Perita Reperta

A short post, a moment in the dialectic of Perita Reperta.

Perita Reperta was, for a brief time, the blog of Timothy Chandler :/

More importantly, Perita Reperta was a series of six handmade books published in Melbourne between 2011 and 2013. One day, perhaps, Perita Reperta will resume publishing. Until that time, here is a record of the contents of its initial series, which sold out long ago.

Number 1 (August 2011)
A general issue with contributions from Timothy Chandler, Gene Flenady, Chelsea Huggett, Ryan Humphreys, Michael Roper & Dan Demant, Alex Selenitsch
Numbered edition of 50

Number 2 (November 2011)
A general issue with contributions from David Blencowe, Timothy Chandler, Sarah Holland-Batt, Gene Flenady, Michael Roper & Dan Demant, Alex Selenitsch, Christopher Snow, Julia Vodermeier
Numbered edition of 80

Number 3 (February 2012)
I Cannot Die by Ross Barham, with illustrations by Helen Gill
Numbered edition of 60

Number 4 (May 2012)
A general issue with contributions from Timothy Chandler, Gene Flenady, Angela Gardner, Helen Gill, Michael Roper & Dan Demant, Catherine Ryan, Alex Selenitsch
Numbered edition of 60

Number 5 (April 2013)
State Philosophy by Gene Flenady, with illustrations by Becc Ország and an introduction by Timothy Chandler
Numbered edition of 80

Number 6 (July 2013)
Some Herakleitos, drawings by Alex Selenitsch, from translations by Guy Davenport, with an introduction by Timothy Chandler
Numbered edition of 40

Towards a Theory of the Selfie (On Spring Breakers and The Great Gatsby)

Occasionally a work of art is made (in the postmodern or post-postmodern period usually a film) which captures the contemporary structure of feeling so thoroughly as to lay bare the present and proximate past to a sense of its own particularity.  For a certain structure of feeling that has been building since the turn of the century, Harmony Korine’s Spring Breakers does exactly this.

 
I watched this film recently with some friends in Melbourne; the response was mixed but everyone agreed that it was an exceptionally interesting work. (My friend Gene, who hosted the screening, has published some thoughts on his own blog.) Some of us had been prompted to watch it after reading Ann Powers’s response to Robin Thicke’s hit of the (northern) summer “Blurred Lines.” Powers positions Spring Breakers within a mode characteristic of recent film clips by female pop stars such as Rihanna, Kesha and Miley Cyrus, in which knowing self-objectification in the style of the selfie has become common. This is the structure of feeling that I am referring to; it can be summarised under the name of the selfie.
 
The selfie is not reducible to narcissism, even though it is classically so (the vanity of the photographer identifying himself as his own subject, the self-obsession of the Facebook tagger identifying herself in the picture she tags). Firstly, the selfie requires the accessible technology of smart phones and social media. This is the framework of perception in which selfie subjectivity arises, a perception in which the flattened simulacral image, quickly and easily edited or reshot, is the knowing mode of self-presentation of an autonomously sexualised subject. Its apprehension of its world is neither cynical nor naïve, and its reproduction of it is neither naughty nor nice (blurred lines). Authenticity is performative (the object of play) as much as any other existential category. Secondly, the ideological framework of the selfie is that of post-GFC neoliberalism. The total loss of faith in governments which persist ruthlessly to privilege the operations of global finance above the wellbeing of citizens without any attempt at disguise, the evaporation of any sense of security with regard to an individual’s future prospects as a participatory member of society, and the preservation – in spite of this – of access to incredibly diverse and seemingly (but, as we know, not actually) inexhaustible commodity markets – these are the material conditions of selfie subjectivity.
 
Spring Breakers presents the first feature-length selfie. Four teenage girls travel to Florida for spring break after robbing a diner and there become involved with a gangster – as gangsters. It is not a film about four girls who go on spring break; it is the totally fucked-up film that four spring breakers would make about their experience of spring break if this were their experience (which, it turns out, it was). Their reflection on the experience is the image of the experience that they give the world (“spring break forever”). Experience is the ultimate commodity, but it only counts if you can capture it on your smart phone and share it with your two thousand Facebook friends. “Pretend you’re in a video game; pretend you’re in a movie,” says one character to another – as though it were possible for them to experience the events in any other way! – as though they weren’t already pretending they were in a movie!
 
Spring Breakers has a surprising amount in common with another recent American film about subject positions/relations within particular moments of capitalism. Baz Luhrmann’s Great Gatsby is surprisingly enjoyable, certainly his best film in many years (though still pretty horrible). Gatsby and Spring Breakers fit into a long line of American films of which Citizen Kane is probably the greatest example, films that represent the tyranny of things over life in American realisations of the capitalist dream. The two films have a number of formal and narrative parallels: for example, they both feature prominent voiceover narration, they both begin with decadent revelry that quickly becomes abject and they both end with the shooting of a significant character. The parallel that struck me the most relates to one of the most remarkable scenes in Spring Breakers: taking place in Alien’s bedroom, the gangster is showing the girls all his expensive possessions, the insignia of his success in a society in which organised crime seems to be the only way out of poverty. “Look at my shit,” he repeats as he presents them with his weapons, clothes, tanning oil, and sprays himself with two different Calvin Klein colognes. The display prompts an unnervingly sexualised response from the girls. Are we to believe that their response is genuine? Is genuineness even an appropriate category in the assessment of this film?
 
This scene is paralleled remarkably closely in Gatsby when Gatsby throws his hundreds of shirts on Daisy as she stands on his bed. She begins to cry and explains herself by saying that she has never seen such beautiful shirts. The narrator (whose intrusion is heavy handed throughout this film) would have us believe that her response is dishonest, that she is really crying because she loves Gatsby but cannot be with him. But this implicit explanation is itself dishonest (or at best partial) because it fails to explain the significance of the shirts. And the shirts are significant: Daisy cries because she has never seen such beautiful shirts. This is a text in which genuineness plays a significant role (even if ironically); by contrast, Spring Breakers could not care less about the category (which does not mean that it might not important in a more detailed analysis). Nevertheless, both of these responses (and not despite but because of their ambiguity) are correct responses to the experience of the abundant reified reality of the capitalist dream. No measured response could be trusted. In one, the girls’ affirmation of all Alien’s shit is sexual (the selfie is always sexual); in the other, Daisy’s affirmation of Gatsby’s shirts is pathetic.
 
The shirts and the shit are both then the symbols of monetary success under the prevailing economic conditions. Both Gatsby and Alien obtain their wealth by trading in contraband (liquor and drugs respectively), the easiest way to wealth for those shut out of state-sanctioned markets because of their class. But they also reveal a lot about their own historical moments. Gatsby’s shirts are the flamboyant excess of an aestheticised boom capitalism. While it may be harder for us to see this today, Gatsby’s wealth (like Luhrmann’s film) is grotesque; in its anxiety to obtain the capital of high culture, it distorts that culture’s products into monsters (so much American architecture of the 1920s reveals this all too obviously). Alien’s shit is by contrast the debased sexualised “products” (in the marketer’s sense) circulating within a neoliberalised society in which the only subject position imaginable is that of the credit-card carrying narcissist. Gatsby’s shirts are the aestheticisation of wealth, Alien’s shit its sexualisation.
 
The conflation of the sexualised individual with his or her property (including the body and its apparel) is the experience which the selfie aims to capture and share. The caption of the selfie is: I know you know I know you want it. But within its structure, the only possible response is to click “like” and think about your next selfie. It will always see itself as the image of its own amazing experiences with the world of things, as, like the voiceovers that recur throughout Spring Breakers, “Something so amazing … magical! Something, so beautiful.”
 
Melbourne, Auckland, Los Angeles, Philadelphia; August 2013

Nothing to See Here

As a part of the Underbelly Arts Festival taking place in Sydney this August, my friends Catherine Ryan and Amy Spiers are creating an artwork entitled Nothing to See Here in which the Sydney Harbour Bridge disappears. The festival is taking place on Cockatoo Island, a former convict settlement and shipyard located in Port Jackson, west of the Sydney Harbour Bridge. A viewfinder will be directed at the bridge from the island’s eastern end, but, by means of augmented reality technology, the world’s most famous steel arch bridge will have disappeared from the vista. Catherine asked me to contribute the following short essay to the exhibition.

The Bridge’s Negative Image

Can the Sydney Harbour Bridge really be made to disappear? Even if it were dismantled by the government that built it, destroyed by terrorists, or erased from view by artists using technological wizardry, could the bridge nevertheless remain exactly where it is, despite its absence from view? With Nothing to See Here (Removal of Sydney Harbour Bridge), Amy Spiers and Catherine Ryan show us exactly this: the bridge’s persistence beyond erasure. Accordingly, the artwork is so much more than a “now you see it, now you don’t” spectacle induced by a technological gimmick, though this is certainly where it begins for the spectator. This artwork constitutes one of the most interesting images of the bridge yet to be made – the first truly negative image of the bridge. The bridge is erased from view, but not from our memory – hence the spectacle – and in fact remains within the work negatively. As we will see, this is not only true in art but also in reality.


In order to explain what I mean I will begin by recalling what is probably the most well-known artwork representing the Sydney Harbour Bridge: Grace Cossington Smith’s modernist painting The Bridge in Curve (1930).

Figure 1.

This is not the bridge we know: the arch is incomplete and the pylons and deck have not yet been built. It is an image of the bridge under construction, and a typically modernist image, too, in that it represents the grandeur and excitement of modern technological achievement embodied in the enormous steel structure dwarfing the natural and older built elements around it. Yet, as an image of the Sydney Harbour Bridge, the painting only has the meaning which it now has for us because we know the bridge as a complete, operational structure that has become central to the idea of Sydney as it is both lived and imagined. The bridge that we live with and create images of in 2013 informs our experience of this painting of its incomplete form. Unlike Cossington Smith and her contemporaries, we now read backwards from our current image of the bridge in order to recognise coherently this image of it under construction. The completed Sydney Harbour Bridge hovers negatively over the image of its incompleteness; we cannot un-know the bridge in its completed form. In the difference between these two images (complete and incomplete) we find a meaning for this artwork as a representation of the bridge.

Spiers and Ryan are not the first to attempt an erasure of the bridge, or at least a part of it. In The Australian Ugliness (1960), the great polemic against Australian buildings and cities, Robin Boyd provides a drawing of the bridge without one of its rusticated pylons, which are purely ornamental and serve no structural purpose. For the modernist Boyd, such unnecessary additions to this elegant and powerful work of engineering are an example of the Australian tendency to tart things up by adding superfluous and often aesthetically questionable design features.

Figure 2.

Boyd correctly points out that the removal of the pylons changes the way we see the bridge completely. Rather than being drawn to the ends of the bridge, our eyes are now drawn to its heights and we get a better sense of how the bridge works structurally. But this experience of difference is only made possible by the actual existence of the pylons. Boyd’s sketch would have an entirely different function if it were not for the fact that the pylons were indeed built and remain in place today. The drawing would have no polemical content and no power to estrange us from the image of the bridge that we hold in our imagination. By removing one of the pylons from his drawing, Boyd alerts us to the fact of their existence; accordingly, he would never be able to remove them completely.

What happens, though, when a large structure is removed from a city – actually rather than virtually? As Marshall Berman shows in his account of modernity, All That Is Solid Melts into Air (1982), the experience of modernisation has been twofold: unprecedented freedom and self-determination for both societies and individuals coupled with a radical transformation of our social and natural surroundings, often resulting in the destruction of many of the things we hold dearest. The original instance of this transformation in an urban context is Baron Haussmann’s modernisation of Paris under Napoleon III in the 1860s, during which the mediaeval Paris of narrow, winding streets was replaced with the modern Paris of grand boulevards. In the first half of the twentieth century in Europe, many urban environments were destroyed beyond recognition by bombing during the two world wars. In the second half of the twentieth century, particularly in North America and Australia but throughout the world, cities were rebuilt along modernist lines, with large international-style towers replacing older and often smaller structures, shopping centres replacing high streets, and motorways ploughing through once lively neighbourhoods or once peaceful countryside. No doubt many people were displaced by the construction of the Sydney Harbour Bridge. For those who lived in the Rocks at the time, it perhaps constituted an exciting but ultimately unwanted transformation of the neighbourhood. Since the start of the postmodern era, we have become very nostalgic and resist strongly the loss of “historic” elements from our cities. The bridge is certainly now one such historic element in Port Jackson.

This history of urban change takes an unexpected turn, however, after the millennium ends and the World Trade Center in New York City is destroyed by terrorists. This loss from the urban landscape and the resulting trauma are of a much greater magnitude and of a different kind than those losses incurred by the wrecking ball in the name of progress. (But this instance of destruction is also categorically different to the immensely devastating and terrifying bombings of the Second World War, most particularly those undertaken in Germany and Japan.) For those of us who have never lived in New York City, the loss of the Twin Towers from its skyline is only something experienced through the differences of representations, for example in the old postcard that includes the towers and the new one that does not. Their absence from the new image, as in the film Zoolander (from which the towers were erased prior to its release shortly after the attacks of 2001), is always noted, which is to say, the towers’ absence in our images of the city gives the buildings a ghostly presence. Accordingly, the September 11 Memorial on the site of the World Trade Center could not be more fitting: two square, one-acre footprints left in the ground where the towers once stood signify their absence.

So, when we look through Spiers and Ryan’s viewfinder on Cockatoo Island, what do we see? We do not say that we see Sydney Harbour; rather, we say that we do not see the Sydney Harbour Bridge. This artwork is less about what we see than about what we do not see. But not seeing something in particular still requires the act of seeing in general. It would be more accurate to say, then, that this artwork, while it may not be about what we see, is still nevertheless and primarily about seeing. The object of seeing is images. If we say that we do not see the Sydney Harbour Bridge, we are still nonetheless “seeing” it negatively. Nothing to See Here accordingly presents us with the bridge’s negative image, the image of its absence. Finally, the removal of the world’s most famous steel arch bridge, though only momentary, could direct us to recall other attempted erasures in Australian history, including, most especially, the doctrine of terra nullius and the genocidal acts carried out in its name.

Acknowledgements
Figure 1: Grace Cossington Smith, The Bridge in Curve (1930), National Gallery of Victoria (source: http://www.ngv.vic.gov.au/learn/schools-resources/art-start/image-bank/grace-cossington-smith).
Figure 2: from Robin Boyd, The Australian Ugliness (Melbourne: F.W. Cheshire, 1960), p. 23.

Melbourne, July 2013

Notes towards an architectural theory

Last week I went to see an exhibition at the University of Melbourne’s Wunderlich Gallery of nine small buildings designed by the Melburnian architects John Denton and Barrie Marshall of Denton Corker Marshall. The buildings were almost all houses and I found one of these particularly striking: Marshall’s Phillip Island House (designed 1983, completed 1992).

The design consists of a large walled courtyard (33 x 33 metres) pressed into sand dunes overlooking the sea on Phillip Island (a couple of hours drive southeast of Melbourne). The house, which is only five and a half metres wide, occupies one side of the yard and a garage lies on the adjacent side; opposite the garage is a portal into the yard; opposite the house is a blank retaining wall. The whole thing is polished concrete, steel and glass, but rising up to the retaining walls and over the house and garage are the vegetated sand dunes. The house has windows and entrances north onto the courtyard and south onto the coastline. There are some good pictures of it here and here.

This will be my first attempt to write about a work of architecture. However, rather than write about this building as architecture, i.e. in the context of architectural history or in its design details, I want to write about this work of architecture as a work of art.

It goes without saying that each work of art should be assessed by the criteria of its particular type (painting, music, poetry, etc.), that is, according to the technique by which it gives sensuous form to its idea. We distinguish architecture from the other arts by the fact that its material and content are matter itself. While I have made the case previously (in an essay on Virgil) that matter is material and material is content, that was in a rather more (but not entirely) figurative sense. In this instance, by “matter” I mean the inert materials of the earth that have been hewn, shaped, fired and so on to create the materials of building.

It is an obvious point worth repeating that materials are as important to architecture aesthetically as they are structurally. My colleague at the Melbourne School of Design, Alan Pert of NORD, once said of his own approach to design, “It all begins with materials.” The best architecture, in my opinion, allows the particular materiality of its materials to appear, rather than covering them with the blankness of paint or – one of the ugliest things ever made – coloured metal cladding; neither of these finishes is capable of communicating materiality with any aesthetic sensitivity. In the façades of Melbourne’s nineteenth-century terrace houses, cast iron, bluestone, polychrome brick, slate and unpainted stucco (mostly now painted) were the standard materials. With these materials the instant city of Marvellous Melbourne was built and through them its colonial bourgeois society expressed itself. Victorian taste (and the material conditions of the society) determined how these materials were worked and presented, or, in Gernot Böhme’s terms, how their materiality was staged. The bluestone foundation, the arcuated brick window, the cast-iron balustrade – these are structural elements that make their materials manifest to aesthetic experience. They prove the technical skill of human labour to transform inert matter into material, to order it according to the abstract understanding and in so doing to strive for the ideal (to put it in Hegelian terms).

These observations about the Melbourne terrace house show, however, that there is more to the content of architecture than simply matter. When we ask the question “what is this poem about?” the answer is often “love.” Can a building be about love? I think the answer must be yes, and that it can be so without recourse to literal featurism in the form of a Venturian duck or decorated shed. It might be easier to grasp this if we think of a courthouse being about the law or a church being about religious community. The boom-style Melbourne terrace house is about bourgeois colonialism. Nevertheless, I don’t want to redact my earlier statement about matter being the content of architecture. The poem, whether or not it is erotic, is first and foremost about language. The building is about earthly matter, which it uses to give sensuous form to an idea.

In some instances, architecture does not simply use materials from the earth to create its form, but rather, like land art, it uses (a patch of) the earth itself, and modifies it in order to create a dwelling place or a place of business or of worship. In a sense, all architecture does this, all architecture is to an extent “landscape” architecture; with Phillip Island House, however, this process – of using the earth as material beyond simply the source of materials – is overwhelmingly palpable.

Phillip Island House is about landscape and about the human practice of transforming landscapes along rational lines in order to create a dwelling. The materials of its composition are not only concrete, glass and steel, but also the earth and vegetation of its setting. Through the building-up of the surrounding dunes to form berms around the courtyard, Marshall has created by artifice the effects of natural history, viz. the slow movement of sand dunes and their colonisation by vegetation. In 2004, I visited the tenth-century church of Saint Caomhán on Inis Oírr (an island in Galway Bay), which is now several metres below ground level due to the movement of sand dunes. Phillip Island House’s framed artificial naturalness (or naturalistic artifice) we moderns call the picturesque. The strong lines of the concrete structure are interrupted by the informal intrusion of the “natural” vegetation. Much has been made of the severity of the building, but the house would only be severe if it excluded these natural elements, which are as much a part of the structure as the concrete retaining walls.

In order to build a dwelling, we must first delineate the space of building, the domain of the householders; we must make a clearing in the forest (for Vico, this is the beginning of civil society). This is precisely the function of the courtyard in Phillip Island House, which begins by pressing a simple geometric form onto the landscape in order to establish a domestic realm. In this respect, the courtyard is no different to the internal courtyard of a farmhouse. One can imagine chickens and vegetable gardens occupying part of the space (the reason for their absence, however, should become clear below).

The house itself, a long, narrow box on the courtyard’s southern end punctuated by windows both into the courtyard and out to the sea, is the real gateway to the dwelling place. For the dweller, the house frames both the domesticated world of the courtyard and the outer world of the beach and the sea. It is too narrow to be discretely directed onto both spaces (the bounded and the unbounded) and as such is liminal to them both. In spite of its sunken positioning and use of raw concrete, it is not a bunker (as some have characterised it). It engages far too openly with its environment to qualify for that name. Rather, it is a portal from the geometric space of the courtyard, the clearing for the dwelling (the house is always on the edge of the clearing, never in the middle), onto the wilderness of Bass Strait. Indeed, the house could have been called “Gatehouse.”

Phillip Island House is a gatehouse because it is a beach house, that is, not an everyday home but one in which holidays are taken. As such, the house itself is peripheral to the true domestic space of the composition, the courtyard, which is appropriately emptied of any domestic functions. But it also protects this space from the outer world, the beach which it nevertheless opens up to, because, as a house, its success depends on the security of its spatial designation of domesticity. There is a necessity to the courtyard beyond any architectural featurism.

The genius of a house like Fallingwater is its ability to maintain an aesthetic sensitivity to its natural surroundings and even to integrate with them in spite of the violent imposition of its form on the landscape. Phillip Island House is completely different in its design, setting and function to Fallingwater but nevertheless has this principle in common with it. Moreover, the success of Phillip Island House lies in the way it takes its materials as its subject matter and through them gives form – in a completely new way – to the idea of the beach house.

Melbourne, 8–11 June 2013

Why Perita Reperta?

Perita Reperta is the name of a series of publications I have produced over the last few years. The phrase is Latin for "lost and found" (kind of); it's also a little poem in itself, with all that alliteration and assonance. Slightly more information about Perita Reperta the print publication can be found on the website.

I decided to start a blog for the usual reasons: to articulate my thoughts via non-scholarly means and to have a record of sorts of those thoughts. I am also about to move to Philadelphia to start a PhD at Penn and I imagine that, as a student in a new city (i.e. without the work commitments and social accretions that take up most of my time in Melbourne), I will have more room for this sort of thing. If anyone reads it, all the better.

I decided to call the blog Perita Reperta mainly because I was too lazy to come up with a new name. And I do really like that name. I also imagine that this blog will not be altogether unrelated to the other projects that have taken the name. There is a unity to my concerns that Perita Reperta encompasses. "Reflections on art and life" would be an accurate description of Perita Reperta, but this is far too cheesy; it's so nauseatingly bad that it couldn't even be used ironically. But anyone who knows me can tell you that such reflection is exactly what I am all about.

Melbourne, 9 June 2013

Vladislav Delay

Late last year I went to see Vladislav Delay, an electronic music artist from Finland, perform in the Argus Building, a derelict art nouveau office tower in Melbourne. I enjoyed it immensely and wrote some notes about it a few days later.

Every work of art contains a theory of art. I learnt the following about art from Vladislav Delay.

1. In Vladislav Delay we experience the total colonisation of our world by machinery, the realisation that the ghost is the machine, that technology is technique.

2. The work of art that takes time as it takes place can only take form momentarily; each form is successively crushed and the particles rearranged carefully. (Or: matter can be neither created nor destroyed; it is constantly in flux.)

3. Such works of art have a fine-grained consistency apart from any form.

4. The ghostly machine dies as soon as it takes form, producing a new machine out of itself, an interruption in the fine-grained consistency that is accommodated unconditionally but never assimilated. Many machines are at work.

5. Never demand chronological consistency of an artwork. Instead,

6. Immerse yourself in the artwork’s consistency, in the particular materials on whose changing organisation any new form is precipitated.

7. The artwork may be encountered as an event (or a series of events) but it does not consist in events. Its consistency precedes all events.

8. In Vladislav Delay, the creation and dissolution of forms by machinery is the aesthetic self-organisation of a volatile elemental consistency.

Melbourne, November 2012