Diverging Planes

I recently received a fascinating text by Gemma Wheeler who is currently completing her Masters in Architecture at Cardiff University. Entitled "(Re-)Storying the Ruin - A Flat Ecological Story of St Peter's Seminary, Cardross", the essay discusses different forms of ecological worldview and how they effect our relationship with the built landscape and wider environment. Below is a short excerpt which discusses my paintings of the Seminary in relation to rhizomatic thinking.

"The traditional linear storytelling of St Peter’s has been deliberately disrupted by engaging multiple voices, such as those from experts in a range of fields (Cultural Geography, History, Landscape Architecture, and so on) who gathered at the Venice Architecture Biennale in 2010 to discuss their thoughts on the building and ideas for its use. The purpose of this “deliberately discursive approach” (van Noord, 2011, p.8) was to “convey a sense of open-endedness, of potential, and of there not necessarily being a single clear trajectory ahead, but rather a multitude of small, incremental decisions” (van Noord, 2011, p.8). Such an approach demonstrates a leaning towards the rhizomatic thinking that Deleuze and Guattari advocate. Where a linear, chronological, point-to-point story is emblematic of a tree as it stretches up straight and hierarchically with a beginning point and an end point; a rhizome has no beginning or end, it is comprised of random connections and disruptions; it is all middle, like the
horizontal sprouting of roots and tubers: “The tree imposes the verb “to be”, but the fabric of the rhizome is the conjunction, “and … and … and”” (Deleuze and Guattari, 2004, p.27). Rhizomatic stories are therefore non-predictive and
have no beginning or end, only middle, only now; and this is recognised with the observation: “It is pointless to dictate what the buildings of the future will look like, or how they will work – we aren’t prophets – but we can …steer their evolution in the here and now” (Hollis, 2011, p.56).


St Peter's Seminary, Ether - 2012 - Oil on canvas over panel

To engage rhizomatically with St Peter’s is to issue forth along the lines of becoming that constitute its assemblage. To break the desire to control the end-point of one’s actions, one must improvise and engage playfully with the lines of flight that cross one’s path. Ross M Brown is an artist who has adopted what could be seen as a rhizomatic approach to the composition of his paintings of St Peter’s (Figure 6). Beginning with a rigidly controlled perspectival drawing, not unlike those of the architect, Brown builds up the painting by pouring, smearing and dripping paint onto the canvas. This process is demonstrative of the contrasting ways in which the building can be perceived. From one perspective, the perspectival drawing is an exercise in point plotting, privileging the form of the building by reducing its material fluctuations to a series of straight lines. The splattered and poured paint, on the other hand, privileges material over form and enables the properties of the paint to define the boundaries of the building. From another perspective, and one that Ingold advocates, the act of drawing is an act of line-making without a beginning or end that loops a mental image into the material world; while painting is an act of covering up the evidence of process in order to present a finished image (Ingold 2011 p218). Whether it is through drawing or the pouring of paint, the artist is engaging rhizomatically with St Peter’s by following the lines of becoming he encounters in observing the building and trailing along new lines of flight created in the painting’s making.


St Peter's Seminary, Stray - 2010 - Oil on canvas over panel

As haecceities, we humans do not live upon the world of materials/plane of immanence, but along the lines of its meshwork. To inhabit this world is to move along the lines as Ingoldian (2011) ‘wayfarers’ and to engage with this world is to attend to the multiple encounters with other lines that cross our paths. It is through these encounters that we acquire knowledge and generate form. Knowledge is not received or found, but experienced and lived first hand; and form is not created or imagined, but generated through the bundling of multiple complex relations of materials and forces. As Alex Hartley and Ross M Brown have demonstrated, to be an artist or craftsman does not have to mean imposing a mentally-envisaged form upon an inert world of matter. Rather, to create, one must consciously enter the flux of materials, follow their lines of becoming, and tease out a form by repeatedly responding to the process of the material’s flow and improvising with what one finds (Ingold, 2011). As Deleuze & Guattari (2004, p.451) succinctly explain: “…it is a question of surrendering to the wood then following where it leads …”."

From "(Re-)Storying the Ruin - A Flat Ecological Story of St Peter's Seminary, Cardross" by Gemma Wheeler

Invisible College public talk - Tim Edensor, 23.3.2012

Great lecture by Tim Edensor, author of the book "Industrial Ruins - Space, Aesthetics and Materiality".  Filmed and organised by NVA for the Invisible College project.

Paths

"Planners love telling us which way to walk. Our built environment- especially our mercantile spaces, shopping centres and the like - is carefully constructed to control footflow and footfall. But we do like to collectively, unconsciously defy them. This is why we see desire paths in our landscapes. Desire paths are lines of footfall worn into the ground, tracks of use. They are frowned upon in our national parkland where they are seen as scars and deviations. PLEASE KEEP TO THE FOOTPATH. You often see desire paths in public gardens and greened city spaces, taking paved paths "off road" into new trajectories, along roadsides and riverbanks. Our edgelands are full of them.

The postwar overspill developments seen on the edges of many of our cities were planned right down to every concrete walkway, subway and pathway. But their green squares and verges were soon criss-crossed with desire paths: a record of collective short-cuttings. In the winter, they turned to sludgy scars that splattered skirts and trousers and clung to shoes, and in summer they turned dusty and parched. Once established they fell into constant use, footpaths which have never enetered the literature. These footpaths of least resistance offer their own subtle resistance to the dead hand of the planner...

Desire paths are interesting because of the way they come into being: a 'bottom up' system against the 'top down' methodology of the planner, and proof of human unpredictability. Nobody decides to make a desire path. There is no ribbon cutting. These are the kinds of paths that begin over time, imperceptibly, gathering definition as people slowly recognise and legitimise the footfall of their peers. Paths are as old as the earliest transhumance, as the first drovers and movers of livestock, or even older. It might seem far-fetched to compare them to the dreaming tracks of the Australian aboriginals, but this slow erosion is how many of our roads began, navigating the earliest or best-disposed route between origin and destination on foot".

From "Edgelands - Journeys into England's True Wilderness" by Paul Farley and Michael Symmons Roberts

Interpreting the ruin image outside of a Neo-romantic framework

"The contemporary obsession with ruins is neither a Baroque meditation on worldly vanitas, nor a romantic mourning for the lost wholeness of the past.3 Rather than recycling romantic notions of the picturesque framed in glass and concrete, the ruins of modernity question the making of such a “world picture,” offering us a new kind of radical perspectivism. The ruins of modernity as viewed from a 21st‑century perspective point at possible futures that never came to be. But those futures do not necessarily inspire restorative nostalgia. Instead, they make us aware of the vagaries of progressive vision as such.

At the beginning of the 20th century, Georg Simmel formulated a theory of ruins that resonates with contemporary preoccupations. According to Simmel, ruins are the opposite of the perfect moment pregnant with potentialities; they reveal in “retrospect” what this epiphanic moment had in “prospect.”4 Yet they do not merely signal decay but also a certain imaginative perspectivism in its hopeful and tragic dimension. Simmel saw in the fascination with ruins a peculiar form of “collaboration” between human and natural creation: “Nature has transformed the work of art into material for her own expression as she had previously served as material for art.”5 Such framing of ruins reveals a multidirectional mimesis: men imitate nature’s creativity, but a natural setting endows human creations with a patina of age. The contemporary ruin-gaze is the gaze reconciled to perspectivism, to conjectural history and spatial discontinuity. The contemporary ruin-gaze requires an acceptance of disharmony and of the contrapuntal relationship of human, historical, and natural temporality. Most importantly, present-day ruinophilia is not merely a neoromantic malaise and a reflection of our inner landscapes. Rediscovered, off-modern ruins are not only symptoms but also sites for a new exploration and production of meanings."

From Svetlana Boym's "Ruinophelia", full text here

Peripheries

Jock Mcfadyen Interview

From Traction Magazine

On architecture and surfaces

Essay by Karl Wallick here

Is Modernity Our Antiquity?

"Bruno Latour wants to argue that this cult of the past - this need, at one and the same time , to conjure the past , revere it , excise it and destroy it - extends to the very heart of modernism and is in the end what undermines modernism from within...[therefor] The real problem, I suppose, is how to represent this passage (from modern to historical) without succumbing to a melancholic reverie; and moreover, how to give form to this when by its very name , modernism came to stand for those artistic forms where , metaphorically at least, the present waged a perpetual war on the past...[as such] iconoclasm was internalized as a metaphorical a priori of modernism. A sense of iconoclasm gave fuel to the latter's sense of invention and history, and in particular to how many of its leading practitioners conceived of their own work: 'Previously a picture was a sum of additions. With me a picture is a sum of destructions' (Picasso); and 'the destruction of old forms was a condition for the creation of new, higher forms' (Mondrian). Following Adorno, we perhaps need to think of the categories of decline (of old forms) less as categories of destruction, but rather as categories of transition."

Mark Lewis "Is Modernity Our Antiquity?" within "Ruins: Documents of Contemporary Art" Edited by Brian Dillon p 87-88



Image: Brice Marden "Formal Marble" 2011

In praise of dis-ordered space

"...ruins, as particular spaces for disorder, can critique the highly regulated spaces which surround them. My argument is not that spatial order is unnecessary, but that disciplinary, performative , aestheticised urban praxis demanded by commercial and bureaucratic regimes which are refashioning cities into realms of surveillance, consumption, and dwelling - characterised by an increase in single-purpose spaces - is becoming too dominant. These orderings are violated in the ruin which, once an exemplary space of regulation, has become deliciously disordered. Ruins confound the normative spacings of things, practices and people. They open up possibilities for regulated urban bodies to escape their shackles in expressive and sensual experience, foreground alternative aesthetics about where and how things should be situated and transgress boundaries between outside and inside, human and non-human spaces. Accordingly, ruins act as spaces which address the power embodied in ordering space."

Tim Edensor in Industrial Ruins: Space, Aesthetics and Materiality p19

Wasteland botany

"Wasteland weeds and flowers are as individual to the twenty-first-century English city as a forgotten coat of arms or motto. By the Eighties, [Oliver Lathe] Gilbert had surveyed many of England's wastelands and urban demolition sites, and noticed all manner of regional variations in their plant life...

Bristol was a buddleia city...succeeded by sycamore; traveller's joy was doing well, red valerian too, and there were naturalised fig trees on the banks of the Avon. There are branches of Starbucks, Carphone Warehouse, WH Smith, Dixons, Currys and McDonald's. Further West and over the border , Swansea was dominated by Japanese knotweed...and had much buddleia, hemp agrimony and pale toadflax; there was also red bartsia, silverweed, sea campion, buck's-horn plantain, polypod and ivy-leaved toadflax. There are branches of Starbucks, Carphone Warehouse, WH Smith, Dixons, Currys and McDonald's. Sheffield featured many garden escapees, blooming from June through to October in a succession of feverfew and goat's rue, tansy, soapwort and Michaelmas daisies. Pink-, purple- and white- flowered goat's rue covered the hillsides, and eastern rocket, wormwood and Yorkshire fog did well. There are branches of Starbucks, Carphone Warehouse, WH Smith, Dixons, Currys and McDonald's. Liverpool had many early successor populations of yellow crucifiers, lesser-hop trefoil, black medick, wall barley and melilots, ; hedge woundwort, cut-leaved cranesbill and evening primrose also flourished. There are branches of Starbucks, Carphone Warehouse, WH Smith, Dixons, Currys and McDonald's..."

p142 "Edgelands: Journeys into England's true Wilderness" by Paul Farley and Michael Symmons Roberts

Notes on waste

Slavoj Zizek on waste in "Examined Life"

"One way of considering ruins and their contents...is as waste. According to this notion, in the ruin all objects are equal, none assigned higher values than others, because they are all categorised as trash. They are useless and worn out, and therefore possess no value and can be, indeed ought to be, discarded... The object's abrupt loss of the magic of commodity - that it is a self-evident, seperate thing of worth and value - seems to confirm Stallabrass's observation 'commodities, despite all their tricks, are just stuff'... Accordingly, waste materials offer evidence for a radical critique of the myth of universal progress driven by the supposedly innovative power of capitalism and technology. For by their presence they rudely display the 'extreme temporal attenuation' whereby industrial techniques and commodities attain venerable status, and fashion produces instant obsolescence, so that the recent past becomes ancient history. Here we are faced with the converse of an ordering modernity in which the norm is for the 'denunciation of any form of fixity in favour of permanent flux'."

Tim Edensor in "Industrial Ruins - Space Aesthetics and Materiality" p 100-101

Unintenional Monuments

"Much of visionary architecture, in Barthes's view, embodies a profound double movement; it is always 'a dream and a function, an expression of a utopia and instrument of a convenience.'" (Svetlana Boym, "Ruins of the Avant-garde")

This "double movement" can be traced through Malevich's distinction between the artwork and the usable object;

"Technical and utilitarian activity...produced 'things' whose perfection changed over time: 'a cart, a cartridge, a locomotive, , an airplane are [all] a chain of unconsidered possibilities and tasks', whereas art 'can call its creations finished works since their execution is absolute , timeless and unchanging" ("The Great Utopia: Russian and Soviet Avant Garde 1915-1932)

It is within this rift between the utilitarian purpose of architecture and the "timeless and unchanging" world of the art object where interesting possibilities and inconsistencies open up;



Scanned page from Svetlana Boym's "Ruins of the Avant-garde", found within "Ruins of Modernity" compiled by Julia Hell and Andreas Schonle

Chris Hall - Architecture in Ballard's "The Terminal Beach"

http://vimeo.com/13673739

Nostalgia and "authentic" ruins

"Nostalgia is never very far away when we talk about authenticity or romantic ruins. The political critique of ruin nostalgia simply as regression corresponds to the philosophical critique of authenticity as a phantasm grounding stable identities. But such a critique misses the fundamental ambiguity of the ruin and the authentic. However justified it may be to criticize the ideological instrumentalization of authenticity claims, it will not do to simply identify the desire for authenticity with nostalgia and dismiss it as a cultural disease...neither will it do to understand the modern imagination of ruins and its link with the sublime as expressing nothing but fantasies of power and domination, though that is the case for Speer's theory of ruin value. The dimension present in any imagination of ruins but missed by such reductive critiques is the hardly nostalgic consciousness of the transitoriness of all greatness and power, the warning of imperial hubris, and the remembrance of nature in all culture." Andreas Huyssen, "Authentic Ruins"

Overlaps

"...The ruin is a shadow realm of slowness in which things are revealed at a less frantic pace. Within this relative stillness, bypassed by the urban tumult, the intrusions from the past which penetrate the everyday life of the city are able to make themselves felt more keenly. To explore these overlapping, multiple temporalities...focus upon the ways in which ruins stimulate multiple memories: recollections which flow into each other and diverge, resonate backwards and forwards, splice the personal and the collective. In ruins, the linearity of narrating the past is upstaged by a host of intersecting temporalities which 'collide and merge' in a landscape of juxtaposed 'asynchronous moments', a spatialisation of memory which involves 'crossing, folding and piercing' rather than sequential organisation." From Tim Edensor's book "Industrial Ruins: Space, Aesthetics and Materiality."

Lefebvre

Passage from "Some thoughts on Anticipated Ruins" by Magali Arriola (Found within "Ruins: Documents of Contemporary Art" Edited by Brian Dillon)

Homework