PASSAGES

Bill Henson, Untitled, 1997-1998

"Dark space envelopes me on all sides and penetrates me much deeper than light space, the distinction between inside and outside and consequently the sense organs as well, insofar as they are designed for external perception, here play only a totally modest role."  Eugène Minkowski, in Roger Caillois, Mimicry and Legendary Psychasthenia. 

Bill Henson, Untitled Series, 1995-1996

"The magical hold (one can truly call it so without doing violence to the language) of night and obscurity, the fear of the dark, probably also has its roots in the peril in which it puts the opposition between the organism and the milieu. Minkowski's analyses are invaluable here: darkness is not the mere absence of light; there is something positive about it. While light space is eliminated by the materiality of objects, darkness is "filled," it touches the individual directly, envelops him, penetrates him, and even passes through him: hence "the ego is permeable for darkness while it is not so for light"; the feeling of mystery that one experiences at night would not come from anything else."  Roger Caillois (1935) Mimicry and Legendary Psychasthenia, originally published in Minatoure, 7.

Darkness and blindness draw their veils, forcing the senses upon themselves. Boundaries between things dissovle in inky blackness, the self melts into the milieu.  Night brings with it a change in state.  Even the eye succumbs, and becomes suffused with poignancy, there is no coincidence that pupil dilation occurs not only with darkness, but also with sadness.  Night's melancholy is palpable.

Robert Smithson’s designation of parts of the ordinary landscape as ‘monuments’ in his 1967 ArtForum piece (The Monuments of Passaic) points up his engagement with the complexities of time, space and memory.  As a critique of the glamorous and slick art world of the 1960s, with its NewYorkCity-centredness, Smithson went out into the margins – geographically and artistically.  His photographs, the instrument with which he monumentalised the landscape, were cheap black and white prints, taken with an Instamatic.  There are parallels here with the work of Hiroshi Sugimoto and Patrick Reynolds, for example, both of whom eschew an appearance of technical perfection in order to infuse their photographs with other presences.  Such photographs are, arguably, phenomenologically ‘tuned’ – they focus not on visual precision, but on sensory impression and phenomenal traces.  Smithson explored ideas of phenomenology in his grappling with time, and in particular seems to have been influenced by Edmund Husserl.  He owned copies of Husserl’s Ideas: General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology and The Phenomenology of Internal Time-Consciousness, as well as the ‘heavily marked text’ of Marvin Faber’s The Aims of Phenomenology: The Motives, Methods, and Impact of Husserl’s Thought.  The idea of a dual consciousness is drawn from Husserl’s work, and Smithson sets up a number of opposing conditions that exemplify this, such as solid and void, identifying Passaic as an ‘absence’ – full of ‘holes’ – as compared to New York City which is ‘tightly packed and solid.’

Passaic, place of monuments, becomes a kind of liminal condition, hovering at the crossing over between present and past, solid and void, where space is a kind of time, and Smithson writes variously on the ideas of ‘time travel’ and ‘space travel’.  The zone of liminality, of margins, is one that is magnetic for melancholy.  Drawn to the terrain vague conditions of suburbia, Smithson’s exploration of time within this unheroic landscape sheds light upon the paradox of monuments.  Smithson’s monuments stand as stranded objects, the very act of his designation removing them from the fabric of the everyday, sudden readymade marks of loss.  Indeed, Smithson’s monuments achieve a melancholy aesthetic through their very imprecision.  What, for example, is the Sand-Box Monument (aka Desert Monument ) a memorial to?  Smithson describes how it ‘became a map of infinite disintegration and forgetfulness,’ yet it is, perhaps, as much about the enigmatic sense of loss which dogs the melancholic, an indefinable loss of things.  If there was a clear sense of what was lost, we could mourn it, grieve it, move on.  Yet, this sense of objects stranded, branded as monuments, lingering as wounds, of sadness without a cause, suffuses the suburban waste-land  with eternal poignancy.

Liminality: Robert Smithson on Spiral Jetty, from a 1970 photograph by Gianfranco Gorgoni

THE FILM

It had been one of my favourite tales, dark, veiled, shadowy.  A story of smell, olfactory depiction.  And finally the film has made it here, as part of the current film festival.  Truly remarkable, overcoming what seems an impossibility, to convey Grenouille's intense topography of odour.  Yet, in a somehow synaesthetic manner, the conflation of music with smell, overlaid, underscored the avalanche of sensations, from the first horrors of his birth, through to the transformational seduction of the entire village at  Grenouille's denouement.  This final sequence was extraordinarily vivid, and without a word being spoken.   Grenouille's obsessively created perfume was intoxicating, captivating, capturing all whom encountered it.  The perfume bestowed upon Grenouille a sense of divinity.  Those encountering him called him 'angel'.  This recalls the notion of the odour of sanctity, the sweet smell said to emanate from the bodies of saints.  This odour was believed to occur at the time of the person's death, and had associations with the smell of the wounds of the stigmata.  One of most potent exemplars of the odour of sanctity was St Teresa of Avila, one of only three women 'doctors' of the Catholic church.  The mysticism of this spiritual smell is much in evidence as Grenouille's perfume seduces even the Bishop of Grasse himself, when the lines of morality and depravity merge in one almighty climax.

A Memento Mori

I: In which the Object is Lost

II: Mourning Sickness

Landscape's mourning over the lost object is interminable.  Freud is consulted, and the prognosis is melancholia, in which the ego plunges itself into sustained grief for the lost object, be it person, idea, place.  As Freud puts it, in Mourning and Melancholia, "the shadow of the object fell upon the ego" and  the "loss of the object had been transformed into a loss of ego..."  In time the ego becomes cannibalistic and "eats" the lost object. 

Landscape has no wish to regain happiness - the pressure and presumption for happiness throughout the Western world, pharmaceutically supported, has all but eliminated true poignancy within the experiential repertoire.  This, then, is to be not an architecture of happiness, but a landscape of sadness, a melancholy place of loneliness and loss.

IV: The Park of the Lost Object

The site is immaterial.  All that is apparent upon the surface is an enigmatic formation of small circular holes of unknown depth.  Their configuration appears significant, as is the nature of the open cavity below.  At night, light shines up from inside this curious cavern, emitting an unearthly glow from within the earth.  The constellation of points is even more apparent at this time, an inflected grid, whose very presence appears to announce an absence.

 V: Finding the Lost Object

The cavern below the pattern of oculi is revealed to be the negative form of a building.  The whole negative structure has been cast from an iconic architectural object, Le Corbusier's Villa Savoye, and this cast then inverted and placed into the ground.  The holes are the negative space of the pilotis, meeting the ground, from beneath rather than from above.  The lost object is suppressed as a subterranean subconscious, the landscape of sadness of the Park of the Lost Object. 

VI: The ‘Open Wound'

This perforated field of landscape, with the lost object of architecture embedded within it, is Freudian melancholia manifest.  Freud wrote that melancholia is like an "open wound," that lesion which is kept raw, in order that the imaginative capacity of loss is maintained.   Loneliness and longing are part of joy that is paradoxically within melancholy, that absence is always already imminent in any presence.

Architecture as landscape's other, object to its field, persists in the form of a spectral spectacle, a ghostly presence.  Like Boullée's "buried architecture," his "architecture of shadows," there is a melancholy weightiness in the suppression of the object.

That night by the forest Boullée had an uncanny sense about himself, about the silent partner that every mortal carries within, and about the unending nothingness that each person will become. It appeared to him in the form of his shadow and then in the shadows of the entire forest.

 Richard A. Etlin (1994) Symbolic Space: French Enlightenment Architecture and its Legacy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, p. 197.  

[Entry for Auckland Architecture Association / Panasonic Urban Gaze competition.  This year's moot was that 'architecture has become a field']  [The Park of the Lost Object won first place].

An Imagined Monument:

Chimneys and Shadows London 6.00am, J.Bowring, June 2007

 "One must, as I haved tried to do in funerary monuments, present the skeleton of architecture by means of an absolutely naked wall, presenting the image of buried architecture by employing only low and compressed proportions, sinking into the earth, forming, finally, by means of materials absorbent to the light, the black picture of an architecture of shadows depicted by the effect of even blacker shadows. "

Etienne-Louis Boullée, in Anthony Vidler (1992) The Architectural Uncanny: Essays in the Modern Unhomely.  Cambridge MA: MIT Press

("You see things as they are and ask, "Why?" I dream things as they never were and ask, "Why not?" George Bernard Shaw, Back to Methuselah (1921) )

Michelangelo Antonioni

(Ferrara, 29 September 1912 – Roma, 30 July 2007)

"We are surrounded by a reality which is not defined or corporeal. Inside of us things appear like dots of light on a background of fog and shadow. Our concrete reality has a ghostly, abstract quality." (From Four Screenplays, 1963)

Ernst Ingmar Bergman

(Uppsala, 14 July 1918 – Fårö, 30 July 2007)

"Film as dream, film as music. No art passes our conscience in the way film does, and goes directly to our feelings, deep down into the dark rooms of our souls."