I think we each have our own take on what the symbol of a house represents. Both in terms of the performance and on a more general level.
I’ve been reading a book called the poetics of space.
‘In the house, Bachelard discovers a metaphor for humanness’.
I thought there is a lot of relevant material relating the house in a broader context and our own thinking. I’ve randomly copy pasted a few below.
The poetics of space/ Caston Bachelar
From the Introduction by J.Stilgoe:
Talking about the house …
“…Always container and sometimes contained, the house serves Bachelard as the portal to metaphors of imagination”
“Out of the house spin worlds within worlds, the personal cosmos Bachelard describes…”
" if the house is the first universe for its young children, the first cosmos, how does its space shape all subseqent knowledge of other space, of any larger cosmos?”
The poetics of space/ Caston Bachelar
“the house is a nest for dreaming, a shelter for imagination”
“….the impact of the house on the human, what is the impact of the human on the house.”
Page 6 from the book
“The house’s virtues of protection and resistance are transported into human virtues. The house aquires the physical and moral energy of a human body. It braces itself to receive downpour, it girds its loins. When forced to do so, it bends with the blast, confident that it will right itself again in time, while continuing to deny any temporary defeats. Such a house as this invites mankind to heroism of cosmic proportions. It is an instrument with which to confront cosmos…”
“Much is to be said about the psychologist of the imagination if to ‘social’ he adds ‘cosmic’ reading. He comes to realize that cosmos molds mankind, that it can transform a man of the hills into a man of islands and rivers, and that the house remodels man.”
“A house constitutes a body of images that mankind proofs illusions of stability. We are constantly re-imagining its reality: to distinguish all these images would be to describe the soul of the house; it would mean developing a veritable psychology of the house.”
Can the contained be contained?
I guess you may remember that I had this idea on doing a piece on Sol Lewitt in Spoleto. It was about documenting his wall drawings but in a way that it becomes a work in itself. Sol was in some way fascinated with mathematical equations. One of his famous pieces is a cube without a cube. (have a look on net)
Somewhere in Spoleto there are these towers in whch there is a rectangular room where he wrote, scribbled and drew lines on all four walls.
I had wanted to make a piece which would be named ‘a room in a box’; to photograph every part of all the walls and making a box which would enable someone to replicated the rectangular room anywhere in the world.
Sol Lewitt was was all about idea and concept. If you buy his artwork you may simply end up with a set of instructions on how to make one of his artworks. The instructions were often quite simple and could be used to produce the piece anywhere in the world.
I have been fascinated with boxes for a long time. A flat in a house is also a set of boxes. Obviously it is more, each flat is a universe in itself, one that transcends geometrical space. Each Universe seems to be contained by another one. And I was interested in the inversion of these Universes. A larger room being part of a smaller one.
I thought of the process of inverting containment and un-containment. Through photography we constantly try to capture and contain something. A camera is essentially a box too. That box contains millions of potential images, each produced at a click of the shutter. Not only does light become dark matter on the negative but the image is inverted twice, printed on its head and mirrored at the same time. I wonder if in years to come most people will have forgotten that photography had gone through this process as the physical negative is rapidly disappearing.
In relation to this inversion process I thought of a funny idea. To make a camera which physically becomes its own picture and its own frame by literally turning it inside out. In other words, to construct a wooden pinhole camera, use liquid light (instead of photographic paper), expose onto the back of the camera, develop, take the camera apart to make: A portrait of a photograph presenting its true self.
A New Day
I guess we all know that nothing lasts forever.
We witnessed yet another testimony of this in the current crisis in Japan. When I pictured earthquakes as a child, I always imagined looking at the ground whilst you see it cracking, being drawn apart. Have to choose which side to run along. The unstable ground symbolized uncertainty and the anxiety that comes along with it. In order to overcome the anxiety we would have to start again. Even though subconsciously we all know that by building we are constructing the 'shadows of their own destruction' (Sebald…)
When does a house become ones home? You could claim it is the moment you move in but I think a home increases in its ‘homeness’ the longer we reside in it. My house in Greenwich has slowly become more of a home as I did it up and started growing on it. And perhaps it grew on me in reverse. I feel slightly anxious as it will be demolished. From the moment I moved in, I always wanted to do a project based in this house, I felt it was a last temporary stop to something that I would bring to a finish. Is this the illusion that the symbol of a house gives us? It stands for the end of a day journey, a place for rest, stability. And yet we have to walk out of it to make the cliches around it fall apart.
What is left of all this? We sometimes have memories and pictures of all these things. As for our performance we may not even have pictures but simply voices retelling the story of what has been.
I know I have been going on a bit and I would have loved to have edited my text, not much times left.
So here a short proposal or idea what we could do for the exhibition in Basel if we don’t simply want to use current work. It references some of the iedas above and one we’ve had together or some issues I’ve tried to explain:
To use the floorboards (referencing what the house is built upon: the ground) as a type of photographic canvas (using liquid light).
Using this canvas to show the house it was built upon. Questioning the stability of the house, whilst keeping part of the real house.
Making a box/ frame out of the floorboards, hence the house will be in a box made by a part of itself. The memory and part of a house has shrunk into a smaller part of a universe.
Realization: we could use my house (there are lots of floorboards we could use) As it will be demolished.
Alternatively for Basel I thought it would be interesting to use the little huts next to the gallery to realize this idea. I have the floorboards for one of them.
Another idea would be to use contemporary images from Japan, referencing current issues.
