Memory, the burden of

My word this week comes from the book Kokoro by celebrated Japanese writer and scholar Natsume Soseki (1867-1916), first published in 1914 (Edwin McClellan translation published by Tuttle, 1969). His most famous novel, Kokoro, centers around the life of an unhappy university student and the relationship he builds with a reclusive old man he calls “Sensei”, whom one day confides to him the burden of a tragic memory from his youth. As with Soseki’s other late novels, Kokoro deals with themes of alienation, guilt, loneliness and memory set in the context of Japan’s modernization during the final days of the Meiji era.
The character below is Chinese in origin and pronounced xin, for heart. In Japanese it is shin or the more onomatopoetic kokoro, which can also connote mind, spirit, thoughts, feelings, emotions. McClellan explains that the best rendering comes from Lafcadio Hearn, who put it as “the heart of things”.

Burchfield's Journals

Salem
September 18, 1914
...
Storm.
Windows. Windows rattled by wind. Sound of sleet striking them. Darkish night. Swinging arclight.
Wind. Winter wind. Snow-laden wind.
Winter. Wind. Rattle.

Burchfield's Journals

Gardenville
October 3, 1941

The cave dream--the marvelous wooded cave that keeps recurring from year to year in my dreams--I rejoiced that I was back in the dream-cave. I was in pajamas--to get to the entrance to the cave I had to climb down a wet slipp[er]y clay bank, which was thinly coated with dry leaves.

Interior & Inbetween Spaces

A recurring motif in twentieth century visual art is the domestic interior, a subcategory of which is the 'empty room'. Take, for example, these three rooms:—What’s the significance of emptiness here? More specifically, what is the actual subject matter that lends them their unsettling quality? Is it in the material objects that describe a condition of inhabitation, or rather the space that surrounds such objects? What about the walls, floor and ceiling planes which circumscribe the spatial volumes, while implicating the viewer through a careful manipulation of perspective?

It seems to me the emotional power of these images lies in the fact that they do not have a subject matter per se, but instead succeed at evoking something—an atmosphere, a latent presence, if you like—that escapes pictorial description altogether. Here emptiness, that is, negative space, is assigned a positive value, which creates in effect a moment of tension between what one expects to see (an object) and what one is confronted with (a non-object). This trick of inversion is what gives rise to that curious sense of surreality and ‘presence of an absence’.

Not so much representations of physical places as metaphors of the mind, the rooms further suggest a sort of topography of the unconscious, where interior spaces such as rooms, closets and corridors describe an analogous landscape of private memories, thoughts and desires. As in those dreams of wandering one’s childhood home, the experience is that of feeling both foreign and familiar at the same time.

A similar line of thinking can be found in the Gaston Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space, who in his introduction quotes Carl Jung:

“We have to describe and to explain a building the upper story of which was erected in the nineteenth century; the ground-floor dates from the sixteenth century, and a careful examination of the masonry discloses the fact that it was reconstructed from a dwelling-tower of the eleventh century. In the cellar we discover Roman foundation walls, and under the cellar a filled-in cave, in the floor of which stone tools are found and remnants of glacial fauna in the layers below. That would be a sort of picture of our mental structure.”

Image Source:
1. Edward Hopper, “Rooms by the Sea, 1951,” in Gail Levin, Edward Hopper: the art and the artist. (New York: Norton, 1980), 295.
2. Vilhelm Hammershoi, “The Artist's House, 1915” in Anne-Birgitte Fonsmark, Vilhelm Hammershoi, 1864-1916: Danish Painter of Solitude and Light. (New York: Guggenheim Museum, 1998).
3. Antonio Lopez Garcia, “House of Antonio Lopez Torres, 1972-75.” http://www.timlowly.com/a/lopezgarcia.html

Work Cited:
Bachelard, Gaston. The Poetics of Space. Boston: Beacon Press, 1969. xxxiv.

Burchfield's Journals

Salem
August 1, 1914

The bark of a buttonwood where peeling is completed seems as smooth & soft as a horse's nose.

Burchfield's Journals

Cleveland
April 29, 1916

… I thought of a moth taking refuge under a leaf at midnight during an August storm— (442)

Toronto Power House

[1]

Name: Toronto Power Generating Station
Architect: Edward James Lennox (1854-1933)
Completed: 1904-1912
Location: Niagara Falls, Ontario
Closed: 1973
Owner: Ontario Power Generation & Niagara Parks Commission
Power Generated: 134,000 KVA
Current Status: Decommissioned (renovation Spring 2007)
Wheel Pit: 22 ft wide, 158 ft deep
Tail-race: 2,000 ft long
[2]

A lesser known building of E.J. Lennox, architect of such Toronto landmarks as Casa Loma and Old City Hall, the TPGS was amongst the first hydroelectric power stations to provide two-phase alternating current in the world. Called by Pierre Berton “the high point of industrial architecture in North America” for its grand Italianate exterior (84), for over thirty years it has lain more or less dormant—a slumbering stone garbed giant on the banks of the Niagara River just upstream the Horseshoe Falls. Major renovations started in 2006, which includes the removal of electrical and mechanical equipment, sealing of multiple portals, and backfilling of the inner forebay. Future use for the building is still to be determined.

[3]
[4]

“The real interest of Niagara for me was not in the waterfall, but in the human accumulations about it. They stood for the future, threats and promises, and the waterfall was just a vast reiteration of falling water. The note of growth in human accomplishment rose clear and triumphant above the elemental thunder.” (H.G.Wells, c1906)

Sources:
Berton, Pierre. A Picture Book of Niagara Falls, Toronto: M&S, 1993.
Cline, Carl Gordon. History of the Hydro-electric Development at Niagara. http://www.rootsweb.com/~onniagar/history/hydro-history.pdf
[1,3,4] Historic Niagara Digital Collections: http://www.nfpl.library.on.ca/nfplindex/

Access Niagara blog: http://www.accessniagara.com/blog/index.php/2006/08/01/power-station-gearing-up-for-new-life-rediscovering-niagara/

Vanishing Point: http://www.vanishingpoint.ca/powergeneration.html
Peter Kiewit: http://www.kiewit.qc.ca/index.asp?CODE=EN&Front=Est

E.J. Lennox: http://www.fineart.utoronto.ca/canarch/architect/lennox.html
Ontario Power Generation: http://www.opg.com/index.asp

[2] Author

Barbieri(esque): Part Two

Of Melting Towers

Camera Obscura (Latin for 'dark chamber')

Dolci cose a vedere, e dolci inganni
[ Things sweet to see, and sweet deceptions ]. [1]

[2]

Through a coin-sized opening in a darkened window an ordinary bedroom in New York becomes a living canvas. In the far corner stands a modest wooden dresser; sitting on top, a bulbous ceramic lamp wears a wide lampshade tilted ever-so-slightly; beside the lamp there’s a picture frame that holds a family’s portrait, silhouettes smiling in the dimness. The dresser, the lamp, and the picture frame are reflected in a tall mirror mounted on the back of a closet door. The room appears small but tidy. The walls are bare. In the foreground a low bed is covered by a plain white spread, trimmed in white.

It is an otherwise ordinary bedroom except for the projected image of an upside-down Manhattan skyline dripping like stalactites from the ceiling.



On the historical significance of the camera obscura, cultural theorist Jonathan Crary writes:

“For over two hundred years [the camera obscura] subsisted as a philosophical metaphor, a model in the science of physical optics, and was also a technical apparatus used in a large range of cultural activities. For two centuries it stood as model, in both rationalist and empiricist thought, of how observation leads to truthful inferences about the world at the same time the physical incarnation of that model was a widely used means of observing the visible world, an instrument of popular entertainment, of scientific inquiry, and of artistic practice. …[But] in the texts of Marx, Bergson, Freud, and others the very apparatus that a century earlier was the site of truth becomes a model for procedures and forces that conceal, invent, and mystify truth.” [3]

The catalytizing—indeed mystifying—element of this photograph by Abelardo Morell (one of his series of camera obscura images produced since the early 90s) is certainly the Empire State Building, laying prostrate (post-swoon?) and faintly shimmering across the clean undulating bedspread.

Whether a premeditated reference or simply a happy coincidence, it recalls a certain painting by Madelon Vriesendorp called “Apres L’Amour,” which was used on the original bookcover of Koolhaas’ Delirious New York (1978). Parallels quickly emerge: the iconic building in question—somewhat melted; spare furnishings; a foreshortened composition; even the strange beam of light coming from out of the left side of the room which suggests a possible camera aperture.

But you be the judge.

[4]

“What is crucial about the camera obscura is its relation of the observer to the undemarcated, undifferentiated expanse of the world outside, and how its apparatus makes an orderly cut or delimitation of that field allowing it to be viewed, without sacrificing the vitality of its being.” (Crary)

[1] Francesco Algarotti, ‘Of the Camera Obscura’ from An Essay on Painting, in Harrison, Charles, Paul Wood, and Jason Gaiger. Art in Theory, 1648-1815 : An Anthology of Changing Ideas. Oxford, UK ; Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2000. 477.
[2] Abelardo Morell, “Camera Obscura Image of the Empire State Building in Bedroom, 1994” in A Camera in a Room : Photographs. Photographers at Work. Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1995.
[3] Jonathan Crary, “The Camera Obscura and its Subject”. Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century. New York: MIT Press, 1991.
[4] Madelon Vriesendorp, “Apres L’Amour” in Delirious New York. New York: Oxford University Press, 1978.

Barbieri(esque): Part One

Q - Is the "destruction of aura" still a relevant debate in today's online culture?

The popular reception of the “Site Specific” series by Italian photographer Olivo Barbieri [1] has spawned a slew of imitators over the blogosphere in recent months. Photosharing websites such as Flickr now have a pool devoted to his signature tilt-shift technique [2], and links to how-to tutorials for creating quick Barbieri knockoffs with Photoshop are readily found [3]. I was intrigued enough myself to tryout this trick on Toronto, from the relative comfort and safety of my office workstation (my helicopter temporarily grounded until spring).


Some questions tend to crop up, though:

Given the ease with which an artist’s characteristic style or technique can be simulated/reproduced/hacked, what effects (whether negative or positive) to the work's artistic integrity result by its co-option into another medium—here digital manipulation—and its subsequent dissemination across the internet, a place where questions of authorship and intellectual property rights become blurred?

What’s more, how are such circumstances measurable legally, morally, and aesthetically when the celebrity of said artist is obviously ascribable to that medium’s wide distribution and availability in the first place? (Consider that Barbieri’s name is now synonymous with the tilt-shift lens effect despite the fact that contemporaries have been doing similar things: for example, Frank van der Salm, Miklos Gaal, Jorg Fahlenkamp, and Toni Hafkenscheid.)

The problem of the authenticity of the artwork calls to mind Walter Benjamin, who, in his 1930 essay A Small History of Photography, observed:

"Now, to bring things closer to us, or rather to the masses, is just as passionate an inclination in our day as the overcoming of whatever is unique in every situation by means of its reproduction. Every day the need to possess the object in close-up in the form of a picture, or rather a copy, becomes more imperative. …The stripping bare of the object, the destruction of the aura, is the mark of a perception whose sense of the sameness of things has grown to the point where even the singular, the unique, is divested of its uniqueness."

[1] http://www.artnet.com/artist/150613/olivo-barbieri.html
[2] http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/faketiltshift/interesting/
[3] http://www.boingboing.net/2006/02/27/fake_tilt_shift_phot.html

Post number one. There.