The Art of History

Marian Maguire, 2005, Shrewd Odysseus finds his bearings

while Tawhirimatea, half brother of Poseidon, looks on

The mnemon epitomised the Greek's memory powers, as someone practised in the art of memory, remembering without need to resort to recording in any way. Mnemons worked in the courts, as recollectors of proceedings, writing nothing down, versed in the skills of total recall. Beyond the courts, they were the attendants of mythical figures, acting as their supplementary memory banks.

Marian Maguire, 2002, Achilles carries Penthesilea through Doubtful Sound (Auckland City Art Gallery)

Following along behind Achilles was, therefore, a mnemon, who had intricate knowledge of the complex tapestry of the hero's life. As a mnemic prosthesis, the attendant issued reminders of the potential consequences of certain actions. For example, a mnemon was appointed to remind Achilles not to kill a son of Apollo, as if he did so he would in turn be killed. This particular mnemonic act was flawed, with the reminder not taking place as required, and the mnemon's life taken instead as a consequence.

Marian Maguire, 2007, Kupe and Herakles dispute the whereabouts of the Pass while Julius Haast affects Disinterest

Epic works such as the Iliad were recited by the mnemons, whose memory training prepared them for their role as cultural repositories, as archives of myth and lore. And in Maori waiata the connections to a mythical past, as well as the navigational routes to areas of harvest, places of pounamu, the loci of the metaphysical moments, were recalled and activated in song, in incantation. Like the phenomenon of the mnemon, the remembering was alive in the ether, not frozen on the page or in a vitrine.

Marian Maguire, 2005, A New Zealander by Parkinson and Ajax by Exekias play draughts (Auckland City Art Gallery)

The role of rememberer, whether attending to the broad sweep of history or the particular history of one's assigned mythical hero, is at a point of creative fusion. Insistently pushing upon memory is forgetting, and the mnemon may draw a veil over a forgotten moment by means of a crafted apparent truth. And at this point, history and story telling coalesce, myth and truth ebb and flow, and the mnemon moves elusively through the labyrinth of memory ...

"...reality is a shell game. Our writing should be too..."

Michael Taussig (2006) Walter Benjamin's Grave

(For more of Marian Maguire's work, see http://www.papergrahica.co.nz/)

Two in the Bush

There's something about the thrill of the hunt that makes events like book sales magnetic. The annual library sale is an event of epic proportions, 800 people already waiting in line before it opened. Carefully avoiding this particular spectacle, the search began somewhat later, by which time the neatly classified tables (Science, Medicine and Health, Home and Garden, Fiction and Literature (an intriguing distinction), Art and Craft, etcetera) were completely hybridised. A defiant sea of uncategorised books awaiting - an entire gymnasium full of trestle tables, with books arrayed spine-up. The adrenalin pulses. Across the table from me two mature gentlemen with strong accents are planning their search strategy. One of them had recently been into the library to get a particular book, and was told it had been taken to the book sale: he was determined to find it. He described it to his companion, in terms so universal it was enough to bring a sigh, an expression of the magnitude of their task. I looked up and they smiled across the table, a communal moment of needle-in-haystack dauntingness. The furtive searching at all the tables all around was tinged with urgency, as though driven by some insatiable need to read, people were stockpiling, taking their hauls from the tables to the side of the gym, where towers of books wavered about. My own harvest was small, precise. After several tables of picking up and putting back, and while I was on Medicine and Health, I spied The Bird Artist by Howard Norman, a title which had gone straight into my mind when I recently read someone writing about it, the title had resonated with a favourite book of my own, Jane Alison's The Love Artist (a re-sampling of the past, one of those works which re-situates all of history within the fiction category, telling of a few lost days in Ovid's life, where he encounters his muse ...). On this same table, about 10 books along, a spine leapt forward, Peter Ackroyd's English Music, which I had been meaning to read, and fate had tweaked the necessary threads. A perfect harvest on a winter's day. The two gentlemen were nowhere to be seen ... had they found the book, given up ... or simply been swallowed up by the vast ocean of tomes, agitated by the furtive dashing, hither and yon, of the book feeders, filling their pantries for the long winter ahead ...

The Garden of Disquiet

An invitation arrived. To design a house for Fernando Pessoa. Yet ... should it be a house? Should it not be a garden, a place of mercurial mysteries, secrets, veils? A landscape where one might assume any one of a number of guises, like Pessoa's personas? A place of harvest, of memory, of dark sounds ... Pessoa's poetry set on fire with the fado ... of hauntings and doppelgangers, (dis)appearances ... shouldn't it, then, be a garden?

Fernando Pessoa's Sopra demais o Vento as fado / tango

Writing is like the drug I abhor and keep taking, the addiction I despise and depend on. There are necessary poisons, and some are extremely subtle, composed of ingredients from the soul, herbs collected among the ruins of dreams, black poppies found next to the graves of our intentions, the long leaves of obscene trees whose branches sway on the echoing banks of the soul’s infernal rivers.

Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet

Italian Fountains, Hyde Park, one year ago today, jb

The static motion of the trees; the troubled quiet of the fountains; the indefinable breathing of the sap's deep pulsing; the slow arrival of dusk, which seems not to fall over things but to come from inside them and to reach its spiritually kindred hand up to that distant sorrow (so close to our soul) of the heavens' lofty silence; the steady and futile falling of leaves, drops of estrangement in which the landscape comes to exist only in our hearing, and it becomes sad in us like a remembered homeland - all of this girded us uncertainly, like a belt coming undone.

Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet

Alvaro Siza is part of Pessoa's constellation. An architect of grace and strength, designer of one of the very best and most subtle landscapes: the swimming pool at Leça da Palmeira in Portugal, and fantastic fusions of architecture and gardens. It should, most definitely, be a garden ...

Publication date: October 2008, Oldcastle Books, UK
(available for pre-order now on Amazon)

Laying out a Ley Line

Ley lines vibrate with invisible forces. Skewering through cities, suturing landscapes. These lines have seduced me in designing, as means of revelation, so now it's time to live it, to walk the line. An exercise in plotting, both mischievously and cartographically, is now underway. There are many lines of force running across Europe, and I'm adding a new one, joining the dots between architectures and landscapes of poetry, places of huge magnetism. My line is the black one, although the red one is also curiously mesmerising ...

The line begins at Santiago de Compostela - appropriately a pilgrimage site. More recently this is the site of the vastly unfurling edifice by Peter Eisenman, the City of Culture.

Then, another place of rippling surfaces, the Bilbao Guggenheim, Gehry's silvery sculpture. I used to think the Bilbao Effect was like Stendhal Syndrome, which could be a motif for this linear tour ...

Along the coast further is Portbou, site of Walter Benjamin's suicide, and the memorial designed by Dani Karavan, called Passages - and thus a necessary Port of call for many reasons ...
A few more things along the line ... such as the homage site for the Nebra Sky Disk, as in the post prior to this one, the Nebra Ark ...
And ultimately ending with Peter Eisenman, an echo of the line's beginning, a site which features large on my field of internal vision, the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe in Berlin, a fitting point of punctuation, a sense of an eternal ending ....
And, so, this is the plan for next year, or something like this ... all donations gratefully received ...

Heavenly Piece

Tools of divination. Enigmatic devices. At the intersection of science and art, physics and metaphysics, theory and mythology, lie objects of intense intrigue. The Claude Glass and Camera Obscura are two moments of fascination that lie at this nexus. Another is the Nebra Sky Disk. A portable planetarium, and a work of extreme beauty, the Nebra Sky Disk is a Bronze Age relic, the size of a large dinner plate. Crafted in 1600 BC, the Sky Disk inhabited the earthly realm until 1999 when it was unearthed at Nebra in Germany, over three millennia later. It was such a remarkable object that it was initially considered to be a fake find, a fabricated artefact. The disk acts as a celestial clock or calendar, where it could be held up to the heavens, and aligned with features of the night sky. Notches around the edges as well as the constellations and planetary bodies depicted provided the coordinates for connecting with the vastness of lunar and solar time.

Arcadia

Up the Hawdon Valley, Arthur's Pass, June 2008

"I like water, especially brooks. The sea is too vast. I don't fear it; it is just monotonous. In nature I like smaller things. Microcosm, not macrocosm; limited surfaces. I love the Japanese attitude to nature. They concentrate on a confined space reflecting the infinite. Water is a mysterious element ... because of its structure. And it is very cinegenic; it transmits movement, depth, changes. Nothing is more beautiful than water." Andrei Tarkovsky