artcrop series #1 - talfelk, 1999

webphoto 020

belly . . . not the band, the home

poem 009

singled scaled
.
every mortal thing acts simple
is iota
a jot I sing
one thing arched and sprung
like a bridge which holds
between.

Spotted by an other
plain cut thing
becomes that self completing ring
the dot
reflecting everything, while
dealing out all being
.......that indoor self
.......delves searchingly
.......and same, so it goes itself,
speaking loops which curl
as this blanket becomes a spelling friend
the single cries
in hope it scales
always missing its other,
.......friend.

photopost 003

15:56:26:11:2004
junebug is now 5wks
[leonardo da vinci]

webphoto 019

walkingpastserge'seye: montréal

poem 008

sustino-madre

perhaps the gentle expansion
..................of your eyes
sent my hand – warm and dry – toward our child,
opening to protect his in mine.
.......You possess this power, hidden
in all the smallest places,
in love that makes important
.......spaces
..................once seen so minor.

webphoto 018

wired lamps in studio

webphoto 017

a pigeon takes flight in Plaza de Mayo last spring
in Buenos Aires

third november essay

Ordering, Meaning, and Distinction
architecture topics

The issue of architectural order is overlaid by the more general issues of created significance. Formal configuration, like any ordering, is a product of conscious action; effecting the intelligible perception of, and affected by the intelligible potential of, the material world. Any attempt to penetrate the nature of order is equally an attempt to reach the foundations by which that structure is a reflection of our understanding of reality. Immediately we find ourselves facing the question of the grounding of our sensual-mental experience, and the problem of its reference - that which our understanding directs us to, directly or by implication.

The discipline of architecture, its geometrical and formal dimensions, rests secure in the belief that its existence is justified by being a fundamental derivative of human nature. But this security is not an a priori condition. It is necessary for architecture to forever earn it through an ongoing effort of self-questioning and self-definition. Architecture cannot take itself for granted but must continuously defend itself against the forces of an everchanging situation. As an independent participant in the general culture it faces the same consuming forces as all of the arts. Its prosaic aspect places it in a more precarious position vis-a-vis any powers actively working to reduce its significance. The topic of order is a subset of the more general human desire for meaning and orientation within the threatening chaos and otherness within which we live.[1]

A primary question which needs to be asked of any discipline is whether it is responsible for the creation of its own significance, or is it dependent on another body of understanding for this. A discipline which relies on outward authority for its meaning does not possess the integration necessary to stand as a fundamental means of exploring and relating to the world. Such a reliance effectively reduces the discipline and its output becomes dominated by a mercantilized character. As articles produced under extrinsic constraints, its products possess a relatively weak value in and of themselves. Instead, they are valued as objects of utility, as currency for trade, as sites of economic investment and speculation, and so on. Just as they obtain their guarantee from an external source, they are chiefly valued for reasons outside of their inherent character. In such a situation, they cannot constitute the material part of a living project. Nor can the discipline of their production be constituted by the processes implicit in its own subject matter and their interaction with the ever changing world which comprises its context.

If architecture is to assert its position as a fundamental human activity, it must understand itself as a body of knowledge in its own right. It must resist its own reduction by other forces; whether these forces are seemingly friend or enemy. The increasing domination of architecture by the mercantile, the utilitarian, the economic, and the technical is no more threatening than its confusion with writing, painting, sociology, psychology and other such bodies. This is not to say that architecture does not share much with all of these. In its operation and theoretical awareness, it deals with similar issues in parallel ways. Even the language it uses parallels that of many other disciplines. But this is not surprising. All human endeavour shares the human condition, and all thought begins in the same place.

Thought, no less than architecture, requires an order, a structure of interrelations which informs itself and is what we term 'meaning.' Fundamental concepts operate across all disciplines and philosophical questions concerning metaphysics, ontology and epistemology impact every mode of understanding and expression. But this does not mean that architecture is equal to any other mode of understanding or expression. Rather, it exists as a process which parallels the efforts of writing, poetry, philosophy, mathematics, physics, sociology, and other such bodies. When it looks to any of these external discourses to explain or justify its theory, its operation, or its designs, then it becomes removed from the inherent set of issues which ground them all. It becomes removed from the condition of life and suffers a profound loss of integrity.

[1] It is important to note that this chaos and otherness is not fully constituted by the natural world, but is equally represented by the creations of human culture; be they objects, concepts, systems, or institutions.

webphoto 016

a crop from No. 3. Parallel Waves, Point Reyes, California, 1980
from the "Overview" Series of 50 aerial photographs in two 5x5 grids
by Marilyn Bridges
[some of her work is posted on photoarts.com]

webphoto 015

waterfoot

webphoto 014

Ed Ruscha
End to the Things Made Out of Human Talk
1977
[Oil on Canvas, 36x84 in.]

second november essay

buildings are figures, not ideas

No matter how complex they are within their own context and presence, buildings operate through their approximation or approach to wholeness. Architecture is essentially synthetic; it is not abstract [1] in any reductive or analytical sense. It requires embodiment and sits as a body within the world. Any body demands stability and coherence; even if this can, at best, be achieved through an unstable equilibrium of otherwise incoherent parts. Ideas are incorporeal. They are not limited by rationality or compromise. Compromise, like the irrational, lies at the heart of habitation. When architecture becomes dominated by its idea, when its body takes form by way of illustarting ideas, when it is determined by a hegemony of ideas alone; buildings are pushed towards the anti-figural in their design.

I include the phrase “in their design” because it is my contention that they can never be so in their operation or physical -experiential presense. However, when they are pushed towards the anti-figural, they sustain losses of disconnection from otherwise essential involvements in the larger world. They suffer a reduction from the fullness of their program and from the dimensioned relationship they ought to maintain with the human body. The result is a significant reduction of their ability to house the interest and desire of the mind. Buildings-as-ideas cannot help being anti-architectural in this sense. Pure ideas, philosophy, cannot survive incorporation without loss: loss of purity, loss of isolated wholeness. Buildings-as-buildings are defined by forces of interaction. They carry innumerable compromises to their integrity brought on by the complexity and contradiction displayed by being related to “everything” else.

Architecture as Idea operates best on paper and other abstracting presentations. Precisely by not being built, by not becoming architecture at all, it retains enough coherence and isolation to be meaningful. If built, it must compromise or fail. Their ideas, built into them, are compromised. They could only hope to become ‘models,’ not buildings. If they lie at the periphery of use and need, they may sit as embodied abstraction – as objects of contemplative enquiry, as art.

[1] Here the meaning of abstract is to be weighted towards its verb use; meaning to deduct, remove; and most particularly to disengage the attention from, and dissemble. [abstract3 v.t. (OED): Deduct, remove; (euphem.) steal; disengage (attention etc.) from; consider abstractly; summarize; hense ~or n. [f. abstract1]. This sense possesses the metaphysical and experiential implications of reducing complexity and suspending necessary connectivity (of parts or meanings). This meaning is tied to the adjectival use of abstract; meaning that which is left after an operation which separates it from matter and parctice. [abstract1 a. (OED): 1. Separated from matter, practice, or particular examples; not concrete; . . . [ME f. OF, or f. L abstractus p.p. pf abs (trahere draw)]].

webphoto 013, poem 007

Poem 006, Walking Down to Sherbrooke, is the second of a trilogy "Three Poems of Brief Belonging," set in Montreal in 1987. The series begins with a reflection upon the peace of summer reading in a quiet walled park on the city's upper slopes near Parc Mont Royal. The poem of this memory, refuge, begins the trilogy. I came across this webphoto of Montreal schoolgirls on one of the streets rising up Mont Royal . . . (a smaller group) but reminiscent of the wall of youthful energy which disrupts my own subsequent Walking Down to Sherbrooke.

poem 007:

refuge
. . . . . . 31.04.87 – shady, warm, 3:00 p.m.

. . . 4 greystone walls . . . turning back the spring sun’s
. . . . . . . . emergent craze, and,
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . together with bright leaves,
creating quiet; one bounded cool place (behind,
. . inside, rested) – I sat inscribed by infinite things,
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .but governed by just some -
. . . .the sun’s set sets out words by Camilio Cela,
. . . . . . . . privileged within Percy-Walters Park,
. . . . the square of benches; the single
. . . . afternoon,
. . . . . . . ..alone and bounded
. . . . by walls and pages – I within the book’s removal,
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .it’s third city of cover
. . . . Montréal, park, reading and page.
. . . . . . ...together under that simple sky,
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .the warmth of spring
. . under the shade of civilizing trees,
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . detained.

webphoto 012

the beautiful parts of my front yard trees

poem 006

walking down to Sherbrooke
. . . . . . . . . . . . 31.04.87- Rue Redpath, sunny, warm, 3:30 p.m.

Forward then down, forward and down.
. . . . .foot after foot falls,
. . . . .making quick stops; sloping over ground,
. . . . .arrested in slow awareness
. . . . .to (then) be found . . .

Suddenly surrounded,
. . . . . . . . . falling to full stop,
. . . . . . . . . within a spread of joyful accents,
. . . . . eyes blocked and jammed,
. . . . . squint flashed by sun,
. . . . . . . . . uniformed schoolgirls making for home,
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . a breathing plaid moving wall,
. . . . . . . . . with descent reduced, I am (stalled)
. . . . . . held for an instant, before lent again,
back walking, back to the city’s blurring gist:
. . . . . . . . . restored downward; halting,
. . . . . . . . . gait falling, foot after foot tracking,
out, under and below . . . forward again to fussing activity
. . . . . . pointing and surrounding and making,
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . pointless my ceaseless turning.

quote

. . . that . . .
effigy in frozen music,
horned and terrible,
of the human form divine,
that eternal symbol of wisdom
and of prophesy
which, if aught that the imagination
or the hand . . .
has wrought . . .
of soultransfigured
and of soultransfiguring
deserves to live,
deserves to live.
James Joyce [1]

[1] James Joyce, Ulysses

webphoto 011

aquarium wave, vancouver

webphoto 010

first november essay

first november essay Duchamp and the Ready-Made

Octavio Paz speaks of "ready-mades" as an-artistic; works of art whose "interest is not plastic but critical or philosophical."[1] If we accept this, and there is plenty of support in Duchamp's own writings for accepting this, we quickly fall into the realm of contradiction. That a work of art might not be plastic, but rather something almost outside, over or past "art," that it be an exploration, not of itself (its processes and material), but of an intellectual struggle to discover the place and value of art, all of this places the "ready-made" within a much larger context than a mere work. Or, it illustrates how there is no such thing as 'mere work.' Duchamp would seem to be struggling to get to the basis which creates our interest (a profound connection) in art in the first case. Works, by being 'interesting' or meaningful, stand between our awareness and its anihilation. They, by definition, call their own existence into question. What then makes "ready-mades" of value any more than any other work: industrial products or art works for example? Are "ready-mades" still of value, or were they wholely exhausted within their own history?

Questions of value are not only philosophical, they involve the nature of our consumption of art. This consumption is a fundamentally social act. Art is an exchange between artist and observer. But what are the conditions for success? Is it true that to come away from a painting with something meaningful (of sense) requires that we first know everything possible about who created it? Surely, the social connection which has an artwork at its intersection relies on something deeper, something fundamentally shared by all, something which does not require a literary accompaniment. It only adds to the rigour of the "ready-made" that it is offered as intellectual work, while the material object which houses the effort only serves to keep it opaque.

The desire is to ask Duchamp for an explanation...the whole point of the work is strengthened by his denial to give an answer...or to give an non-answer: 'I don't know, I just felt like it.' Just because he plays his game in the gallery of the mind does not mean that Duchamp is playing a discursive game. He is producing art about art, using our understanding of the objective as the material he manipulates. It is not the object which is of interest, but our relation to it and the context in which it is placed. The "ready-made" attains its value from the force it exerts on us to reassess our perception of our world. This is an act of reconnection to the fundamentals of our existence. After all, perception, as a connection between the experiencing subject and its forever distanced object, is the embodiment of the ambiguities of epistemological desire and the universe's refusal to answer. But, why do we need to be reconnected in this way. Art, like all human activity aimed at awareness, is prone to the dulling effects of habit and repitition. To overcome this we need to continually re-invent our cultural productions, to continually seek newness.

The "ready-made" attempts to resusitate the habitual observer by criticizing the formulaic, the systematic, the rational (as assumed to be), and the prejudicially accepted canons of taste. The new is placed within the context of the habitually old in order to frustrate and contradict it. This is not done with any desire to progress beyond the old. There is no progress here, just expression. The role of the "ready-made" is to keep life going...to keep art and our experience of it alive in our experience of reality. The "ready-made" is a metaphysical attitude turned into art through a play within the space which ties art to its very material incarnation. The physical is not the endpoint of the work of art. Against it resides something other (an-aesthetically) which removes us from the sensual influence of what is at first hand, spatially and temporally. The expression contradicts itself in order to avoid conforming to any preconception, to get away from the taste developed to quiet our dissatisfaction with our limited awareness. Freedom from ourselves is the value found here. The "ready-made" interests us because it holds a mirror to the reality we too often ignore in our repetitive habitual lives.

[1] Octavio Paz, “The Ready-made,” in Marcel Duchamp in Perspective ed., Joseph Mashek (New York: Prentice Hall, 1975): 84.

webphoto 009

Alberto Sughi - To Go Where - crop