Seeing Is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees
- Sonorisms I
- More than just a machine that runs along
- Nobody was doing anything
- NYLA
- Aggressively Zen
Because the approach to the room is along a long corridor, the attentive visitor might at first think that three light squares had been affixed to the windows or, as one gradually came closer, that the tinting of the windows had simply been removed in these three lighter near-square areas. Davies continues: "only at this point do the other senses kick in. The visitor begins first to hear and smell the ocean and then to actually feel the outside air entering the gallery; this sensory experience is in complete contradiction to the faulty first impression."
One of the responsibilities for an architect is to provide a space that is usable and enhances the possibilities for what you do. But mostly, museums are just the opposite; they're horrible spaces, anti-art, they can't be used. They can't function, they overwhelm it. So in a way, they become objects in themselves many times, almost sculptures, and they get a lot of aggrandizement out of it...In terms of Bilbao, the one difference there is that they did not really want a museum, they wanted a monument. They wanted a thing that would bring people to the Bilbao.
Lawrence Weschler:
The red, for example, wasn't simply red – or rather it was: the surface was covered over in a completely even gloss of lipstick red paint – but (had it been doing that before?) the panel was reflecting ambient conditions like crazy, so much so that in fact almost none of the surface, strictly speaking, was red. Pool-like, it was reflecting the yellow ceiling panel beyond, whose own color was in turn being affected by the blue floor piece beyond that. There were purple effects and green, a sort of even bruise-brown hovering over the entire array when one now viewed the gallery from the side.
In order: Kenny Price, Blue Lou, Legacy, Fourfold, Niagara.
Irwin has explained that he decided to use the fluorescent tubes in the "dumbest" way possible, but, as one critic cautioned, "dumb, it turns out, has a special meaning for him: It's a form so simple that you end up not paying attention to it as a form." Irwin's interest was, rather, in the range of light, color, reflection, and shadow interaction made possible by combining tubes with different hues and finishes by wrapping them with theatrical gels.
EVER PRESENT NEVER TWICE THE SAME
EVER CHANGING NEVER LESS THAN WHOLE
I'd been talking about this idea of a conditional art for a very long time, and what I did was actually accomplish it, the idea that there was not a normal structure to it, that every decision had to be intuitive or instinctual or tactile. You decide to go this way or that way, but there was no beginning, no middle, and no end and so there's no hierarchical structure to it at all. And at the end of it, I mean, after you wander for a while, you just ended it yourself because there was no solution to it.
Photographs of 5 Openings 2 + 3, Untitled, and Double Diamond.
Black Line Volume, String Line-Light Volume, Corridor String Piece, Line Rectangle
"The resultant black rectangle was not what you "looked at" – there was actually nothing to focus on – but soon it brought the space into focus with a distinct visual snap. From inside, the light in the area seemed different, more substantial, and the wall color began to shift ambiguously. From outside the area, the tape seemed to lift the plane of the floor upward in your field of vision, and it also made the room seem wider and shallower than it really was." — Roberta Smith
"Quality is only there," Irwin explained, "if you pursue it all the way to the last bolt." Consequently, how joints are finished must be specified in the contract. "And believe me," he added ruefully from experience, "there is a real discrepancy here. The difference [in] how we interpret the word finish or this word quality is really disparate."
"When you bring them in and get them to be part of it," he noted, "the workmen themselves start to take pride in it. And when they start taking that pride in this idea of quality, ...it starts becoming theirs, something important to them, that they in fact do know what we are talking about."
I know some people are going to say: "Hey! That's Dan Flavin's act. Why in the hell is Irwin doing a Dan Flavin? Why is he suddenly so inconsistent – fluorescent one day and Cor-Ten the next?" The key to all of this is that we have to examples what we mean by consistency. And here the critical question is: "what do we use to measure consistency with?" If you measure consistency in terms of material, or gesture, then I will be found inconsistent. But, in all of the recent pieces and proposals, if you go to the actual site and look at it, you will find that the solution is absolutely consistent on the grounds within which it responds to its environment. This in turn is consistent with my development of the implications implicit in non-object art.
Irwin also included as part of the expanding network of aesthetic experiences radiating out from the museum a series of what he termed "incidental" sculptures, or phenomena of perceptual interest...
"Continuing Responses" began formally in the museum as a series of situations in direct response to the already existing spaces and their uses. At first easily accessible but then moving to consider more and more those previously unacknowledged and covert events. This project now moves outside the museum beginning with a window of the museum and then to include a series of "concrete" and "incidental sculptures" on sites throughout Fort Work and vicinity. These responses already number twenty-five and are referenced by a map of locations in the lobby of the museum.
I tilt the room just enough, the space just enough that you may not be able to use your normal mode of placing yourself in that space, forcing you for one second to make a perceptual read and become aware that you are the perceiver and that all information comes through that perceptual act and that when you walk out of there, ...if you take that with you, you will begin to see things everywhere around you and that you are the one that is changed and you are there and that is what changed things.
I cannot perceive for you. I can conceive for you and we can then in a sense hold a general agreement about quality of conception and we may all operate under it and that's what is known as a common agreement. But the area of perceiving as such is totally individual, there's no way that we carry it in that sense.
This is not an antisocial gesture; it is in fact a highly ethical one, since trying to get another person to see what and how you see has the potential to become a violation of the other's own autonomy:
There is nothing more unethical than having ambitions for someone else's mind.
Someone said to me the other day that there's nothing really ever new. That everything really repeats itself, you know, is repeating itself all the time, and they were showing me a Carl Andrew and they were also showing me some aborigine art and there really was a very strong similarity. And so I got to thinking about it and it came to me that if everything is really repeating itself constantly and that there's nothing ever really new...at the same time it's equally true that nothing is ever exactly the same. That everything is different every single time even though it's repeated constantly and all the same things keep passing through. They're never exactly the same so that the nature of change is not about something wholly new. It's actually about the subtlest slightest kinds of differences.
The column essentially disappeared into the space. It was there but it wasn't. As you walked around the room, suddenly, it might flash. Or, because I'd notched a little facet along one side, there might appear, for just an instant, a single white line, or a thin black glint.
The column was an indication of my wanting to get out and treat the environment itself, I don't mean in the sense of building buildings or being an architect, but rather of dealing with the quality of a particular space in terms of its weight, its temperature, its tactileness, its density, its feel – all those semi-intangible things that we don't normally deal with.
Irwin had begun his disc paintings with what, in retrospect, he described as a simple question: "How do I paint a painting that does not begin and end at an edge but rather starts to take in and become involved with the space or environment around it?"
Artwork and detail.
I took the surface of the canvas and curved it slightly in all directions, so slightly that you did not see it as being curved, but sensed its added physicality...The beauty of it for me was that you were not aware of it first as an idea, but only aware of it on this tactile level.
Black rakuware tea bowl (late sixteenth century), Kyoto, Japan. Freer Sackler Museum of Asian Art.
For Irwin, the lesson of [the raku tea cups] was twofold: first, their presentation was important, insofar as the ceremony involved a gradual preparation of the audience's aesthetic attention. Then, when the time came to handle the cups, the intimacy of the experience fused visual and tactile sensations into a single continuum. As he also noted:
he would set on the table this box with a beautiful little tie on it – very Japanese – and you untied it, you opened up the box, he let you do that. And then inside of it was a cloth sack. You took the sack out, and it had a drawstring, and you opened up the drawstring and you reached inside and took out the bowl. By that time, the bowl had you at a level where the most incidental detail – maybe even just a thumb mark – registered as a powerful statement.
The conscious design and maintenance of agriculturally productive systems which have the diversity, stability, and resilience of natural ecosystems. It is the harmonious integration of the landscape with people providing their food, energy, shelter and other material and non-material needs in a sustainable way.
The word Permaculture is taken from the Latin Permanens–meaning to endure of persist through time and cultura–referring to cultures–coming together. Permaculture is an interdisciplinary design science in the field of sustainable system design, with sustainable defined as:
a system which over its lifetime produces energy equivalent to or in excess of what it consumes.
Permaculture operates on three:
- Care of Earth
- Care of Species
- Return of Surplus to the first two
I have spoken, on a more mundane level, of using akido on the landscape, of rolling with the blows, turning adversity into strength, and using everything positively. The other approach is to karate the landscape, to try to make it yield by using our strength, and striking many hard blows. But if we attack nature we attack (and ultimately destroy) ourselves.
There are two basic steps to good permaculture design. The first deals with laws and principles, while the second is more closely associated with practical techniques.
The principles are inherent in any permaculture design, in any climate, and at any scale. They are, briefly:
- Relative location: every element is placed in relationship to another so that they assist each other
- Each element performs many functions.
- Each important function is supported by many elements.
- Efficient energy planning for house and settlement.
- Emphasis on the use of biological resources over fossil fuel resources.
- Energy recycling on site.
- Using and accelerating natural plant succession to establish favourable sites and soils.
- Polyculture and diversity of beneficial species for a productive, interactive system.
- Use of edge and natural patterns for best effect.
The core of permaculture is design. Design is a connection between things. It's not water, or a chicken, or the tree. It is how the water, the chicken and the tree are connected. It's the very opposite of what we are taught in school. Education takes everything and pulls it apart and makes no connections at all. Permaculture makes the connection, because as soon as you've got the connection you can feed the chicken from the tree.
To enable a design component to function efficiently, we must put it in the right place.
For things to work properly, we must remember that:
- The inputs needed by one element are supplied by other elements in the system; and
- The outputs needed by one element are used by other elements (including ourselves).
Each element in the system should be chosen and placed so that it performs as many functions as possible.
Important basic needs such as water, food, energy, and fire protection should be served in two or more ways.
Sectors deal with the wild energies, the elements of sun, light, wind, rain, wildfire, and water flow. These all comes from outside our system and pass through it. For these, we arrange a sector diagram based on the real site, usually a wedge-shaped area that radiates from a centre of activity.
Elements are placed according to intensity of use, control of external energies, and efficient energy flow.
Permaculture systems seek to stop the flow of nutrient and energy off the site and instead turn them into cycles, so that, for instance, kitchen wastes are recycles to compost; animal manures are directed to biogas production or to the soil; household greywater flows to the garden; green manures are turned into the earth; leaves are raked up around trees as mulch.
The British devised a system of farming in which pastures were broken up after the animals had been on them a few years. The pasture was plowed up and put into a high nutrient-demand crop, followed by a grain crop, followed by a root crop. One year it was left fallow to rest the soil. This was sustainable, but it took a long time to cycle.
Masanobu Fukuoka, that master strategist, deals with time stacking. He does not have to follow, because he never removes the main part of the crop from the soil. He starts the next crop before the last crop is finished.
In conventional agriculture, vegetation is kept at the weed or herb level using energy to keep it cut, weeded, tilled, fetilised, and even burnt; that is, we are constantly setting the system back and incurring work and energy-costs when we stop natural succession from occurring.
Instead of fighting this process, we can direct and accelerate it to build our own climax species in a shorter time.
There is no attempt to form the garden into strict neat rows; it is a riot of shrubs, vines, garden beds, flowers, herbs, a few small trees, and even a small pond. Paths are sinuous, and garden beds might be round, key-holed, raised, spiraled, or sunken.
To the observer, this may seem like a very unordered and untidy system; however, we should not confuse order and tidiness. Tidiness separates species and creates work, whereas order integrates, reducing work and discouraging insect attack. European gardens, often extraordinarily tidy, result in functional disorder and low yield. Creativity is seldom tidy.
Perhaps we could say that tidiness is something that happens when compulsive activity replaces thoughtful creativity.
The importance of diversity is not so much the number of elements in a system; rather it is the number of functional connections between these elements. It is not the number of things, but the number of ways in which things work.
Guilds are made up of a close association of species clustered around a central element (plant or animal). This assembly acts in relation to the element to assist its health, aid in management, or buffer adverse environmental effects.
An edge is an interface between two mediums. Edges are places of varied ecology. There is hardly a sustainable traditional human settlement that is not sited on those critical junctions of two natural economies. Successful and permanent settlements have always been able to draw from the resources of at least two environments.
The edge (boundary) acts as a net or sieve: energies or materials accumulate at edges, e.g. soil and debris are blown by wind against a fence; seashells form a line at the tide-marks on a beach; leaves accumulate at kerbsides in a city.
Disadvantages can be viewed as "problems" and we can take an energy-expensive approach to "get rid of the problem", or we can think of everything as being a positive resources: it us up to us to work out just how we can make use of it.
"Problems" can be intractable weeds, huge boulders lying on the perfect house site, and animals eating garden and orchard produce. How can we turn these into useful components of our system? Boulders on the perfect house site, for example, can be incorporated into the house itself, for beauty and as a heat storage system.
It is the quality of thought and the information we use that determines yield, not the size or quality of the site.
There are several ways to start the design process, depending on your nature and needs. You can start out by defining your goals, as precisely as possible, and then look at the site with these goals in mind. Or you can take the site with all its characteristics (both good and bad), and let goals suggest themselves. Of the two questions—"What can I make this land do?"—or—"What does this land have to give me?"—the first may lead to exploitation of the land without regard to long-term consequences, while the second to a sustained ecology guided by our intelligent control.
Maps are useful only when they are used in combination with observation. Never try to design a site by just looking at a map, even if it is thoroughly detailed with contour lines, vegetation, erosion gullies, and so on marked in.
Maps are never representative of the complex reality of nature. Remember, "The map is not the territory."
As we walk about a site and talk to people, we can note our observations. At this stage, we try to store the information we gain in some accurate way, carry a notebook, or a camera and tape-recorder, and make small sketches. The notes we end up with can later be used to devise design strategies.
We do not just see and hear, smell and taste, but we sense heat and cold, pressure, stress from efforts of hill-climbing or prickly plants, and find compatible or incompatible sites in the landscape. We note good views, outlooks, soil colours and textures. In face, we use (consciously) all our many senses and become aware of our bodies and responses.
Beyond this, we can sit for a time and notice patterns and processes: how some trees prefer to grow in rocks, some in valleys, others in grasslands or clumps. We see how water flows on the site, where fires have left scars, winds have bent branches or deformed the shape of trees, how the sun and shadows move, and where we find signs of animals resting, moving, or feeding. The site is full of information on every natural subject, and we must learn to read it well.
In a natural landscape, each element is part of the greater whole, a sophisticated and intricate web of connections and energy flows. If we attempt to create landscapes using a strictly objective viewpoint, we will produce awkward and dysfunctional designs because all living systems are more than just a sum of their parts. Our culture has tried to define the landscape scientifically, by collecting extensive data about its parts.
These methods are much like the group of blind mullahs in the Sufi tale, who try to describe an elephant.
If you have to stand somewhere doing tedious work, at least make it interesting.
The main problem lies in the often perverse arrangement of older houses, which face the road rather than the sun, and in the mania for glass windows on all outside walls.
If you are having trouble knowing where to start, always start at the doorstep.
The American lawn uses more resources than any other agricultural industry in the world. The American lawn could feed continents if people had more social responsibility.
Why should it be indecent to have anything useful in the front half of your property or around the house where people can see it? Why is it low-status to make that area productive? The condition is peculiar to the British landscaping ethic; what we are really looking at here is a miniature British country estate, designed for people who had servants. It has become a cultural status symbol to present a non-productive facade. The lawn and its shrubbery is a forcing of nature and landscape into a salute to wealth and power, and has not other purpose or function.
The only thing that such designs demonstrate is that power can force men and women to waste their energies in controlled, menial, and meaningless toil.
I see no other solution (political, economic) to the problems of mankind than the formation of small responsible communities involved in permaculture and appropriate technology. I believe that the days of centralised power are numbered, and that a re-tribalisation of society is an inevitable, if sometimes painful, process.
The greatest change we need to make is from consumption to production, even if on a small scale, in our own gardens.
People who force nature force themselves. When we grow only wheat, we become dough. If we seek only money, we become brass; and if we stay in the childhood of team sports, we become a stuffed leather ball.
To become a complete person, we must travel many paths, and to truly own anything, we must first of all give it away.