Residency at Fritz Hansen Day 2
A new collage from last week’s residency at Fritz Hansen. The piece was made with an inkjet print of Mies van der Rohe’s Highfield House and coloured paper.
Residency at the Republic of Fritz Hansen
I’ll be an artist in residence at the Republic of Fritz Hansen design shop on June 3rd and 4thwhere I’ll be showing some brand new print and collage pieces as well.
Republic of Fritz Hansen
(near Oxford Street tube) 13 Margaret Street, London W1W 8RN
www.fritzhansen.com
Artist of the Month at Kahaila
I’ll be showing a selection of recent work as well as brand new work at the Kahaila Cafe next month.
The opening night features music by
Wilderthorn (
https://www.facebook.com/wilderthorn
)
and
Flight Brigade ( http://www.flightbrigade.com )
Thursday, March 7th at 7.30pm
Kahaila, 135 Brick Ln, London E1 6SB
Free Entry.
The work will remain on display until 3rd April.
Residency Post #6: Uncatalogued Books
This is a series of blogs posts about my residency at the Westminster Reference Library that coincides with my exhibition Not in View, which continues until 23rd February. Westminster Reference Library Gallery, 1st Floor; 35 Saint Martin’s Street, London WC2H 7HP
From the big wooden table I’m sitting at, I have a view of the countless colourful book spines on the library shelves. If you rummage in any one of these books, you may find many different types of marks in its pages: underlined texts, circled words, starred items, highlighted sentences, doodles or notes scribbled in the margin. Then there are rips and folds in the pages, worn edges, missing pages and pieces of paper stuck inside books.
These markings and peculiarities might add increased emphasis to a highlighted sentence or pull your attention away to another portion of the page, where there might be a profusion of doodles. The content of the books, even if only very marginally, is warped by these markings. All these interventions make the readers seem more like users as opposed to just passive readers, while the interventions themselves become more like attempts at a form of communication with future readers.
Once a book has been modified, it is unique. There is not a single book that is identical with the same exact markings, even if it stems from the same print run. A modified book thus has an extra layer added to it and becomes a new type of document, one which records the series of interactions it has had with its users.
The library archive, full of these books, becomes a different type of archive altogether. An archive not only of knowledge categorized by subject matter, but also an archive of uncatalogued interactions in the form of doodles, scribbles, shaky lines, rips, folds, all of which have no authors, no titles and have not been entered into the library computer system.
Residency Post #5: Villa Savoye
This is a series of blogs posts about my residency at the Westminster Reference Library that coincides with my exhibition Not in View, which continues until 23rd February. Westminster Reference Library Gallery, 1st Floor; 35 Saint Martin’s Street, London WC2H 7HP
Le Corbusier’s Villa Savoye (in Poissy, France) was completed in 1931 for Pierre and Emilie Savoye as a summer house. The client’s brief allowed for almost unfettered freedom in the design of the building. In many ways this is Le Corbusier’s ideal house. His free floor plan with no load-bearing walls allowed Le Corbusier to place interior walls where he deemed aesthetically pleasing. He instructed the Savoyes to have as little furniture and as few belongings as possible, as he thought furniture was unnecessary and should be replaced by equipment.
Le Corbusier’s ideal house was purely functional and rid of any decoration. He defined the function of a house with three points: “1. A shelter against heat, cold, rain, thieves and the inquisitive. 2. A receptacle for sun and light. 3. A certain number of cells appropriated for cooking, work and personal life.”
Accordingly, Villa Savoye’s aesthetic is minimal and industrial. The cylindrical structure on the roof, the tubular railings and the clinical white of its walls are reminiscent of an ocean liner. A ramp leading from the entrance to the first floor is visible from almost every corner of the house, implying the movement of vehicles. The villa also pays homage to the car: the driveway underneath the house is a semi-circular path whose radius corresponds to the turning radius of a 1927 Citroën. Naked light bulbs illuminate the interior. The pipework is visible in the bathrooms. It is no longer man who is the measure of this house, but the machine.
It is a rational house where everything is in its place, just as the architect stipulated. A house in which placing a few sofas in the living room was not recommended. A house in which piling books in corners was highly discouraged. A house in which filling the walls with artwork would be irreverent. A house in which replacing the steel front door would be blasphemous. A house which prohibits being inhabited.
Residency Post #4: The Attic of Modernism
This is a series of blogs posts about my residency at the Westminster Reference Library that coincides with my exhibition Not in View, which continues until 23rd February. Westminster Reference Library Gallery, 1st Floor; 35 Saint Martin’s Street, London WC2H 7HP
The modernist ideals of the 20th century of creating utopias and better societies ultimately proved incapable of being realized, partially because many of those ideals were married with Soviet or Nazi ideologies and partially because creating utopias is not exactly a piece of cake. When all these utopian ideas didn’t work, or at least didn’t live up to the promises in the written manifestos, many considered the entire modernist project a failure.
Yet perhaps there are things that have been overlooked in this period: things that were started and never quite finished, things that never developed their full potential, ideas that were incomplete, forgotten, lost, marginalized pushed aside? What hides in the attic of modernism? Can all that was lost or never realized be found again? And how would the history of that era have unfolded, if some of these marginalized ideas had not been pushed aside? How would our present time look now?
But this loss applies not just to the 20th century, but to all centuries. Perhaps it is a rule of time, that there is always something lost to counterbalance that which is gained. In the poem Under a Certain Little Star, Wislawa Szymborska writes, “I apologise to time for the muchness of the world overlooked per second.”
Perhaps the muchness of what hides in the modernist attic will never fully come to light. But with that knowledge, maybe one can still rummage. Who knows what one might find?
Below:
Folded House Esters I and II
Residency Post #3: Hidden Spaces
This is a series of blogs posts about my residency at the Westminster Reference Library that coincides with my exhibition Not in View, which continues until 23rd February. Westminster Reference Library Gallery, 1st Floor; 35 Saint Martin’s Street, London WC2H 7HP
The art critic Jan Verwoert writes of the beauty of latency and how the concept of latency is not valued in our society today, which he describes as one driven by the culture of high performance:
“The appraisal of latency restores dignity to the unsaid, the unshown, and everything that can’t be dragged out into the open in the rush of high performance when the value of all our potentials appears to depend entirely on our capacity to actualize them right here, right now.” 1
A good example of latency is memory. Each of us stores memories that are latent and only become active when they are triggered. Sometimes a whole lifetime can go by without a certain memory being recalled.
As Verwoert writes, that which is latent is often unshown, not immediately apparent and hidden. When I look at the images of buildings in books there seems to be a latent energy hidden within them. First of all they are images of spaces and thus cannot give the viewer the same experience as of walking through the space. The viewer imagines walking through the space by looking at the images. By imagining walking through the portrayed space the viewer activates the image and imagines that which is not visible in the images: interior spaces, the other side of the building… The viewer imagines these hidden spaces by using latent memories of previous buildings and spaces. Spaces as they exist on a page cannot be separated from the viewer activating them by viewing them.
1 Jan Verwoert, ‘Exhaustion and Exuberance’, in Tell Me What You Want, What You Really, Really Want, ed. Vanessa Ohlraun (Rotterdam: Piet Zwart Institute 2010).
Residency post #2: An Incomplete View
This is a series of blogs posts about my residency at the Westminster Reference Library that coincides with my exhibition Not in View, which continues until 23rd February. Westminster Reference Library Gallery, 1st Floor; 35 Saint Martin’s Street, London WC2H 7HP
I’m paging through more books about Mies van der Rohe and looking at the images of the Barcelona Pavilion which architects used as blueprints to reconstruct it in the 1980s. These images are said to document the pavilion. But as with any documentation, details fall away and that which is being documented can never be pinned down. These images (these documents) can be seen as a type of reconstruction in themselves. There is not a single person in the images, so the sense of scale remains vague. The pavilion appears from a particular viewpoint, creating an abstract composition on the page. It is a very particular image yet gives the illusion that it is a somewhat faithful representation. And perhaps that is the nature of all documentation- it gives the illusion that it fully represents that which is documented, whereas it is only a partial view, an incomplete view, a reconstructed view.
The piece I made today is entitled The Barcelona Pavilion in Pieces.
Residency Post #1: The Barcelona Pavilion’s Double
This is a series of blogs posts about my residency at the Westminster Reference Library that coincides with my exhibition Not in View, which continues until 23rd February. Westminster Reference Library Gallery, 1st Floor; 35 Saint Martin’s Street, London WC2H 7HP
Sitting at a giant wooden table, I’m looking at some images in a book about Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. One of his most well-known buildings is the Barcelona Pavilion, which was an exhibition building for the German section of the 1929 International Exposition in Barcelona. No trade exhibitions were to happen within the building, allowing Mies to furnish it only with purpose-designed furniture and a single sculpture and creating a fluidity between the inside and the outside. The Pavilion was demolished in 1930. It was then reconstructed in 1986 with the aid of black and white photographs of the original as well as the original plans. This double of the pavilion survives until today.
The image in the book I’m looking at shows the original Pavilion during its short existence. There is a pool next to the pavilion. In the water the sharp angles of the building become sinuous lines; the outline of the building becomes an organic shape.
This reflection reminds me of Italo Calvino’s description of one city (from Invisible Cities): Valdrada. This city is reflected (and reproduced in its entirety) in the mirror surface of the river on whose banks its stands. In Valdrada, every house, window and geranium pot has a corresponding twin house, window and geranium pot in its reflection. The same city is seemingly repeated twice- yet it is not quite the same. As any mirror reflection, it is an inverted reflection. Valdrada has a double but it is not a perfect double.
In the image, the water in the pool drastically changes the pavilion’s image and reconstructs it on its own terms: fluid, amorphous and ghostly. The water has taken too many liberties with the pavilion’s image; the reflection has taken on an independent, shapeless existence. If this reflection is to be the double of the Mies’ Barcelona Pavilion, then the original must be significantly different from this pavilion at the pool’s edge.
The piece I made today is entitled: Barcelona Pavilion’s Reflection
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