Unit 2 Assessment

Learning Outcomes:

1. Present in the final exhibition, a resolved body of creative practice that has evidenced the systematic enhancement of your knowledge and understanding.

My final piece was the result of my systematic gathering of images and of a long enquiry of reframing 'identity'. My participation to the symposium which took place on May, signals the first steps towards a body of creative practice.


2. Analyse and reflect coherently upon your own practice and its context in both written and verbal forms.

The context of the technique i chose as the ideal embodiment of my all theoretical concerns, can be evidenced here.
The technique of collaging involves a state of negating any figurative sense; of  disturbing the status of all individual elements. There is a freeing emotion when a figure is destroyed. It is a mode of making a point against the social system of symbols and all accepted norms and as such was related in my mind to acts of Iconoclasm. Even though it is related to destructive acts, i tried to find a way so as not to depict just the fragmentation of the human body, but to create a new assembage which could evoke the feeling of hope.
I also associated my practice with Henri Bergson's notion of ' an intuition of change': as the emphasis shifts to what one really feels and lives,  a sequence of 'states' of a cyclical nature is being born.

3. Summarise your overall progress and formulate a constructive plan for continuing Personal and Professional Development.

I summarised my overall progress at the 'reflective journal'.
Some of my inspirations concerning my future professional development can be also viewed here.

Reflective journal

In my project proposal in the beginning of the year, I was writing about ‘private fantasies’ and I was interested in the dimensions of subjectivity around us. In my first post on my blog I questioned ‘what does the word reality stand for’ and I described the city ‘as a circus full of transient encounters.'

Strangely enough, the latest book I bought is titled “Circus”, written by Rupert Croft Cooke and Peter Cotes. It charts the history and the origins of the circus: “…The importation of the more exotic life forms from distant places must have excited the stay-at-home crowds who had never travelled beyond the walls of their native cities, so that circuses have fulfilled the dual purpose of entertaining the public and in rural areas of England educating them in natural history.” (Circus, a world history, Rupert Croft-Cooke and Peter Cotes,p.7)
All these wondrous exhibitions of exotic animal and species and organized sequences of performances seemed to introduce into human thought options and alternatives that a ‘stay- at -home’ person would never have thought of.

Douglas Gordon Proposal for a Posthumous Portrait, 2004

Now it seems clear to me that even if in the beginning I was not aware of how I could create an overlapping of distant realities, what source material I would use and what steps I would make in order to mix it with my own subjectivity; this overlapping was very much the focus of my interest . 

As I became deeper involved in this research, I started to perceive the province of collision not as something stable and fixed, but as an area where transformation takes place; where different parts could start exchanging elements, forming new entities.

In short, I was lead to the common basis that forms all the myths: mutations; the duration when one‘state’ gives its place to ‘another’, the duration where two natures are present; one ceasing to come forth and one dying. This viewpoint of the notion of constant change and hybridity helped me to focus not on the disorientating multiple facets of reality but on its explanation as a natural phenomenon encompassing the world.

All my research was about trying to make a picture of life as a continuous interaction with others, as a continuous becoming. Through mutation and rebirth, the 'escape' into the inventive nature of a child's experimentation is introduced. 

What I present in the final exhibition is exactly this: an imaginative play of forms, a sequence of ‘states’ of a cyclical nature, where one’ state’ gives birth to the other. There is a constant marriage of different realities, a negation of a single identity or of a dominant authority; there is not death, there is only fluidity. There is no longer any figurative sense; the emphasis shifts from considering time as ‘duration’ to what one really feels and lives -as Bergson introduces in his ‘introduction to Metaphysics’- ‘attached to the intuition of change’.The one and only reality we could seek for is our subjectivity; a subjectivity which through its flowing through time, differentiates itself. 

According my practice, I realized the relationships I was looking for between parts in order to compose the sequence of images, could continue forever. The reason behind the specific selection of images is still a subject for contamplation and critique, yet the incorporation of the accidental appeals to me.

The research I have been involved into, helped me accept my incompleteness in my own practice and to separate myself from my work. It has also helped me conceive it just as a representation causing my personal transformation the same time. It will always be impossible to identify myself into my work. It is more a play of inventing other selves for me, combining differently elements, past and present, interacting with others and collaborating.

Personally I cannot distinguish personal from professional development.

All my research helped me evolve personally, helped me reject all the fear of not recognizing myself into my work; as such, liberated me. Now, I feel more able to experiment practically with ideas.

This year allowed me to free myself from all the constraints of the architectural discipline while my future plan is to combine all my previous skills and explore more the physical interface and sense of tactile. Iam inspired from all the optical devices i encountered in my research; devices which mutate the forms around us and alter our perception as well as from interventions in existing buildings using mirrors:

Olafur Eliasson, colour vision Kaleidoscope, 2003

Olafur Eliasson Your Compound View, 1998

Alfons Schilling, Gazelle, 1993

Alfons Schilling vision machines

Stereoscopes, 1900

Old optical device using lens and creating a new portrait as an assembage of parts of other portraits.

Jeu d'Ovide ou des Metamorphoses, France 1870

SintaWerner, model for a site specific installation at QUAD, Derby and the Grundy Gallery, Blackpool, 2009

A potential direction would be set designing; meaning set designing for real space and real people; collaborating with others with whom I could share the same interests of a world full of misperceptions.

Final Exhibition

Statement about the work:

Indefinite Cycles of Loose Ends

‘He saw all these forms and faces in a thousand relationships become newly born. Each one was mortal, a passionate, a painful example of all that is transitory. Yet none of them died, they only changed, were always reborn.’- Herman Hesse

Muybridge’s studies of human and animal movement are brought together with a group of diverse things: objects like old furniture, drawers, medical instruments, architectural elements, columns, statues.

The marriage of these diverse images creates a series of ‘states’ of a cyclical nature, where the former ‘state’ is giving birth to the latter. The aim was to create a play of forms and ‘states of being’; of a creature continuously mutating through the constant exposure to others, whilst simultaneously perforoming mundane tasks.The sound that the creature creates was considered again as something organic; always following its mutating form but at the same time having its own logic of gradual unfolding. The sound is designed to follow the one-minute rhythm of the animation composing a seven-minutes video which then repeats itself again resulting to an indefinite number of cycles of audiovisual material. It is a play of forms and modes of being, of converging narratives and metamorphosis.

Sound design was done by Daniel Lea. The sounds featured in this animation were created in his recording studio in a collaborative spirit. Without his conrtibution the piece would not have been the same. The audio part of the piece shares with the visual the ‘same’ nature, while at the same time adds a new ‘echo’ to it.

I should add that the copyright of Muybridge's stills has expired and all his images are in public domain. Evidence for this fact could be found at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Muybr77.jpg

Becoming

Images i gathered while searching for assembages.
The images i present here, had to do with my own subjectivity; are images which open in my mind 'another space' for all the forms that are included, ending to form a multiplicity of becomings.
All these images introduce a freeing play of forms: imagination applies forms upon others; always seeing relationships between them.

I apologize for not remembering the books from which they were abstracted. All these images had been collected during the whole period of my research and had been stored in my mind for long time.

(image depicting the godess of North India, 'the cosmic lion')


The following images were taken from a book concerning the art of the mentally disturbed people. All the drawings published in this book were made by people who had been considered from the society as outsiders; as insane. The first one has the title: 'Man of a genious' while the second one ' self potrait of a megalomeniac, naked among women, ejecting worlds'; both from Lombroso.

Iyeronimus Bosch's studies of monsters:

Nicholas de Larmessin:

John White, Pictish man holding a human head.,1587( British Museum):

Jacques Le Moyne de Morgues. Young daughter of the Pics., 1585-8 (Yale Center for British Art):

Max Ernst : La reve d'une petite fille qui voulait entrer au Carmel...de par la grace du tres invisible fiance, 1929-30.

The Nordic Diane. From Linnaeus, Fauna svecica, Holmiae, 1746 :

Human instruments as parts of the created world, engraving by Maarten van Heemskerck(1572):

Religious images:

A religious image owned by Athens Byzantine Museum:

All these images acted as my inspiration; each one seperately describing a lived experience, all of them together creating" a portrait"of a person: the moving away of one 'state' to another.

Destruction of Forms, synthesis of forms

Being impressed by the cover image of the book 'Iconoclasts and their motives' of David Freedberg, i started reading the book.

The cover held a stiking image of a portrait being slashed by red paint or just a knife; for sure it reminded of blood.

The book numered several assaults on well- known, publicly displayed art works in our century, while seeking for an answer to the assailant's motives. Instead of regarding the assaults as acts of one who is considered to be mentally disturbed, the writer characterizes them as 'interaction between people and images'. For him the assauts are a way for people to deal with images, a kind of response to them. Images are nothing more than a kind of a description to a perception.

Wikipedia: "Iconoclasts:.. A term that has come to be applied figuratively to any person who challenges established dogma or conventions." while at the same time it is a term strongly related with the making and worshipping of 'graven images'.

Freedberg writes: 'It seems that an attack on an image should seem to be an appropriate mode of making a political point.'(p.11)

He writes about 'the man who in 1975 slashed the Nightwatch with a common eating knife' that the 'loci of his slashes' could be explained through the symbolic manipulation of light and darkness; figures dressed in black became in the assailants mind the personification of evil.

Mary Richardson who slashed Velasquez's Rokeby Venus in March 1914 said after the assault: " I have tried to destroy the picture of the most beautiful woman in mythological history as a protest against the Government for destroying Mrs Pankhurst, who is the most beautiful character in modern history. Justice is an element of beauty as much as colour and outline on canvas..."

Velasquez, Rokeby Venus, detail. London, National Gallery. As damaged in 1914

Master of Alkmaar, Seven Works of Mercy, detail. Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum. Damaged state before restoriation.

Willem Drost, Christ appearing to the Magdalene. Kassel, Germaldgalerie, as damaged in 1977.

Really interesting is the appeal that the destruction of an image has on people: " Every newspaper attempts to give a photo of the damaged work...In 1911; Het Eleven captioned its photograph of the damaged Nightwatch with the most specific details of the likely movements of the assailant's hands...Even the normaly dry and sober Press Reports of the National Gallery went so far as to detail the size and numbers of the slashed strips, how they fell to the floor, and so on..."

Also interesting is the huge response that the restoration of the Nightwatch in 1975-76 had, 'most of which the Director of Rijksmuseum had allowed to be carried out in public, behind glass ' where 'many more than the usual number of visitors are reported to have flocked to see it'.

It seems that there is a freeing emotion at the moment when a figure is destroyed, a break of the hold that all representations have on people. 

All the restoration acts carried out in public behind glass could play the role of a metaphor; they act as a celebration of the victory of a language of symbols again: the assailant kept in jail or in the mental hospital punished for his insane act, while people watch the 'awesome difficutlies of repairing the work', the almost' magical success of making it appear as if the attack had never happened'.

Some days after, at a friend's house, i started browsing IG Ballard's book 'Crash'.

I read the following description: "...Vaughan devised a terrifying almanac of imaginary automobile disasters and insane wounds- the lungs of elderly men punctured by door handles;the chests of young women impaled by steering-columns, the cheeks of handsome youths pierced by the chronnium latches of quarter lights...For him these wounds were the keys to a new sexuality born from a perverse technology. The images of these wounds hung in the gallery of his mind like exhibits in the museum of a slaughterhouse."

Everyone familiar with the book already knows that it presents an image of the human body being pierced, smashed into hundered pieces. In the preface of his book he admits he is using the car as a metaphor of modern technology. He questions: " Will modern technology provide us with hitherto undreamed of means of tapping our own psychopathologies? Is this harnessing of our innate perversity conceivably of benefit to us?"

He continues: " I feel myself that the writer's role, his authority and licence to act, have changed radically. I feel that, in a sense, a writer knows nothing any longer. He has no moral stance. He offers the reader the contents of his own head, a set of options and imaginative alternatives. His role is that of the scientist, whether on safari or in his laboratory, faced with an unknown terrain or subject. All he can do is to devise various hypotheses and test them against the facts." (Ballard 1995)

 

Ballard's book lead me to browse Kafka's 'Castle'. There are some quick notes taken from the editor's preface:

"...There is a common relationship between parts even if it cannot be understood..."

"...In a unified world nothing can be seperate..,"

 As the editor comments on Kafkas ' The Castle' he talks about the duality in the writer, somehow about the other side of the coin:... "In one aspect the surface as experienced seems fragmentary, disconnected, and therefore inexplicablle, a source of anxiety. In one other there is a dream-like acceptance which implies a belief in haromny beyond intellectual perception."

The fragmenation of the human body- old phenomenon but at the same time it could not be more modern- is for sure charged with essential fear. But it could also be charged with the feeling of hope, hope that comes when all these fragments instead of just being hung in "the galleries of our minds", come together in another assemblage and start to signify another 'whole'.

My visit to Prague PQ Festival/ Theatre Design Practices

During my visit to PQ festival in Prague i collected photographs from the scenography works and exhibitions i found more interesting. The practices of 'theatrical design' involve  the collection of diverse images and found objects, their dislocation in an other space(the space of the play), as well as their constant transformation over time.

Milon Kalis exhibition:

His sketches of the narrative, structure and characters reveal a process of work which invoves collaging: juxtaposition of diverse fragments substracted from reality and their original context, mixed with his own fantasy until they obtain a totally new meaning.

The following photos are from a students' exhibition. I apologize for not remembering the name of the college. Again what fascinated me was the surprising juxtaposition of different realities: true vegetation  grows and water runs on a floor made of tiles, a bathtab is turned into an armchair,...

The next photo is from a mural in one of the exhibition spaces. Interesting enough, it was not one of the exhibits.