Gerard Hoffnung: the bricklayer's lament

Hoffnung was born in Berlin, 1925, went to London as a refugee in 1939, became a writer, a composer and a cartoonist of a particularly gentle kind:

Gerard Hoffnung, cartoon.

From 1958:

And how dreadful, he died in 1959 of a cerebral haemorhage, just 34. 

Lebbeus Woods: May 31, 1940 – October 30, 2012

No one as influential to my generation as Lebbeus Woods.  He did not build, he drew, he thought, he continually shifted, like light and shadow, through the space of architecture. 

Lebbeus Woods, an imagined wall that would protect Bosnia where others failed.

'The wall would be built very high, with a vast labyrinth of interlocking interior spaces, creating a structurally indeterminate system that would be extremely difficult to bring down by demolition charges or artillery fire. Tanks and mobile artillery could not be brought through the wall. Foot soldiers could not climb over the wall in large numbers, but would have to go through it. Once inside, they would become lost. Many would not be able to escape. They would either die, or, as it were, move in, inhabiting the spaces, even forming communities. Local farmers from the Bosnian side, could arrange to supply food and water, on a sale or barter basis. In time, they would move in, too, to be close to their market. Families would be living together. The wall would become a city.'

War and Architecture

John Berger and Tilda Swinton

via politicstheoryphotography

Richard Long on Box Hill

the Guardian's caption: Land-mark ... a cyclist passes Richard Long's artwork Box Hill Road River, in Surrey. Photograph: Brian Cleckner/National Trust

Richard Long's centre line on the zig-zag portion going up Box Hill in Surrey, part of the cycling track for the Olympics: evidently it was inspired by the graffiti chalked on the roads during the Tour de France, which, now that I've looked it up, isn't that interesting. 

Here he is talking about laying down the road paint, like a thief in the night.  an authorised thief in the night, with a team of helpers. 

aesthetics / anesthetics at Storefront

Aesthetics / Anesthetics. Storefront for Art & Architecture, New York

on birds, axonometries, children, green, comics and 30 Storefronts
June 27 - July 28, 2012

What is it that an architectural drawing does and how does it do it? How can we distill beauty from cosmetics? How can new modes of representation produce new architectures and new sensibilities? 

Aesthetics/Anesthetics is an exhibition about architectural drawings.

The above is from the press release.  There is a clever gif halfway down the Aesthetics / Anesthetics page on the Storefront site.

Frida Escobedo is part of this exhibition.  On Site, early early on, maybe issue 5 or 6, published two houses by Perro Rojo, which was Frida Escobedo and Alejandro Alarcon at the time.  Young Mexican architects, like Canadian ones, do some very interesting early work, then go off to the GSD or Yale and hook into The Young Architects Forum, Storefront.  Escobedo is in the Mexican pavilion at the Venice Biennale this year.  There is a kind of new internationalised trajectory for critical practices that are rooted in their own countries and participate in a slate of venues that really have no specifically cultural location, other than their culture of diversity.

Bangalore

Plan of Bangalore, 1791

This plan of the original fort at Bangalore is from a most interesting site, deeplythinking.  The note across the top says: Plan of Bangalore (with the Attacks) taken by the English Army under the command of the Rt Hon'ble Earl Cornwallis March 22 1791. He was related to the Cornwallis, Lieutenant-Governor of Nova Scotia, who founded Halifax in 1749 to counter French interests established at Louisbourg. 

Deeply Thinking Guruprasad says this attack plan map was part of the Third Anglo-Mysore War and shows the fort, the walled pendant hanging from the town which was surrounded by thick bushes and hedging. Bangalore became a British military base in 1809, developing over the next hundred years into the old town, the Petta, and the new station.

Bangalore, 1924What a diagram of British colonialism: the old town, the Petta and fort supervised by adjacent gridded suburbs, the station separated from the native quarter by a wide zone of parks and parade grounds.  Richards Town, Fraser Town and Cleveland Town northeast of the Cantonment Bazaar were probably named after officers and their companies, much the way Halifax streets were named after the companies stationed in barracks on them.  On the native side are the jail, the plague camp, the cemetery, the veterinary camp for the horses. On the British side are the Maharaja's palace, the polo ground and no doubt other sites of safety. (go to the original site by clicking on the pictures for enlarged versions of these maps – they are really interesting in detail)

In fact, this is all much like Halifax which, as late as 1960, allowed African-Canadians to crowd into Africville at the extreme northern end of the city, separated from the city itself by commons and an ambiguous zone that contained a mental hospital, a jail, and the city dump.  No such thing as disinterested urbanism: social relations are deeply embedded and last for centuries.

Turner of Oxford

William Turner of Oxford. View of University Park Looking Towards New College, Oxford, after 1825. Watercolor over graphite on paper. 8 1/2 x 15 1/8 in. The Metropolitan Museum, New York.

Somehow completely in thrall to these horizontal landscapes this week.  This one so diagrammatic, one wonders if he was there at all.

winter in aberdeenshire, could be here

John Gardiner Crawford. Winter. n.d. Oil on masonite, 101 x 69 cm. The Scottish Gallery.Too much contact with landscape clearly makes one very abstract.

north wales in 1802

Cornelius Varley. Craig Goch, Moel Hebog, North Wales, 1802. Watercolor over graphite. 16.4 x 36.5 cm. The Metropolitan Museum, New York

This calm small watercolour of 1802 was done the year before Lusieri's Parthenon, below.  The description on the Metropolitan Museum website says that Varley left painting in favour of the development of optical instruments.  
Both are about seeing, the relationship between detail and sight, between recording and looking. 

the southeast corner of the Parthenon, 1803

Giovanni Battista Lusieri. The South-east Corner of the Parthenon, Athens, 1803. watercolour, 64 x 83cm. The National Galleries of Scotland, Lady Ruthven bequest, 1885.

When Lord Elgin was removing the sculptures from the Parthenon, the ones held in the British Museum as the Elgin Marbles and the subject of a long and intense campaign by Greece for their repatriation, he had Giovanni Battista Lusieri record the removal process.  

Thomas Bruce, 7th Earl of Elgin was the British ambassador to the Ottoman Empire between 1799 and 1803.  Clearly the Ottoman Empire, which had reigned from 1299 to 1923 – the remains are today's Turkey – didn't much care for Greece, indeed relations between Greece and Turkey simmer and seethe still.  Why were Canadian UN Peacekeepers in Cyprus for so long, for example?  Greece, Greek history, the Parthenon, the Phidian sculptures would have seemed archaeological, not particularly essential to a centrally located but culturally marginal part of a vast empire which occupied the Middle East, North Africa, the northeast Mediterranean and surrounded the Red Sea, the Black Sea and touched the Caspian Sea and the Persian Gulf.

Greece was lost to the Ottoman Empire in 1821, but by then the archaeological looting was complete.  Britain purchased the marbles, already in their possession, in 1816. The legality of the removal was questioned immediately after it happened; even Byron protested the removal, so it is not just a recent 20th century controversy. During the Greek War of Independence of 1821-1833, the Ottomans used the Erechtheum as a munitions store, confirming a basic disinterest in the spatiality of history in occupied territory.  

It was the beginning of the era of the Grand Tour however, and a British love of things Greek: language, architecture, philosophy.  It was felt that the marbles of the Parthenon were safer in England than in a place with a growing independence movement which predictably ended in a 12-year war.  

The moral justification for looting during a war often rests on salvation and protection.  At the end of the 20th century, the Elgin Marbles remained in the British Museum because Athens is considered too polluted – had they been left on the Parthenon, they would have dissolved away.  Now, I suppose Greece is considered to financially unstable to look after them. 

Linda Kitson: Sir Galahad

Linda Kitson, Sir Galahad moored at Fitzroy. She continued to burn until she was towed out to sea and sunk as a War Grave. 16 June 1982. Imperial War Museum 15400

In this year of anniversaries of death by sea, here is a drawing by Linda Kitson who was commissioned by the Imperial War Museum in 1982, as a war artist, to go with the British troops to the Falklands. The Sir Galahad was a supply ship, hit by Angentinian planes on June 8th.  It was carrying explosives, and 200 men were killed, or injured, many of whom were Welsh Guards, a dreadful irony given the Welsh history in Patagonia in southern Argentina. 

Bengal River Fish, 1804

Bengal River Fish, ca. 1804 India; Calcutta School Pencil, gouache, watercolor, and gilding on paper 14 1/4 x 20 1/2 in. (36.1 x 52 cm) Metropolitan Museum, New York.

A lovely drawing, delicate, precise, and gilded.  The description on the Met website says: This painting shows two views of a Bengal river fish, executed in pencil and watercolor with traces of gilding on paper. The twin images of each side of the fish are placed by one another, the upper image in a dark gray tone and the lower one in a paler shade of the same color. The mottled, scaly surface of the fish's body is carefully rendered, as are its mouth and eyes. The painting is from the collection of Marquis Wellesley, governor-general of India from 1798 until 1805. Wellesley had large menageries and hired native artists to paint each of the birds and animals in them.

Björn Braun, tree, material

Björn Braun, Untitled, 2009. Meyer Riegger, Karlsruhe/Berlin.

From an article in Frieze:

'collages – usually unframed and mounted on the torn-off covers of hardback books'

'works use only what can be found in the original pictures: he cuts and tears things out, reforming or repositioning them in the finished piece.'

Gareth Long and Derek Sullivan: the illustrated dictionary of received ideas

Gareth Long and Derek Sullivan. The Illustrated Dictionary of Received Ideas.

Gustave Flaubert. Dictionnaire des Idees Reçues
1911-13
A dictionary of received wisdom: misguided, banal, what everyone thinks and never questions.  In 1852 Flaubert wrote 'It would be the justification of Whatever is, is right'.

Jorn Barger in 2002 did an analytic reorganisation of the dictionary into broad categories such as 'things to make fun of' (Philosophy: always snigger at it), things to thunder against' (Whitewash (on church walls) Thunder against it.  This aesthetic anger is extremely becoming). 'Things to pretend (Illusions: Pretend to have had a great many, and complain that you have lost them all).

The kind of person, or people, defined by this dictionary of admirable philistinism is familiar to anyone who has ever read a British novel about the class system but to find it so sharply defined in France is surprising when most of what we know of France is Proust (one must claim to have read it, a long time ago though), Sartre (did him in university – brilliant), de Beauvoir (unrequited lover/feminist – really responsible for Sartre's success) — this is catching, this received wisdom stuff. The clichés come so easily, they must be just below the surface.

Anyway, wouldn't have known about Flaubert's dictionnaire if I hadn't heard about Gareth Long and Derek Sullivan's ongoing project to illustrate the dictionary.   They hold public drawing sessions, one of which was at Artexte last October and another is today, June 1 at the Art Gallery of York University.   They've built a special desk to do these drawings on, taken from Flaubert's last and incomplete book, Bouvard and Pécuchet, so we are looking at a large project, part performance, part book making, for there are books, small, that come out of this – one is published by Artexte (edition of 150, $40), others in smaller editions from other venues. 

Flaubert on what everyone knows about architects: Architectes --- tous imbéciles.
--- oublient toujours l'escalier des maisons.

Gareth Long and Derek Sullivan. Illustrated Dictionary of Received ideas. here- Antiques: Are always of modern fabrication. Antiquities: Commonplace, boring.

Armelie Caron: tout bien rangé

Armelie Caron. New York, tout bien rangé, 2005 / 2008

Armelie Caron, in Anagrammes Graphiques de plans de villes - 2005 / 2008  , takes a figure ground map of a city and classifies all the blocks by size and shape.  Of course Manhattan is numbingly regular, and Berlin has lots of triangular blocks as axes slice through quite regular fabric.  Paris is a surprise, the axes are wider than the blocks, which as a texture are very tiny indeed. 

Re-organising pattern is always quite entertaining, sort of visual puns where a letter is out of place and it throws out a whole new, absurd, meaning.  These city blocks are re-arranged according to visual rules, rather than urban or historical relationships and says quite a lot about the scale of collective life each individual block in each city.  Paris has so many infintesimal blocks, probably the size of one building.  These are the blocks of Kieślowski or early Truffaut where there is a very fine line between apartment and street, where private life is small and public life is all.

Armelie Caron. Paris, tout bien rangé, 2005 / 2008

Anselm Kiefer: winter

Anselm Kiefer, Gescheiterte Hoffnung (C.D. Friedrich), 2010, Charcoal on photographic paper. Courtesy Gagosian Gallery, New York. Gescheiterte Hoffnung translates as Wreck of Hope.The last of a series of four photographs done for the New York Times: winter.  By far the most memorable image of the series, and perhaps of the year.

The title refers to Caspar David Friedrich's Das Eismeer, an 1823 painting inspired by one of Parry's ships caught in the ice on an expedition to find the Northwest Passage in 1819.

Cy Twombly

Cy Twombly. Apollo & Artist, 1975on lists: the Cy Twombly website is very generous.  It has all his work from 1951 to 2010 in 5-year periods.  If one is feeling desperate, one could do worse than to pick a year and look at all the drawings and paintings he did that year.  And then some other time, look at a completely different year.  I've always thought his work was about handwriting. The drawings seem to be full of written instructions for how to see. 

The Menil Centre in Houston has a pavilion dedicated to Twombly, solid, but it feels inside like a white canvas tent so the light is pale and completely diffuse. On the Menil website it doesn't look at all as I remember it: I remember paintings the size of the walls in quite small spaces.  They were wonderful.

Some work makes me very hopeful.

lists and letters

Juta Savage letter to Dorothy Weiss, 1984 Oct. 6. 1 item : ill. ; 36 x 43 cm. Dorothy Weiss Gallery records, [circa 1964]-2001 (bulk 1984-2000). Archives of American ArtJulia Kirwan put together Lists: To-dos, Illustrated Inventories, Collected Thoughts and Other Artists' Enumerations from the Archives of American Art from the Smithsonian collections.  There was an exhibition of all the lists in Washington through most of last year and there is a book, published by Princeton Architectural Press.

This is a case where even a shopping list has a kind of rivetting assemblage of marks on the page.  Juta Savage's collection of teapots above is not only a letter, but also the working out of variations.  The hand is an automatic extension of the eye and mind.  This is, all artists will tell you, why they are such good snooker players. 

drawing

Newspaper Rock State Historic Monument, on the access road to Canyonlands National Park, Utah

Newspaper Rock is a curious mound, an erratic in the manner of Uluru – a mound projecting from a sandstone wall, covered in petroglyphs that range in age from 2000 to 100 years old, made by a number of groups from the Anasazi to the Navajo.  I saw this first in the mid 1980s on a driving trip to the four corners where Utah, Arizona, New Mexico and Colorado meet, in a single point.  A surveyor's dream.  

In those days the American landscape was completely graffitied.  At the time in Canada highway crews painted over all the tags beside the road with carefully matched rock-coloured paint, so in contrast US highways were very noisy with much crude writing. 

Newspaper rock seemed of a piece with all this drawing on stone; an even array of mark-making.  We have given over our ability to make drawings to a variety of professionals.  We don't write any more, everything is typed, we don't make little drawings much: graphic design and photography is so pervasive.  Graffiti on the side of railway cars is the only thing in my environment these days that is personal, hand-done, anarchic. And this is something of a shame.   We should all spend the weekend with a pencil in hand, making lots of little marks on paper.  It would be very interesting to see what it is that we actually draw. 

Tacita Dean

Tacita Dean. The Roaring Forties: Seven Boards in Seven Days, 1997. Chalk on blackboard support, each: 2438 x 2438 mm. installation. Tate T07613

Unbearably frightening: lost down a mine, lost in space, lost at sea. 

Tacita Dean is known for her films, but I once saw a series of large chalk drawings she did, The Roaring Forties: Seven Boards in Seven Days, at the Tate.  They are large diagrams, full of film instructions, structural analysis, notes.  The Roaring Forties are fierce winds in the Southern Ocean; the ship she was drawing was under sail.  The drawing above is of a row of sailors tieing down the mainsail – I think that's what they are doing, my sailing experience only extends to sabots.   This mast with sailors also looks eerily vertebral.

Each drawing is on a large 8' square blackboard.  They really are notes: just enough information to tell us something about a longer narrative broken into seven chapters, but not enough to get the story.  It all remains fugitive, incomplete, partially erased, inconclusive.  The drawings appear to be factual – the direction of the wind is noted, for example, yet the scene is never one we could possibly imagine.  Lashing the mainsail is something known to only a handful of people in this world, and is mostly known from literary description - small black and white words on paper.  Clues are given in these drawings that only enable the imagination, nothing further.

It is interesting that as a filmmaker with the capacity to tell stories in full colour and detail, Dean's films are shadowy narratives much like the ones, always intangible, that haunt us.