https://skurrilsteer.org skurrilsteer Wed, 23 Aug 2023 16:53:14 +0000 https://skurrilsteer.org en https://skurrilsteer.org/Home-Image-Scroll Sat, 30 Nov 2019 16:51:50 +0000 skurrilsteer https://skurrilsteer.org/Home-Image-Scroll <img width="1675" height="2570" width_o="1675" height_o="2570" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/d065da081205311e6388f7745dd99e28dea71b20502e9d2974ab395052938bed/Mule-Head.png" data-mid="57744770" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/d065da081205311e6388f7745dd99e28dea71b20502e9d2974ab395052938bed/Mule-Head.png" /> https://skurrilsteer.org/home Thu, 23 Jan 2020 19:53:24 +0000 skurrilsteer https://skurrilsteer.org/home <img width="365" height="362" width_o="365" height_o="362" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/087c9676b334e0d712d515dca2188d238faff0701850acce4518e282dd38b94a/asterisk.jpg" data-mid="59305543" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/365/i/087c9676b334e0d712d515dca2188d238faff0701850acce4518e282dd38b94a/asterisk.jpg" /> https://skurrilsteer.org/Info Sat, 30 Nov 2019 16:51:51 +0000 skurrilsteer https://skurrilsteer.org/Info <img width="1675" height="2570" width_o="1675" height_o="2570" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/d065da081205311e6388f7745dd99e28dea71b20502e9d2974ab395052938bed/Mule-Head.png" data-mid="59007617" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/d065da081205311e6388f7745dd99e28dea71b20502e9d2974ab395052938bed/Mule-Head.png" /> https://skurrilsteer.org/the-riddle-of-daedelus Thu, 08 Jun 2023 17:10:01 +0000 skurrilsteer https://skurrilsteer.org/the-riddle-of-daedelus The Riddle of Daedalus – Pavel Tchelitchew as Psychedelic Architect In May 1964, Jean Houston and Robert Masters – two scientists who had met when conducting government research on the effects of LSD, and who would later found the Human Potential Movement and publish The Varieties of Psychedelic Experience (1966) – wrote a letter to Edward James. They asked permission to photograph two works by Pavel Tchelitchew,the Russian-born painter James had known and collected since 1932. Houston and Masters wanted The Riddle of Daedalus (1946) [named after the architect of the Cretan labyrinth that housed the minotaur] and Eye (1947), which were at that time on show at the Gallery of Modern Art in New York, to feature in an experimental film they were developing on ‘techniques for affecting alterations of human perception’.1 It is not difficult to see why the paintings would have been appropriate. They are early examples of Tchelitchew’s so-called ‘Interior Landscapes’ or ‘Celestial Physiognomies’, produced soon after Hide and Seek (1938-1942) – a painting based upon a visit to James’ home at West Dean, Sussex, almost a decade before – in which a semi-translucent figure appears at the bottom-right. This figure was soon extrapolated into The Golden Leaf (1943), a painting in which the translucent body, seen from behind, is packed with a mesh of physiological systems, overlaid according to a symbolic colour scheme aligned with the four elements: earth, air, fire, and water.2 <img width="568" height="825" width_o="568" height_o="825" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/00c1dd82c8571e94db1bfb3f64374266c1097e863e5b8b55bce6e312a26dc447/riddle-of-daedelus.png" data-mid="199595322" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/568/i/00c1dd82c8571e94db1bfb3f64374266c1097e863e5b8b55bce6e312a26dc447/riddle-of-daedelus.png" /> <img width="1200" height="1272" width_o="1200" height_o="1272" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/4d6722178269ce9c7f710f1247b0eb372016cf1ecbc58705827585de305f2548/Pavel-Tchelitchew-1898-1957-The-Eye-gouache-on-three-joined-strips-of-paper-laid-down-on-board-1200x1272.jpg" data-mid="199595227" border="0" data-scale="96" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/4d6722178269ce9c7f710f1247b0eb372016cf1ecbc58705827585de305f2548/Pavel-Tchelitchew-1898-1957-The-Eye-gouache-on-three-joined-strips-of-paper-laid-down-on-board-1200x1272.jpg" /> At the beginning of 1945, having seen work-in-progress the previous summer, Edward James was emphatic about the importance of Tchelitchew’s new work.3 He considered it a ‘new period of painting […] among the finest work produced in our lifetimes’, describing images ‘filled with X-rayed figures […] with all the veins, arteries and nerve systems glowing like Aurora Borealises’, as well as commenting on the painter’s technique of ‘blow[ing] gelatine […] between every layer to make them glow’ (and getting ‘terribly out of breath’).4 The first ‘Interior Landscapes’ were well received by critics too, even if some felt that the artist revealed his anatomical secrets ‘pitilessly’ – surely an ungenerous response to works so alive with empathic energy and wonder.5&nbsp; What developed from these paintings were not mere renditions of anatomy, however. Although the young Tchelitchew was briefly a student of medicine, his only attendance at anatomy class – complete with perfumed handkerchief over his mouth – resulted in him being revived in the street. His appeals to traditions of anatomical representation are obliquely present yet, ultimately, singular.6 Tchelitchew’s lineage is not one that aspires to anatomical accuracy through dissection (a la Leonardo da Vinci) or meticulous measurement (a la Albrecht Dürer); his debt to Vesalius and those flayed figures posing in Tuscan landscapes are merely a platform. Furthermore, if Tchelitchew’s vision echoes an ancient desire to see into the body, it is also coloured by more modern insights, such as X-ray analysis, microscopy, perhaps even psychoanalysis, [x] but also by his own earlier focus on nested forms and double-images, metamorphosis and the mutability of form, hallucinogenic emulsions and ‘oil slick’ colours [such as Phenomena].7 For Lincoln Kirstein, the artist’s friend and commentator, Tchelitchew’s living bodies are penetrated not by the ‘scalpel but by light’, and remain ‘motile, dynamic’, as precarious as an ‘alcohol flame’, upheld by inner illumination.8 Kirstein asserts that Tchelitchew’s focus to the human body is a matter of manifesting a universal intimacy, a ‘symbol in microcosm of the universe in macrocosm.’9 He famously posited that Tchelitchew selected topographical elements of anatomy like landscape features – sites – emphasising complex interrelationships between inside and outside, energy and matter.10 Yet whereas Kirstein was determined to point out that the artist was ‘no scientist’, it is tempting to speculate on what happens when Tchelitchew is instead cast as architect (even a singular – and ultimately psychedelic – one).11 Kirstein himself identified architectural archetypes within Tchelitchew’s anatomies, ranging from the ‘antrum, the vaults of the sinus, the spiral labyrinth of the inner ear, the corridors of the semi-circular canal; the labyrinthine skull, the crystal grotto; shells and caves’.12 Beyond these specifics, however, we might also see how Tchelitchew’s bodies become increasingly invested with the mechanics of an architectonic principle, one in which the binding element of light is made manifest as a complex quality of transparency, both intellectual and perceptual, that combines the ‘literal’ (thematerially see-through) with the ‘phenomenal’, as in qualities that allow the mind to discern underlying sensations of spatiality itself.13 Associations between human anatomy and architectural thought have been in play for centuries, such that representational conceptions of being-in-the-world have been approached through topographical projections of the body, from diagram to the built object (as it were), in different ways – whether as model of the divine or a vessel for the eternal, or later adopted as an organisational principle or unit of measurement concerning the ‘way space is imagined and how power finds its form’.14 Yet one might start to think Tchelitchew-as-architect through his particular approach to transparency, considering his see-through bodies in relation to aesthetic and utopian discourses of modernism, especially those associated with glass: a near-mythic construction material in this context, one that denies secrets and reveals inner workings. One might recognise in Tchelitchew’s figures an echo of theGläserner Mensch [‘Glass Man’], an exhibit first shown at 1930s Hygiene exhibitions as a paradigm for ‘healthy living’.15&nbsp;The Gläserner Mensch was made possible by Werner Spalteholz, whose material innovations (ironically in new plastics – the term ‘glass’ here denotes a generic transparency) allowed audiences to see through tissue, bone and blood vessel, such that ‘with the right illumination’, organs would be rendered semi-transparent and would ‘glow with an almost supernatural iridescence’.16 Yet despite the theatrics of the pose (suggestive of sun worship, idealised religiosity, and an attempt to ‘overcome corporeality’), the emphasis here is still on an aesthetic one might associate with the Bauhaus: the elimination of ornamentation and the striving toward a principal of transparent clarity.17 Although such anatomical exhibits elicited fascination more often than revulsion, they nonetheless rendered bodies transparent through the use of chemical agents, and remain resolutely ‘not-living’, stabilised, neutered, and dehydrated. Tchelitchew’s ‘Celestial Physiognomies’, by contrast, seem to sustain their appeal to a vital, vibrant, and nebulous organic life. As we will see, it would take time for a more universal, geometric, or crystalline architecture to develop from underneath Tchelitchew’s all too human bodies. One might also consider the transparent structures of the Celestial Physiognomies in the context of theories of ‘Glass Architecture’, as laid out in the visionary politico-aesthetics of Paul Scheerbart. Preluded by the interpenetrating illumination of Gothic cathedrals, and extending the possibilities of letting more and more light into living space (through technology), Scheerbart’s theories were soon adopted by German architect Bruno Taut and the so-called ‘Glass Chain’ correspondents, whose letters detailed extraordinary visions for utopian societies, culminating in images of floating continents and crystal cities.18 Taut considered glass a ‘material of brilliance’ that would allow man-made structures to interpenetrate their environment, a sentiment best understood in a cultural climate excited by glass-skinned skyscrapers, dreams of fusing inside and outside, public and private (haunted, of course, by dystopian fears regarding what such fusions might actually imply).19 Yet, interestingly, Scheerbart rejected the representation of the human figure in architecture, instead focusing on extrapolations from plant and mineral kingdoms, perhaps sensing that Glass Architecture’s aim of making interior and exterior space continuous would require an inevitable dematerialisation of the ‘human envelope’.20 By the early 1950s, Tchelitchew’s own renderings of bodily tectonics (now focused on the head) were reduced to purely linear contours: near-monochrome compositions of ‘weightless, transparent, dematerialized forms’, manifest as ‘illuminated linear tracks rather than as a glassy, continuous, transparent surface’.21 Commenting on his 1950 exhibition in Rome, fellow painter Fabrizio Clerici noted how Tchelitchew’s latest works ‘identify themselves in space and with&nbsp;space’, how they ‘circumvent it, cover it […] make it visible, just as breath makes the surface of still water palpitate with the concentric vibration of successive waves’.22 Yet the more striking feature of these linear heads, for Tchelitchew-as-Architect, is the provocation of their reversibility – what Parker Tyler describes as a ‘simultaneous going-and-coming’, whereby a ‘single head, by its ingenious concave-convex treatment, had begun to look like two heads, and in reverse, two heads to look like one’.23 This reversibility is a radical extension of Tchelitchew’s transparency (and part of his psychedelic architectural methodology!). As Tyler also suggests, the artist here moves from transparency to something like transmutation, where ‘every distinct anatomic structure [is] translated into a network […] different seen from the inside, and yet the same.’24 Still subtly suggestive of the ‘elaborate symmetries’ of baroque church construction that the artist recalled from his youth, this would be an architecture capable of ‘showing in- and outside [as a] continual interplay of expanding surface and revealed interior’, which results in what critic Laurence Alloway called a new kind of ‘transparency-universality equation.’25 But where does Tchelitchew-as-Psychedelic-Architect go next? Up until his death in 1957, his approach would seem to be the gradual dematerialisation of human presence. The baroque complexity of revealed inner organs is more and more ‘aerated, evaporated’ (yet no less alive), as Tchelitchew strips away everything but an underlying substrate, a field of kaleidoscopic light and energy in which linear vectors coalesce into a mesh of facetted polyhedra.26 The resulting ‘super-geometrical diagrams’ move from organic form to more crystalline structures, as if presenting a movement between the vibrancy of organic bodies and that of inorganic matter.27 The wireframe lattices pulsate, hinting at a quantum world of entangled fractals, far beyond what Kirstein calls the ‘complex separations and superimpositions of systematic levels in structure.’28 It is worth noting that, at the opening of his 1954 exhibition at London’s Hanover Gallery, Edith Sitwell declared that Tchelitchew’s work reminded her of the eighteenth-century Swiss philosopher and scientist Lorenz Oken, whose assertion that ‘matter is rigidified light’ was made in the context of referring to crystalline forms being the ‘secret rays of the universe’.29&nbsp;Yet what does this emergent field lay out, or make possible? If one might attempt to diagram Tchelitchew-as-Architect through his connections to the ‘crystalline Renaissance’ of Luca Pacioli and the nested Platonic Solids of Kepler; the mathematical proportions of Matila Ghyka or the psychedelic utopias of Wenzel Hablik, one might consider Tchelitchew’s effervescent ground in relation to what David Lewis-Williams calls, in his discussions of the spaces inherent to altered states of consciousness within the minds of early humans, a ‘neurological substrate’.30 Lewis-Williams describes a spectrum of consciousness, with prismatic colours an early visual manifestation of alterity, whether it be ‘irrational, marginal, aberrant or even pathological’.31 The sensory deprivation of seers and shamans here provides a means for shifting consciousness along an ‘intensified trajectory’ toward the release of inwardly generated imagery.32 The resulting ‘geometric visual percepts’, including ‘dots, grids, zigzags, nested catenary curves, and meandering lines [which] flicker, scintillate, expand, contract, and combine with one another’, are produced by the neurology of the human nervous system. They are not strictly hallucinations but ‘phosphenes’ (generated within&nbsp; the eye) or ‘form constants’ (generated within the optic system) – a call back to Tchelicthew’s sustained focus on the transparent eye.33 Lewis-Williams also asserts that there is a ‘spatial relationship between the retina and the visual cortex’, such that when links between retinal receptors and neurons are reversed (such as following the ‘ingestion of psychotropic substances’), the ‘pattern in the cortex is perceived as a visual percept. In other words, people in this condition are seeing the structure of their own brains.’34 Tchelitchew’s effervescent architectural diagrams could also be considered as images of mind-manifesting – the etymological root of the psychedelic. In his extraordinary biography of the artist, Parker Tyler declared that, although suggestive of architectural diagrams and possessed of a ‘peculiar architectonic tension’, Tchelitchew’s ‘Celestial Physiognomies’ were ‘not true architecture’, claiming that their quality of magic made him ‘hesitate to imagine them in actual dimensions’.35 Perhaps it is possible to consider them as architecture within psychedelic dimensions – or as ‘true’ psychedelic architecture, born of the labyrinthine structures that the mind inhabits and which disclose the mind’s inner workings to itself. In their 1968 book on Psychedelic Art, Houston and Masters claim that Tchelitchew’s late geometric works capture the ‘profound, extraordinary consciousness of the basic structures of Being as apprehended on the deepest psychical levels’ – the reference to ‘basic structures’ arguably stands in for the complex, architectural nature of consciousness as it is opened to new possibilities.36 From the perspective of Tchelitchew-as-Psychedelic-Architect, one might imagine his appeal to a form of architectural consciousness that is as unmoored, as if in zero-gravity, conceived and experienced without gravitational co-ordinates or expectations. Again, one might speculate on how this is an extension of Tchelitchew’s earlier concerns, such as the ‘improvised three-part perspectival system’ that Angela Miller describes as being at work in Hide and Seek, in which ‘forms are seen directly from above, as if one is looking down on them, as well as from below and at eye level’.37 In classical mythology, the riddle of Daedalus – the architectural complexity of the Cretan labyrinth containing the monstrous minotaur – is ultimately ‘solved’ by the thread of Theseus, a gossamer linearity unspooled between exterior and interior, allowing the maze to be undone and escaped. Tchelitchew’s solution, or attitude, to Daedalus’ puzzle is more complex – his labyrinth is challenged because all co-ordinates and expectations for solidity, transparency, reversibility, gravity, and so on, are laid radically open. As for a consciousness in an altered state, for the psychedelic architect, the labyrinth becomes an altered site that can be let go, released, as a cumulative result of the artist’s ‘back and forth [movement between] the vocabulary of human anatomy and the geometric idiom of architecture.’38 References [1] Jean Houston, Robert Masters (and Robert Ross) to Edward James, 11 May 1964. Edward James Archive, West Dean College. [2] Lincoln Kirstein, note for exhibition, np. Edward James Archive, West Dean College. [3] James owned many works by Tchelitchew; in fact he described how they surrounded his bed when living in a minimalist, glass-walled house in California, asserting that one canvas , The Lady of Shalott (1944), ‘meant to be the inside of Martha Graham – the modern dance recitalist. It rather frightens me, so I have it in storage.’ James would also buy The Crystal Grotto (1943) for $850, with Parker Tyler noting spitefully that ‘the artist doubts he understands them.’ (Tyler ( 1967)&nbsp;The Divine Comedy of Pavel Tchelitchew: A Biography, New York: Fleet Publishing, p87) [4] ‘Pavel Tchelitchew’, 8 January– 3 February 1945. Durlacher Bros., New York. Edward James, letter to XX, XX. Edward James Archive, West Dean College. [5] Allen S. Weller, ‘The Image of Man in Contemporary Art’, in Contemporary American Painting and Sculpture, 1959, University of Illinois, p26. If Houston’s and Master’s film remained unrealised, it is worth noting that a documentary film about cancer, Challenge (directed by Low and Lambart, 1950), featured ground-breaking animation sequences – combining chiaroscuro drawings, staggered mixes and fades, linear outlines and transparencies – directly influenced by and commenting on Tchelitchew’s work. The way in which the film was restricted by requirements for anatomical correctness, and indeed the emphasis on pathology, disease and decay, throws into relief the vital dynamism of the paintings, in which ‘drama’ emerges from the notion that the ‘tubes, sponges, vessels and processes are not drained away but active in full force’. See: Cantor, D. (2021) Cancer, research, and educational film at mid-century: the making of the movie ‘Challenge: science against cancer’(1950). Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press (Rochester studies in medical history), p111. [6] Tyler 1967, p33. [7] Miller, A. (2020) ‘Vibrant Matter: The Countermodern World of Pavel Tchelitchew’, The Art Bulletin, 102:2, p122. [8] Kirstein, L. (1994) Tchelitchev. Santa Fe, New Mexico: Twelvetrees Press, p92. [9] Kirstein, L. (1951) Note published alongside Tchelitchew Drawings 1951, New York: Durlacher Bros, np. [10] Kirstein, 1994, p91. [11] Kirstein, 1994. [12] Kirstein, 1994, p92. [13] Cf. Rowe and Slutzky, 1955. [14] Ross Exo Adams, ‘Becoming-Infrastructural’, e-flux, October 2017 [ https://www.e-flux.com/architecture/positions/149606/becoming-infrastructural/ ] [15] The term ‘glass’ here being a metaphor for transparency rather than a material, as the Gläserner Mensch actually made use of ‘Cellon’, a celluloid-like material derived from acetylcellulose, which had been developed, ironically enough, by a Dresden manufacturer of preserves. See CB, p191. [16] Klaus Vogel, ‘The Transparent Man—Some Comments on the History of a Symbol’, in Bud, R., Finn, B.S. and Trischler, H. (eds) (1999) Manifesting medicine: bodies and machines. Australia: Harwood Academic (Artefacts, v. 1), p38. [17] Vogel 1999, p45. [18] In 2017, the architectural practice, Space Popular, attempted to refresh attitudes to glass as a radical material using both physical objects and virtual environments, noting that the ideas of Taut and his correspondents remained unrealised. &nbsp;redefine the limitations of the material and imagine its bright, colourful, and energising possibilities. The exhibition ‘The Glass Chain’ was held at Sto Werkstatt, London;&nbsp; explores an alternative future for glass in architecture inspired by the legacy of the infamous Glass Chain Letters (1919–1920).t: http://www.spacepopular.com/exhibitions/2017---the-glass-chain [19] Paul Scheerbart (1914) Glasarchitektur [Glass Architecture]. Taut, an architect and devoted disciple, dedicated his 1914 Werkbund Exhibition building, the Glass House, to Scheerbart [architecture as politics]. [20] ‘Aphorism 24: The avoidance of figure representation in architecture. While architecture is spatial art, figure-representation is not spatial art and has no place in architecture. The animal and human body is made for movement. Architecture is not made for movement and is concerned with formal composition and ornament. Only the plant and mineral kingdoms should be exploited – better still the whole repertoire of free invention – one should not think of the animal and human body as a design element. The fact that the ancient Egyptians did so is no reason at all for doing so today: we no longer associate our gods with the bodies of animals and humans.’ (Scheerbart, Glass Architecture, p48) [21] Kirstein 1994, p128. [22] &nbsp;Fabrizio Clerici, exhibition catalogue, 1950 [translation by the author] [23] Tyler 1967, p29-30. [24] Tyler 1967, p29-30. [25] Alloway, L. ‘Rigidified Light’, Art News, 1954, Vol. 53, Issue 8, p60. [26] Tyler 1967, p472. [27] Kirstein 1994, p96. [28] Kirstein 1994, p92. [29] Sitwell, E.&nbsp; [30] Lewis-Williams, J.D. (2008) The Mind in the Cave: Consciousness and the Origins of Art. London: Thames &amp; Hudson, p112. [31] Lewis-Williams, p121. [32] Lewis-Williams, p124. [33] Lewis-Williams, p126-127. [34] Lewis-Williams, p124. [35] Tyler 1967, np. [36] Houston, Jean; Masters, Robert E. L., Psychedelic Art (1968) New York, Grove Press, p112. [my emphasis] [37] &nbsp;Miller, pXX. On the centripetal pull toward the centre and zero gravity architecture, see: https://www.media.mit.edu/projects/spatial-flux/overview/ [38] Tyler 1967, p272. Bibliography Ross Exo Adams, ‘Becoming-Infrastructural’, E-Flux Architecture, October 2017 [https://www.e-flux.com/architecture/positions/149606/becoming-infrastructural/] Laurence Alloway, ‘Rigidified Light’, Art News, 1954, Vol. 53, Issue 8, p60. A. M. F., ‘Pavel Tchelitchew: Poet of Science’, Art News, Jan 15-31, 1945, Vol. 43, Issue 19. Reyner Banham, ‘The Glass Paradise’, in Banham, R. and Banham, M. (1996) A Critic Writes: Essays by Reyner Banham. Berkeley: University of California Press, p32-33. Rosemarie Hagg Bletter, ‘The Interpretation of the Glass Dream—Expressionist Architecture and History of Crystal Metaphor’, The Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 40, no. 1 (1981) Cantor, D. (2021) Cancer, research, and educational film at midcentury: the making of the movie ‘Challenge: science against cancer’(1950). Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press (Rochester studies in medical history), p111. Clerici, F., PT exhibition catalogue, Italy, 1950 Kuzentsov, A. (2012) Pavel Tchelitchew: Metamorphoses. Stuttgart: Arnoldische Art Publishers. Kirstein, L. (1994) Tchelitchev. Santa Fe, New Mexico: Twelvetrees Press, p92. Lincoln Kirstein, ‘The Interior Landscapes of Pavel Tchelitchew’, XXXXXX. _____________ ‘The Position of Pavel Tchelitchev’ in Ford, C. H., Neiman, C. and Nathan, P. (eds) (1991) View: parade of the avant-garde: an anthology of View magazine (1940-1947). 1st ed. New York : Emeryville, CA: Thunder’s Mouth Press ; Distributed by Publishers Group West, p49-53. Latimer, T.T. (2017) Eccentric modernisms: making differences in the history of American art. Oakland, California: University of California Press. Michel Leiris, ‘Man and his Insides’ in Brisées, (trans. Lydia Davis), 1989, San Francisco: North Point Press, p41-45. Lewis-Williams, J.D. (2008) The Mind in the Cave: Consciousness and the Origins of Art. London: Thames &amp; Hudson. Angela Miller (2020) ‘Vibrant Matter: The Countermodern World of Pavel Tchelitchew’, The Art Bulletin, 102:2, 121-145, DOI: 10.1080/00043079.2019.1676130. Nathanson, R. (arr.) (1972) Pavel Tchelitchew: a Selection of Paintings, Gouaches and Drawings. Ditchling: Ditchling Press. Sarah Elliott Novacich, ‘Transparent Mary: Visible Interiors and the Maternal Body in the Middle Ages’, The Journal of English and Germanic Philology, Vol. 116, No. 4, University of Illinois Press (October 2017), pp. 464-490. https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5406/jenglgermphil.116.4.0464 Lorenz Oken, Elements of Physiophilosophy (trans. Alfred Tulk) London: The Ray Society, 1847. Scheerbart’s Glass Architecture Jeffrey T. Schnapp, ‘Crystalline Bodies: Fragments of a Cultural History of Glass’, West 86th: A Journal of Decorative Arts, Design History, and Material Culture, Vol. 20, No. 2. The University of Chicago Press on behalf of the Bard Graduate Center (Fall-Winter 2013), pp. 173-194. Tchelitchew, P. and Kuznetsov, A. (2012) Pavel Tchelitchew: Metamorphoses. Stuttgart: Arnoldsche Art Publisher. Parker Tyler (1967) The Divine Comedy of Pavel Tchelitchew: A Biography, New York: Fleet Publishing. __________ ‘Human Anatomy as the Expanding Universe’, XX: XX. __________ ‘Tchelitchew’s World’, XX: XX. __________ ‘Tchelitchew: The melancholy of anatomy’, XX: XX, April 1964. Anthony Vidler, ‘Transparency’ in The Architectural Uncanny: Essays in the Modern Unhomely, (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1992), pp. 217-226. Vidler, Anthony, ‘Transparency: Literal and Phenomenal’, Journal of Architectural Education, Vol. 56, No. 4 (May, 2003), pp. 6-7. Klaus Vogel, ‘The Transparent Man—Some Comments on the History of a Symbol’ in Bud, R., Finn, B.S. and Trischler, H. (eds) (1999) Manifesting medicine: bodies and machines. Australia: Harwood Academic (Artefacts, v. 1). Allen S. Weller, ‘The Image of Man in Contemporary Art’, in Contemporary American Painting and Sculpture, 1959, University of Illinois. https://skurrilsteer.org/altered-sites Wed, 23 Aug 2023 16:53:14 +0000 skurrilsteer https://skurrilsteer.org/altered-sites Altered Sites <img width="2551" height="1701" width_o="2551" height_o="1701" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/fd64493a394436a2937afb0c41439d970e0af779ac30d99645d29ae44809b4aa/IMG_8217-copy.jpg" data-mid="212237357" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/fd64493a394436a2937afb0c41439d970e0af779ac30d99645d29ae44809b4aa/IMG_8217-copy.jpg" /> <img width="1406" height="1701" width_o="1406" height_o="1701" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/7955a7298490405ab182aa7a6220b5db1df5d945c916a8abb949e89e948f5b7e/IMG_8220-copy.jpg" data-mid="212237358" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/7955a7298490405ab182aa7a6220b5db1df5d945c916a8abb949e89e948f5b7e/IMG_8220-copy.jpg" /> <img width="1384" 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data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/9a281ac52b8c60614494c826b5040fe567348a9bed0839da751372b84acb269f/IMG_8230-copy.jpg" data-mid="212237367" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/9a281ac52b8c60614494c826b5040fe567348a9bed0839da751372b84acb269f/IMG_8230-copy.jpg" /> <img width="2551" height="1701" width_o="2551" height_o="1701" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/0e33e7cf678aaf1e273421232242eb588d96a0c643bef352af49528d1d33a5c4/IMG_8232-copy.jpg" data-mid="212237368" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/0e33e7cf678aaf1e273421232242eb588d96a0c643bef352af49528d1d33a5c4/IMG_8232-copy.jpg" /> <img width="1356" height="1701" width_o="1356" height_o="1701" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/7df14ccaac2608dc98da6d802e4f4884c0dba0f613e3c9983eba811052f73006/IMG_8240-copy.jpg" data-mid="212237369" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/7df14ccaac2608dc98da6d802e4f4884c0dba0f613e3c9983eba811052f73006/IMG_8240-copy.jpg" /> <img width="2550" height="1701" width_o="2550" height_o="1701" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/7e96ce6dd879d1e29be5e738c60e880d1a4190848159c678843f88b68641d7a1/IMG_8242-copy.jpg" data-mid="212237370" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/7e96ce6dd879d1e29be5e738c60e880d1a4190848159c678843f88b68641d7a1/IMG_8242-copy.jpg" /> <img width="1712" height="1701" width_o="1712" height_o="1701" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/99112df9d5c26d683e729cc9d51197751a32865b9069ae8fbf596eefaf67a31e/IMG_8243-copy.jpg" data-mid="212237372" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/99112df9d5c26d683e729cc9d51197751a32865b9069ae8fbf596eefaf67a31e/IMG_8243-copy.jpg" /> <img width="2551" height="1701" width_o="2551" height_o="1701" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/10925fbc93a091aca054448e470b761e21b76bf8b68a7eda093ce85fe517aff0/IMG_8244-copy.jpg" data-mid="212237373" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/10925fbc93a091aca054448e470b761e21b76bf8b68a7eda093ce85fe517aff0/IMG_8244-copy.jpg" /> <img width="1071" height="1701" width_o="1071" height_o="1701" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/e6e8c5ab711e280d8ec45fdfa3db7eeb59270996be124dfd2bf7a33331b17cf0/IMG_8246-copy.jpg" data-mid="212237374" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/e6e8c5ab711e280d8ec45fdfa3db7eeb59270996be124dfd2bf7a33331b17cf0/IMG_8246-copy.jpg" /> <img width="2540" height="1701" width_o="2540" height_o="1701" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/d5a2cb7db8083a1dd21b4c1b5e7772af8b17516d42598ed2ff4531b4b001a6b2/IMG_8248-copy.jpg" data-mid="212237375" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/d5a2cb7db8083a1dd21b4c1b5e7772af8b17516d42598ed2ff4531b4b001a6b2/IMG_8248-copy.jpg" /> <img width="1328" height="1701" width_o="1328" height_o="1701" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/463f3b5b5b610feafe2b89e90cef49de61afa912d3ad90e19f31821243d50ee9/IMG_8249-copy.jpg" data-mid="212237376" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/463f3b5b5b610feafe2b89e90cef49de61afa912d3ad90e19f31821243d50ee9/IMG_8249-copy.jpg" /> <img width="2552" height="1701" width_o="2552" height_o="1701" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/710ecb3be757481105f33870ada1494d3959979d640661e3267e90c275b06d6f/IMG_8251-copy.jpg" data-mid="212237377" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/710ecb3be757481105f33870ada1494d3959979d640661e3267e90c275b06d6f/IMG_8251-copy.jpg" /> <img width="2161" height="1701" width_o="2161" height_o="1701" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/757bb9f2691243ad6baf765fe746b7cdb36dcac2e2c4cc71ff87b96eb55baf15/IMG_8257-copy.jpg" data-mid="212237378" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/757bb9f2691243ad6baf765fe746b7cdb36dcac2e2c4cc71ff87b96eb55baf15/IMG_8257-copy.jpg" /> <img width="2551" height="1701" width_o="2551" height_o="1701" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/23e0c48832c4fee7b748ddfa1560b20daef192b857c3ade4905db56d1edf0f91/IMG_8259-copy.jpg" data-mid="212237379" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/23e0c48832c4fee7b748ddfa1560b20daef192b857c3ade4905db56d1edf0f91/IMG_8259-copy.jpg" /> <img width="1383" height="1701" width_o="1383" height_o="1701" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/18f4a39dd8b490f80ac2e980e4ff530344d3d2242adfa0f313af677b0ad27287/IMG_8262-copy.jpg" data-mid="212237380" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/18f4a39dd8b490f80ac2e980e4ff530344d3d2242adfa0f313af677b0ad27287/IMG_8262-copy.jpg" /> <img width="1379" height="1701" width_o="1379" height_o="1701" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/a252570def7882a30a921517296f593311df9ecc94ef755146ea892de7cbaabe/IMG_8264-copy.jpg" data-mid="212237382" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/a252570def7882a30a921517296f593311df9ecc94ef755146ea892de7cbaabe/IMG_8264-copy.jpg" /> <img width="2552" height="1701" width_o="2552" height_o="1701" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/a8941ae281aa3f02eb24ed4d9d4b9bf28c9693b217d680bb8a8d8d1f67b503d4/IMG_8272-copy.jpg" data-mid="212237383" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/a8941ae281aa3f02eb24ed4d9d4b9bf28c9693b217d680bb8a8d8d1f67b503d4/IMG_8272-copy.jpg" /> ‘Altered Sites’ was an exhibition curated by George Charman and David R J Stent to accompany the symposium ‘Altered Sites: On Psychedelic Architecture’ in May 2023. The symposium and exhibition aimed to explore experimental and critical approaches to architectural form through explorations of built and/or imagined structures as sites of alterity. The presentations used notions of psychedelic experience and expansive consciousness to engage with site as a potentially productive form of difference, dynamism, and otherness. ︎ When Dr. Humphry Osmond suggested the term ‘psychedelic’ to Aldous Huxley in 1956, as part of their enthused discussions around the emancipatory usage of hallucinogens, he drew upon the compound etymology of the Greek psykhe [mind] and deloun [to make visible, to reveal]. Aspects of this conjunction between an interior world and a tangible, external counterpart is at the heart of this event. The meeting point for such a dialogue is proposed as ‘architecture’, yet is not limited to designed or constructed buildings but more as a dynamic space between the structured and the unformed. ‘Altered Sites: On Psychedelic Architecture’ explores structures – buildings, objects, images, writing, creative practices – in which gestures of inversion, reversal, involution, projection, expansion, collapse, and so on, remain present. An intellectual pioneer of hallucinogenic experience, Huxley occupies an unexpected place in the founding of West Dean College. It was from Huxley that poet and College founder Edward James sought advice on setting up his utopian educational community as early as 1939, an organisation which continues to support traditional and experimental art and craft practices to this day. James was also inspired by Huxley’s experimentation with psychedelics in relation to his own experiences with teonanácatl mushrooms in Mexico in 1957, not as a recreational drug but as a means to creatively expand consciousness. Photographs by George Charman List of Works (see map below) 1. Edward James – The Little City of Seclusia (1957) Oil on canvas. West Dean College Collection (WDCC) 2. George Charman – Formwork #1 and Formwork #2 (2023) Felt pen, Posca pen, coloured pencil on paper 3. Unknown [Plutarco Gastélum] – Studio of Pavel Tchelitchew (New York City) (1945) Colour photograph (WDCC) 4. Eugene Berman – Architectural Fantasy (1935) Ink on paper (WDCC) 5. Edward James – To the Earth (c.1943) Gouache on collotype (WDCC) 6. Mark West – Hotel Edward Hopper [Court Interior, Lobby I, Lobby II] (2007) Digital prints on Somerset Satin 7. Unknown [Edward James] – Photogram I &amp; II (c.1943) (WDCC) 8. Adam Wiseman – Arquitectura Libre (2018) Colour photograph 9. Adam Wiseman – Arquitectura Libre (2018) Colour photograph 10. David R J Stent – These Weak Kindnesses (Crosshairs &amp; Local Ceremonies) (2023) Acrylic, spray paint, ink, coloured pencil, salt, ash, gesso on board 11. Cecilia Charlton – First, You Don't Know What You Don't Know [Ocean series, Sunlight Zone] (2023) Hand-woven cotton and wool yarn. Courtesy of Candida Stevens Gallery 12. Cecilia Charlton – Then, You Know What You Don't Know [Ocean Series, Twilight Zone] (2023) Hand-woven cotton and wool yarn. Courtesy of Candida Stevens Gallery 13. Cecilia Charlton – Next, You Know What You Know [Ocean Series, Midnight Zone] (2023) Hand-woven cotton and wool yarn. Courtesy of Candida Stevens Gallery 14. Cecilia Charlton – And Then, You Don't Know What You Know [Ocean Series, Abyssal Zone] (2023) Hand-woven cotton and wool yarn. Courtesy of Candida Stevens Gallery 15. Pavel Tchelitchew – The Skull [The Crystal Grotto] (1940) Gouache on paper (WDCC) 16. Vitrine: a. Eugene Berman – Untitled ‘Capriccio’ (1935-37) Ink on paper (WDCC) b. Eugene Berman – Triumphal Arch (1935) Ink on paper (WDCC) c. Gerald Rebaudo – Untitled (1982) Pen on paper (WDCC) d. Marcel Duchamp – Rotoreliefs (1935) Offset lithographs (WDCC) 17. Mark West – Hotel Edward Hopper [Seaside Fac.] (2007) Digital print on Somerset Satin 18. David R J Stent – These Weak Kindnesses (The Ballard Twins &amp; Untitled) (2023) Acrylic, spray paint, ink, coloured pencil, salt, ash, gesso on board 19. Unknown [Edward James] – Photograph of Pavel Tchelitchew painting on the balcony of studio (New York City) (1945) Colour photograph (WDCC) 20. George Charman – Formwork #3 (2023) Felt pen, Posca pen, coloured pencil on paper 21. Mark West – Hotel Edward Hopper [Colour 3 Courtyard] (2007) Digital print on Somerset Satin 22. Melanie Smith – Fifteen Minutes of Sublime Meditation (2020–2021) Video<img width="3508" height="2480" width_o="3508" height_o="2480" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/fe4dfeb888cfcbe7fba5a59210036295d3f60dded996a3b0bafb0935595e99bb/Altered-Sites-Map.png" data-mid="188720060" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/fe4dfeb888cfcbe7fba5a59210036295d3f60dded996a3b0bafb0935595e99bb/Altered-Sites-Map.png" /> https://skurrilsteer.org/thickening-of-thought-1 Sat, 16 Oct 2021 09:52:00 +0000 skurrilsteer https://skurrilsteer.org/thickening-of-thought-1 ‘thickening of thought and narrative loops, even’ &nbsp;<img width="800" height="1131" width_o="800" height_o="1131" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/89d1fcb3883b54fb81ccf8b10132ef93d0405ad3cbc24414cc4a337d482f00ae/HoM_publication_cover.jpg" data-mid="121750173" border="0" data-scale="47" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/800/i/89d1fcb3883b54fb81ccf8b10132ef93d0405ad3cbc24414cc4a337d482f00ae/HoM_publication_cover.jpg" /><img width="800" height="1131" width_o="800" height_o="1131" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/435f0bc13dc46bbb1e37c11d2de6837094f5edfb8123ec820bec58d39c6f6fe0/HoM_rear.jpg" data-mid="121750174" border="0" data-scale="47" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/800/i/435f0bc13dc46bbb1e37c11d2de6837094f5edfb8123ec820bec58d39c6f6fe0/HoM_rear.jpg" /> https://skurrilsteer.org/blue-slipped-stone-burst Sun, 27 Jun 2021 08:36:25 +0000 skurrilsteer https://skurrilsteer.org/blue-slipped-stone-burst ‘Blue-Slipped Stone-Burst’ Seeing Destructive Plasticity in Takuro Kuwata The fact that Japanese artist Takuro Kuwata is from Hiroshima Prefecture might suggest that the violent appearance of much of his work contains a latent evocation of the atomic explosion of 6th August 1945. Kuwata (born 1981) is of a different generation, of course, yet even that superficial association suggests productive possibilities in terms of contextualising his work. Indeed, one may see echoes of that horrific event and its aftermath in the way Kuwata’s ceramic objects shuck their own skins, peel or turn inside-out, their glazes raised like keloid scarring.1 Their ravaged appearance evokes more contemporary destructions too – earthquakes, tsunamis, volcanoes, nuclear accidents, even diseases and pandemics – the post-war anxiety of Japan folded into the relentless information cycles of globalized culture. Kuwata’s objects curdle and separate according to various combinatory and permutational factors. Colors and textures range from over-saturated pastels to metallic excesses; from bubble-gum pinks to toxic mercury; gilded beads that look like sweat, or fragments of confectionery. The explosive force of these objects can be read in the context of self-cancellation, as if their destructive capacities were focused entirely upon themselves, yet this reading is made more complex in relation to the chawan (tea bowl) at the heart of chanoyu (the tea ceremony), a complex array of formalized rituals and customs with a long history in Japan.2 <img width="2000" height="1600" width_o="2000" height_o="1600" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/f3c753a05f13bc37341581ac1ce67cb8ef1122a18b0411d45bbe2b39017e2ac4/Kuwata-01.jpg" data-mid="112415093" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/f3c753a05f13bc37341581ac1ce67cb8ef1122a18b0411d45bbe2b39017e2ac4/Kuwata-01.jpg" /> Kuwata’s first solo exhibition in London, at Alison Jacques Gallery in 2016, bore the title ‘From Tea Bowl’, the preposition suggestive of both precedent and point of departure. A previous show in New York had been named ‘Dear Tea Bowl’, a title that simultaneously declared a term of affection and proposed a form of address, as if setting out the parameters for an ongoing correspondence . After graduating from Kyoto Saga Art College in 2001, Kuwata was apprenticed to master potter Susumu Zaima in order to learn traditional making techniques. Kuwata has acknowledged that Zaima introduced him to the “spirit of the tea ceremony”, allowing him to “connect with Japan’s cultural and historic past”.3 Further influence came during Kuwata’s time at Tajimi City Pottery Design and Technical Center, following a visit from Seizō Hayashiya, renowned as a chawan expert who had published on the subject since the 1970s. As well as showing him important examples of chawan, Hayashiya would appraise Kuwata’s pieces in the context of formal tea ceremonies at Kakiden Gallery in Shinjuku.4 The resulting assessment – that Kuwata’s works were simply ‘not tea bowls’ – is worth questioning, not least to speculate as to what kind of relationship with chawan (and chanoyu) they do embody, but also the degree to which they have subtle connections with associated material techniques and aesthetic principles. After all, connections with the structural underpinnings of chanoyu are part of what allowed Kuwata to start “colouring outside the lines.”5&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; Chanoyu has a complex past. Rooted in ancient China, codified in 16th century Japan, the culture of tea drinking blends influences from Shintoism, Zen, Taoism, Confucianism, and has developed through centuries of variation and innovation in both theory and practice. Tea culture spans activities ranging from an everyday tea-drinking to the development of prescribed rituals determining the use of specific spaces and utensils. As an “art of everyday life” made distinct through the overlaid “artificiality” of rules of etiquette, chanoyu contains within it an enduring and uneasy duality of both art and life.[6] Chawan play a unique role in the evolving tradition, their enigmatic form being simultaneously “grounded in function but communicating something well beyond its utility.”[7] Kuwata himself insists that his work is in dialogue with chanoyu, describing a “dual sensitivity” in his approach – one that moves between “specific function and abstract aesthetic”, as his output is notably split between smaller functional sculptures (not restricted to tea bowls) and larger-scale ‘totems’, each operating within contexts that shift back and forth in origin and time, from East to West, from past to future.[8]Such a dialogue between form and function may also connect to Kuwata’s early awareness of the avant-garde Sōdeisha movement (1948–1998), founded by Yagi Kazuo, who approached ceramics as art objects rather than functional wares.[9] These crossovers underpin Kuwata’s ambitions for the wider use of his ceramics. He has stated his desire to popularize the ubiquity of what he calls a “special cup”, such that his unique ceramic vessels might form a part of renewed ceremonial patterns in people’s lives.[10] Of course, this desire is consistent with the wider contextual development of chanoyu, which itself resulted from the “crystallization of the manner of use” in relation to its accoutrements, as the social function of tea became a motivating force that drew clear connections between art objects and everyday life.[11] In addition to tea culture and other contemporary practitioners engaged with its influence – such as Kentaro Kawabata, Toshio Ohi, and Shingo Takeuchi – Kuwata’s work connects to reference points from Europe and North America. On the surface, Kuwata’s use of oversaturated color – bright blues, reds, silver and gold – could be associated with the work of artists working in other traditions and settings, such as Philip King, Ron Nagle or Ken Price, as well as Kuwata’s stated admiration for commercial Finnish ceramics, Northern European furniture design, and even the graphics of the London Underground map.[12] Kuwata’s combination of sources and influences not only indicates a cross-cultural richness but also indicates an intention to contrast (even collide) a synthetic or industrial aesthetic with the organic, handmade qualities associated with chawan. Instead of sharp colors being used as ‘accents’, as most commonly found in traditional approaches to Japanese ceramics, Kuwata instead transfers them to the entire form. But, again, this distinction between old and new, or traditional and avant-garde, is not clear cut. The ‘Pop’ intensity of Kuwata’s color could just as easily be associated with matcha, the vibrant green powdered tea first introduced to Japan from China in the early Kamakura period at the end of the 12th century, which has since become a powerful visual focus of chanoyu.[13]Color has an uneasy duality at the heart of Kuwata’s engagement with chanoyu, one that implies an insecure line between the natural and the synthetic. A usefully evocative – and notably ‘Western’ – account of bright colors in raku-ware comes from Bernard Leach, a key figure in bridging cultural distance within the field of ceramics. Recalling a certain chawan glaze, Leach describes it as “not the red of iron oxide, even as employed in the brightest overglaze enamels, but almost a pure colour of tomato”.[14]Kuwata’s use of color is certainly emphatic and succinct, arguably “pure,” yet does not rely on associations with natural sources. Indeed, Kuwata has claimed to have “never understood why ceramics have to reflect nature”.[15] <img width="2756" height="2756" width_o="2756" height_o="2756" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/36a1f6881dc959e83814a6126a924b228863ad1780a4debf631d0e7299bc3897/Kuwata-02.jpg" data-mid="112415095" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/36a1f6881dc959e83814a6126a924b228863ad1780a4debf631d0e7299bc3897/Kuwata-02.jpg" /> It is instructive to consider that Kuwata’s explosive forms cite traces of an incipient violence of distortion that can be linked to aspects of chanoyu as it developed. In ‘The Beauty of Irregularity’ (1953), Sōetsu Yanagi discusses links between the Way of Tea and deformation, instances aligned with the fundamental principles underlying the creative work of the tea masters of Japan, which further informed the elusive qualities of wabi aesthetics. Within the handmade domestic crafts that provided the springboard for the ‘quietism’ of the Tea Masters, an inherent art of imperfection was sought because, as Yanagi puts it, that which is perfect carries “no overtones” and “admits no freedom”. [16]Although other enthusiasts of chanoyu proposed different extremes – Shin’ichi Hisamatsu, for example, suggesting that chanoyu should positively rejectthe perfect, opening the way for manufactured imperfection, arguably a key aspect of Kuwata’s approach.[17] Yanagi preferred to see it in relation to muso, the Buddhist concept of unchanging formlessness behind all phenomena, where distinctions between perfect and imperfect no longer exist. From this perspective, the objects emerge instead from a world where such dualism is irrelevant. Yet something of this duality does appear to persist in Kuwata’s practice. The artist has spoken of wanting to make work that is “completely new”, that “reflects our time”, yet much of his methodology, most notably the use of accident and chance, borrows from ‘tradition’, perhaps acknowledging the latent experimental innovations embedded within that word.[18]Consider the importance of the ‘iconoclastic’ innovations of chanoyu master Oribe Furuta in the mid-16th to 17th century, such as Goshomaru bowls, often asymmetrically warped and of uneven thickness, and which became known as kutsugata(shoe-shaped) from their similarity to the clogs of ceremonial costume.[19] Other scholars have noted instances where Oribe favoured chawan that had been broken purposefully, such as breaking an old Korean bowl into fragments in order to make a smaller bowl more to his taste, a sensibility inherited from Oribe’s own master, Sen no Rikyū, as a sense of finding beauty in damage.[20] Kuwata takes this long-established radicalism to another kind of visibility – turning up the gain, as it were, on this aspect of chanoyu, until it ruptures, revealing other possibilities. He employs the deliberate ‘misuse’ of established making techniques, and indeed points of appreciation, of chawan, in his pursuit of the accidental. The technique of kairagi, for example. in which thick white feldspar glaze shrinks during firing, often revealing the layers of bare clay underneath, is a decorative effect firmly embedded in the codified connoisseurship of chawanaesthetics. Louise Allison Cort’s discussion of the Kizaemon tea bowl, a National Treasure renowned for its embodiment of the transition between Korean making methods and subsequently rarefied points of chawan appreciation in Japan, highlights how the qualities of kairagi – historically associated with resemblance to ‘plum blossom bark’ or shagreen, the textured skin of rays often used on decorative scabbards – is listed as one of the ‘seven points to see’ for any informed appraisal.[21] Kuwata accentuates the crawling effect of kairagi by overlaying glazes on colored clay slip, allowing vibrant combinations to vie for supremacy during firing. He cites a seminal visit to an exhibition at the Gifu Prefectural Museum by Living National Treasure, Toyozo Arakawa, noted for his use of the thick white glaze Shino-yu, which can also drip and crawl before hardening, depending on the heat of the kiln. Kuwata noticed an edge coming off one of Arakawa’s pieces – a tiny detail, redolent of both destruction and formation, that would go on to inform a body of work in which excessive glazes lose their integrity during firing. Commonly used to generate subtle decorative imperfections in the glaze, Kuwata’s use of the effect is magnified, shifted to another scale, such that distinctions between integrity and flaw become difficult to discern. Kuwata similarly exaggerates the celebrated practice of kintsugi, a method of using gold lacquer for repair. He applies scaled-up layers of powdered gold and platinum to fired and glazed surfaces, then re-fires the object in order to provoke extreme deformation. This approach is informed by a playful attitude to techniques developed in both East and West. Kuwata has acknowledged the influence of the gold edging of Wedgwood cups in his use of metallic materials, yet history records how “breaks and repairs [in chawan] are openly acknowledged [and] mends executed with gold lacquer, red lacquer, or even silver staples.”[22] The latter further contextualizes Kuwata’s pioneering use of refractory needles – thin lengths of heat resistant metal, normally used in the construction of kilns – which both direct and further randomize processes of distortion, resulting in unique textural effects that are both rustic and futuristic, natural and synthetic: an appearance that has been evocatively described as “plants dipped in metal”.[23]Another key process for Kuwata isishihaze, or ‘stone explosion’, whereby mineral additions to the clay puncture the surface during firing. The technique historically involved small, dust-like fragments of stone, emerging in swathes to create stippled textures that catch light and shadow. Again, Kuwata takes this technique to an extreme, radically oversizing the stones, almost to the extent that they outweigh the clay from which they burst forth. What is consistent in all these adapted techniques is the primacy of chance; as Kuwata puts it, “ceramic pieces are not completed only by themselves.”[24]His work appeals to all manner of material contingencies: drying patterns, inconsistencies, resistances, impurities, and so on. Kuwata considers these part of the “individuality of the clay” from which “expressions” are brought forth.[25]Of course, such an appeal to chance, to outside forces, is not alien to contemporary sculpture, ceramics in general, or chanoyuin particular, yet the foregrounding of process has an appealing insistence in Kuwata’s use of titling. As well as a blanket assignation of ‘tea bowl’ in much of his early work, Kuwata’s website lists works with permutational, descriptive titles that read like recipes combining known archetypes with unpredictable actions: ‘Blue-slipped Stone Burst Vase’, ‘Pink-sky-slipped Kairagi Shino bowl’, ‘Pink-slipped Stone-burst vase’, ‘Red-slipped Platinum-drop Stone-burst Bulb’. If there is a sense of pleasure in this process, it is useful to note that the great tea master,Kanichiro Morikawa, once suggested of chanoyu that “(t)here can be too much formality, although of course form is necessary, but the essence of Tea is to give pleasure.”[26]Kuwata draws on other, quite different forms of ritualized pleasure. He is not the only artist engaging withchawan for whom Yoshihiro Yamada’s manga Hyouge Mono (2005-2017, adapted for television 2011) – in which the character of Furuta Sasuke is obsessed with the tea ceremony – was formative.[27]In an interview with Ceramic Review, it was noted that Kuwata was once “deeply involved with Japan’s underground hip-hop scene as a DJ and dancer, spending much of his time in nightclubs”, with the interviewer citing the influence of neon lights, strobe effects, “advertising hoardings [and the] excesses of consumerist culture” on his work.[28]Kuwata’s desire to communicate directly with his friends in this street-dance scene has also been credited as leading to his decision to take his ceramic work to a “material and aesthetic extreme.”[29] Such strategies arguably involve a provocation of chance, as the artist consciously inserts contingency into his making (firing) process, both in the form of open-ended consequence and literal physical impositions – the latter functioning as supplements of matter that form dynamic ‘obstacles’ within standardized processes. As much as symbols of randomization, these ‘alien’ objects are equally redolent as pockets of resistance (or certainty) within an operation already tempered by chance. In this context, it is possible to consider integrated forces of change and fixation in relation to the different types of workmanship – described by David Pye as existing on a spectrum of ‘certainty’ and ‘risk’ – with a view to questioning whether Kuwata’s chawanappeal to a synthesis of both.[30] In the ‘workmanship of certainty’, Pye suggests that the “quality of the result is exactly predetermined before a single thing is made” and characterizes activities of mass production and automation, where the action is “useful, expedient, beautiful, precise”.[31]The ‘workmanship of risk’, on the other hand, might also employ a range of machines, tools and templates – what Pye calls “shape-determining jigs” – but with the difference that the outcome depends far more on the “judgement, dexterity and care” the maker exercises as they work.[32]Here, the essential idea is continually at risk during the making process, such that the danger of “spoiling the job is at every minute real”.[33] Aspects of Kuwata’s workmanship do indeed see him operate in an extreme, exaggerated region of risk, yet there are also specific parameters (even if constantly destabilized) set into it too: what we might describe as the ‘templates’ of the vessel form; the ‘shape’ of both chawan and chanoyu; the tangible, tooled plasticity of clay; the chemistry of glazes, the heat curves of the kiln. Evidence of Kuwata’s combined workmanship of certainty and risk is most clearly seen in the ease with which their integration is carried off in his work: like many accomplished craftspeople, he does not place chance procedures in opposition to stable material effects, but combines them in a complex repertoire. This has a particular significance in relation to chanoyu: Sōetsu Yanagi discusses the ‘roughness’ of traditional craftsmanship, a quality in the finished object that emerges from an easy-going naturalness towards materials and processes. This nonchalant attitude is in no way contrived – it is free but not consciously so. Where the “skipping of glaze or other imperfection” has occurred in a tea bowl in a way that is “quite fortuitous”, this is integrated in other, more stable aspects of the object / process / tradition, aided by an attitude of calm acceptance, free from any restriction – the traditional craftsperson operates in this sense “without polarized conceptions” or pretension with regard to certainty or risk.[34] Clay, a plastic medium, is ideal for Kuwata’s insistent appeal to principles of irreversible, chance-led deformation. We can approach this topic through the notion of ‘destructive plasticity,’ as developed by philosopher Catherine Malabou. Given the term’s etymological roots in the Greek plassein [meaning ‘to mold’], there are countless metaphorical associations between plasticity and clay, not only in the wider context of the so-called ‘plastic arts’, or the essential mutability of cultural disciplines, but also in material terms: the shaping and imprinting of information (writing incised on clay tablets); or myths concerning humans molded into being from lumps of argillaceous mud. Plasticity is a concept that straddles many disciplines, from art, design, politics and medicine. Consider, for example, neuroplasticity: the brain’s ability to learn, heal, mold and reconfigure itself. In these fields, ‘plasticity’ is almost always seen as positive. Yet Malabou attempts to distinguish two types of plasticity: positive and destructive. In positive plasticity, a continual balance is kept between the capacity for change and the aptitude for remaining the same; in other words, between future and memory, between giving and receiving form.[35]More compelling for Malabou is destructive plasticity, which “does not repair and in which the smallest accident suffices for the biggest possible deformation”.[36] Malabou extends this as a philosophical concept in which a given network of relations (for example, in the brain or the formation of subjectivity) is forced to “reinvent itself and discover its freedom in relation to the traces from the past.”[37]Malabou draws on real traumas for her examples, writing of “split identities, sudden interruptions, the deserts of Alzheimer’s patients, the emotional indifference of some who have suffered brain injury, those traumatized by war, victims of natural or political catastrophe.”[38] The means by which Malabou draws out her interest in destructive plasticity is concerned with extremes of methodology – when discussing the “constant interplay between the formation and maintenance of subjectivity”, for example, moving between “rigidity and plasticity”, Malabou seeks new territory by “trying to radicalize [her] approach.”[39]As we have seen, a similar radicalization of methodology is evident in Kuwata. When Malabou evokes the “powers of plasticity […] beneath an apparently smooth surface like a reserve of dynamite under the peachy skin of being”, it is difficult not to make connections with Kuwata’s tea bowls.[40] Another aspect of Malabou’s destructive plasticity that may be relevant to Kuwata’s work concerns the process of human growth and ageing. Malabou argues that destructive plasticity supports some of the earliest, formative phases of life – the programmed cellular annihilation (apoptosis) observed in fetuses, for example, which allows the developing fingers to separate – as well as in old age, when biological and neurological plasticity inevitably diminishes. The idea of ageing as an irreversible, transformative trauma (one that can take place instantaneously, at any moment) resonates powerfully for Malabou: “In the end it may be that for each one of us, ageing arises all of a sudden, in an instant, like a trauma, and that it suddenly transforms us, without warning, into an unknown subject.”[41]Kuwata does indeed set up fraught accelerations in his kiln, somehow indicative of a ‘forced’ growth or ageing. His clay objects experience artificial durations and impositions of alien matter, such that already-unpredictable chemical processes delivered by heat become even more prone to destruction. But is the result, to take a phrase from Malabou, “unable to recognize itself”?[42] &nbsp; &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; Here it may be useful to acknowledge Malabou’s distinction between destructive plasticity and metamorphosis. In the latter, exemplified by mythological stories about the transformation of humans into animals or plants, Malabou insists only the “external form of the being changes, never its nature.”[43]She contends that there is a limited palette of forms, and that a cycle of change occurs within a given range of possibilities – in other words, form alters but substance remains. This raises the question as to whether it is appropriate to consider Kuwata’s work (and indeed its relationship to chanoyu) in terms of destructive plasticity, a “suddenly deviant […] unhitching from what came before”, or rather metamorphosis, changing the outer appearance of the teaware genre, as it were, while leaving its cultural content intact.[44]For Malabou, metamorphoses never quite abandon the “true nature of being” because if this fundamental ‘ur-identity’ were to change “substantively,” then what preceded any metamorphoses would lack the “ontological tangent” upon which it is predicated.[45] A transformation set outside the cycle of metamorphoses would suggest that the subject had “become unrecognizable.”[46]This gets to the heart of what is at stake in this reading of Kuwata’s work: in its relation to chawan it operates somewhere between destructive plasticity and metamorphosis, precisely in the context of a contingent recognition.[47] <img width="3000" height="4498" width_o="3000" height_o="4498" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/ab4a450781829997884e462c535ea5a06a79c3659481d81841e136205402ea81/191024_Aneta-Regel_00523.jpg" data-mid="112415099" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/ab4a450781829997884e462c535ea5a06a79c3659481d81841e136205402ea81/191024_Aneta-Regel_00523.jpg" /> At this point it is useful to bring in the work of Polish artist Aneta Regel, whose practice shares similar materials and processes with that of Kuwata, yet with markedly different intentions. Regel’s work is certainly concerned with a “meeting of the past with present reality, of Western and Eastern cultures,” yet she moves away from Kuwata’s solid-color, graphic abstractions, instead focusing on quasi-botanic and corporeal forms.[48]Displaying an indifference toward any polarized position on functionality, Regel’s abstract forms echo Kuwata’s interest in combining clay and glazes with additional elemental ingredients, such as volcanic rock, basalt, granite, and feldspar. In an echo of Kuwata’s “dual sensitivity,” Regel says she wants to achieve a “dynamic friction,” objects that “exist neither in the natural [nor] in the manufactured world.”[49]Regel’s pieces are positioned in a complex relation to (distorted) natural forms, rather than the culturally coded object-based associations of chanoyuthat are arguably present for Kuwata.[50]Both artists’ methods involve pushing their materials beyond their limits – using multiple firings, importing fragments from other pre-fired pieces of work, setting up volatile mixtures of both refined and unprocessed materials. For Regel, as with Kuwata, this results in randomized textural effects and disruptions. The complex overlays of weathered textures form unpredictable combinations that embrace (or even simulate) natural, eruptive impulses and elemental references. Regel’s pieces embody metamorphic states that emphasize the plasticity of her materials, or more specifically, that which Regel calls their “capacity to be modified”, equated not only with “our own ontology but also […] the way we interact with objects and one another”.[51] Inasmuch as Regel’s work aims to capture the “moment of transition from one state to another, from raw to ‘ripened’, solid to fluid, rough to smooth,” a residual degree of representation persists, including the incorporation of autobiographical motifs – domestic patterns, personal memories – within more general textural allusions to landscape and spirit of place.[52]By contrast, Kuwata’s training emphasized the historical significance of using raw materials from specific regions in the production of ceramic ware, bringing the historical-material influence of place into the process and result – embedded in nature without mirroring it. During his rural apprenticeship with Susumu Zaima, Kuwata has recalled, master and apprentice would take ashes from the stove of the local café in order to blend them into yuyaku glazes. He would sometimes dig clay with his hands or bring stones down from mountainsides to use in ishihaze.[53]Kuwata still lives and works in Toki City in the Gifu region of Japan, an area rich in ceramic traditions inherently connected to the natural landscape. Landscape operates differently for Regel. The dry, powdery effects she is drawn to echo certain kinds of lichen or mold growth, allowing a greater prominence for mimesis, however distorted it may be. Although similarly transformed by color, Regel’s pieces seem irresistibly anchored to landscape ‘recognition’ in an indirectly imitative way, no matter how fragmentary the object may seem. Within rough clumps of weathered clay, swamped by emerging solids and added grains that lay dormant or germinate, Regel’s objects intimate tree branches, parched fields, boulders lifted by glacial ice, riverbed wreckage. Regel’s engagement with landscape concerns autobiographical narrative, not wholly unlike Kuwata’s appeal to the traditional Japanese concept of mitateru, a poetic process of triggering the imagination through an object’s “allusive qualities.”[54]This process involves ‘seeing’ landscape in a related representational sense – a tree line in a flick of glaze, an outcrop of rock in a cup rim. This form of metaphorical allusion, where potential meaning shifts according to environment (described by Kuwata as “thinking of something as something else”), is again cited by the artist in the context of chanoyu. Kuwata explains how the tea master would often “narrate what he saw in the tea bowl and the stories would inflect the bowl’s character.” [55] Yet Kuwata’s approach to chawan suggests that his allusions are more embodied than seen; that the plasticity of his objects alludes to a form of (cultural) landscape in a way that is not primarily (or even necessarily) visual or mimetic. Yet the relationship to ‘seeing’ in Kuwata’s process is complex. Many of his techniques involve making judgments while the work is hidden in the kiln – allowing glaze to melt and run, or determining the shift of an embedded stone, for example. This hidden working relates to post-Cagean aesthetics and the knowing role of chance procedures in creative activities, but it also suggests another, stranger kind of ‘unseen vision’ – a form of divination, perhaps; a recognition of latent information, relating to what Regel calls the “secret” withheld by materials.[56] We might draw comparisons here with the work of artist Alex Hoda, specifically his sculptural projects that engage with molybdomancy, a form of divination involving throwing molten metal into a liquid (in Hoda’s case, water), resulting in unique, distorted forms that can be interpreted both literally and symbolically.[57]Perhaps Kuwata is engaged with some form of keramancy,or divination through clay, with an open-ended (but half hidden) vision of the past, present and future of chanoyuforming part of the spell. Of course, it may be that such extravagant speculations are unnecessary. Ultimately, Kuwata’s vessels fall short of being what Malabou describes as “absolute existential improvisation… a form born of the accident.”[58]Instead, we ourselves might recognize Kuwata’s explosive chawan as embodiments of plasticity itself, especially in relation to the overarching framework of chanoyu, wherein the inherent potential for the destruction of form maintains a presence in the process of formation, held in an unseen suspension between metamorphosis and destruction.[59] Kuwata’s appeal to contingency, chance and the accident may not result in the appearance of something radically new, something unrecognized – yet his works do embody plasticity’s “capacity to transform itself, to transgress its own limits, to displace itself, to become other.”[60]As Kuwata both literally and figuratively plants explosions within his objects, he may in fact be setting in motion an ongoing, metamorphic correspondence between destructive and formative plasticity. As close as they come to losing their formal and structural integrity, Kuwata’s objects remain contingent on what has gone before. At their heart, Kuwata’s chawan are emblematic of a matrix that can give, receive, and annihilate form. Given the appropriate conditions of both ‘chance’ and ‘certainty’, they can incite transformation. This article is based on a talk presented in 2017 at West Dean College of Arts &amp; Conservation, United Kingdom, as part of the ‘Ceramic Plasticity’ symposium. David Stent (2021) “Blue-Slipped Stone-Burst” – Seeing Destructive Plasticity in Takuro Kuwata,&nbsp;The Journal of Modern Craft,&nbsp;14:1,&nbsp;43-56,&nbsp;DOI: 10.1080/17496772.2021.1901439 References [*] Names in this article are given in western order, family name last. 1 Such associations between the artist, place, and violent historical events are noted by Jeffrey Uslip, “Takuro Kuwata”, Kaleidoscope Asia, September 2014, p.32-33. 2 Literally meaning ‘hot water for tea’, chanoyu is here being used to denote the tea ceremony in all its historical complexity, acknowledging a cultural matrix of ritual and etiquette, as well as its importance as an ongoing social activity. 3 Isabella Smith, “Psychedelic Ceramics”, Ceramic Review, November / December 2017, p.12. 4 Takuhito Kawashima, “Takuro Kuwata”,apartamento, May 2019, p.170. 5 Ibid. 6&nbsp;Murai Yasuhiko. “The Development of Chanoyu” in Kumakura Isao &amp; Paul Varley, eds.Tea in Japan: Essays on the History of Chanoyu. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1994, p.3-4. 7&nbsp;Bonnie Kemske, The Teabowl: East &amp; West. London; New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2017, p.13. 8&nbsp;Erica Bellman, “Breaking the Mold | Takuro Kuwata”, T Magazine, New York Times, January 2013. [9]A related duality might be said to exist in the gallery representations of Kuwata’s work in both the context of contemporary craft and in galleries such as Gagosian and Alison Jacques. [10]Anna Marks, “Drinking Out of Cups? Eccentric Ceramics Reinvent the Tea Ceremony”, The Creator’s Proejct, VICE, September 2016 &lt;https://creators.vice.com/en_uk/article/nz4pp8/eccentric-metallic-ceramics-japanese-tea-ceremony&gt; [11]Soetsu Yanagi, The Unknown Craftsman (Japan: Kodansha International Ltd, 1973), p.181. [12]Takuro Kuwata and Katja Sifkovic, “Bringing the Power of Nature into Ceramic”, Azito-Art, February 2013 &lt;http://azito-art.com/topics/bringing-the-power-of-nature-into-ceramic-interview-with-takuro-kuwata/&gt; [13]Yashuhiko, “The Development of Chanoyu”, p5. [14]Bernard Leach, Beyond East and West: Memoirs, Portraits, and Essays (London; Boston: Faber, 1978), p.275. [15]Smith, “Psychedelic Ceramics”, p.12. [16]Yanagi, The Unknown Craftsman, p.120. It is worth pointing out that the mingei (folk craft) movement often associated with Yanagi is not a stated influence on Kuwata’s work; in fact, it is more often discussed in the context of related concept of kōgei (craft), as championed by the curator Yuji Akimoto. [17]In his reflections on specific principles of Zen aesthetics in relation to chawan, Hisamatsu argues that “Asymmetry is a destruction of perfection [which] goes beyond perfection and negates it.” Shin'ichi, Hisamatsu, Patrick Macgill James, and Abe Masao. "The Nature of ‘Sadō’ Culture."The Eastern Buddhist, New Series, 3, no. 2 (1970): p.12-13. [18]Alison Jacques, “Takuro Kuwata – From Tea Bowl”, Alison Jacques Gallery, October 2016. &lt;https://www.alisonjacquesgallery.com/exhibitions/139/overview/&gt; [19]Annegret Bergmann, “Goshomaru: Kabuki Zeitgeist in Tea Bowls”, The Journal of Asian Arts &amp; Aesthetics, Vol. 6, 2020, p.37. See also Julia R. Nakano-Holmes, “Futura Oribe: Iconoclastic Guardian of Chanoyu Tradition”, PhD Thesis, 1995, University of Hawaii. [20]Watanabe, Takeshi. "From Korea to Japan and Back Again: One Hundred Years of Japanese Tea Culture through Five Bowls, 1550-1650." Yale University Art Gallery Bulletin, 2007, 82-99. [21]Louise Allison Cort, “The Kizaemon Teabowl Reconsidered”, Chanoyu Quarterly No. 71, 1992, p20.See also Guth, Christine M. E. "The Aesthetics of Rayskin in Edo-period Japan: Materials, Making and Meaning." Impressions, no. 37 (2016): 88-105. [22]Cort, p.19. [23]Salon 94 Bowery, “Flavor of Nature – Takuro Kuwata”, Salon 94 Bowery, January 2013. &lt;https://www.salon94.com/exhibitions/detail/takuro-kuwata&gt; [24]“Takuro Kuwata - Why I Create”, Phaidon, November 2017. &lt;http://www.phaidon.com/agenda/art/articles/2017/september/27/takuro-kuwata-why-i-create/&gt; [25]Ibid. [26]Quoted in Leach, Beyond East and West, p.297. [27]Howard Kaplan, “Crafting the Future”, Living Form, September 2017 &lt;https://living-form.com/studies/crafting-the-future/&gt; [28]Smith, “Psychedelic Ceramics”, p.12. [29]Mark Rappolt, “Takuro Kuwata - From Tea Bowl”, Art Review, Winter 2016, p.99. [30]David Pye, The Nature and Art of Workmanship (London, New York: Studio Vista; Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1971), p.20–29. [31]Ibid., p20. [32]Ibid., p.22. [33]Ibid., p.21. [34]Yanagi, p.123. [35]Catherine Malabou, What Should We Do with Our Brain? (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), p.56. [36]Joerd van Tuinen, “Elasticity and Plasticity: Anthropo-Design and the Crisis of Repetition”, Critical and Clinical Cartographies: Architecture, Robotics, Medicine, Philosophy (Edinburgh University Press, 2017), np. [37]Ibid. [38]Catherine Malabou, Ontology of the Accident: An Essay on Destructive Plasticity(Cambridge: Polity Press, 2012), p.2. [39]Malabou 2008, p.163. [40]Malabou 2012, p.1. [41] Malabou, Ontology of the Accident, p.49. [42] Adrian Johnson and Catherine Malabou, Self and Emotional Life (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013, p.58. [43]Ibid., p.7. [44]Ibid., p.2-3. [45]Ibid., p.9. [46]Ibid., p.9. [47]Underlying this distinction between destructive plasticity and metamorphosis is another dialogue between plasticity and flexibility, also at play in the states of matter evident in Kuwata’s work, and indeed ceramics in general. In plasticity, there is an essential resistance such that, in the realm of physics at least, a plastic material is defined as opposed to elastic – a rubber band, for example, always returns to an initial shape (even as it deteriorates with age), whereas “marble, once sculpted, cannot go back.” (Street, Anna, Julien Alliot, and Magnolia Pauker, eds. Inter Views in Performance Philosophy: Crossings and Conversations. Performance Philosophy. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017, p.166) After suffering endless remodeling in its raw state, plastic clay becomes fixed (into fragility) by firing – a process that is simultaneously laden with risk and irreversible. [48]“Aneta Regel”, Wall Street International Magazine, 18th August 2017 &lt;https://wsimag.com/art/29238-aneta-regel&gt; [49]Caro, “Aneta Regel’s Clay Sculptures Look like Mossy Tree Branches and Rocks”, Hi-Fructose Magazine, 26th March 2016. &lt;http://hifructose.com/2016/03/26/aneta-regels-clay-sculptures-look-like-mossy-tree-branches-and-rocks/&gt; [50]Ibid. [51]John Christian, “Aneta Regel”, Aneta Regel (website), August 2007 &lt;http://www.anetaregel.com/about&gt; [52]Aneta Regel, quoted in Noémie Jennifer, “The Mossy Sculptures Are Actually Ceramic Sculptures”, Creators | Vice, March 26th 2016 &lt;https://creators.vice.com/en_uk/article/yp5k8k/aneta-regel-ceramic-wooden-sculptures/&gt; [53]Kuwata and Sifkovic, np. [54]Smith, “Psychedelic Ceramics”, p.16. [55] Ibid. [56]Noémie Jennifer, np. [57]Frigeri, Flavia, Claire Shea, Alex Hoda, and Cass Sculpture Foundation, eds. Work in Progress - Alex Hoda: Jelena Seng. Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz, 2015. Hoda’s ceramics have other associations with Kuwata, most notably the obvious fascination with chemical change, a sense of ‘provisional’ form, and the ‘kitsch mucus’ excesses of glaze. [58] Malabou, Ontology of the Accident, p.2. [59] Crockett, Clayton. "Deconstructive Plasticity: Malabou’s Biological Materialism." In Derrida after the End of Writing: Political Theology and New Materialism, 109-20. New York: Fordham University Press, 2018, p113. [60]Malabou, Catherine. Plasticity at the Dusk of Writing: Dialectic, Destruction, Deconstruction. New York: Columbia University Press, 2010, p24. https://skurrilsteer.org/the-depiction-of-dissemination Sat, 30 Nov 2019 16:51:52 +0000 skurrilsteer https://skurrilsteer.org/the-depiction-of-dissemination The Depiction of Dissemination Joseph Wright of Derby’s A Philosopher Lecturing on the Orrery in which a lamp is put in place of the sun&nbsp;(1766) in relation to the opening scene of Béla Tarr’s Werckmeister Harmonies&nbsp;(2000) <img width="1000" height="712" width_o="1000" height_o="712" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/050181a215fa08b9120548ac51fc3ac8eb69641b91daa90ce7f56c8b3acabf63/joesph_wright_Orrery.jpg" data-mid="55748559" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/050181a215fa08b9120548ac51fc3ac8eb69641b91daa90ce7f56c8b3acabf63/joesph_wright_Orrery.jpg" /> Joseph Wright of Derby – A Philosopher Lecturing on the Orrery in which a lamp is put in place of the sun&nbsp;(c.1764-1766) Oil on canvas, Derby Museum and Art Gallery. A. From the mid-1760s onwards, Joseph Wright of Derby produced a number of dramatically lit scenes depicting scientific experiment and demonstration, at that time wholly original choices of subject matter. Wright’s decision to paint such scenes was quite conscious and deliberate, reflecting the compelling mix of art, science and philosophy that encapsulated much about the artist’s life, interests and outlook. Wright had previously gained a good reputation and made a decent living through portrait and landscape commissions, yet was never satisfied with these activities alone. Such generic subjects were not highly regarded and a sustained focus on them was not considered a particularly highbrow vocation. Instead it was a form of History painting that was held in highest esteem in Wright’s time – grand works that incorporated religious, literary and classical themes. By turning his attention to the latest scientific discoveries and the individual luminaries who were making and disseminating them, Wright made an attempt to place his work (and theirs) into another grand history that was just being written. His prescience was remarkable; he realised early on the significance of many of the developments happening all around him in that burgeoning Age of Reason and knew, furthermore, that his treatment of them could further underwrite their importance. 1&nbsp;As well Caravaggio, an acknowledged master of chiaroscuro, Wright is also associated with a number of Dutch painters renowned for similarly rendered lighting effects, particularly those produced by candlelight: Gerrit von Honthhorst, Godfrie Schalken and Hendrick Terbrugghen. Wright employed striking techniques of chiaroscuro in his depiction of Enlightenment science, technology and industrialisation.1 His lifelong preoccupation with light was always accompanied by his keen interest in other mechanical, analytical and philosophical studies, which he had maintained throughout his middle-class upbringing. Crucial to Wright’s engagement with the latest developments in science and technology, however, was his relation and geographical proximity to the epicentre of the Industrial Revolution. He counted as friends, acquaintances, and indeed patrons, many members of the Birmingham-based ‘Lunar Society’, a group of intellectuals and prominent cultural figures devoted to the study and celebration of scientific enquiry and innovation. The regular meetings of the Society, scheduled around the phases of the moon, would focus on cutting edge experiments and current debates concerning developments in a variety of fields, ranging from chemistry, medicine, cosmology and engineering. Wright’s contacts with figures such as Dr. Erasmus Darwin (grandfather of Charles), the industrialists and steam innovators Matthew Boulton and James Watt, the chemist Joseph Priestley and the ceramicist Josiah Wedgwood, informed his thinking and artistic direction. Wright was a painter fully embedded in the world of intellectual investigation and invention, yet his interest was not only in the depiction of new ideas or even the lofty roles played by thinkers and philosophers. In addition to his portrayals of Natural Scientists and alchemists, Wright produced a series of canvases focusing on smithies and forges, showing heroic craftsmen toiling in their workshops. His passion for the depiction of dramatic light effects, used so effectively in heightening the drama of intellectual and physical achievements, also drew him to subjects such as Mount Vesuvius, firework displays, and explorations of the effects of moonlight on cloud. One of his most celebrated works, A Philosopher Lecturing on the Orrery in which a lamp is put in place of the sun (first exhibited in 1766), depicts a group of figures carefully positioned around a large orrery.2&nbsp; 2 An orrery is a manufactured device, usually driven by clockwork, which models the motions of the solar system. Planets and their satellites are seen to move about a stationary sun, which is itself often replaced by a temporary light source. The interrelating movements of the Earth, Moon, Sun (and further planets) could demonstrate phenomena such as day and night, the seasons, lunar phases and eclipses. The devices are named in reference to Charles Boyle, the fourth Earl of Orrery, who commissioned and purchased one of the first devices built by John Rowley in about 1713. A number of similar planetary mechanisms have existed since antiquity. Richard of Wallingford (1292–1336) is said to have designed a sophisticated equatorium named ‘Albion’ that could calculate lunar, solar and planetary longitudes. Unlike most equatoria, the Albion could also predict eclipses. In the 1770s, the lecturer Adam Walker developed a large transparent orrery known as a Eidourian, a form of projection device with which he would conduct public lectures – one of the first attempts to fuse educational material with forms of popular entertainment. Crucially, orreries are devices used for demonstration rather than discovery (compare this with an astrolabe, for example). As well as communicating the pleasures of scientific inquiry, they could be used to emphasise different forms of authority according to different social settings. An orrery could be used prominently visible or it could be made to fade into the background. As opposed to more ‘philosophical’ machines, which were considered to be unmediated transmitters of God’s messages (such as the air pump), an orrery would function by holding back its presence, still “using artifice to display a doctrine about nature” but in such a way that it made that doctrine seem inevitable and authoritative. (Schaffer 1994, 157) Orreries would also serve to render the gestures of their ‘demonstrators’ tacit, especially as their use required much training and no small degree of targeted theatrical showmanship. A Natural Philosopher, standing at the back dressed in a colourful academic-like robe with red sleeves, is seen using this device to impart information about the nature of the solar system to a small audience. Rising above the orrery, there is a dome of metal strips projecting the relative axes of the Sun and the surrounding planets. A number of ivory planets can be seen attached to brass wires, which are connected by long cords to a series of collars moving around a central pivot. Immediately to the left of a child silhouetted in the foreground, we see the interlinked Earth and Moon. Orreries such as this were often used in the popular scientific demonstrations that often toured the country during the 18th&nbsp; Century. Lecturers in natural philosophy would offer courses and presentations on the most up-todate discoveries in physics, optics, chemistry, electricity and magnetism. Wright almost certainly attended many such lectures, including a series conducted by James Ferguson in Derby in July 1764, based on a previous publication concerning ‘Mechanics, Hydrostatics, Pneumatics and Astronomy’. Many itinerant lecturers such as Ferguson would also present private lectures in the homes of well-to-do families, bringing the most advanced thinking in the civilised world to the doorstep of those with means. These activities would feed into a more general cultural shift concerning the nature of science and its engagement with the wider world, as emerging scientists moved away from speculative philosophy to more formalised and rigorous procedures such as collecting specimens and conducting controlled laboratory experiments.3 3&nbsp;“Featuring orreries, prisms, microscopes, and many other instruments, the courses attracted both men and women from elite society. A peculiarly English phenomenon was the emergence of itinerant lecturers who circulated the larger provincial towns such as Bath, Bristol and Derby, bringing the fashionable knowledge of science into the homes of well-heeled rural residents.” (Terpak 2002, 176-177) Developing alongside advances in technology and increasing audience sizes, these public lectures became increasingly elaborate. Their educational scope soon combined with all forms of theatrical showmanship and trickery so as to become closer to magic shows and circus spectacles. Although these activities quickly became profitable, their focus was predominantly on the popularization and increased accessibility of knowledge – finding ways to turn the announcement of new information into instructive and worthwhile entertainments. This period of great development was supported by a general inclination to better disseminate and propagate scientific and technical knowledge, both to promote invention and to explore how that knowledge was then applied to society at large – and paintings such as those by Joseph Wright would be instrumental in this. Apart from the central area around the orrery, Wright’s scene is cast in darkness, as if the artist’s first thought was to acknowledge a base metaphor for the Age of Enlightenment, contrasting the emanations of knowledge and understanding against the pervading gloom of ignorance and the prejudices of times past. As always with Wright’s paintings, the scientific equipment is meticulously reproduced. Technical accuracy was of particular importance for him in his work, as was a precise portrayal of costume and setting. His intention was to be faithfully authentic in relation to the otherwise unfamiliar and complex processes and methodologies he sought to simulate and reproduce. The paintings themselves had to be precise in order to engage the viewer on a similar (though obviously distinct) level to the demonstrations or experiences they represented. This is a key observation: Wright’s paintings were in themselves informative; they too sought to connect with a pedagogical function in some way. They not only showed how knowledge was disseminated but also the actual specificities of that knowledge – Wright showed real equipment, accurately rendered experiments, almost verifiable results – he sought an illustrative authority that would give his paintings scientific import in themselves. Yet, crucially, this was only a partial&nbsp; authenticity, perhaps consciously emphasized by Wright himself, as he concealed details through the use of dramatic shadow, deliberate blockages and occlusions (ellipses and eclipses), throughout many of his ‘demonstrations of demonstrations’. This concerns processes mediated by technology – in the case of Wright's painting this involves the orrery as well as the tools of representation he has employed in the production of the work. He evokes an effective transmission&nbsp; of an experience – mostly via the reactions of the characters depicted – by way of his facility with the technology of painting. The ‘technical’ here not only suggests machinery and equipment, of course, but the application of acquired knowledge (scientific or otherwise) for practical purposes: it is the technological ‘dissemination of depiction’ as well as the depiction of dissemination. In this sense Wright’s painting is engineered to elicit a certain kind of response – it both shows&nbsp; learning and performs&nbsp; learning; it is tied in with its own reciprocal involvement with the continuing development of ideas Wright has seen emerging in his immediate vicinity and in his own lifetime. Of course, we can imagine how many of the specifics of any demonstration of the known solar system, and its subsequent depiction, might have looked like in the mid-1760s. Around this period, the number of planetary bodies would seem particularly lessened in relation to today. It would not be until 1781 that Herschel would discover Uranus – and not until six years later that its moons, Titania and Oberon, would be added – and Neptune was not located until 1846. Pluto, the nominal planet, would come later still. Of course, this is always the case, as more and more new information about the universe is discovered alongside technological advancement, but it shows how the orrery demonstration Wright captures is very much a moment in time and always already an indication of the limits of human knowledge. Wright’s depiction of the group of figures surrounding the orrery is also very particular. Made up of three men, a woman and three children, the small audience does not appear to be scholarly, but instead drawn from the middle classes. Their reactions are subtly different, ranging from rapt attention and wonder to contemplative and even morose reflection. Wright’s expert use of light and shadow skillfully emphasises these contrasting reactions to the lesson being received. He effectively charts the durational unfolding of transforming perception, as each figure and the collective tries to assess its place in the universe and the nature of humanity’s position in the natural order. It should be remembered that lectures such as these were often specifically designed to elicit such profound responses, encouraging both rational thought and religious awe in light of the ‘true’ structural vision of God’s universe. The figures are grouped together like planets and their satellites. In fact Wright does not pass up the opportunity to convey particular aspects of the scientist’s lecture in the manner in which he deals with the faces of the audience, as they clearly imitate the phases of the moon – new, half, gibbous, first and last quarter – emphasizing the link between the earthly and the celestial, as well as making reference to human mortality and the relative&nbsp;insignificance of human life spans in relation to cosmic time. The members of polite society we see have to contemplate the ‘world machine’ and their newly revealed place within it. Their responses, when put in this context, are not so surprising. The younger man on the right puts his hand to his brow, as if deep in contemplation about the implications of the vast scale or intricate beauty of the solar system. The Philosopher appears to point toward him, as if highlighting the profundity of the effect his words are having. He in turn seems perturbed or distracted by the man taking notes to his right, as if he were stalled in the midst of an elucidation or having to account for the effects that his demonstration are having on his audience. Or could it be that Wright intends another, more subtle reference to processes of transcription – perhaps implanting doubts into the Philosopher’s mind concerning the consequences of translating personal appearances into written tracts (either for commercial purposes or for ease of distribution) or the inevitable trajectory between verbal lectures, note taking and the published volumes seen on the bookshelves at the back of the room. Many of the figures in Wright’s painting have been provisionally identified. The man taking notes is thought to be the cartographer and draughtsman Peter Perez Burdett, a close friend and associate of Wright. It seems likely that he represents a particularly attentive and already learned attendee, illustrating a thirst for detailed knowledge and the desire to absorb details with unerring accuracy. It has also been suggested that the older man on the right is Lord Ferrers, who owned (and possibly built) the orrery Wright depicts, and who first bought the completed painting in 1766. The figure of the Philosopher himself, arguably the most dominant figure in the painting, is thought to have been modeled, at least in part, on Sir Isaac Newton.4 <img width="1024" height="754" width_o="1024" height_o="754" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/1fa6ec40ec1a270767680e5af91f3ba1971c5862028ce0562430962426ade904/joseph-wright-of-derby---an-experiment-on-a-bird-in-an-air-pump.jpg" data-mid="55749677" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/1fa6ec40ec1a270767680e5af91f3ba1971c5862028ce0562430962426ade904/joseph-wright-of-derby---an-experiment-on-a-bird-in-an-air-pump.jpg" />Joseph Wright of Derby – An Experiment with a Bird in an Air Pump (1768), oil on canvas, National Gallery, London.&nbsp; <img width="241" height="316" width_o="241" height_o="316" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/a64ca69c065de0b6301b39b81a7a8396f7c4658f07d5be02d844e0631c7545a0/picture8.jpg" data-mid="55765434" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/241/i/a64ca69c065de0b6301b39b81a7a8396f7c4658f07d5be02d844e0631c7545a0/picture8.jpg" />Joseph Wright of Derby – Portrait of John Whitehurst (c. 1782-83), oil on canvas, private collection 4 (cf. Egerton 1990) Although the references to Newton could well be deliberate – his celebrated treatise on the laws of universal gravtation had been published in 1687; he died forty years later – it has also been suggested that the figure of the Philosopher is ased upon Wright’s friend, the geologist John Whitehurst. Wright had portrayed Whitehurst previously and it may be that he (or indeed Newton again) features in another of Wright’s most celebrated paintings of a science-based subject: An Experiment with a Bird in an Air Pump from 1768. Completed two years after of A Philosopher Lecturing on the Orrery in which a lamp is put in place of the sun, this painting presents a more ambiguous representation of the benefits, methods and morals of the dawning scientific age. Instead of the admiring way in which the Natural Philosopher figure is seen in the former painting, he is here portrayed in an uncertain role, conducting an experiment that involves denying air to a live bird. It is clear in Wright’s painting that the spectacle is upsetting for many of the audience members and the forthright gaze of the scientist, as he looks straight out of the painting toward the viewer, suggests that he is making an appeal in relation to his power over another creature. Wright seems willing to beg the question asto the reasoning behind this demonstration of imminent death and the graphic means employed to engender a realisation of universal mortality. A similar experiment to convey the same principals could be conducted using what is known as a ‘lungs glass’, a mechanical instrument that contracts to form a vacuum, Yet Wright’s subject, and indeed the experiment’s subject, is a dramatically contorted and illuminated cockatoo. The demonstration of the solar system would&nbsp;no doubt have involved an exposition of Newtonian laws of universal gravitation, showing how the universe fitted together according to an ordered, harmonious system that not only confirms God’s existence but makes his omnipotence manifest. Yet it seems equally plausible to suggest that another figure in Wright’s composition plays the most crucial role: in the foreground, the young boy with his back to us – thought to be Wright’s nephew, Laurence Shirley – takes on the ‘role’ of the eclipse. In order to demonstrate solar eclipses, as evidenced in Wright’s own depiction, the brass ball of the Sun is replaced by a candle, most likely made up of a lamp wick set in a jar of oil.5 <img width="585" height="750" width_o="585" height_o="750" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/26b1028bc3e6a9bf2c3ebd017256dd6ffa2cc0ed569b3d3d7af7079e4b03b6a2/Joseph_Wright_of_Derby._Girl_Reading_a_Letter_by_Candlelight-_With_a_Young_Man_Peering_over_Her_Shoulder._c.1760-62.jpg" data-mid="55749715" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/585/i/26b1028bc3e6a9bf2c3ebd017256dd6ffa2cc0ed569b3d3d7af7079e4b03b6a2/Joseph_Wright_of_Derby._Girl_Reading_a_Letter_by_Candlelight-_With_a_Young_Man_Peering_over_Her_Shoulder._c.1760-62.jpg" />Joseph Wright of Derby – A Girl Reading a Letter by Candlelight with a Young Man Peering Over her Shoulder (c.1760-62), oil on canvas, private collection <img width="329" height="445" width_o="329" height_o="445" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/69d66ba4e73f0a6fb5611a077001377050245cf8bd8937284173c9c3c19a47e7/LaTour.jpg" data-mid="55749829" border="0" data-scale="100" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/329/i/69d66ba4e73f0a6fb5611a077001377050245cf8bd8937284173c9c3c19a47e7/LaTour.jpg" />George de la Tour – The Young Singer (c.1645), oil on canvas, Leicester City Museum<img width="2048" height="1448" width_o="2048" height_o="1448" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/9bcce1c2cd90260f0c08cefbc3a4ae3094eaf9eb0571b41ac9cf1ad730c91c6a/Georges_de_La_Tour_035.jpg" data-mid="55749841" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/9bcce1c2cd90260f0c08cefbc3a4ae3094eaf9eb0571b41ac9cf1ad730c91c6a/Georges_de_La_Tour_035.jpg" /> Georges de la Tour – The Dice Players (c.1651), oil on canvas, Preston Hall Museum, Stockton on Tees. <img width="801" height="1095" width_o="801" height_o="1095" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/e20abb862df66ea59aafb7e47d456cb8cccb6e6a96bf88c0e7c81366e755efc1/CarpenterShop.jpg" data-mid="55749951" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/801/i/e20abb862df66ea59aafb7e47d456cb8cccb6e6a96bf88c0e7c81366e755efc1/CarpenterShop.jpg" />Georges de la Tour – St. Joseph in the Carpenter’s Shop (1642), oil on canvas, Musée du Louvres, Paris. <img width="878" height="1200" width_o="878" height_o="1200" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/7f1beecf6d7452b306c90e64f1ab9641f23bc715ced6337f18c9f6cab5982f63/CarpenterShop4.jpg" data-mid="55749960" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/878/i/7f1beecf6d7452b306c90e64f1ab9641f23bc715ced6337f18c9f6cab5982f63/CarpenterShop4.jpg" />Georges de la Tour – St. Joseph in the Carpenter’s Shop (detail) (1642), oil on canvas, Musée du Louvres, Paris. 5 In many of Wright’s candlelit paintings, including that based on the orrery demonstration, the candle flame is deliberately obscured. It appears to be a common feature of this style of painting, yet in that case in particular this technique is harnessed to further underline the theme and nature of the solar eclipse, extending the artist’s metaphor concerning the accessibility of knowledge and understanding in relation to the human condition. The real subject of such a painting, it could be argued, is the effect of the occlusion of ‘light’, where this word functions as a particularly loaded metaphor. The painterly device immediately frames the more general theme of human endeavour and scientific discovery (light) in a context of pervading ignorance (darkness), by way of an indirect perspective – a route that suggests ignorance can always be returned to and that understanding need always be seen in the context of the unknown in order for its effects to be fully understood. The shielding of the candle flame deflects the viewer’s attention from any concentrated source of light – as well as the cause of specific phenomenon in the ‘narrative’ of the orrery painting, for example – allowing Wright to better emphasise the effects of ‘illumination’.In one of Wright’s earliest paintings of a candlelit scene, A Girl Reading a Letter by Candlelight with a Young Man Peering Over her Shoulder (c.1760-62), the flame of the illumining candle is shielded by the sheet of paper in the young subject’s hand. The result is a degree of transparency that can be compared with other examples of this technique by Wright and others – we can see great variety in the levels of opacity, as light is tested against different forms of matter. Blocking off these details through various compositional devices or otherwise not allowing the naked flame to be seen, is a trait that Wright shares with a number of other artists, including the French Baroque painter Georges de la Tour (1593–1652). The Dice Players, a late painting by La Tour from around 1651, would even appear to be a direct influence on the style and composition of A Philosopher Lecturing on the Orrery in which a lamp is put in place of the sun. The same radial composition dominates, as a variety of figures are carefully positioned around a single light source. The canvas shows off la Tour’s powerful technique, which is especially visible in his depiction of light hitting the surface of a wooden table, the polished metal of breastplates and the textures of clothing. John Berger paints an unflattering portrait of La Tour as an arrogant, greedy and violent war profiteer – a marked contradiction to his usual 20th Century presentation as a painter famed for his portrayals of simplicity and humanist reverence (with subjects such as beggars, saints and ascetics). In particular, Berger draws a contrast between La Tour and Caravaggio, suggesting that the latter is always involved in his scenes, delving into the worlds of those he lived among. La Tour, by contrast, held himself back, remaining at a remove for the purpose of what Berger calls “self-preservation.” (Berger 2009, 114) More interestingly however, Berger suggests that in his paintings of card-players and tricksters, La Tour’s paintings “reveal no psychological insight [and] the interest is schematic. “La Tour, I believe, saw the whole of life as a scheme over which nobody on earth had any control, a scheme revealed in prophecy and the scriptures […] where people are transformed into ciphers. Yet the total faith of the Middle Ages has gone. Scientific observation has begun. The individuality of the thinker and artist cannot be brushed aside or undone. Consequently the painter cannot simply submit to a God-given iconography. He must invent. Yet if he accepts such a view of the world (the world as unquestionable scheme) the only way he can invent is by imitating God, modestly and piously, within the small domain of his art. Accepting the world as scheme, he makes his own harmonious visual schemes out of it.” (Berger 2009, 115) La Tour could aim to compose his own specific moments / scenarios of constructed order; in his art he could achieve a harmony of simple schemes, where the unimaginable scale of the universe could be reduced to bare essentials. In many of these paintings, the shielded candle flame appears like a gesture of intimacy (that, crucially, is not directed outward, or that does not let the viewer into it), as well as a gesture of privation. Yet it can also serve as an indication of fragility and vulnerability, occasionally revealing the transience of existence through degrees of transparency, capturing corporeal presence through a particular treatment of flesh. At the same time it can institute a kind of embedded, inaccessible volume within the painting that somehow withdraws its provenance – we are not permitted to gaze upon that which makes the vision possible: that principal of light that stands in for both divine and Godless creation. Such a crucial element of the painting, and the contained depiction, becomes separated from us. Instead we are left with a black hole that both attracts and repels us at the same time. The French poet Francis Ponge describes the candle as a “singular plant” that is revived at night. He also describes how moths are attracted to its glow: “instantly singed or knocked out / of battle, they simmer on the verge of a frenzy akin to stupor. / But the candle, in flickering across the book and brusquely dissipating the original smokiness, encourages the reader – then bends over its dish and drowns in its food.” (‘The Candle’ – Ponge 2000, 19) With remarkable economy of means, Ponge establishes connections between the candle’s tender flame – its spine wick always soon to fall away from softening muscle, always set to extinguish itself – book learning, the furious desire for the acquisition of knowledge, and the ever present threat of darkness returning. Here the candle’s illumination becomes all consuming in the sense that there is no other light source. There is no open door or window through which natural light may creep in; no other rooms are suggested. Consequently, some of the surrounding figures – specifically the young girl whose pointing hand penetrates the orrery’s ‘shell’ and the young couple sat opposite each other (could it be that this pair – positioned a universe apart, as it were – are in some way connected?) – seem mesmerised by this isolated point of illumination. The figures circle this singularity point as if around a campfire or a television set. Yet it is only these three figures that can be said to be looking directly at the point we cannot see – the occluded focus that marks the middle of the canvas. Although nothing of its actual flame is made visible, we can see an inverted and curtailed reflection of the candle in the curved near-edge of the orrery’s base. Instead we focus on the figures seeing the candle for us. Our emissaries, then, are shown being subjected to lessons that amount to rational, spiritual and moral improvement. It is worth asking whether Wright’s depiction serves to expand upon or disrupt distinctions between teacher and pupil, or whether he seeks to contrast a mechanical vision of the universe with a more poetic one. As well as being an favourable and optimistic representation of science and its benefits to mankind, A Philosopher Lecturing on the Orrery in which a lamp is put in place of the sun&nbsp; also engages with its own role in this developing world of technological advance – its address is very much to the capabilities and techniques of painting in the dissemination of new ideas – even if it has to look to classical models (or proven dramatic tropes such as chiaroscuro) in order to best present them. Wright’s painting is itself a demonstration device, not only of the artist’s individual admiration for the practice of science and the manner in which its discoveries can be delivered to the people, but also in terms of a more fundamental and poetic reflection on the implications of new insights into the workings of the universe. It is an acknowledgement of the theoretical beauty of natural laws, made specifically in relation to the making and receiving of images&nbsp; of knowledge. Wright’s painting is a record of reception. It displays listening, witnessing, conceptualizing and the processing of information in ways that are explicit and deliberate. It conveys a period of ‘sinking in’ and, in doing so, captures the both the illumination of learning and the darkly enduring context of the unknown. B. The opening sequence of Béla Tarr’s Werckmeister Harmonies&nbsp;(2000) begins with a small, enclosed stove fire being put out with water. The camera lingers on this act of extinguishing for a moment before rising and revealing a rural barroom tavern situated on the plains of Hungary.6 <img width="576" height="449" width_o="576" height_o="449" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/0433528d6e50ddb8fc0c25a9bd727fa39c209f9decd4900039d09cf6d7611ea4/picture7.jpg" data-mid="55764296" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/576/i/0433528d6e50ddb8fc0c25a9bd727fa39c209f9decd4900039d09cf6d7611ea4/picture7.jpg" /> Still from Stalker by Andrei Tarkovsky (1979) 6 The film is co-written by Tarr and Lázló Krasznahorkai, the author of The Melancholy of Resistance (1989), the novel on which it is based. From the book we know that the establishment is known as “Pfeffer and Co., Licensed Victuallers of Híd Road”, also known as the “Peafeffer” (Krasznahorkai 1989, 65). The layout of the bar in Tarr’s film, including the way it is initially framed, are reminiscent of the café-bar featured in Andrei Tarkovsky’s film Stalker (1979), where a trio of figures – ‘Stalker’, ‘Writer’ and ‘Professor’ – convene ahead of their treacherous excursion into The Zone. The prominence of a such a ‘trinity’ of characters could hold significance, as we shall see, but it could also possible be to suggest links to Luger, the barman in Stalker, having trouble with a malfunctioning light – another potential metaphor for the uncertainty of understanding and the potential for existing knowledge to come apart. Further comparisons between Tarr and Tarkovsky could be numerous: their use of long durations, balletic zooms and pans, and so on.This simple action – cancelling light / warmth and moving on – functions as if one scenario is stopped in order for another to take place: a reset, one light going out and another coming on. It also operates as a way of setting the stage for activity, taking things back to emptiness or darkness (even ignorance) in order for new activities of illumination to occur. Without any edits or cuts, the camera slowly moves into the barroom, which is crowded with a few dozen men.7 7 Like many other of Tarr’s films, such as Damnation (1988) and Satantango (1994), Werckmeister Harmonies is noted for being made up only a dozen or so shots of extended duration – up to ten minutes before cutting away. Yet even though these long shots are not treated as ‘still’ images as such – the continuous, restless movements of the camera always undermines this – it still appears as though all movement is associated with a still base. The way the camera moves is akin to the movements of the eye over a painted composition, as if the swings and pirouettes were evidence of saccadic traversals over a given scenario. The movement is free and continuous, the perspective around head height – we feel like another of the patrons trying to secure one last drink. The barroom is decorated spartanly, a few chairs and tables scattered here and there, and it is soon apparent that it is near to closing time. There is already an undeniable an air of inebriation. The landlord, a Mr. Hagelmeyer, calls time: “Gentlemen, please!”8 8 The ‘Gentlemen’ described consist of working men: “drivers, painters, bakers, warehousemen” (Krasznahorkai 1989, 66). It is worth emphasizing that in this scene, the performance we are about to see takes place after closing time in a public house. It is not a private space and this is not polite society. What might otherwise be a celebrated appearance by a Natural Philosopher, visiting a house to give a private educational demonstration, is here translated into an instance whereby the town eccentric begins rotating a group of drunkards in a poetic meditation on the mysteries, not just of the cosmos but of the exquisite loneliness and unknowing that is part of earthly existence. As the film continues we see that the village is caught in the grip of a frost that will not fade, under skies that will not produce more snowfall – the place is in limbo. The very first lines of the script suggest that all that is to follow will only do so after regular hours have expired and that it is then that the request comes, once again, for Valuska to ‘show them’. The after-hours setting indicates that the upcoming entertainment, or indeed instance of learning, not only takes place outside work (being in the bar) but that it is also situated outside any designated leisure time. It is staged in a zone where neither work nor pleasure appears to be directly involved. This puts Valuska’s ‘lecture’ beyond both categories, or in some way outside the ‘earthly’ division between the two. It is not sufficiently outside of work to become a definitively leisurely activity (and vice versa) and, furthermore, its timing is such that it falls precisely in the last moments of this established in-between zone – where time has been ‘called’ yet there still may be space for one-for-the-road. In a sense, this is presented as the perfect (non)time for knowledge to be encountered or taken in – or at least a certain type of knowledge that indicates something profound about the nature of the universe. It is a moment specifically placed outside of societal time in order to stage access to understanding that is also outside ordinary, accepted boundaries. We might compare this with Wright’s depiction of a performance of teaching and learning that takes place in an enclosed environment, surely by-invitation-only. A distinction could be drawn between the private conveyance of material / knowledge, and the form of public demonstration, even one that has, as Krasznahorkai tells us, become overly familiar through repetition. Even these tired public spectacles (which are less easy to avoid) can produce powerful residual effects. At this point a man with a wide, pale moustache emerges from the crowd to exclaim: “Just wait a bit for Valuska to show us!”9 9 The as-yet-unfulfilled request is for Valuska to show the clientele of the ‘Peafeffer’ this “business of ‘the erf and the mune’” (Krasznahorkai 65). But what is implied by the directive ‘to show’ in this context? We will soon know that this not only involves Valuksa’s manipulation of his physical surroundings and people in order to effectively ‘model’ something, but also his verbal descriptions and capacity for narrative.This same man slowly makes his way across the room, towards the camera, looking as though he is about to rope us into the events about to unfold. He then pulls János Valuska, a younger man in his early thirties, from behind the frame.10 10 Valuska is a postman – a person concerned with the delivery and dissemination of information. It is interesting to note the slight difference in translation from the original novel and the English subtitles of Tarr’s and Krasznahorkai’s screenplay, where Valuska alternately describes his speech as an ‘exposition’ and an ‘explanation’. Both words have particular meaning when it comes to the dissemination of learning or the manner in which knowledge is imparted. The former is etymologically linked to processes of showing in such a way that it already implies a more visual register than the more literal or mediated root of ‘making plain’ in the latter. Valuska is quickly given a drink and steered by the shoulder toward the bar. Again, the man with the&nbsp;moustache makes his appeal: “Let’s make some room for Valuska to show us.”11 11 The near repetition in this line suggests a reference to Valuska’s own repetitions – the training he has undergone in order to effectively ‘use’ and control his temporary orrery. His is a “set speech” yet his delivery is both relentlessly rehearsed and still dramatic. Through such memorised delivery unforeseen transformations can still occur. No matter how many times his routine has been repeated, there is still a shadow covering it – there is still an unknown quantity. Krasznahorkai’s novel suggests that the repetitions serve as a way for Valuska, as the naïve younger man, to be accepted into the barroom community. Conforming to their drunken wishes is a way for him to find solidarity. Krasznahorkai also writes: “the explanation (…) as a piece of entertainment, had been polished as smooth as possible and simply seemed to occupy the time, had long ceased to be of any interest to anyone.” (Krasznahorkai 65) There are also references here to the occupation of space – the surreal notion of playing out a simulation of the solar system in a village barroom. Yet in as much as it suggests a sense of confinement, this act also contains the seed of a deeper freedom, not only of the imagination and the possibilities of thought (be it appeals to rationality or spiritual reflection), but a definition of freedom in particular reference to Valuska’s lack of any sense of proportion. The other patrons soon begin to move tables and chairs to clear the floor.12 12 Here the rest of the clientele begin to embrace the fact that the show is about to come to them – for otherwise the crowd displays a “certain obstinacy in dawdling within the four walls of the ‘Peafeffer’ (…) the last thing on its mind being any kind of venture into the unknown.” (Krasznahorkai 1989, 68) Nonetheless, this swift clearance betrays a tacit sympathy with Valuska’s capabilities and his willingness to expose his limited knowledge to the room – in fact to celebrate it precisely for its limited scope. The collective clearance is a sympathetic creation of space, an almost involuntary concession to possibility that is wide enough to allow a partial viewpoint on the cosmos to be levered in. Valuska and his conductor move slowly into the centre. Preparations are being quietly discussed between them and the man with the moustache appears honoured to be the first selected participant:13 <img width="673" height="443" width_o="673" height_o="443" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/c42639850f1d092cd75f8cb243469e15b5db5ce1e2de28b2bd821f4c9441632e/Screen-shot-2011-09-27-at-13.01.07.png" data-mid="55764719" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/673/i/c42639850f1d092cd75f8cb243469e15b5db5ce1e2de28b2bd821f4c9441632e/Screen-shot-2011-09-27-at-13.01.07.png" /> Werckmeister Harmonies (2000)13 Valuska begins to construct his live orrery – a trio of Sun, Earth and Moon formed from selected individuals, with others on the periphery like other stars / spectators. Although it can be related to the planetarium device depicted by Joseph Wright, Valuska’s orrery, established in the barroom, employs modes of thinking, collective inquiry and discovery in a different way.According to what attributes are Valuska’s heavenly bodies chosen? It becomes increasingly clear as the scenario unfolds that the characters of these elements, as they spin and interact with one another, take on more and more explicit personal dimensions, as some participants seem to relish their roles, while others stare out blankly, quietly performing their allocated duties with the minimum of effort or desperately fighting off alcohol-induced sleep. They each take their place in the constructed universe according to individual nuances of performance, yet are willing to be conducted by Valuska’s superior ‘knowledge’. It remains the case that, throughout, the selected participants collectively contribute to an agency that ultimately provides a platform for the rest of the drunken crew to ‘join them’. “You are the sun. The Sun doesn’t move, this is what it does.”1414 As opposed to many other planetary models, orreries were amongst the first devices to demonstrate the sun-centred Copernican cosmology, as this comment off-handedly asserts. Valuska wiggles his fingers, demonstrating flickering flames. The newly appointed Sun mimics him, waving the fingers of both his hands as he stands upright in the middle of the room. It is as if he were imitating a candle around which the barroom revolved. At this point another man, this time wearing a hat and leaning against the wall, is beckoned toward centre stage. He does not protest. “You are the Earth. The Earth is here for a start and then moves around the Sun.” After positioning the Earth, Valuska then begins what seems to be a rehearsed introduction: “And now… we’ll have an explanation that simple folks like us can also understand about immortality. All I ask is that you step with me into the boundlessness where constancy, quietude, and peace, infinite emptiness reign. And just imagine that in this infinite sonorous silence, everywhere is an impenetrable darkness. Here we only experience general motion and at first we don’t notice the events we are witnessing.”15 <img width="641" height="800" width_o="641" height_o="800" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/c95bfcf5fa9147259c0c6745d938141dbe33c8df1fdbf01f8f5a1a87602f7885/joseph-wright-bladder.jpg" data-mid="55764771" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/641/i/c95bfcf5fa9147259c0c6745d938141dbe33c8df1fdbf01f8f5a1a87602f7885/joseph-wright-bladder.jpg" /> Joseph Wright of Derby – Two Boys by Candlelight Blowing a Bladder (1768-71), oil on canvas with silver leaf, San Marino, Huntingdon Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens. 15 These more expansive introductory remarks suggest something of Valuska’s forthcoming ability to create a believable, involving and ultimately convincing world for the patrons of the ‘Peafeffer’ (and us), purely through his words and his manipulation of movement. His choreographed presentation harnesses the collective imagination in a way that creates an atmosphere of suspended disbelief – a spell is cast, across both time and space, in which the lesson of his story can be best received. A similar metaphor is at work in another candlelit painting by Joseph Wright of Derby entitled Two Boys by Candlelight Blowing a Bladder (1768-71). The inflation of the bladder can be seen as an equivalent metaphor for Valuska's establishment of an improvised yet tangible world by which to convey the "harmonious conjunction" of the "ghostly eclipse" (Krasznahorkai 1989, 75). The bladder is another, more literal, exponent of substitution, yet it performs a similar function as the orchestrated movements of the unsteady drinkers in the ‘Peafeffer’. The painting simultaneously shows an establishment of volume, demarcated by the limits of the inflating organ, with the inclusion of the moment of eclipse – the boy’s hand supporting the sac of air completely blocks out the candle flame. His fingers rise like black roots into the globular bladder. For all its moon-like appearance (what might be described as its albedo – a reference given credence by the fact that Wright applied an underlay of silver leaf beneath the oval section of the bladder and the candle), the bladder is not just a stand in for one planetary body amongst many – it is an indication of an enclosed cosmos, as if infinite limits could nevertheless be bounded, or must be bounded, for the imagination to take hold of them. In order for the nature of the cosmos to be played out on the cleared floor of a barroom, the creation of a world must be set in a coherent atmospheric structure. This confers the establishment of a shared image – as provided for the audience by allotted representatives of Sun, Moon and Earth, but also through them: their operations being established on a plain of collective imagination and involvement. This is a spectacle that is illustrated, embodied and, at the same time, made ready to be transcended: a swelling balloon that is a symptom of the unrepresentable being tapped into, forced into an arena of representation. In addition to this, Wright’s painting shows the bladder taking the place of the candle flame, neatening and pacifying it somehow, as if again indicating the types of ‘illumination’ Wright engages with in his scientific concerns, stemming in part from the curiosity of man. The light-infused bladder, a sign of both containment and expansion, lights up the two boy's faces, framing them in the tense anticipation of what is to happen next. (cf. Terpak 2002, 191) The use of metaphor and fictional invention, specifically in relation to conveying complex celestial re-evaluations, can also be usefully related to writings by the Italian poet Giacomo Leopardi. In a short, four-act play entitled Copernicus (c.1827), Leopardi stages discussions between the figures of Sun, First and Last Hour of Day and the eponymous philosopher. During an especially “long night” that again echoes the effects of an eclipse, the Sun decides (out of “laziness”!) that it is no longer prepared to travel around the Earth. Instead the Sun is to take over the position hitherto occupied by the Earth, in the centre or “highest seat” of the universe. Everything is, from this point on, to orbit around it. In order to make this happen, the Sun requires Philosophy. Copernicus is enlisted by one of the Sun’s ‘handmaidens’, the Last Hour of Day, to rearrange the conception, and therefore the actual functioning of the cosmos. The Sun tells him “there will be no more day, not today, tomorrow or ever, if you do not arrange it.” (Leopardi 1981, 150) Copernicus lists the difficulties of such a task, protesting that such an overturning of knowledge “will cause an apocalyptic revolution in metaphysics [and] indeed all that relates to the speculative area of knowledge”; men, he cries, “will find themselves changed utterly from what they were heretofore and what they imagined themselves to be.” (Leopardi 1981, 153) In is a curious echo of the residual convictions and affectedness of János Valuska, the Sun recognises the capacity for philosophy to change the accepted laws of the solar system. It sees that the world of ideas can be transferred with real power into the idea of the world: thought is able to move planets and stars, and to satisfy desire by allowing it to become actualized. Valuska starts to spin the Earth around the Sun. “The brilliant light of the Sun always sheds its heat and light on that side of the Earth which is just then turned towards it. And we stand here in its brilliance.” They continue the movements he has directed. Then he introduces the Moon. “This is the Moon. The Moon revolves around the Earth.” Physically manoeuvring their interconnected orbits, Valuska spins the men in tandem. He seems to encourage a musical or rhythmical pattern, before stopping them abruptly:16 16 Is this an interruption of Valuska’s narrative or the last set-up for his ultimate point? Where does the beginning of an ‘event’ come in this case – is the postman describing its precise unfolding in time, or is he providing an image of it having already occurred? Is it possible for him to differentiate between these states? There are many descriptions of progress in Valuska’s words and everyone in the room (and beyond) senses the implied inevitability of the eclipse. “What is happening? We suddenly see that the disc of the Moon, the disc of the Moon… on the Sun’s flaming sphere makes an indentation, and this indentation, the dark shadow, grows bigger… and bigger. And as it covers more and more, slowly, only a narrow crescent of the Sun remains, a dazzling crescent. And at the next moment… the next moment, say that it’s around one in the afternoon, the most dramatic turn of events occurs.”17 17 This is the crux of Valuska’s presentation – the moment we have been waiting for. The reference to the dazzling crescent suggests that an increase of illumination occurs in privation, the strength of light increasing as the limits of darkness widen. Valuska bows the Sun down so that he faces the floor.18 18 Does the duration of the eclipse come in a physical gesture? Valuska physically folds the Sun figure over at the waist, forcing him and his still-waving fingers to face the floor for a few moments, as he describes the effects of the absence. Valuska’s description touches upon the melancholy of enduring ignorance, the prospect (suddenly undeniable) of a world abandoned by God, who is either dead, absent or uncaring; the world is made strange, with all things cast into chaos and unknowing. The moment of the eclipse is crucially ambiguous too. It is described in terms of panic and uncertainty, especially in the initial reaction of those that see it, but it is also recognised as a principal of order, a conjunction so harmonious and rare that its power of conjunction sweeps across space and time – a unique event that contains a multitude of significance. “At this moment… the air turns suddenly cold. Can you feel it? The sky darkens and then goes all dark. The dogs howl, rabbits hunch down, the deer run in panic, run, stampede in fright. And in this awful, incomprehensible dusk, even the birds… the birds too are confused and go to roost. And then… complete silence.”19 19 Animals are thrown into confusion as the entire natural world knows not how to react to the effects of the eclipse. Panic runs through all manner of creatures, including those that are ignorant of the paths of planets, the overlaps of satellites or the possibility that this might be predicted and explained. Within the eclipse, the quality of the light, the disruption in time and sequence (cause and effect), is described as ‘incomprehensible’ – it cannot be attended to. Amid further references to connections between silence, coldness and darkness, Tarr makes a deliberate and compelling intervention: at the very mention of the ‘complete silence’ of the eclipse, he introduces piano music. This does not make proper sense without making reference to the musical theories implied by the film’s title. As the itinerant postman, another of Valuska’s series of duties is to visit the retired music professor Gyuri Eszter. In a lengthy speech in the middle of the film, Eszter makes reference to the 17th century German music theorist Andreas Werckmeister and his advocacy of the equal temperament tuning system, suggesting that this was a gesture too dismissive of hitherto accepted musical theories (espoused by figures such as Pythagoras) which linked to the essential harmony of the universe: i.e. the music of the spheres – tones said to be produced by the very movements of the planets. Eszter bemoans what he considers to be distortions of equal temperament and longs for a return to a more ordered system by which music remains a tangible, recognizable link between the earthly world and the celestial heavens above. Piano music begins. “Everything that lives is still. Are the hills going to march off? Will Heaven fall upon us? Will the earth open under us? We don’t know. We don’t know for a total eclipse has come upon us.”20 20 Valuska’s vision of ignorance, doubt and unknowing is apocalyptic. The duration of the eclipse is a window of uncertainty where all secure knowledge is on the verge of collapse. For a brief moment, it is an event so momentous that it emerges as a kind of slow motion revelation or sublime encounter. The ensuing wave of disruption, and the effects of Valuska’s enacted commentary upon it, is indented in Krasznahorkai’s novel, where he asks whether the eclipse does something like identify a ‘problem’ of unknowing that, due to its nature, could not be otherwise recognized: &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; “(…) alleviating something in them once more,&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; but only once,&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; some burning itch&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; of which, as yet, they had no knowledge?” &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; (Krasznahorkai 1989, 74) The author immediately dismisses the question, suggesting only that the patrons of the ‘Peafeffer’ had ‘left the door open’ and that the moment is soon gone. They are only temporarily disrupted from their habitual patterns of thinking – the disruption is not permanent and neither are its surrounding effects. The moment of reception, the moment of learning, is in fact a period of forgetting. The patrons of the ‘Peafeffer’ absent themselves momentarily, along with the Sun. They are taken out of themselves, after having been positioned in such a way as to be free to “forget the ending” (Krasznahorkai 1989, 74). Therefore, to emerge from the period of eclipse, as it is staged inside the barroom, is to be woken from a dream. Part of Valuska’s aim is to generate this targeted forgetting – to formalise an event that itself consists of formlessness – which the drunkards soon emerge from, “sharply re-establish[ing] contact with terra-firma.” (Krasznahorkai 1989, 74) It is only Valuska that continues to ‘see’ the dream vision he himself perpetuated. Only he can visualise the moon’s continuing transit, or recognise the (eternal) return symbolised by the sun’s reappearance. Only he can hear any possibility of harmonious music linking this world below and that above. The action pauses and the camera starts to withdraw. It is as if something has been abandoned, mid-explanation. The perspective starts to alter as the frame rises toward the ceiling, only coming to a stop when the rim of an overhead light intrudes into the image. The return of the Sun is already prefigured. The camera returns to earth and Valuska speaks again: “But… but no need to fear, it’s not over. For across the Sun’s glowing sphere slowly the Moon swims away. And the Sun once again bursts forth [He raises up the Sun to an upright position] and to the Earth slowly there comes light again [He starts the Earth and Moon spinning again] and warmth again floods the Earth. Deep emotion pierces everyone. They have escaped the weight of darkness.”21 21 It could be argued that the underlying optimism in Tarr’s film concerns this process of accepting change (and indeed destruction) in the hope that a process of learning will emerge through it – that a seed of hope remains present even as a world descends into chaos and violence. The crucial theme in Werckmeister Harmonies could be the return of light, or the possibility of regaining ‘order’ – something like the survival of an encounter with the new or with the unknown, not in the sense of being able to pass over the new without effect or to exploit and assimilate the unexpected, but rather allowing novelty to be recognised on its own terms. The film engages with this theme throughout its wider storyline, where the appearance of the strange and unfamiliar is symbolized by the visit of a travelling circus to the village, where the ‘biggest whale in the world’ is preserved and displayed in the back of a truck. A mysterious Prince accompanies this sideshow – a figure that is never seen directly (shown only in shadow, as if eclipsed) but whose presence encourages the fermenting unrest to explode into violent destruction, with mobs running riot through the streets. Beckoned by Valuska, the rest of the bar starts to move into the middle of the room to start spinning and pirouetting like additional stars and planets. Soon everyone has joined in the dance, not necessarily all as planetary bodies but as figures of force – moons or orbit rings, perhaps, crowding the Sun.22 <img width="920" height="562" width_o="920" height_o="562" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/1ac23f333d1531df1c626f707602a64e2f13171d7246c818a08ea081fad6fc86/Screen-shot-2011-09-27-at-13.02.01.png" data-mid="55765094" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/920/i/1ac23f333d1531df1c626f707602a64e2f13171d7246c818a08ea081fad6fc86/Screen-shot-2011-09-27-at-13.02.01.png" /> Werckmeister Harmonies (2000)22 The movements of the drinkers are symptomatic of a recently abandoned reverie and the joy that might accompany any subsequent, clear-headed embrace of mystery. The dance is also an active and involving demonstration, as the camera swirls around with the men of the ‘Peafeffer’, each of them gently buffeted by others, still finding their way somehow. The dance is then dispersed as the landlord strides through the crowd to open the door, crying: “That’s enough! Out of here, you tubs of beer!” Valuska approaches the door, putting on his coat and scarf. He says calmly: “But Mr. Hagelmayer, it’s still not over.”23 23 What are the limits of an eruption of strangeness into everyday life, or the lasting consequences of an artificially staged collision between banal uniformity and unique events? Even as Valuska’s presentation unfolds “with not the minutest variation in his delivery” (Krasznahorkai 1989, 73), there is nonetheless a residual effect of unsettling his audience. Even if they are so used to it they do not hear it, Valuska’s performance still moves them. The last line of the scene, uttered as Valuska exits the ‘Peafeffer’, constitutes his ultimate appeal to the unfolding of understanding he has briefly flirted with, and his final attempt to emphasise the possibility of its continuation under other conditions. Even if, after waking from the spell, the patrons of the ‘Peafeffer’ remain essentially indifferent, it is in fact Valuska that is the student. His role is pedagogical, to be sure, but it also possesses a maieutic function – he reveals knowledge to himself. He tries to be an intermediary but also has to assume to his own form of responsibility for attending to these universal secrets on behalf of others. He is the one that is most profoundly and most enduringly affected – he is, after all, the ultimate audience for his own exposition/explanation. Krasznahorkai mentions “the intense look on his face suggesting he was merely the medium for others.” (Krasznahorkai 1989, 72) Part of Valuska’s assumption of this role concerns the transfer of his understanding, which might be seen as ‘virtual’ (aligned with his barroom simulation), into actuality – he performs a transformation of ideas into matter, into tangible results. Krasznahorkai’s explains that Valuska “wanted to see, and did in fact see, the light returning to earth; he wanted to feel, and did in reality feel, the fresh flood of warmth; he wanted to experience, and genuinely did experience, the deeply stirring sense of freedom that understanding brings to a man who has laboured in terrifying, icy, judgmental shadow of fear.” (Krasznahorkai 1989, 75) The linkage between imagined desire and actual experience is blurred for Valuska – he finds himself in a half-light world, caught in an in-between space that outlines a fundamental quality of the transmission and acceptance of knowledge. No one else is seen to leave.24 24 At the end of the night, and of Tarr’s opening sequence, Valuska is ultimately alone. Subsequent shots see him trudging through the ice bound streets, passing under localized street lighting as if linking up stars separated by dark voids. Only he gets lost in the “monumental simplicity of the cosmos” (Krasznahorkai 1989, 68), carrying his acquired vision with him. It is only he who eventually pays the price – Valuska is driven insane, unable to reconcile the possibility that it is only the equally chaotic (i.e. corrupt) representatives of the village that can restore order after the rioting, essentially revealing that there is no way out of the cycle, there is no alternative (other than violent anarchy) to the flawed and rotten system that engendered the violence in the first place. Valuska’s relationship to knowledge, as embodied in his strange, otherworldly presentation, is his means of escape and his downfall. For “Valuska really did know nothing about the universe, for what he knew was not exactly knowledge. He had no sense of proportion and was entirely lacking the compulsive drive to reason; he was not hungry to measure himself, time and time again, against the pure and wonderful mechanism of ‘that silent heavenly clockwork’ for he took it for granted that his great concern for the universe was unlikely to be reciprocated by the universe for him.” (Krasznahorkai 1989, 80) Tarr’s film, like Wright’s painting, is not engaged with the same transmission of knowledge that is depicted. In A Philosopher Lecturing on the Orrery in which a lamp is put in place of the sun, the child allocated the eclipsing role not only obscures the Sun / candle but prevents our own visual access to a fundamental part of the mechanism being explained. We cannot see the Sun but only the effects of its emanations. In Werckmeister Harmonies, Valuska enacts the eclipse in a way that we, and the device he constructs, must ‘fill in the gaps’, but it cannot be the perfect fit for the vacancies it contains. There is no perfect overlap. The two depictions, then, concern the dissemination of understanding achieved via means that foreground the possibility of the failure of that dissemination, of new understanding reverting back to the status quo, or being otherwise full of ‘obscuring holes’. References Allen, J. &amp; O’Reilly, S. (2009) Magic Show. London: Hayward Gallery Press. Barker, E. E. &amp; Kidson, A. (2007) Joseph Wright of Derby in Liverpool. Yale University Press. Barker, E. E. (1999) ‘A very great and uncommon genius in a peculiar way’: Joseph Wright of Derby and candlelight painting in eighteenth-century Britain.’ PhD Dissertation, Yale University. __________ (2000) ‘New light on The Orrery: Joseph Wright and the representation of astronomy in 18th-century Britain’ in British Art Journal, v. 1 no. 2 (Spring 2000) p. 29-37. Berger, J. [1972] ‘La Tour and Humanism’ in (2009) [1980] About Looking. London: Bloomsbury, p110-117. Bredekamp, H. (1995) The Lure of Antiquity and the Cult of the Machine. Princeton: Markus Wiener Publishing Inc. Daston, L. (2011) Histories of Scientific Observation. University of Chicago Press. Daston, L. &amp; Park, K. (1998) Wonders and the Order of Nature, 1150-1750. New York: Zone Books. Egerton, J. (1990) Wright of Derby. London: Tate Gallery. Fraser, D. (1990) ‘Joseph Wright of Derby and the Lunar Society – An essay on the artist’s connections with Science and Industry’ in Egerton, J. (1990) Wright of Derby. London: Tate Gallery. Gammell, L. (2004) Exploring the Invisible: Art, Science and the Spiritual. Princeton University Press. Kovács, A. B. (2007) ‘The World According to Béla Tarr’. National Audiovisual Archive and Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest. Krasznahorkai, L. (2000) [1989] (trans. Szirtes, G.) The Melancholy of Resistance. New York: New Directions Books. Leopardi, G. (1981) (trans. &amp; ed. Casale, O. M.) A Leopardi Reader. Chicago: University of Illinois Press. Musson, A. E. (2008) Science, Technology and Economic Growth in the 18th Century. London: Routledge. Nicolson, B. (1968) Joseph Wright of Derby. London: Paul Mellon Foundation for British Art. Ponge, F. (2000) [1942] (trans. Fahnestock, L.) The Nature of Things. New York: Red Dust Books. Schaffer, S. (1994) ‘Machine Philosophy: Demonstration Devices in Georgian Mechanics’ in Osiris 9: The History of the Science Society: 157-182. Tarkovsky, A. (dir.) (1979) Stalker. USSR: Mosfilm. Tarr, B. (dir.) (2000) Werckmeister Harmóniák&nbsp; (Werckmeister Harmonies). Budapest / Berlin / Paris: Goëss / von Vientinghoff Produktion / 13 Production. Terpak, F. (2002) 'Experiments in the home' in Stafford, B. M. &amp; Terpak, F. (eds.) Devices of Wonder: From the World in a Box to Images on a Screen. Getty Research Institute. Uglow, J. (2002) The Lunar Men: The Friends who made the Future 1730-1810. London: Faber &amp; Faber. Wallis, J. (1997) Joseph Wright of Derby. Birmingham: Derby Museum and Art Gallery. First published to accompany 'New Perspectives on Joseph Wright' conference, hosted by the Digital and Material Art Research Centre (DMARC), The University of Derby, January 2012 https://skurrilsteer.org/listening-and-its-not Sat, 30 Nov 2019 20:01:07 +0000 skurrilsteer https://skurrilsteer.org/listening-and-its-not Listening and its not <img width="1818" height="2503" width_o="1818" height_o="2503" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/dc3ee06387199eb07320c7b8ccc5310c491fdabec045b503e0ba33eaa41b6600/listening-and-its-not.png" data-mid="56144694" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/dc3ee06387199eb07320c7b8ccc5310c491fdabec045b503e0ba33eaa41b6600/listening-and-its-not.png" /> from Listening and its not (ed. Patrick Farmer), published by SARU and Compost &amp; Height, 2016 https://skurrilsteer.org/inch-by-inch-bold-ghost Sat, 30 Nov 2019 16:51:53 +0000 skurrilsteer https://skurrilsteer.org/inch-by-inch-bold-ghost Inch by Inch, Bold Ghost &nbsp; Transom believes his written work often stalls when trying to find the right method for puncturing his thought. He is in the middle of writing yet his mind flits back to the time he spent standing before the painting, comfortable with the notion of it being one of those occasions where there is nothing to be done except to maintain one’s position before an object of contemplation, allowing intensities of recognition to come and then quietly depart. From his position in the gallery he had acknowledged that the painting was wildly familiar – why did you put it like that? thinks Transom as he writes – even if the nature of that familiarity was to remain obscure. Until this point, no term of common measurement had allowed him to fully write out his response. &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; There were certainly different orders of recognition at work, Transom writes. Standing before the painting, he had anticipated that it would take sustained labour to put all the strands of his connective associations in touch with what empowered them, or to reconcile the components of his thought that were always ready to spiral away from him and each other. Yet the ‘wildness’ of the familiarity, Transom says to himself (then writes), came from its vibrancy – an attribute that to him is both matter-of-fact, as crisp as the work’s execution, and otherworldly. The landscape, painted by John William Inchbold in 1885, has been visited a number of times, looked at again and again, in an attempt to come to terms with its tensions of familiarity and obscurity. From the distance of his writing desk Transom feels that it is not exactly the painting that he is concerned with, nor the specific details of its maker. It is rather the manner of the image’s persistence in his mind. This continues to motivate his thoughts, as if the resources of the implied uncertainty were physically pressing against his back, forcing him to work.<img width="658" height="1000" width_o="658" height_o="1000" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/7e1ad8703af37c007e9919aa8fa66abbaee2cd051ce14f38492106e5e904f0f6/Inch-by-Inch--Bold-Ghost---Stent.jpg" data-mid="56145851" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/658/i/7e1ad8703af37c007e9919aa8fa66abbaee2cd051ce14f38492106e5e904f0f6/Inch-by-Inch--Bold-Ghost---Stent.jpg" /> &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; Transom addresses the painting once more, thinking back to the exhibition and glancing at a postcard reproduction on his desk. His general acquaintance with the image is such that his awareness skims over it in clusters, as if scanning for further information. The painting shows a muddy slope rising from a stand of oak trees, a blue sky shining from behind a bare canopy, and a segment of forest slanting off to the side. The composition is asymmetrical, as if capturing a moment prior to a vortex drawing all things up from the surface of the earth. Transom focuses on the tumescent trunk dominating the scene – an oafish and anomalous index of the resinous light. He considers how this tree immediately disturbs him once again, as if its appearance suggested that an affliction could be imparted through hardened paint. But the fattened oak concerns him mainly in its banality. It is not obviously oversized but remains obscurely monstrous even in its fidelity to scale. In the gallery, as he had leant close to the canvas, Transom had noted bloody leaves in the foreground branches and mistook petals of primrose and harebell for metallic shards of litter. Now, as he writes, it is clear that Inchbold’s meticulous observation and technical detail have assumed an uncertain presence in Transom’s mind. For all its clarity, the image resists him. Transom remembers imagining hearing a camera shutter resounding in air more open than that of the gallery, as if trying telling him that the image had to have been produced mechanically – a tinted daguerreotype. Either that or it was a palpepral design pressed into the underside of a skin lid.&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; Yet even if it had not echoed a photographic mode, Transom would insist that he knows the painting’s specific slant of light – that exact form of sunburst pushing its way from a cloudbank like a tongue exiting closed lips. He knows the movement of that flare as it fizzes into firm edges and then fades. Moreover, Transom’s knowledge is both contained across the entire painting and isolated within it. It is there in the colour of the sky, hi possession of the sensation objectified in its deployment of intensity. After a few moments thought, Transom rejects the correlation with a memory of Polaroid pigments enclosed in cloudy plastics, the chemicals vibrant with their ability to weaken. Neither is it simply vague nostalgia, he asserts, even if the lit landscape did tap into images formed in his youth. Transom’s conviction is that the scene has already been experienced by him in every specific detail or, rather, in a configuration now precisely encoded within the materiality of Inchbold’s canvas. No memory is triggered by what he sees but an abstracted experience is materially provided for him. &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; Struggling to understand, Transom begins to consider the sunburst in temporal terms. He thinks of it as an opening presented as motion – a line of shadow burning into the earth for a moment, having been preserved and given to him without residue or exception yet inaccessible to his comprehension. Transom closes his eyes to cut out most of the light in the room. In darkness he wonders to what degree the accuracy of Inchbold’s technique supports the painting’s persistence. Something about its conceit of realism supports and undercuts the recognition of his experience as ‘real’ and not recollected, yet he cannot go any further. The familiarity of the painting is not that of seeing an old friend across a room, but recognition that remains buried. The wildness of its familiarity, in all its alien features, will not come freely to his consciousness. Rather than providing any flash of recall, the painting forces him to stare into obscurity, forever attempting to penetrate darkness. Transom associates this persistence on the edge of recognition with being haunted. It is as if the painting had become a figure of indeterminate presence for him. Every time he sees it, it is like seeing a ghost. But of what – a remnant of his fleeting possession of the image or a trace of all images’ resistance to being used as a fixed resource? Was it an anticipation of images still to come? &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; Breaking his line of thought, Transom considers how the gallery assigned two titles to the painting: In Early Spring and A Study, in March. As he read them, Transom had felt that the oddly segmented appearance of the latter suggested a disruption of contemplation by an invading force. He now reflects that although Inchbold may have drawn inspiration from William Wordsworth’s ‘The Excursion’: “When the primrose flower peeped forth to give an earnest of the spring”, ‘earnest’s sense of promise is also accompanied by the German Ernst, suggesting ‘struggle’ and ‘combat’. Just for a moment Transom feels he is on the cusp of penetrating his thoughts about the painting. He sees that he never really wanted to come to terms with the banal resistance of the image, or to populate its expertly embodied vacancy. Its presentation of a world without human figures was always a latent announcement of their upcoming labour, including obvious implications of agriculture, farming or enclosure. The invisibility of this labour contains the nature of the painting’s withdrawal. Even if the emptiness of the painting were what kept Transom returning to it – waiting for it to fill – he realizes that this banality should be attacked. The scene, in all its detailed precision, is without anchor or disruptive point. It has no life beyond its surface. Moreover, writes Transom, if no position of conflict exists within the painting, if no scene of struggle is possible even over the lip of the slope, it would be foolish not to impose one upon it. Failing that, it would be necessary to read the painting’s vacancy precisely as a technical idiocy that demands action. At this moment Transom despises the fact that he has responded to the image at all. He regrets having moved in its ghostly light. He must compose himself. Published in&nbsp;Paperweight: A Newspaper of Visual and Material Culture. Vol. 1, No. 2, Spring / Summer 2011, London: Polygraphia.