. Thus the circle closes. (25)

Together we will invent what I call the imagination without strings. (26)

A: How do you want to achieve that?

E: We should throw a ball.  Instances of this kind are so plentiful every where, that if I add one more, it is only for the pleasant oddness of it. Dance, and that to great Perfection! (27)

(1) Hugo, Les Miserables

(2) Sorkin, All Over the Map

(3)Hays, Architecture Theory since 1968

(4) Deleuze, The Fold

(5) Foucault, History of Madness

(6) Alberti, Momus

(7) Senk, Capsules Typology of Other Architecture

(8) Asimov, Complete Robot Anthology

(9) Lacan, The Psychoses Seminars of JL

(10) Foucault, History of Madness

(11) Deleuze, Difference and Repetition

(12) Stoppani, This Thing Called Theory Critiques Critical Stud

(13) Bureaud, MetaLife Biotechnologies Synthetic Biology ALi

(14) Alberti, 10 books of architecture 1755

(15)Alberti, 10 books of architecture 1755

(16) Vitruvius, Ten Books on Architecture 1999

(17) Alberti, On the Art of Building in Ten Books 1988

(18) Freud, The Uncanny

(19) Zitzen, Less than nothing

(20) Senk, Capsules Typology of Other Architecture

(21) Lahiji, Architecture Against the PostPolitical Essays

(22) Schumacher, The Autopoiesis of Architecture Vol1

(23) Doherty, Is Landscape Essays on the Identity of Landsc

(24) Hartoonian, Time History and Architecture Essays on Critical

(25) Hays, Architecture Theory since 1968

(26) Hays, Architecture Theory since 1968

(27) Harrison Wood Gaiger, Art in Theory 1648 1815

[uav-deliverance]

Who are we?

A race, a tribe, a herd, a passing phenomenon, or a traveler still traveling in order to find out who we are, and who we shall be?

Where are we?

Out of history, of his or her story, and back into it, out in space and back to earth, out of the womb and back to dust, who are we? [1]

We are not going in circles, we are going upwards.

The path is spiral;

we have already climbed many steps. [2]

I ) Preamble 

In the name of any individual that opt for the necessary-evil, no matter what circumstances:

May such be called a contributor to the Embassy of Smugglers.

Originated with the acknowledgement of the necessity of the practice of smuggling among the public, mobilized by referendums on various levels, the contributors have been granted the right to representation on the highest international level, under the protection of international treaties.

Embassy of the Smugglers, located in Zürich, Switzerland, is henceforth the global embassy of a constitutional body that has no land, no territory, nor a dominion, solemnly its contributors.

May smuggling keep on improving wealth and well-being of the humanity.

II) The Basis [3]

1: All individuals, regardless of their origin and nationality, can be a contributor to the embassy at their own will. 2. Contributors, their rights and freedoms shall be the supreme value. 3. The recognition, observance and protection of human and civil rights and freedoms shall be an obligation of the Embassy. 4. Trust governs. Loss of the constitutional rights follow common disbelief.

III) Right to life and to personal freedom [4]

1.Every person has the right to life. The death penalty is prohibited. 2.Every person has the right to personal liberty and in particular to physical and mental integrity and to freedom of movement.

IV) Right to privacy [4]

1. Every person has the right to privacy in their private and family life and in their home, and in relation to their mail and telecommunications. 2. Every person has the right to be protected against the misuse of their personal data.

V) Freedom of expression and of information [4]

1. Freedom of expression and of information is guaranteed. 2. Every person has the right freely to form, express, and impart their opinions. 3. Every person has the right freely to receive information to gather it from generally accessible sources and to disseminate it.

VI) Sovereignty [5]

1. Sovereignty belongs to the contributors without any restriction or condition. The exercise of sovereignty shall not be delegated by any means to any individual, group or class.  2. No person or organ shall exercise any state authority that does not emanate from the Constitution.

VII) Prohibition of abuse of fundamental rights and freedoms [5]

1. None of the rights and freedoms embodied in the Constitution shall  be  exercised in the form of activities aiming to violate the indivisible integrity of the Embassy with its contributors and spaces, and to endanger the existence of the democratic and secular order of the constitution based on human rights.

2. An exception to this may be granted by a solid majority of the contributors, if the new order introduced surpasses the old at fulfilling the duties of the embassy.

VIII) Architecture

1. Provisions

The Universe must have taken its origin from a very low state of entropy or- in other words - from a very high state of order. This allowed an uninterrupted series of transformations that have been going on for 13.8 billion years. The passing of time, from our point of view, is nothing but this: a continuous passage from ordered configurations to other less ordered specific configurations. [6]

The world is the quintessential public space from its origins. It predates the formation of the modern nation state, across whose porous borders colonizing and immigrant groups may enter speaking their own languages and bringing their own customs and artifacts.[7] 

The embassy is the systematic exploitation of the capsularisation, to provide a model for the return to the quintessential.

2. Duality, Twins and Coupling

The chancery is constituted of the couple of digital and physical twins. None is prior to other - here rules the simultaneity.

The constitutional body of the embassy has no regard to nationality, and only people entering the embassy’s premises are its contributors, who either gives in the passport the entrance in exchange for a daily visa to inside, or passes a three layered digital authentication gate.

The spatial services of the chancery is mainly -but not only- accessed via the digital twin, which is a virtual geometrical instance of the physical twin. The referentiality of the virtual towards digital, enables a long-lasting memory of a space. Any proposed alteration to the digital should be accommodated in the physical as much as possible.

Through this differentiation and coupling of identities, the physical twin is purified to fulfill its raisin-d'être, it becomes ultimately representational of a greater public space, far more than it can physically hold.

The language spoken in such abstract space is the sole language in which there are no barbarians, because everyone speaks it as an immigrant, with no political obligations of conforming to the mother tongue spoken by the natives.[8]

The digital twin will be kept as digital assets within the embassies premises, granting its ad hoc instances the same political invincibility it bears.

With the political positioning of such a public space, the contributors are granted a possibility to circumvent the external political hindrance to the access to the freedom of communication.

3. Special clauses on the architecture of the digital twin

The principle of utilitas, firmitas, venustas formally applies to the architectonics of the digital twin.

It assumes the symbol of an abstract composition in space which gains in richness because it is not passively seen but actively traversed by the contributor, whom experiences visual as well as kinesthetic sensations of tilting, turning, dropping and climbing. [9] This is not an architecture registered in style, typologies, tropes, distinctions, definitions, in fixed measurements and origins; but rather in its intricate excesses and in its affecting hazes. [10] Because the imaginary process relies on intentionality, the world is constituted not from the outside into our consciousness, but rather we constitute the world based on our intentions toward it. [11] Thus for the fulfillment of the venustas, the instances of the digital twin refer to the memories of the contributors.  This is the opposite of the ‘romantic ruin’. Because the buildings don’t fall into ruin after they are built but rise into ruin before they are built. [12]

Every service to be provided by the physical twin, should be providable by the digital twin, thus fulfilling the utilitas.

In case of a physical threat to the existence of the physical twin, the digital twin will migrate to the contributors under the sophistication of RAID (Redundant Array of Independent Disk) and the information of the locations of the shards will be kept in a public ledger, to be eventually reorganized around a new physical twin. Thus the longevity of the digital twin exceeds that of the physical twin, fulfilling firmitas.

[1]Adnan__There [2]Hesse__Siddharta  [3]Russia__1993_2014 [4]Switzerland__1999_2014 [5]Turkey__1982_2017] [6]Rovelli__The_Order_of_Things [7]Soussloff__The_Absolute_Artist [8]Buehlmann_Hovestadt__Domesticating_Symbols [9]Lynch__The_View_from_the_Road [10]Smith__Bare_Architecture [11]Sartre__Limaginaire [12]Smithson__Monuments_of_Passaic

[automaticvr]

Screen City Biennial (SCB) in Stavanger, is the first Nordic Art Biennial dedicated to the expanded moving image. It presents artworks that explore the relation between image, sound, new technologies, public and digital spaces. The architecture of the Norwegian port city Stavanger facilitate an exhibition of new formats and the use of moving image in contemporary artistic practices. Participating artists: Richard Alexandersson (SE) /Jonathas de Andrade (BR) / Band of Weeds (FI) / Andrés Bedoya (BO) / Ursula Biemann (CZ) & Paulo Tavares (BR) Sissel M. Bergh (NO) / Vincent Carelli (FR/BR) / Marjolijn Dijkman (NL) and Toril Johannessen (NO) / Saara Ekström (FI) / Flatform (IT) / Ximena Garrido-Lecca (PE) / Mai Hofstad Gunnes (NO) / Laura Huertas Millán (CO)/ Mikhail Karikis (GR/UK) / Tove Kommedal (NO) / Jakob Kudsk Steensen (DK) / Tuomas A. Laitinen (FI) / Michelle-Marie Letelier (CL) / Michelle-Marie Letelier (CL) & Kalma (SP) / Kristina Õllek (EE) / Enrique Ramírez (CL) / Oliver Ressler (AT) / Luis Roque (BR) / Momoko Seto (JP) /Emilija Škarnulytė (LT) / Andrew Norman Wilson (US) This year the Biennial, curated by Daniela Arriado and Vanina Saracino, sets out to present, facilitate and examine art and artistic inquiry that raises questions of how human action affects the ecologies with which it is implicated. With the theme, Ecologies – lost, found and continued, the biennial engages a post-anthropocentric worldview: it searches for ecologies that may be ‘lost’ to the dominant imaginary of the modern, rationalized Western society and found in what by some is considered to be the periphery of this. Anthropocentric theories have highlighted how the human being is the central agent to environmental transformation. World views guided by dualisms between concepts such as "nature—culture" and a sense of distance between humans and our environments have informed our paths of evolution and innovation—and brought our ecosystems into a state of imbalance. In the Nordic context, a growing attention to environmental thinking and dark ecology in artistic discourse mirrors a global acknowledgment and urgency of the need to rethink the human place in the biosphere and how we are connected to the world. SCB 2019 commissioned new works to Emilija Škarnulytė (LT), Saara Ekström (FI), Tuomas Aleksander Laitinen (FI), Michelle-Marie Letelier (CL), Enrique Ramírez (CL) and the Band of Weeds (FI). The Biennial will use Stavanger harbor’s architectonic positioning in the Nordic landscape to present a broad range of international artists working in the fields of moving image and expanded video and film, augmented and virtual reality, audiovisual, performance and installations. The SCB Journal coincides with public program events and intersects with the online program. The complete program of lectures, screenings and online works will be announced on our website. For more information about the program and events during the opening weekend: 2019.screencitybiennial.org (https://ift.tt/2ZfojN6) Visit For more information on the location and visiting information, go to https://ift.tt/2HmzxJo For professional accreditation (press, art professionals, students), please apply before September 1st here (https://ift.tt/2HmzxJo) Follow us: Facebook (https://ift.tt/2ZiTabx) Instagram (https://ift.tt/2Hlvm0s) Opening weekend event: https://ift.tt/2ZeSZhq Contact: contact@screencitybiennial.org Press inquiries: press@screencitybiennial.org Website: 2019.screencitybiennial.org (https://ift.tt/2ZfojN6) journal.screencitybiennial.org (https://ift.tt/2HjpDbJ) Address: Screen City Biennial /Art Republic AS Stavanger Sentrum, Byen, Søregata 30 4006 Stavanger, Norway Screen City Biennial is produced by Art Republic Norway

[distinctinside]

field note, 10.05.19

First sketches: listening to Zaha Hadid on Malevich while going to visit Michael in his studio in Mitte: on Architecton A, other architectons, the Black Square, the white non-colour phase, and the red soft-edged square blending with the infinity, giving up the fulcrum: and something that is being said there, by Achim Borchardt-Hume, that Malevich set out to really question what is painting and what is art, and on Zaha Hadid, who with every project sets out to question the fundamental  parameters: how does the building function, how does it relate to its environment, and how it abstracts. It struck me then what the indistinct does to a district. It suspends the rules of objectivity and poses the most fundamental question about the city, its most fundamental parameters: density, walls, crowd, streets, squares, cafes, motion, exhibitions, its dwelling function, space. Through the limit of the indistinct one can really ask the question: what is at stake in the sheer fact that something like the city shall exist? Three questions then: 1) Blanchot: What would be at stake in the fact that something like art or literature exists? 2) Malevich/Zupančič: the “birth of the painting-surface.” A painting-surface or a “plane” is not an object that could be found anywhere in the world (and then reproduced or represented in a painting); it exists only as a painting. This is not to say that the painting represents some imaginary fantasy-object that exists nowhere in reality, only in the fictive domain of the painting. On the contrary, Black Square introduces a new object in reality, this new object being precisely the painting-surface as object. A painting such as Black Square is the very materiality of the painting-surface. What then would be at stake in re-presenting this surface, among representation? where it loses its fulcrum. 3) benevolent neutrality of the indistinct: with the dissolution of identity, the urban for the first time comes back to the fold: where the comer realized the unfamiliar. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yye33DucQvw&t=402s Certain obscurity in posing questions produces the very phenomenon to follow.

[xinternationalculture]

Contemporary Architectonics; or, Bespoke Frankenstein

1.

Three stories—two literary, one folkloric.

First story: A novelist, known only as The Writer, leaves behind his life’s work, “The Book of the Grotesque,” which is unpublished, but read and admired by at least one person.

Second story: A teenager, named Quentin Compson, is admitted to Harvard. The summer before he moves east, his father takes him to visit Miss Rosa Coldfield, an antebellum luminary who insists on telling Quentin about their town’s history.

Third story: A freed slave, working one of the few jobs available to him, becomes famous for the speed in which he hammers holes into rock. Upon noticing a steam-powered drill at the railroad company he’s employed by, he challenges the man tasked with selling them to a contest, and wins.

Example one is the framing device of Winesburg, Ohio. Early modernism, proto-metafiction—whatever one wants to call it, the beauty of the narrative lies in proxy. The Writer is unable to leave his small town, so he creates a character, George Willard, to project his anxieties and ambitions onto. The tenacity of Willard’s inquiries into the lives of his friends and neighbors, and his success in leaving Winesburg, serve to illuminate The Writer’s passivity, and his failure to do so in life. Imaginary achievement distracts from tangible failure.

Example two is the beginning of Absalom, Absalom! Miss Coldfield claims their exchange is for Quentin’s benefit; the southern way of life has been wiped out, thanks to northerners who nonetheless fetishize its history. Maybe he could write a story or an article about it for the magazines and make some money. But Quentin isn’t stupid. Jefferson is still there; it’s Miss Coldfield who fears erasure as a southern Lady. It falls on Quentin’s generation to carry her burden. Yet he’s also carrying his family’s; they’ve sold a large portion of their plantation to pay for his tuition. And his sister’s; she tried to hide an unplanned pregnancy by marrying the town banker—veering so far away from southern ladyhood that she’s run out of Jefferson entirely. A year after he arrives in Massachusetts, Quentin drowns himself in the Charles River.

Example three is the John Henry myth. Like most things concerning the black experience, romanticism belies reality. The holes Henry and his coworkers drilled were for explosives—to blow holes into mountains for railroads. Conditions for steel-driving men were horrible; workers hammered away in decreasing visibility as developing tunnels filled with dust and noxious fumes. Those who didn’t make it were piled into makeshift graves: where John Henry would’ve ended up after dying from exhaustion, in spite of his dignity and strength. Charming, in its luddism.

One person burdened with regret, another with history, another with their place in a society frequently finding ways to render their existence obsolete.

But the point is, none of them are living.

2.

“The novel’s not dead. It’s not even seriously injured.” So said Don DeLillo, roughly ten years before James Wood took to the pages of the New Republic to use Zadie Smith’s White Teeth as a springboard to pillory narrative principles that DeLillo helped canonize. Every generation of writers has to contend with the musings of that era’s critics, and it appears that the mechanisms of modern writing are still trying to address the overabundance of vitality Wood pointed out in “Human, All Too Inhuman.”

Writing stems from the oral telling, but, paradoxically, there are several mediums that perform the function of storytelling more efficiently than speech. One side of contemporary fiction has concrete knowledge usurping emotional intelligence, the result being an overabundance of facts that propel action as if it were a push alert. The backlashes towards this—the formalist revival in poetry, Wood’s “autonomous novel”—seem equally narrow, for changes in consciousness should inherently affect the types of work writers produce.

Recently, an article in the TLS questioned Wood’s range in an era where politics has become more aggressive on street level. All the midcentury geniuses—Trilling, Sontag, Baldwin, McCarthy—were never afraid of parsing out the politics of a novel—or taking a stab at politics outright. Wood couldn’t even implicate himself as a white New Yorker critic, as a Harvard professor on holiday in Italy, in the plot of a Jenny Erpenbeck novel on refugees. What is his utility?

From a practitioner’s standpoint, it’s a fair question, but unduly harsh. James Wood has written cogently on the 2008 financial crisis in relation to the work of Adam Haslett and Jonathan Dee, as well as the effect colonialism has had on ascendent people of color in the context of V. S. Naipaul. And wasn’t it Trilling who compared James to Dreiser, finding the latter utterly inferior—only admired by liberal critics because his subject matter was more useful from a socialist perspective? Utility is not the same as value.

Wood isn’t wrong, just right in the wrong way. His largest sin isn’t gentility; it’s his refusal to let the dead be dead. In harping on realism as our center of gravity, he presupposes that the forms inhabiting realism’s counter-traditions draw strength from it—that our current reality is vital enough for literature to serve as its distillation.

To DeLillo, only the novel is alive, not the society it represents. But of course this is abstract. The novel is an inanimate object; it has no life to speak of. What he meant was that novels should be spacious enough to encompass whatever changes happen within culture, but as a vessel rather than a purifier.

This gets closer to writing’s conservatism, its tutelage by models. All of the novels DeLillo cites as exemplary have been connected to the works of others. JR, by William Gaddis, was rightly linked by the editors of n+1 to Henry Green, while Harold Bloom saw shades of Faulkner in Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian. And it was none other than James Wood who looked at Gravity’s Rainbow, and Pynchon’s work in general, only to throw up his hands, nonetheless acknowledging he was America’s most symbolic writer since Melville.

Writers, subsisting off other writers. Writing, as vessels for other writing. This is the stuff of time capsules. Or coffins.

3.

This past January was the 200th anniversary of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. Though gesturing towards Prometheus in its full title, and rhetorically to Paradise Lost, no one would call it a parody. On the contrary, whatever references it draws are cloaked in its story.

Victor Frankenstein begins work on his Creature because of grief; his mother has died of scarlet fever. Eventually, he gets the idea to reanimate dead tissue, and plunders morgues and graveyards for human remains. Miraculously, he succeeds, only to discover what he created isn’t the idyllic image in his head, but a hideous monster. Horrified, Victor leaves, meets up with a friend, goes back to his apartment, only to discover that the Creature has escaped.

It proceeds to wreak havoc on Victor’s life; towards the end of the novel, dying from hypothermia in the North Pole for some reason, he tells the expeditioner who finds him to “seek happiness in tranquility and avoid ambition.” One can’t help but think that ambition is the least of Victor’s problems. For starters, he only feels responsible for his Creature when it insists that he create a companion—someone to spend his life with who understands his personal experience. The fear of a race of hodge-podge bodies overthrowing humanity causes Victor to renege on his promise to do so. Then his solution to the problem is to kill the Creature, which never would’ve been alive in the first place if it weren’t for him.

Victor Frankenstein’s failure is one of stewardship. He failed to give his Creature a fighting chance.

One of the defter choices Shelley makes is Victor refusing to reveal his technique in bringing the dead to life. From a practical standpoint, one cannot elaborate on something that’s impossible; but it also serves as a commentary on Victor’s ego. He makes his creature, then abandons it. His caution is an imposition—of his morality onto our own. The assumption is that every other person who encounters such an ugliness would repeat the same action, but who is he to decide? No matter. We’ll work with what we have.

Victor describes his Creature as having “yellow skin scarcely cover[ing] the work of muscles and arteries beneath…[with] shrivelled complexion and straight black lips.” In other words, its seams are showing.

Victor Frankenstein was of means. Suppose he’d gotten his wits, and cut the creature’s “lustrous black, and flowing” hair to something more respectable—business length. What if afterwards, he decided to take the Creature to a bespoke tailor in Bavaria? The head cutter would’ve fainted, but composed himself after Victor made him an offer, and a good one—large enough to match the eight-foot-tall figure he’d have to contend with. Then, after all of that, suppose Victor releases his creature into the wild. Still ignorant of how it’d be perceived, it’d nonetheless have a normal-enough appearance to blend in, at least until people got up close. Unassuming and subversive, the horror of experiencing the derivative is replaced by the allure of a familiar quality found in a stranger that you can’t quite place, only to have one’s breath taken away at the shock of a revelation.

4.

“In January 1878, a professor of botany named S.A. Rachinsky wrote to [Leo] Tolstoy about what he felt to be ‘a basic deficiency in the construction’ of Anna Karenina, namely that ‘the book lacks architectonics.’” Tolstoy disagreed. “On the contrary,” he replied, “I take pride in the architectonics. The vaults are thrown up in such a way that one cannot notice where the link is.”

A responsible creator, Tolstoy is instructive in his insistence on hiding his structures. But he’s a supreme inventor. The rest of us—working with both the relative pedagogies of MFA writing programs and an increased relativity in what constitutes literature—can learn a lot from Victor Frankenstein’s failures—and Mary Shelley’s identification of them through the camouflaging of her influences.

Discussions these days center around the canon being compromised, and the increasing need to decolonialize it. If we’ve indeed reached the end of the line, and a reshuffling is in order, very well. Let’s take a moment to mourn the dead. But avoiding scavenging their various corpses and attempting to reanimate them seems too much to leave on the table. If one keeps their formulas to themselves, all the better. There are plenty of labs to work in, plenty of codes to crack.

A contemporary architectonics must deal with a history we find abhorrent—a graveyard riddled with dead things—and face our disgust as we rummage for parts suitable enough to suture into large creations. But the next step—Tolstoy and Shelley’s point, and our responsibility as writers and makers—is not to let our Creatures run around naked. Artifice asks not that one aim towards aristocracy; only that your influences be clothed.

Heroism in the novel seemed toxic and unsightly, until Helen Dewitt breathed life into the character of an 11-year-old genius. And the slave narrative, sallow with cliche and stereotype, until Paul Beatty introduced us to a middle-class black man scheming to bring attention to his decertified town by resegregating it. And allegory, dusty and emaciated, until Carmen Maria Machado reappropriated it to apply to the spectral, slow-burn subjugation of women and girls. These are just three examples; doubtlessly, one could think of more. But the point is less about abundance than the activity—about reconciliation as an aesthetic project.

Despite the amount of opinions present, none of this is meant to be prescriptive. Merely, to explore more autonomous forms of creation—less-fraught inquiries of “What have I done?”

___________________

J. Howard Rosier lives in Chicago, where he edits the journal Critics’ Union. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in The New Criterion, Kenyon Review, Bookforum, The Believer, and elsewhere. Rosier is the recipient of the James Nelson Raymond Fellowship from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and an Alan Cheuse Emerging Critics Fellowship from the National Book Critics Circle.

[doshmanziari]

An Architectural History of Yharnam || 2018 Developments

I’ve returned to writing this. Below are some snippets. If this is going to be a historical text, I see no reason to exclude bits of stuffy academic debates.

“The age is running mad after innovation; all the business of the world is to be done in a new way; men are to be hanged in a new way; the world itself is not safe from the fury of innovation…”

A certain narrow-minded self-importance and xenophobic insularity can be discerned by Yharnam citizens’ popular adoption of “castle” at one point as a way of referring to their homes.

Winkmann became a theoretician for the Sidereal movement, writing:

“Those who have hitherto written of aesthetics, from laziness rather than a lack of knowledge, have fed us with metaphysical ideas. They have imagined an infinity of beauties and have perceived them in Labyrinthine statues, obelisks, and archways, but instead of showing them to us they have talked about them in the abstract, as though all the designs and monuments had been destroyed or lost. Therefore, to treat of the art of design of the Ancients and to point out its excellence both for those who admire it and for artists themselves, it is necessary to come from the ideal to the sensible, from the general to the particular; and to do this, not with vague and ill-defined discussions, but with a precise determination of those outlines and delineaments which produce those appearances that we call virile, powerful, and beautiful forms.”

“The works of man are at times like man himself. Primitive works of art, incomplete, coarse, which expose the indecisiveness of inexperience, or the stabbings for a procedure, are often more useful, more worthy of attention, and more instructive than other works seemingly more elegant, correct in their general conception, more studied or cleverly executed, but which commit the grave error of revealing nothing to the spirit.”

One can see a subsequent enactment of these principles in the upper cathedral ward, with its Pthumeric sculptures and usage of broad and massive forms possessing a technical refinement surpassing Old Yharnam’s, broad and massive itself. Yet one can also recognize within this call for first-hand observation a disinterest in its applicability to Yharnam’s contemporary culture; Winkmann makes no mention of Yharnam’s broader organizational or hygienic needs. An article by Telville, a rare example of a call for seeing aesthetics from a historical perspective, comprises one of a few contrary responses:

“The very position of Winkmann and writers of his ilk has led them to relish an unlimited detachment from pragmatics; and so they have become much bolder in their novelties, more enamored of supposed ancient wisdom and more confident still in their individual reason. No matter how close such men have ever come to reproducing and elaborating on the Ancients’ work, this whole derivative system is inescapably based on an initial conception, that of attributing an essential and super-historical character to a particular choice. The supposed universality of the Ancients’ architecture is an attribute given by history, not inherent in their nature. Why shall we worship tombs?”

If Yharnam’s architecture was admired by “outlanders”, it was primarily because of its methods. The process, and not the building, was coveted. Even so, a number of articles in architectural journals attest to a begrudging interest in Yharnam’s “bizarreness.” In the same article, Henri condemns Yharnam by stating, “It is no longer architecture,” and yet later on also describes its buildings as “an art truly individual which does not find its equivalent with us.” Time and again, there is a reformulation of the idea that Yharnam’s architecture may finally blossom into something admirable when, but only when, more rhythm, fitness, proportion, and dignity are added to its “picturesque” qualities. Until then, it would be original but not proper.

Whatever sympathies or antipathies later readers may have with the involved parties, it must be noted that the external critics of Yharnam’s architecture generally only had second-hand contact, neglected to give authorial attribution to designs, and were primarily informed by exterior illustrations in journals -- illustrations which were accurate and yet only partial. Such illustrations excluded the interrelationships of technology, plan, and elevation; more than that, there was no sociological dialogue between those distantly interested and the inhabitants of their objects of criticism. To them, the architecture was an inexplicable organism that acted independently of its inhabitants. Yharnam would go on to have a reputation for fierce xenophobia, but at one point it encouraged outsider eyes looking in.

“We are becoming wonted to having foreigners write amiable and appreciative criticism on the work that our architects are doing. Many foreign critics have a way of discussing the matter that leaves more sting than balm behind.”

^ Bringing in the other angle of external critics having their own blindspots even when criticism may be applicable; reflecting late-19th century tensions and maintained ignorance between the US and France; the idea here being that Yharnam's architecture was reflective of some social and cultural norms, themselves criticizable, but that the architecture was not an inexplicable organism as foreign criticism seemed to treat it. Emphasize the theme of architectural theoreticians and the non-intellectual citizenry developing separately and yet somehow in tandem: the theory is myopically formal, but it's embraced by society as signifiers of civic pride and proof of an especial creative talent (emboldened as xenophobia later on, its own sort of myopia)

Architecture was severed from the important problems of its time: the artists, who should have been concerned with the aims of architectural production, isolated themselves with imaginary or purely formal problems, prolonging the myth that architecture could control society and that its aesthetic properties were somehow spiritual; and the engineers, concentrating on the means of realizing their creations, forgot the ultimate aim of their work and allowed themselves to be used to any end whatsoever. At the same time, it must be noted that Yharnam’s classes very much enjoyed the architectonic variety these debates produced, and seem to have become only more emboldened when external criticism was directed their way. Why shouldn’t Yharnam’s working class, eventually emerging as a financially empowered middle class with luxuriant tastes, enjoy the fruits of its industry and visual inventiveness?

Over time, Yharnam's governing classes and institutions came to hold the belief that one need only concern oneself with the single enterprise for a balance to eventually reassert itself throughout the whole. The elite believed that they were moving towards a “natural” and “enlightened” order, one that more truthfully reflected an underlying cosmological paradigm, knowable from the analysis of its elements, like the Byrgenwerthian corpuscular theory of the natural world. The structures of traditional societies -- the political privileges of Cainhurst’s feudalism, the organization of Yharnam’s medicinal and industrial economies -- appeared as collapsable trifles to be removed suddenly and violently so that the world could move forward into the imagined natural order. Any outcome was morally justifiable, for it would reflect ostensible scientific truisms: the strong would survive the revolution, and the weak would at best be guinea pigs.

[islandsofthemind]

‘INSULAE’ - Hans-Christian Schink

The isle lies on the waves, on the instable, on temporary balances. Physical place and, at the same time, psychological abstraction. Place of the soul, conceptual representation or an intimate refuge. Real and imaginary isles, observed now by the reassuring position of those who find themselves in the “middle”, now through the distorting and desacralizing mirror of marginality. This phenomenal and contemporary object sometimes crystallized in peculiar and unchangeable relations. Privileged observatory as regards the transformations which are taking place in the lagoon city.

A photographic workshop by photographer Hans-Christian Schink was be developed in Venice and in the surrounding numerous minor isles in 2017. It offered room to different photographic interpretations: the lagoon eco system and the military defensive works; the representation of the landscape, of the city and of the different insular realites, whether like “human landscape” or from an architectonic, urbanistic and naturalistic point of view; the portrait as research on the public, identity and social relations and at last the personal story through indications, signs and fragments.

More info: https://landscapestoriesworkshop.com/2017/03/17/insulae-i-photography-workshop-with-hans-christian-schink-i-venezia/ - http://www.hc-schink.de/

[planetarie-howers]

missing home in an odd tender tremulous kind of way that maybe isn’t missing at all because there really is no pain in it, just a sort of astonishment that childhood was... such a thing as it was, as perfectly whole and contained as a soap bubble, and that i am old enough, just barely, to see it in its wholeness now. i am an adult. or at the very least i can no longer hide from the obligation to be an adult. finally emerging into this world of equivocal things.

i realise that none of this comes easily. empathy or maturity or tact or prudence. i wonder if i am just... somehow late to it. only very recently have i managed to sprout that voice in my brain that slaps me across the face and says don’t be a baby. don’t sulk don’t complain don’t hide don’t starve don’t be ridiculous and petty. my trainwreck of a relationship, with all its melodramatic ultimatums and architectonics of tragedy, really did not help me grow up. god, i’m a wild specimen. finally cutting myself down to size. human-size.

i am starting to see my anorexia a little unkindly as a sort of immaturity. though i always had some intimation of that, for all those years. no one’s really starved their way to god, not even simone weil, she was just an idealistic nuisance in spain, and wasting everyone’s fucking time... no one’s a hero in 2020. drink the most ethical mylk you can find and give your spare change to charity. maybe my teenage self would be disappointed but is this not always how it goes? not that i ever did anything apart from read camus and be snide about bucket-shakers.

sometimes i still lie awake and feel as guilty as if my life depends on it, as if there’s money to be made from it. but it’s not my original sin and i did not plunge the world into flame by kissing a girl. i just did a shitty thing. maybe that’s worse. maybe i’d prefer to scrub imaginary blood off my hands and hurl myself from the battlements, maybe i’d prefer to be dragged shrieking to hell by mephistopheles—at least something grand and doomed in that—but that’s a kind of redemption too, and you don’t deserve that. i don’t know if i’ll ever really believe in myself again. but maybe that’s a good thing. bit of an out-of-control ego i had for a while—feels like millennia ago.

feeling like summer will never come. grace lee deciduous tree extraordinaire. do i just need twice the amount of vitamin D as everyone else? at least i’m not as cold, bit of fat on me this year, makes all the difference—god i was so so happy that afternoon in gangnam last summer, 36’C—thought i could dissolve into a heat haze of bliss.

[biofunmy]

In the galleries: Artists create a multi-work homage to a teacher and a comrade

Then 22 and working for Time magazine, Burnett focused on 1960s American cars and beach culture — and counterculture — at NASA’s equivalent of Woodstock. He photographed such middle-American types as square dancers, a paperboy and a huckster selling dubiously authentic “moon maps.” But he also documented a guitar-strumming troubadour; a young couple with a transistor radio, their faces reflected in a rearview mirror; and a man with binoculars on the roof of a van embellished with the words of the Fugs, a hippie folk group. Both the kids and their elders appear to be in profound communion with their automobiles, whether lounging in a sedan’s trunk or sleeping partly beneath a VW bug.

Shot both after dark and under withering sun, Burnett’s color photos feature deep blacks and hot whites. In the exemplary shot, a few dozen space buffs are shielding their eyes with their hands as they gaze up into the bright July sky. The sight they seek is distant and receding. Burnett’s is right in front of his lens.

David Burnett: We Choose to Go to the Moon Through Feb. 2 at Leica, 977 F St. NW.

Lincoln Mudd

Some 30 friends and admirers contributed to “Lincoln Mudd: Student, Mentor, Colleague,” and their work makes up more than half of the tribute to the Montgomery College professor who died in 2018. Yet Mudd himself is clearly the star of the exhibition at the college’s King Street Gallery, which showcases the artist and teacher’s remarkable ability to conjure pliant forms in iron, bronze and aluminum.

Even when Mudd was making prints, another specialty, he was drawn to metal. One of his handsome woodcuts depicts a pileup of girders, suggesting a bridge in the process of either coming together or apart. His sculpture is less architectonic, even when it has such structural elements as the hexagonal boxes that punctuate three arcing strands in the show’s only example of Mudd’s working entirely in wood. The artist’s pieces often use cast metal to simulate fabric or even softer materials.

“Bayou Choo Choo” is a small, boxy vehicle dwarfed by a towering plume of smoke. The sinuous form of the abstract “Herding One Desert” is topped with strands of iron rope. Most evocative is “Night Hymn,” in which a cloak wraps the contours of a life-size body that’s almost entirely absent. Aside from the shape, the only evidence of human presence is a hand clutching the empty garment. As with that print’s enigmatically overlapping girders, the missing person could be arriving or departing.

This sense of fluidity echoes Mudd’s process. The artist made molds, but he didn’t use them to produce multiples of the same piece. Instead, he introduced variations into the casting process to yield one-of-a-kind sculptures. The knowledge that he did so gives added resonance to one of the tribute works, Pablo Callejo’s “Metal Pour With the Guys.” The etching doesn’t simply celebrate the fellowship of artists engaged in heavy physical work. It also shows a process that, for Mudd, was as much improvisational as mechanical.

Lincoln Mudd: Student, Mentor, Colleague Through Jan. 31 at King Street Gallery, Montgomery College, 930 King St., Silver Spring.

Suh & Graves

After sketching urban scenes in flurries of pencil and watercolor, Suh Yongsun carefully dates them. But what most strongly fixes the Korean artist’s vignettes in time and place is the found objects he incorporates. Most of the Suh pictures in MK Gallery’s “Midtown and Beyond” were made in New York and include bits of tickets, handbills and food packets. A few are rendered on paper bags. The things the artist saw, bought and ate are all part of the record.

Although based in Seoul, Suh spends part of each year in the United States; these pictures include depictions of Atlanta as well as New York. Wherever he goes, the artist records his surroundings in an expressionist style that stresses spontaneity and childlike directness. The show’s only portrait is of Tina Turner, painted in quick strokes of clashing orange and green on a Metropolitan Museum of Art brochure. Suh splashes impressions atop borrowed context.

Kathleen J Graves, the show’s other contributor, also freezes moments. But she stages the scenes she photographs in the two series represented here, “Nature and Culture” and “Dark Days.” The first includes close-ups of century-old domestic objects, notably ceramics, nestled amid outdoor plants. The man-made things are incongruous, yet feature decorative motifs drawn from nature. The items were crafted, the artist suggests, at a time when people were closer to the world around them.

That idea is pertinent to the second series, partly inspired by the rising sea levels that affect Graves’s Long Island workplace. These computer-modified pictures collage nature imagery with renderings of imaginary mini-robots that observe damage to the biosphere and devise strategies to repair it. Manipulated after rather than before the shutter clicks, the “Dark Days” photos offer ways to remake the planet with imagination rather than bulldozers.

Suh Yongsun & Kathleen J Graves: Midtown and Beyond Through Feb. 4 at MK Gallery, 1952 Gallows Rd., No. 202, Vienna.

Frank Van Riper

Last year, Frank Van Riper exhibited vintage black-and-white pictures of Paris and New York at Photoworks. Many of those images are now at Waverly Street Gallery, where the photographer (and former Washington Post columnist) is showing “A Tale of Four Cities.” The additional locales are Washington (Van Riper’s longtime home) and Venice. The added element is color.

As a veteran newspaper shooter, Van Riper developed a mastery of monochromatic images, although his blacks are too intense for newsprint. In Venice, he captured ebony skies mirrored by equally dark water punctuated by shimmering light. The color photos are mostly of the District and portray familiar places. But as he demonstrates with a deftly framed picture of the interior of the Pension Building (now housing the National Building Museum), seen through one of its distinctive stairways, Van Riper knows just where to stand.

Frank Van Riper: A Tale of Four Cities Through Feb. 8 at Waverly Street Gallery, 4600 East-West Hwy., Bethesda.

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