Topographic Phrenology

Taranaki, 10 May 2010, JB

Space and Time

The sense of space, and in the end, the sense of time, were both powerfully affected. Buildings, landscapes, &c. were exhibited in proportions so vast as the bodily eye is not fitted to conceive. Space swelled, and was amplified to an extent of unutterable infinity. This, however, did not disturb me so much as the vast expansion of time; I sometimes seemed to have lived for 70 or 100 years in one night; nay, sometimes had feelings representative of a millennium passed in that time, or, however, of a duration far beyond the limits of any human experience ...

Pinhole photograph, JB

The minutest incidents of childhood, or forgotten scenes of later years, were often revived. Of this, at least, I feel assured, that there is no such thing as forgetting possible to the mind. A thousand accidents may and will interpose a veil between our present consciousness and the secret inscriptions of the mind; accidents of the same sort will also rend away this veil; but alike, whether veiled or unveiled, the inscription remains for ever; just as the stars seem to withdraw before the common light of day, whereas, in fact, we all know that it is the light which is drawn over them as a veil, and that they are but waiting to be revealed when the obscuring daylight shall have withdrawn.

Pinhole photographs - superimposed, JB

In the early stage of my malady the splendours of my dreams were indeed chiefly architectural; and I beheld such pomp of cities and palaces as was never yet beheld by the waking eye, unless in the clouds. To architecture succeeded dreams of lakes and silvery expanses of water. The waters then changed their character--from translucent lakes shining like mirrors they now became seas and oceans.

Marlborough Sounds, JB

Text: Thomas de Quincey (1821) Confessions of an English Opium-Eater

Spark of Being

Mourning News

Adam Farlie, Mourning Light

Everyday objects possess the most potent affective power. In their ability to withdraw their familiarity, to defamilarise themselves, ordinary objects constantly hold us to ransom. Through toying with our vested affections, they embody tremendous emotional capital. Adam Farlie's Mourning Light is lightshade as turncoat.

No longer the shedder of light, the familiar assistant with tasks, it instead casts blackness. Only the shade itself is illuminated, outwards. The interior of the lightshade is deathly black - not a flat disc, but a depth of darkness. One can place one's hand - or even one's head - into the void, and become increasingly in the dark. Our yearning for the return of the light's familiar helpfulness is met with nothing but an eternal void, a contrariness, a denial. We are left bereft.

Adam Farlie, Mourning Light

The X-ray

Thoughts of an Architect - John Hejduk, 1986

1. That architectural tracings are apparitions, outlines, figments.

They are not diagrams but ghosts.

2. Tracings are similar to X-rays, they penetrate internally.

3. Erasures imply former existences.

4. Drawings and tracings are like the hands of the blind

touching the surfaces of the face in

order to understand

a sense of volume, depth and penetration.

5. The lead of an architect's pencil disappears (drawn away)

metamorphoses.

To take a site: present tracings, outlines, figments, apparitions,

X-rays of thoughts. Meditations on the sense of erasures.

To fabricate a construction of time.

To draw out by compacting in. To flood (liquid densification)

the place-site with missing letters and disappeared signatures.

To gelatinize forgetfulness.

[from Victims. A Work by John Hejduk. Architectural Association. London 1986.]

Guido Reni (17th century), St Sebastian, X-ray carried out as part of conservation by the Auckland City Art Gallery, NZ

Painters see gardens as an issue of values, of colour, light and perspective. This is their right. But there is another way to make gardens which, for the sake of clarity I would call the gardener’s way. This is difficult to explain in words, because it is something very closely linked to the earth, to water, to the sap of plants, to the air, to sunlight, to blowflies and worms … something non-verbal and unreasonable. … It cannot be defined by arguments, or by a ruler and compass. Seen in ground-plan and section form, one of these gardens is very little. I should like to avoid the obligation of drawing it or tracing it out, even with a reed, scratching the earth among manure and flies. Drawn on paper, the garden is an X-ray: the lips, the smile, the clear gaze, the skin, its tepidity, all of this is missing.

Rubió i Tudurí quoted in Eduard Bru (1997). Three on the Site / Tres en el Lugar. Barcelona: Actar, 26-27. (Rubió i Tudurí’s words are from the 1931 report on the Duchess of Gramont’s garden in Vignoleno, Italy, planned in 1931, and originally published in Arquitectura i Urbanisme, Barcelona).

Guido Reni (17th century), St Sebastian, Oil on canvas

Dark Times

In the dark times, will there also be singing?
Yes, there will be singing.
About the dark times.
Bertolt Brecht, Motto



Tomasz Bednarczyk, I see you

Memory Mirrors

Andy Lock, 2003-04, Orchard Park series (Bed)

Like a death mask, Andy Lock's images of Orchard Park persist as impressions of something now gone. Before the building was demolished Lock photographed the abandoned apartments, the images gaining a metaphysical haunting with his alchemical photo processing. Taking the images as slides, Lock projected them onto a wall painted with glow-in-the-dark paint, and then photographed the after-glow, the after-image that appeared on the wall.

Andy Lock, 2003-04, Orchard Park series (Monopoly)

Like an apparition summoned to a séance the photographs appear unearthly. The green of the glow in the dark paint is at once nostalgic and toxic. The phosphorescence is is reminiscent of a Christmas decoration I have which is generations old, and glows in the dark. This magical quality always seemed very sinister, as, so family mythology had it, the glowing surface was radioactive.

Andy Lock, 2003-04, Orchard Park series (Vinyl Armchairs)

If photography is, as Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote in the 1850s, "the mirror with a memory", then perhaps it is a mere skip from the specular to the spectral, of haunted reflections, the after-images of the after-life ....