Selected Courses on Digital Art-UOWM

7 Απριλίου 2013

STORYBOARD

Filed under: Notes — admin @ 15:15
http://www.hiroadproductions.com/

Filed under: Notes — admin @ 15:12

TYPES OF CONTENT
1. Documentary; provides documentary information on an existing person or object
2. Narrative: fictitious depiction, like live theater except is recorded; has a narrative element, story
3. Advertisement: commercial tools used to promote or sell a product, service or point of view
4. Experimental: works which do not fit into the above categories

IMAGE SOURCES FOR MOVING IMAGERY
1. video imagery; recorded with video camera
2. film: imagery: recorded with film
3. 2D animation: created with traditional or computerized techniques
4. 3D animation: created with 3D animation software
5. video processed: video imagery modified using hardware or software
6. still images: scanned or shot with a camera

ORIGINS OF CONTENT
a. personal experience
b. based on a belief system or concept(eg. Catholicism or Capitalism)
c. based on a book or writing
d. based on current events
e. the imagination

UNFOLDING CONTENT OVER TIME

present

past future

Consciously or unconsciously, the viewer will attempt to answer the following questions:

1. What’s happening here?
2. What has been happening?
3. What might happen?

KEEPING THE VIEWER INTERESTED

If content an action within the finished work is presented in an expected or cliche manner, viewers will probably become bored. No one type of content will be of inters! to all viewers, must consideridentity of the viewer.

Methods of keeping interest:

a. present new content of interest to the viewer eg. create a documentary about a publicaly available vehicle which could transport anyone to the moon at a cost of $99.95

b. present popular content, but from a new perspective eg. create a documentary about the disadvantages of a computerized society

c. present action is unexpected (example: in the film “M. Butterfly” the viewer
and male lover learns at the end of the film that thebeautiful actress is a man”)

d. recomprehension of the past example2: in the film “The Adjuster (1991)” by Atom Egoyan, an attractive well dressed woman sits beside a large, dirty, supposedly homeless man on a subway car.  To the shock of the other passengers, the woman begins to rub crotch area of the man. At the next stop, the man and woman run off the train, followed by them laughing as they run onto the. They are a man and wife who enjoy exhibitionism.

example 3: In “Exotica(1994),1′ also by Egoyan, viewers follow the life of a customs agent whooften visits a strip club where he always requests a dance from a specific young woman. Late in the film, the viewer learns the young woman had been the baby sitter for the man’s young daughter who had been murdered a few years earlier. His encounters with the woman oscillate between sensuality and nostalgia and human comfort.

OVERALL STRUCTURE
storyboarding: series of small drawings indicating keyframes, sequences, transitions, etc.

frame: single frame making of a shot

———————————————————————————————————–
shot: collection of related frames

shot-synthesis-lighting
——————————————————————————————————————–
sequence: a collection of shots related formally or conceptually

complete video/film/animation: consists of frames, shots and sequences

transitions: cinematic effects between sequences or shots

key frames: two extremes of a particular movement

inbetweening: calculation of frames in between key frames

MOVING IMAGERY NOTES
September 7, 1998

Filed under: Notes — admin @ 14:57

Friday, June 11, 2010

Reproduced Form/Form Reproduction

Under what circumstances can a work of art be reproduced?  Here, a series of historical examples and judicial opinions involving the copyrighting and patenting of steel tube cantilevered chair designs provide some guidance.  These cases demonstrate a conceptual wordplay of sorts.  Whereas some deal with issues of reproduced form, the others concern form reproduction.  Or, put another way, whereas the former is an investigation into form, the latter is an examination of process.

However, no discussion invoking the term “reproduction” can begin in earnest without at least a brief mention of Walter Benjamin’s seminal and oft-quoted essay, “Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit” (“The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility”) (1939).[1]   The much-lamented loss of the aura, defined as the “formulation of the cult value of the work of art in categories of spatiotemporal perception,”[2] is of little use here.  Yet Benjamin’s essay reveals additional insights concerning an original work of art and its copy.  Beginning with the dictum that all art is in essence reproducible, Benjamin distinguishes between manual reproduction and mechanical reproduction, noting, “Confronted with its manual reproduction, which was usually branded as a forgery, the original preserved all its authority; not so vis a vis technical reproduction.”[3]   This type of reproduction has two aspects.  First, it is a process that is “more independent of the original than is manual reproduction.”[4]   Second, “technological reproduction can place the copy of the original in situations which the original itself cannot attain.”[5]   Here, Benjamin is perhaps inviting us to make further distinctions between the processes of technological reproducibility and the objects of such processes.

(Top) Marcel Breuer, Model B3 “Wassily” Chair; (Bottom) Völkisch dining room from Gretsch, Planung und Aufbau im Osten (1941) (Source: Michael Thad Allen, “Modernity, the Holocaust, and Machines without History” [2001])
To further delve into this distinction, a contemporary understanding of the problems surrounding issues of mechanical reproduction are in order.  A series of images will provide some initial guidance.  In “Modernity, the Holocaust, and Machines without History” (2001), historian Michael Thad Allen features a series of images that, when viewed together, reveal more of a polemic than an editorial decision.  One is a picture of one of Hungarian architect Marcel Breuer’s most recognized chair designs—the Model B3 or “Wassily.”  Culled from the Bauhaus Archiv, this is a familiar object, a complicated skein of pressed leather stretched tautly across a polished steel-tube frame.  When set against the light background, it looks as if the chair were suspended in midair. The image stands in stark contrast to another image, a sketch of a völkisch kitchen from Diploma Engineer Hermann Gretsch’s Planung und Aufbau im Osten (Deutsche Landbuchhandlung, 1941).  Here, atop wooden parquet, a phalanx of wooden chairs surrounds a large, flat maple-hewn table.  The drawing, from an omniscient birds-eye view, reveals a series of wall-hangings, each featuring a deity or character from Der Nibelungen or any other Nordic phantasie.  The image depicts a comfortable setting, and yet suggests a more complicated set of values.
Diploma Engineer Gretsch was an advisor to Deutsche Edelmöbel (German Nobel Furniture), the SS’s venture into furniture and industrial design.  Towing the party line and vehemently opposed to what he envisioned as modernism’s slavish aping of capitalistic styles, Gretsch was a tireless advocate of a design ideology he called “Agrarian Objectivity.”  A “’timeless’ aesthetic located in an imagined epoch before capitalist spoliation,” Agrarian Objectivity was a “direct attack upon left-leaning artistic movements associated with ‘New Objectvity’ [Neue Sachlichkeit].”[6]    Here was a design concept that made no effort to conceal its political orientation and that placed an unmistakable priority on production.  Allen therefore remarks on what he labels as productivism:

Production was to manufacture the German spirit, a spirit forged as the maker rather than the consumer of goods.  At the heart of Nazi modernity was the dream of a perfect system […] But it was to be a system whose overarching output was supposed to be culture – the New Order of National Socialism.[7] 

For Gretsch, Agrarian Objectivity ensured that its material artifacts became emblems of German race and values.[8]   Gretsch famously declared: “Race, heritage, tradition, and lifestyle are important, but designers completely forgot them.  They have forgotten that they must also satisfy cultural needs.”[9] 
Agrarian Objectivity was not only a manifestation of Nazi ideology, but as a theory of industrial production, it placed great emphasis on the creation of artifacts.  If a wooden stool was superior to a cantilevered chair in that it suited the German spirit, it was only because woodworking, and not the wooden stool, fueled the imprimaturs of productivism.  To suggest that Agrarian Objectivity paid no attention to form may be too simplistic, however.  The form and look of a heimat or Biedemeier furniture set is as important as the industrial techniques used to produce them.[10] 
Breuer’s writings provide another example of how a form versus process dichotomy begins to take shape.  Consider Breuer’s own meditation on form and its relation to the modern movement in an article titled “Metallmöbel und moderne Räumlichkeit” (“Metal Furniture and Modern Spatiality”) (1928).  Here, Breuer notes:

Since the external world affects us today with the most intense and various impressions, we change the form of our lives in more rapid succession than in earlier times.  It is only logical that our surroundings must undergo corresponding changes.  We are approaching furnishings, spaces, and buildings which, to the greatest possible extent, are alterable, mobile, and accessible to various combinations.  Furniture, even the walls of the space, are no longer massive, monumental, apparently permanently rooted, or in fact permanently installed.  They are much more injected with air, drawn, so to speak, in space; it hinders neither movement nor the view through space.  The space is not longer a composition, no rounded-off whole, since after all its dimensions and elements are subject to essential changes.  One comes to the conclusion that any correct, usable object fits in the space in which it is needed, similar to how a living being fits in nature: a person or a flower.  The reproductions show metal furniture of the same characteristic form, determined by the type of design, in the most various spaces: in the theater, auditorium, atelier, dining room, and living room.[11]

Granted, for the proponent of Agrarian Objectivity, as well as for the avatar of Neue Sachlichkeit, technological reproducibility (or technical reproduction) was an inescapable condition of contemporary society.  Benjamin does not devote much time to finessing any distinction between form and process—one can only speculate as to any importance he would have assigned to this issue.  This distinction between form and process nevertheless becomes important especially when considering issues of copying.  For a further examination of how Weimar-era and Nazi authorities dealt with issues of form and process, this analysis once again looks to the manufacturing of chairs in Germany prior to World War II.  An excellent and influential article by historian Otakar Máčel involving legal claims surrounding the manufacturing of tubular steel chairs is indispensable.  In “Avant-Garde Design and the Law: Litigation over the Cantilever Chair” (1990), Máčel outlines two lawsuits of paramount importance: the first, involving a 1929 claim by Hungarian furniture impresario Anton Lorenz against the international furniture company Gebrüder Thonet Aktiengesellschaft (AG) (“Thonet”); the second, a claim by Mauser Kommanditgesellschaft (KG) against Ludwig Mies van der Rohe from 1936.

Mart Stam, drawing of first cantilever chair (1927) (Source: Otakar Máčel, “Avant-Garde Design and the Law: Litigation over the Cantilever Chair,” Journal of Design History Vol. 3, No.2/3 [1990])
Reproduction of Stam’s 1926 cantilever chair (Source: Máčel)

Stam, tubular steel chair licensed to L.&C. Arnold (1927) (Source: Máčel)

Although the facts underlying these cases are complex, the origins of the claims can be traced to the 1927 Werkbund exhibition in Stuttgart.  There, Dutch designer Mart Stam sketched his concept for a cantilevered chair on the back of a wedding invitation at the Hotel Marquart. Stuttgart was a fertile environment for other European designers and avatars of modernism.  The Werkbund exhibition itself provided an ideal forum where designers could market and license their creations.  Stam was no exception, for shortly after he modified his chair design, which consisted of gas pipes arranged in the “continuous line” typifying cantilevered design, Stam licensed this design to the iron works of L.&C. Arnold in nearby Schorndorf.  Unknown to Stam, and in an event that would be significant over a decade later, in 1923, a metalworker named Gerhard Stüttgen designed a steel-tube chair that did not use legs for its back supports for his students at the Köln Kunstgewerbeschule.[12] 

Around the same time that Mart Stam completed his chair designs, both Marcel Breuer and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe also completed designs for steel tube furniture.  In 1926, Breuer designed a series of stools and tables that utilized the principle of the cantilever chair.  Breuer recalls a conversation he had with Stam in 1926 or 1927 regarding the cantilevered chairs:

I explained [to Stam] that I was working with a craftsman in Dessau and I would like to introduce a heavier tubular section to do a heavier cantilever chair.  He went home and drew it up this chair.  He somehow got legal protection.  But he did it in solid pipe […] I mentioned to him my stool […] that if you turn it on its side it is a cantilever chair.  But the tubing was not thick enough; I needed 25mm tube.  I did it myself; turned it over.[13] 

Breuer and Mies van der Rohe featured their designs at the Werkbund exhibition.  Unlike Stam’s and Breuer’s decidedly angular designs, Mies’ chair featured the well-known curved and continuous profile.
In Berlin, Marcel Breuer’s own company, Standard-Möbel Lengyel & Co., became the licensee for all of the designer’s furniture.  The company was not successful at first, and 1928, Breuer and business partner Kalman Lengyel hired Anton Lorenz, a successful Hungarian entrepreneur, to run the company.[14]   Although Breuer entrusted Lorenz with the future of the furniture venture, a sudden instance of pragmatism inspired him to license the rest of his tubular steel furniture designs to Thonet in July 1928.  This eventually created a situation where two separate companies—Standard Möbel and Thonet—were manufacturing Breuer’s chair designs.[15]

Breuer, tubular steel chair (1928-9).  This is Breuer’s version of Stam’s chair—also known as the Thonet B33, and the inspiration for the Standard-Möbel L33 (Source: Máčel)
DESTA ST-12 tubular steel chair (1929) (variant of Stam’s chair, similar to Standard-Möbel  L33) (Source: Máčel)
Breuer, tubular steel chair (1929) (first version of the Thonet B34 chair) (Source: Máčel)
Anton Lorenz, DESTA SS32 chair (1929), based on Breuer’s design? Or Stam’s? (Source: Máčel)
A series of events further complicated legal matters in 1929.  On April 11 of that year, Thonet bought most of Standard-Möbel’s interests.  This transaction excluded Standard-Möbel’s own factory on the Teltowerstrasse in Berlin, and as a result that part of the company was not only able to keep the company name, but kept Lorenz as the firm’s only officer.  Included in Standard-Möbel’s sale was the transfer of all Breuer’s designs to Thonet.  But in an inexplicable instance of major legal oversight, Standard-Möbel’s L33 and L34 chairs were not included in the rights transfer.  Standard-Möbel refused to assign the rights to these chairs to Thonet (ostensibly because these designs were to be manufactured at the Teltowerstrasse factory).  A letter signed by Standard-Möbel’s lawyers on June 18, 1929 thus explains:

Your particular request to hand over to you models L33 and L34 cannot be complied with, as these models are patented and copyrighted by our Mr. Lorenz who does not intend to transfer these rights to you.  There is no doubt whatsoever that these pieces had been assembled from your materials and in your working-time; our Mr. Lorenz will be pleased to receive your invoice for assemble and labour, upon receipt of which he will reimburse you in cash.[16] 

Thonet nevertheless continued to produce the chairs, and Lorenz filed a suit against the furniture maker in July 1929.  Standard-Möbel’s officer, however, arranged for other legal maneuverings securing the ability to own the rights to all cantilevered furniture.  Not only did Lorenz enter into a separate contract with Mart Stam to purchase all the designer’s rights to cantilevered designs, but Lorenz also formed another company in September 1929, Deutsche Stahlmöbel (DESTA).  DESTA manufactured the L33 and L34 chairs (ST12 and SS32 respectively), as well as furniture concepts by other well-known designers.
The ensuing legal opinions interpreted Lorenz’ claim as a question of authorship.  Lorenz’ attorneys sought an injunction to prevent Thonet from manufacturing the Breuer chairs, claiming that the designs were originally authored by Stam.  The civil division of the Landesgericht Berlin found in favor of Lorenz.  Thonet appealed to the federal Reichsgericht and subsequently lost that decision on June 1, 1932.  That court specifically asked whether the Stam chair was “an object of arts and crafts or a technical innovation,”[17] an important issue because only the former could receive copyright protection.[18]   Thonet maintained that the chair was the result of a technical process.[19]   In disagreeing, the judges concluded:

The basic feature of Stam’s chair resides in the austere and strident movement of line; avoiding all superfluous parts it embodies modern objectivity in a sparse form derived by the simplest of means.  Whether or not its formal aspects are also technically inspired is irrelevant to the question of its artistic quality.[20] 

Thonet also argued that the quality of its chair was better than that of Standard-Möbel’s.[21]   This difference in quality was raised in order to reaffirm the idea that Stam’s chair was a product of technical innovation, not artistic design.  The court, however, saw the issue differently.  The reproduction of Stam’s form was actionable—Thonet was therefore in copyright violation.  In noting that the chairs “so closely resemble one another that no essential features can be found to differentiate them,”[22]  the court basically emphasized that the Thonet chair was a replica of the Standard-Möbel chair.  In other words, in declaring Breuer’s chairs were replicas of Stam’s, the court came to the unbelievable conclusion that Thonet was in reality producing Stam’s chairs.
If Lorenz’ case against Thonet emphasized the mechanical reproduction of an object’s form, then what types of legal criteria can be used to describe the process of reproduction? Here, a case by Mauser KG against Mies van der Rohe becomes of special importance.  On the heels of the Werkbund exhibition, Mies filed patent DRP 467 242 on August 24, 1927 covering the manufacturing processes for a series of steel tube chairs.  The “salient features” of this patent included: “the use of cold-drawn bent steel tube; sufficient springiness (or resilience) for comfort; and, as far as the form is concerned, a chair – in which the seat frame and its support are made out of a single piece of resilient curved steel tube … [t]his tube is bent in a semi-circle and forms a continuous line form the supporting part to the seat and the back.”[23]   In 1936, the outspoken architect made public statements that both L.&C. Arnold and Mauser KG were violating his patents.  Later that year, Mauser sued to invalidate Mies’ patents.

Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, tubular steel chair manufactured by Berliner Metallgewerbe J. Müller (1927).  According to Máčel, this chair was later manufactured by Bamberg Metallwerkstätte in 1931 and Thonet in 1932.
 Gerhard Stüttgen, tubular steel chair (1923) (Source: Máčel)
Mies’ attorneys mounted a defense based on two criteria.  First, Mies contended that several of Mauser’s chairs, though not sharing any formal characteristics with his designs, nevertheless violated his patent.  However it is the second criterion of Mies’ defense that deserves special mention.  Here, Mies’ attorneys asserted that by the time the patent was filed in 1927, several furniture producers were already employing similar manufacturing techniques.  The idea here, of course, was that Mies was the first to develop and exploit these processes.  In an unexpected development, Mies patent attorneys used Stam’s chairs “as proof of the contemporary existence of designs embodying the characteristics patented” by Mies.[24]   At the time, Mauser had just obtained the rights to Stüttgen’s previously-mentioned chair designs, and introduced evidence that it was he, and not Mies, that had pioneered the manufacturing process.  Yet bad lawyering hampered Mauser’s case—Stüttgen was forced to admit that when he was developing his own manufacturing processes, he did not believe that they would be able to manufacture any useable furniture designs.  Mauser responded by claiming that Mies had knowledge of Stam’s designs (thereby claiming once again that the patent was invalid).  Yet the court determined that Mies filed his patent three days before the Werkbund exhibit even begin, thus invalidating any claim that Mies had prior knowledge of this process.[25]   The Kammergericht (Supreme Court) decided in Mies’ favor in 1937, and awarded Mies previously-owed compensation.  These decisions, as opposed to the Lorenz-Thonet cases, demonstrate that in matters of mechanical reproduction, form is indeed subordinated to technical inventions, materials, and construction.
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Filed under: Notes — admin @ 14:56

Monday, June 14, 2010

Two-Dimensional Realism

Photograph of Mordecai Gorelik’s stage design for Charles Bickford’s stage adaptation of Carl Sandburg’s Casey Jones (Source: “A Locomotive Steals the Show: ‘No.4’ Is Hero of Dramatized ‘Casey Jones'” Life (Mar. 14, 1938), p. 41.) 

“The white surface descends and the events of the three dimensional stage imperceptibly blend into two-dimensional illusions.”[1]  And so the German sociologist and film critic Sigfried Kracauer describes that moment just after the orchestra stops playing and right before the projectionist screens a film on the movie screen.  Here, it is as if the lowering of the movie screen saves the audience from the orchestra’s musical assault.   And yet Kracauer’s description of film as “two-dimensional illusions” presents something of a problem.  This is because cinematic set design—a broad term describing the various constructions and decorations used to evoke a film’s concepts and ideas—is also about presenting and conjuring the illusion of three dimensions.  Movies and stage plays both rely and capitalize on the audience’s ability to see things in three-dimensional space.  But the ability to manipulate two-dimensional objects to make them appear as three-dimensional objects is also an important aspect of set design.  This manipulation also had political dimensions.

In a 1947 issue of Hollywood Quarterly, a craft-oriented journal covering the film industry, veteran stage designer Mordecai Gorelik issued a vituperative rant against RKO studio management.  “In some ways the Hollywood treatment of settings cases a revealing sidelight on the general Hollywood approach to reality,” Gorelik writes.[2]   Reminding the reader that a film set is first and foremost a “human environment” and a “highly important, if mute, aspect of the screen story,” Gorelik continues: “What happens to this part of life on its way through the camera lens?  As a Broadway designer who has also worked in pictures (as film production designer), I am bound to report that any attempt to bring reality to movie settings encounters stern resistance on the big lots.”[3]

Concept Drawing by Mordecai Gorelik for None But the Lonely Heart (RKO, 1944) Image: Gorelik (1947)

To prove his point that Hollywood producers did not value realism in set design, Gorelik recounted his experiences as a production designer for several RKO films.  He refers to the the original production designs and art department sketches of street scenes from Clifford Odets’ None but the Lonely Heart (1944) as  “cliché” designs executed by a “Prix de Rome type” who was eventually fired.[4]   Odets would eventually hire Gorelik, who then remade the street scene into a “typical example of rattletrap slum housing.”[5]   This was a shabby aesthetic that Gorelik would perfect for other films as well.  Thus for a British production at Ealing Studios, he designed a dark, squat antique store that called attention to “the pathetic smallness and the sordid poverty of the things on sale.”[6]

Gorelik’s concept sketch for an antique store, Ealing Studios, London. Image: Gorelik (1947)

Gorelik felt that his designs were openly antagonized.  For Jacques Tourneur’s Eastern Front drama, Days of Glory(1944), another RKO production, Gorelik designed a guerilla encampment made to resemble something that impoverished yet redoubtable Red Army cheloveks would mount in anticipation of a Nazi siege.  Gorelik recounts RKO’s set design philosophy at the time:

The RKO method was to do a perfect carpentry job with dressed lumber from the studio stockpile and then chop up the result with axes and chisels in order to denote rude construction […] It was my painful duty to interrupt this process and have the stairway built of logs, saplings, charred timber, old doors, and other material that any reasonable person would consider more available under the conditions of the story.[7] 

Gorelik felt that he was correcting instances of what he labeled “Belasco Naturalism,”[8] a form of “literal reproduction” that amounted to nothing but a “superficial ‘snapshot’ technique without selectivity, style, or dramatic content.”[9]   Gorelik understood that realism could not be achieved “by the literal reproduction of anything”, and thus he advocated a type of documentary quality, an American variant on neorealism’s imprimatur of showing “characters of great humanity caught up in everyday life” in a rich mix of cinematography, writing, and direction that created a cinema based on “the material signs of everyday existence, on the inherent qualities of place, on autobiography, on authentic sentiment.”[10]   This, too, was met with resistance from the studio.  Gorelik continues describing his art director’s heartaches on the set of Days of Glory:

The same picture called for a peasant cart made of crude lumber.  I found just the right material for it on a nearby ranch – rough boards that had lain for years in the open.  The cart was built at the ranch and was brought to the studio.  Next day I saw it in one of the studio alleys.  It had been painted a fine, spanking battleship gray all over; all texture was gone, and you couldn’t tell the wood from the metal parts.  It became necessary to repaint the cart with artificial wood graining in an effort to restore some of its original appearance.[11] 

Such anger and disappointment could perhaps be explained by the fact that Gorelik was one of the foremost stage designers in left-wing and radical theater groups during the 1930s. During that time, New Deal legislation initiated many programs in art stewardship, and theatre groups in American large cities took the initiative and started companies that specialized in the production of “social plays” that responded to the economic, social, and political woes spurred by the Great Depression.  In 1935, Gorelik was a member of the Theatre Union, the most well-known Socialist theater outfit of the era. The Union’s organizers were well-versed in contemporary theater trends, and although they were familiar with a poorly-received 1925 New York production of Bertolt Brecht’s The Threepenny Opera, they did not know much about the playwright’s other dramatic works.  Brecht was disliked among other theatre circles, but he also became famous for his film Kuhle Wampe (1932), a piece of anti-fascist agitprop, and along with Kurt Weill, was identified as part of a new generation of anti-Nazi “revolutionary figures.”  Also, by 1935, the once-maligned production of The Threepenny Operawas beginning to be viewed as a critical success.  Through Friedrich Wolf, director of the Theatre Union, and Benno Schneider, artistic director of the Yiddish left-wing theater group ARTEF, the Union arranged for Brecht’s arrival in the United States.  The two were familiar with Brecht’s most recent play, Die Mutter (The Mother) (1935), the playwright’s ambitious adaptation of the Maxim Gorki novel of the same name, and were busy securing rights and financing to produce the first English-language performance of this play.  Like many other German intellectuals of his generation, Brecht was in exile, seeking solace and protection from the burgeoning rise of Nazism in Germany.  Finally, in 1935, Brecht stole away on a worm-ridden dingy from Denmark to New York.  Upon landing, Brecht immediately contacted Wolf and Schneider, ready to begin work on the American production of The Mother.

Brecht and the Theatre Union did not have an easy relationship.  At first, the production was marred by financial hiccups and major disagreements between Brecht and the show’s producers.  However, the relationship between Brecht and Gorelik was a different matter.  The two became close friends as collaborators.  Gorelik was a devotee of Brecht’s and admired the playwright’s ideas for the set and production design.[12]   When The Mother finally opened on 19 November 1939, the production featured many of the performative elements, such as projection screens, visible lighting apparatuses, and audience-actor participations, commonplace to Brecht’s Lehrstücke, or teaching plays.[13]   There was a small budget for set design for The Mother, but Gorelik nevertheless created a “small revolving stage partitioned through the center” that stood “just under a projection screen.”[14]   Gorelik continues describing his design: “At stage right were two grand pianos.  The stage was illuminated by a row of visible spotlights … The projection screen was in constant use as an editorial commentary.”[15]

Mordecai Gorelik’s stage design for Brecht’s The Mother (1935). Image: Baxandall (1967).

Gorelik’s anti-naturalist sentiments can also be traced to his work with Brecht on The Mother.  Brecht notes that American productions (presumably still under the sway of Belasco’s techniques) utilized a form of naturalism that did not serve the revolutionary potentials of theatre.  Brecht continues:

Naturalism has a revolutionary aspect, for it shows the social conditions which the bourgeois theatre takes great pains to conceal.  Also, a call to fight is sounded, which proves that the fighters exist.  But only in a second phase does proletarian theatre begin, politically and artistically, to qualify itself for it social function.  The first phase shows that the class struggle does exist.  The second shows how it ought to be conducted.[16]

The professional relationship with Brecht was also productive in other ways, for it was during this time that Gorelik was able to formulate his ideas for New Theatres for Old (1940), a book-length exegesis on this history of stage and set design and the first written treatise of the notion of “Epic Theater.”

Epic Theater was a kind of experimental dramatic production that featured “a non-illusory style that was designed to impart an explicit socio-political message through the intentional destruction of theatrical verisimilitude.”[17]   At first, this notion may seem paradoxical, but the main idea behind Epic Theater (as with Brecht’s Lehrstücke) was to break down any type of slavish naturalism, unnecessary photorealism, or—to use Gorelik’s own language—literalism that would impede or dilute the essence, or “scenic gestus” of the production.  On the heels of The Mother, productions like Erwin Piscator’s and Lena Goldschmidt’s The Case of Clyde Griffiths (1936) (a stage adaptation of Theodore Dreiser’s An American Tragedy), Paul Green’s Johnny Johnson (1936), George Sklar’s Life and Death of an American (1939), and Marc Blitzstein’s The Cradle Will Rock (1937), used agitprop elements such as “direct appeals to audiences, choral effects, political slogans, non-illusory setting and staging, episodic structure, type characters”[18]  to deliver a clarified message to the audience.

Gorelik believed that Epic Theatre was the latest and most important event in the evolution of the dramatic arts, a position he vehemently upheld in his New Theatres for Old.  In that book, Gorelik looked to the prehistory of Epic Theatre—Renaissance and Baroque drama—and identified two strains of set and stage design: the conventional and the illusory.  Illusory stage design was in essence a form of symbolism, a form of “attenuated naturalism” that suspended critical judgment and operated under a directive “according to which the environment was reduced to atmosphere, to ‘dreamlike mists,’ [whose] only function of was to create a powerful emotional impression on the beholder.”[19]

Gorelik, on the other hand, characterized Epic Theater as a type of conventional theater.  Finally, here was a type of theatre that “organized experience into a rational structure” whereby each performance was transformed into an “impartial” forum where “facts were introduced, hypotheses were investigated, and fallacies were exposed.”[20]   Epic Theater relied upon the “objective logic of events” by applying principles of scientific Marxism to bring to drama “the experimental, unprejudiced and precise method of the scientific laboratory.”[21]   For Gorelik, the stage presented an opportunity to bring to light “the temporal affairs of the socio-economic world” and to provide “an instrument for the transvaluation of political consciousness … a means of promoting social change.”[22]   Gorelik did believe, however, that the principles of Epic Theater could be applied to the screen as well:

No Epic play or film can hope to present facts which will not be questioned, no matter how well supported the evidence may be.  What is significant is the tendency to rely upon facts, to rely upon the objective logic of events rather than upon subjective emotion.[23] 

But in his 1947 piece for Hollywood Quarterly, Gorelik seems to have made an about-face.  “What of the more subtle use of setting in achieving the style or dramatic content?”[24]  he asks.  Gorelik thus describes another design challenge on the set of None But the Lonely Heart:

For the back alley of the Fun Fair in Lonely Heart the art factory offered a piece of prosaic naturalism, without regard to the fact that this alley was one of the most romantic locales in the story.  Again I was obliged to redesign, curving the walls of the alley, arching it with trees, placing shadowy hoods over doors and windows.  This shift towards a more poetic imagery was meaningless to the art regime.[25] 

Perhaps Gorelik’s invocation of curved forms and manipulated shadows is a veiled reference to Hans Poelzig’s architecture and film set designs.  Yet Gorelik’s fluctuations between realism and “poetic imagery” suggests how this landmark figure was trying desperately to be employed by the “Hollywood Art Machinery” that seemed all too eager to reject him.

This is not to say that global concerns made issues of theatrical realism totally irrelevant.  In 1943, just before Gorelik was working for Odets and Tourneur,  RKO’s “authenticity division” deployed several employees to assist the U.S. Army’s Chemical Warfare Service in building and designing the interiors for the “Typical German and Japanese Test Structures” at Utah’s Dugway Proving Ground.  Acting on information about wood construction techniques and architectural design in Germany and Japan provided by Erich Mendelsohn, Konrad Wachsmann, and Antonin Raymond, the RKO group was only one example of how entertainment and military interests conjoined in service of the war effort.  Gorelik was no exception.  He took up an additional job directing radio plays for the Office of War Information while working as a set designer.  During this time, in 1944, he also began a stint at Douglas Aircraft producing exploded axonometric drawings of airplanes.[26]  And after the war ended, he became a film instructor at a special university for discharged G.I.’s in Biarritz.

Mordecai Gorelik holding a maquette of his stage design for Casey Jones (Source: “A Locomotive Steals the Show: ‘No.4’ Is Hero of Dramatized ‘Casey Jones'” Life (Mar. 14, 1938), p. 42.)

Gorelik was fairly well-known.  So was his struggle against what he would call “Belasco Naturalism.”  Such issues of naturalism versus realism on stage are best encapsulated by a review in Life of Charles Bickford’s 1938 stage adaptation of Casey Jones.  The reviewer describes the centerpiece of the stage design: a giant replica locomotive designed by Gorelik (see image at the very top of this post):

It is made of lath, covered with black velours.  Its fire is a red spotlight.  Its steam is real steam blown by a fan.  Its bell is a sound taken on the New York Central Line.  Its sway is produced by two stagehands operating levers on either end.  Its cost was 81,500.[27]  

Most of the review features images of Gorelik’s stage design.  And in one instance, a small photograph shows the designer himself, holding a small scale model of the “No.4” locomotive, giving the reader a sense of how a three-dimensional object has been flattened to become more of a two-dimensional one.  The review ends with a poignant jab: “Casey Jones, its locomotive aside, is not a good play but it has the makings of a superb movie.”[28]

__________________________

Notes


[1] Siegfried Kracauer, “Cult of Distraction: On Berlin’s Picture Palaces” Thomas Y. Levin trans. New German Critique No. 40 (Winter, 1987): 91-92.
[2] Mordecai Gorelik, “Hollywood’s Art Machinery,” Hollywood Quarterly Vol. 2, No. 2 (Jan., 1947): 153.
[3] Ibid.
[4] Odets declared of this set design: “This place is so pretty that I’d like to live in it myself.  What I want for my action is not a relic of the good old days, but a relic of the bad old days.  This street must be the villain of the story; it is the sinister primary reason for the whole dramatic chain of events.” Ibid.,p.155.
[5] Ibid.
[6] Ibid., p. 156.
[7] Ibid., p. 157.
[8] Named after David Belasco (1853-1931), the influential set designer and dramaturge recognized for bringing a new type of naturalism to American stages in the early 20th century.  His techniques emphasized natural lighting and often attempted to create a realistic stage atmosphere.  Belasco famously declared “it is much easier to appeal to the hearts of audiences through their senses rather than through their intellects.” Lise-Lone Marker, David Belasco: Naturalism in the American Theatre, Review Author: Thomas F. Marshall, American Literature Vol. 47, No. 3 (Nov. 1975): 454-455.
[9] Gorelik, “Hollywood’s Art Machinery,” p.157.
[10] Maristella Casciato, “Neorealism in Italian Architecture” in Sarah Williams Goldhagen and Réjean Legualt, eds. Anxious Modernisms: Experimentation in Postwar Architectural Culture (Cambridge: MIT, 2000): 25-26.
[11] Gorelik, “Hollywood’s Art Machinery,” p. 157.
[12] Set design for The Mother had always been a divisive issue.  According to Theatre Union member George Sklar: “[T]he use of ‘das kleines Brecht Vorhang,’ the seven-foot –high burlap curtain strung on a wire and pulled by hand to close it.  We saw no sense in this curtain.  The Civic Repertory Theatre had two balconies.  The audience in the orchestra couldn’t see what was happening behind the seven-foot curtain when it was closed, but the audiences in the two balconies looked down over it and could!  Why?  We never did find out from him.  Gorelik  … fought with him about it for a couple of weeks, then discovered the brilliance of ‘epic theatre’ and became a Brecht disciple.” Lee Baxandall, “Brecht in America: 1935” TDR (1967-1968) Vol.12, No. 1 (Autumn, 1967): 78.
[13] See Anne Fletcher, “The Gestus of Scene Design: Mordecai Gorelik and the Theatre Union’s Production of Brecht’s The Mother”Theatre History Studies, Vol. 23 (2003).
[14] Baxandall, “Brecht in America: 1935”, p.78.
[15] Gorelik, New Theatres for Old (New York: Samuel French, 1940): 396 quoted in Ibid.
[16] Baxandall, “Brecht in America: 1935”, p. 84.
[17] Ira Alan Levine, Theatre in Revolt: Left-Wing Dramatic Theory in the United States (1911-1939) PhD dissertation, University of Toronto (1980): 227.
[18] Ibid., p. 228.
[19] Gorelik, New Theatres for Old, p.263 quoted in Ibid., p.241.
[20] Ibid., p. 244.
[21] Ibid.
[22] Ibid., p. 295.
[23] Gorelik, New Theatres for Old, p.435-436 quoted in Ibid., p.282.
[24] Gorelik, “Hollywood’s Art Machinery,” p.158.
[25] Ibid
[26] Fletcher, Rediscovering Mordecai Gorelik: Scene Design and the American Theatre (Carbondale, Illinois: Southern Illinois University Press, 2009), p.166.
[27] “A Locomotive Steals the Show: ‘No.4’ Is Hero of Dramatized ‘Casey Jones'” Life (Mar. 14, 1938), p. 41.
[28] Ibid.

Filed under: Notes — admin @ 14:30

    3dimensions-iun-lgt-park-public sculpture-outopia-eliason-le corbusier-boltanski// sem 3,4 public sculpture 1,2

    Filed under: Notes — admin @ 06:36

    24 Spheres. Time of Change.

    makro

    pbscl
    public sculpture- scale- primitive shapes- the magic of material
    File:RichardSerra Fulcrum2.jpgFile:Richard Serra Sealevel1.jpgFile:Richard Serra View Point.jpg0

    24 Spheres. Time of Change.

    mikroMya-3dprt-3dim-3dmax-rl-mod
    diatoms-exhibition-1

    24 Spheres. Time of Change.









    For me Utopia is tied to our ‘now’, to the moment between one second and the next. It constitutes a potential that is actualized and transformed into reality; an opening where concepts such as subject and object, inside and outside, proximity and distance are thrown up in the air only to be defined anew. Our sense of orientation is challenged, and the coordinates of our spaces,collective and personal, have to be renegotiated. Mutability and motion lie at the core of Utopia.” – Olafur Eliasson 
    As visitors step into long tunnel filled with dense fog and slowly shifting colored lights, they must give up their sense of sight in order to pass from one end to the next in this 2010 installation by Olafur Eliasson at the ARKEN museum in Copenhagen. The dense fog instead encourages visitors to rely on their other senses to navigate the space, drawing to their attention changes in light and sound as other visitors move around you. The colored lights change subtly, from the bright yellows of morning to the deep inky purples and blues of twilight, allowing participants to notice the changes in light of everyday that they might otherwise miss with the distractions of the outside world present. Concentrating on our personal relation to the world around us, Eliasson seeks to reveal the idea of ‘Utopia’ to us as “the now”, or as “moments between one second and the next”. A sensory experience. His 90 meter installation challenges visitors to consider their place in their environment and how they relate to not only the world around them, but also others who share the same space. By blocking outside distractions with the fog, we can better understand our own Utopia, redefining our identity in relation to our surroundings.Eliasson’s use of the visitor as a participant in the work is more than just a cheap thrill, instead the slow pace of the trek through the tunnel encourages quiet reflection and promotes both inner and outer awareness of the world and our place in it. (2)








    global village
    the impact of the idea of global village – networks-artworks

    boltanski

    borders/public-private///

    Filed under: Notes — admin @ 06:35
    File:RichardSerra Fulcrum2.jpg

    Filed under: Notes — admin @ 06:24

    The year is 1881. Convalescing in Alexandria, sketching images of Nile Vultures gliding in the sweltering Mediterranean skies, the French ornithologist and engineer Louis-Pierre Mouillard writes of an air teeming with life. Appearing early on in his influential treatise on bird flight, L’Empire de l’Air, Mouillard’s powerful, sublime description of the air casts a prophetic eye to the future: “O! Blind Humanity! open thine eyes and thou shalt see millions of birds and myriads of insects cleaving the atmosphere. All these creatures are whirling through the air without the slightest float; many of them are gliding therein, without losing height, hour after hour, on pulseless wings without fatigue; and after beholding this demonstration given by the source of all knowledge, thou wilt acknowledge that Aviation is the path to be followed.” [1] Here, then, is a plea to view the world differently. It is a new sensibility that does more than call attention to the changing air; it asks us to look at the numerous denizens of the air as something altogether different. This is because for Mouillard, these are not birds or insects. They are airplanes.

    In Mouillard’s world, these creatures maneuver easily through the air thanks to their nearly weightless bodies. This was the predominant view for centuries. Even that most dedicated chronicler and student of animal flight, Étienne-Jules Marey acknowledged how those before him thought that insects and birds were able to “float” in the sky because of air-filled sacs that made them no different than balloons. Marey and his contemporaries looked to the flight mechanisms of birds and insects as models for human-powered, heavier-than-air flight. And during its initial moments, heavier-than-air flight was only slightly heavier than air. This was the case with the earliest airplanes: delicate, cumbersome assemblages of cloth, wood, and wire that strained to escape the surface of the earth only to fly slowly, elegantly, and effortlessly on currents of air. This was not a common sentiment, however. Franz Kafka referred to the various machines lined up like flying mantises at the 1909 Brescia Air Show as “suspicious little wooden contraptions.” [2] For the budding modernist, aircraft were no different than Gregor Samsa, the scarab-like tragic figure from The Metamorphosis: insects with uncontrollable appendages that were “continually fluttering about.” [3]

    Samsa’s fantastical predicament moored him to some very real concerns. And despite Kafka’s plodding verse, we can think of another modernity that follows Nietzsche’s clarion call to “kill the Spirit of Heaviness.” [4] Here, instances like F.T. Marinetti’s descriptions of pilots, who upon returning to earth, leave their machines “with an elastic ultralight leap,” [5] or Le Corbusier’s observation that airplanes are a “sign of the new times” advancing forward “in a winged flurry,” [6] tell of a modernism imbued with a lightness. It is a physical and metaphysical lightness. An aerodynamic lightness.

    As stated by James A.H. Murray in the New English Dictionary on Historical Principles (1858), “Aerodynamics [is the] branch of pneumatics which treats of air and other gases in motion, and of their mechanical efforts.” [7] Murray’s definition is based on an earlier entry from the Popular Encyclopedia of 1837: “Aerodynamics; a branch of aerology, or the higher mechanics, which treats the powers and motion of elastic fluids.” [8] Though these definitions speak more of laboratories and experimental chambers, consider how Siegfried Giedion, that most stalwart promoter of architectural modernism, puts forward the laboratory as a metaphor for the creation of new architecture. Using ferroconcrete construction as an example, Giedion makes much of how concrete is not only a “laboratory product,” but also made in a laboratory. [9] This language is more than metaphorical, as demonstrated when he places new advances in iron construction on an aerodynamic footing:

    Instead of the rigid balance of support and load, iron demands a more complex, more fluid balance of forces. Through the condensation of the material to a few points, a creation of the airspace, des combinations aériennes that Octave Mirabeau recognized already in 1889. This sensation of being enveloped by a floating airspace while walking through tall structures (Eiffel Tower) advanced the concept of flight before it had been realized and stimulated the formation of the new architecture. [10]

    Giedion’s reference to Eiffel Tower is not accidental. Since its construction for the 1889 Exposition Universelle and until the early 20th century, Gustave Eiffel’s iconic structure was the ineluctable center of aviation in the world. In 1901, the Brazilian aviator Alberto-Santos Dumont won the Deutsch de la Meurthe prize after circling the Eiffel Tower in his No.6 Airship. Similar feats would have more lasting influences on architecture culture. Hence in Aircraft (1935), Le Corbusier writes of his early days as an apprentice in Auguste Perret’s office in 1909, sequestered in a “student’s garret on Quai St. Michel,” and hearing the noise of the Comte de Lambert’s Wright Flyer circle the Eiffel Tower. [11]

    Le Corbusier’s life-long romance with flying machines is well known. And not surprisingly, Giedion would describe Le Corbusier’s own architecture in aerodynamic terms. Writing about the Cité Frugès à Pessac in Bordeaux, Giedion describes the building as something not unlike a wind tunnel: “Corbusier’s homes are neither spatial not plastic: air flows through them! Air becomes a constituent factor! Neither space nor plastic form counts, only RELATION and INTERPENETRATION!” [12] This is a description of a new kind of architecture comprised of light structures, many appearing “as thin as paper” that transform buildings into “cubes of air” and make an “immediate transition to the sky.” [13] Architecture, now aloft, seems to have taken on the qualities of the airplane.

    André Devambez (1867-1944), Le seul oiseau qui vole au-dessus des nuages (The Only Bird That Flies Above the Clouds), 1910, H. 45; W. 68cm, © ADAGP, Paris-RMN (Musée d’Orsay)/Hervé Lewandowski. A reproduction of this painting would appear in L’Illustration (September 17, 1910)

    Consider, for example, André Devambez’ painting of an ungainly aircraft grazing the clouds high above Paris for the September 17, 1910 issue of L’Illustration. The machine — an Antoinette V monoplane — was one of the most celebrated aircraft in early twentieth century French aviation. Designed by the engineer and inventor Léon Levavasseur, Antoinette aircraft were lightweight machines that were as pleasing to the eye as they were to fly. One reason for this was that Levavasseur, who began his career as an engine designer for speedboats, created a lightweight, aluminum-cast, gasoline-injection engine with a high power-to-weight ratio for all his aircraft. His engines powered some of the most important aircraft of its day: Farmans, Blériots, Esnault-Pelteries. Not wonder, then, that Devambez portrays the Antoinette as a bold, graceful, dragonfly-like machine, freed from its earthly shackles, hovering lightly above a bank of cumulus clouds. Like others, he would have known that French aviator Hubert Latham prized the machine precisely for these characteristics. A dashing figure known as “The Storm King,” Latham set multiple records in Antoinette aircraft. And despite two failed attempts to cross the English Channel, Latham and his Antoinette were a familiar presence in the skies of cities like Paris and Berlin. 

    (Top and Bottom) From A. Cléry, “L’Aéroplane ‘Antoinette V’” L’Aerophile: revue technique et pratique des locomotions aériennes (Jan. 1, 1909)
    (Top) Wing assembly for Antoinette V, from A. Cléry, “L’Aéroplane ‘Antoinette V’” L’Aerophile: revue technique et pratique des locomotions aériennes (Jan. 1, 1909); (Bottom) Advertisement showing Levavasseur’s lightweight Antoinette engine, from L’Aerophile (Jan. 1, 1909)

    In January 1909, the French aviation impresario Georges Besançon published a lengthy article about the Antoinette V inL’Aerophile, the Aéro-Club de France’s monthly journal. The article celebrated many of the airplane’s innovations, and yet focused especially on its construction. Images and drawings from the article show the wings and fuselages before the application of painted and lacquered fabric as skeins of wooden spars joined with aluminum gussets—these give the aircraft a fragile, skeletal appearance. The author, A. Cléry, reminds readers how the Antoinette’s wings and fuselage are made from combinations of triangles and pyramids—a construction technique that not only accommodates traction and compression, but also does so with a minimum amount of materials. This, Cléry observes, is “the same principle of the construction of steel bridges and the Eiffel Tower. Its application to the construction of airplane wings has resulted in an absolute rigidity and strength, combined with the greatest possible lightness.” [14]

    (Top) Alexander Graham Bell’s “Siamese Twin” kites, from Alexander Graham Bell, “Aërial Locomotion, With a Few Notes of Progress in the Construction of the Aërodrome,” National Geographic Magazine (Jan., 1907), 1-33; (Bottom)  Bell’s “Cygnet II,” February 25, 1909. Bulletins, from January 4, 1909 to April 12, 1909, Alexander Graham Bell Family Papers at the Library of Congress, 1862-1939, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress.


    Cléry was not the only one to make a connection between Eiffel and Levavasseur. As one of L’Aerophile’s most avid readers, the American inventor Alexander Graham Bell would take a particular interest in Cléry’s article about the Antoinette V. Since 1899, Bell had been preoccupied with building kites that improved on Lawrence Hargraves’ “box” designs. He settled on kites composed of multiple cells of tetrahedral structures, a design that would increase the amount of surface area with a minimum of materials. His first kites were small, wood-and-cloth pyramids consisting of smaller tetrahedral units. And as he became more ambitious with his designs, he created large, ungainly tetrahedral space frames that had to be towed out into the open water in order to be set aloft. Of these, the largest were the “Cygnet” series, which were gigantic structures comprising of 3,393 tetrahedral cells. Tested out in the waters of Keuka Lake, near Hammondsport, New York from 1907 to 1908, the Cygnets were temperamental things. In the words of their pilot, Thomas Selfridge, the Cygnets “persistently refused to fly.” [15]

    (Top and Bottom) Alexander Graham Bell’s Tower, from “Dr. Bell’s Tetrahedral Tower,” National Geographic Magazine (Oct., 1907), 672-675.


    Despite the Cygnet’s perceived stubbornness, Bell found solace in Cléry’s emphasis on tetrahedral structures. Later in 1909, Bell noted how the Antoinette “seems to be constructed throughout upon the tetrahedral plan.” [16] The emphasis on “construction” should not be taken lightly, for Bell’s Cygnets were more architectural than aerodynamical. And in a series of spreads for the October 1907 issue of National Geographic Magazine, editor Gilbert M. Grosvenor depicted what would be the fullest architectural expressions of Bell’s aeronautical work. Titled “Dr. Bell’s Tetrahedral Tower,” the piece shows images of an 80-foot observation tower built in 1907 at Bell’s estate in Beinn Bhreagh, Nova Scotia. With legs made of tetrahedral-celled trusses that intersected high above to ground to form a platform, Bell’s structure was touted for its lightness and ease of assembly. Its use of eight-pin joints to hold the frame no doubt foreshadowed similar innovations by Max Mengeringhausen, Konrad Wachsmann, or R. Buckminster Fuller. Bell’s truss system resulted in a kind of building that was light and that, echoing Giedion’s description of the Eiffel Tower, gave one the sensation of being aloft. It was an aerodynamic building in the sense that it could accommodate moving air. But it was also aerodynamic because it was a structure originally designed to fly. When we normally think of flying buildings, we immediately conjure images of architecture outfitted with streamlined forms not unlike those made memorable by Erich Mendelsohn or Norman Bel Geddes. Bell’s tetrahedral tower is radically different from these, however. As an assemblage of pipes joined into lightweight pyramids and tetrahedrons, Bell’s tower nevertheless captivates us because it is one of the few instances where we can talk of a flying machine that has truly evolved into architecture.

    (An Italian version of this article appeared in September 2011 in Materia 70. Many thanks to Daria Ricchi for her beautiful translation.)

    __________________

    Notes


    [1] Louis-Pierre Mouillard, “The Empire of The Air,” Annual Report of the Board of Regents of the Smithsonian Institution, Showing the Operations, Expenditures, and Conditions of the Institution to July, 1892 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1893), 398. This is an abridged translation of Mouillard, L’Empire de l’air: essai d’ornithologie appliquée a l’aviation (Paris: Masson, 1881).
    [2] Franz Kafka, “Die Aeroplane in Brescia,” Bohemia (29 September 1909), quoted in Peter Demetz, The Air Show at Brescia, 1909 (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002), 115.
    [3] Kafka, “The Metamorphosis,” in Joyce Crick, ed. The Metamorphosis and Other Stories (London: Oxford University Press, 2009), 82.
    [4] Friedrich Nietzsche, “Of Reading and Writing,” in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, R.J, Hollingdale, trans. (New York: Penguin, 2003 [1961]), 68.
    [5] Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, Teoria e invenzione futurista, Luciano de Maria, ed. (Milan: Mondadori, 1968), 116, quoted in Jeffrey T. Schnapp, “Propeller Talk,” Modernism/Modernity Vol 1.3 (1994), 165.
    [6] Le Corbusier, Sur les 4 routes (Paris: Gallimard, 1941), 125.
    [7] “aerodynamics, n.” The Oxford English Dictionary. 3d ed. 1989. OED Online. Oxford University Press. 10 June 2011 .
    [8] John D. Anderson, Jr., A History of Aerodynamics and its Impact on Flying Machines (Cambridge, United Kingdom: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 5.
    [9] Sigfried Giedion, Building in France, Building in Iron, Building in Ferroconcrete, J. Duncan Berry, trans. (Los Angeles: Getty Center Publications, 1995), 150-151.
    [10] Ibid., p. 102.
    [11] Le Corbusier, Aircraft (London: The Studio, Ltd., 1935), 6.
    [12] Giedion, Building in France, p. 169.
    [13] Ibid.
    [14] A. Cléry, “L’Aéroplane ‘Antoinette V’” L’Aerophile: revue technique et pratique des locomotions aériennes (Jan. 1, 1909), 7-8.
    [15] Report of Flight of Cygnet II, Monday, March 2, 1908. Notes by Thomas E. Selfridge, from September 24, 1907 to July 24, 1908. “Series: Subject File, Folder: Aviation, Aerial Experiment Association vs. Meyers, 1908-1912, undated.” Alexander Graham Bell Family Papers at the Library of Congress, 1862-1939, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress.
    [16] Bell, “The Antoinette V.” Bulletins, from January 4, 1909 to April 12, 1909, Alexander Graham Bell Family Papers at the Library of Congress, 1862-1939, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress.

    6 Απριλίου 2013

    ANIM.2D/3D-sculpture-aptics-vision/sem7 aptics-screen based art-sculpture-blender

    Filed under: Notes — admin @ 13:26

    Directed by Hayao Miyazaki | 1986
    This sublime adventure fantasy, replete with proto-steampunk imagery, touchingly conveys a message of ecological awareness. A young girl drops from the sky and lands in the arms of orphan Pazu—and not a moment later they’re on the run from a shadowy government agency and a band of pirates, both after the magic crystal she possesses. The chase leads them up and into the clouds to the floating airship Laputa, an overgrown fortress inhabited by gargantuan, dilapidated robots.

    http://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/McM0_YHDm5A

    The film tells the story of Chronos, the personification of time and the inability to realize his desire to love for a mortal. The scenes blend a series of surreal paintings of Dali with dancing and metamorphosis. The target production began in 1945, 58 years before its completion and was a collaboration between Walt Disney and the Spanish surrealist painter, Salvador Dalí. Salvador Dali and Walt Disney Destiny was produced by Dali and John Hench for 8 months between 1945 and 1946. Dali, at the time, Hench described as a “ghostly figure” who knew better than Dali or the secrets of the Disney film. For some time, the project remained a secret. The work of painter Salvador Dali was to prepare a six-minute sequence combining animation with live dancers and special effects for a movie in the same format of “Fantasia.” Dali in the studio working on The Disney characters are fighting against time, the giant sundial that emerges from the great stone face of Jupiter and that determines the fate of all human novels. Dalí and Hench were creating a new animation technique, the cinematic equivalent of “paranoid critique” of Dali. Method inspired by the work of Freud on the subconscious and the inclusion of hidden and double images. 
    Dalí said: “Entertainment highlights the art, its possibilities are endless.” The plot of the film was described by. Dalí as “A magical display of the problem of life in the labyrinth of time.” 
    Walt Disney said it was “A simple story about a young girl in search of true love.”

    http://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/1GFkN4deuZU

    http://www.youtube-nocookie.com/v/nU-_95qI66g?hl=en_US&version=3


    Its roots “anima” and “animus” are Latin for breath,soul, and mind.”

    Discussions of animation often involve concepts of
    >>μεταμόρφωση
    >>ανθρωπομορφισμό anthropomorphism
    >>ριζική μεταμόρφωση transmogrification

    >> απο τους νόμους του φυσικού πεδίου.
    >>φαντασία
    >>μίμηση mimesis
    >>πολυμορφικό παραλογισμό των σωμάτων
    the polymorphous perversity of bodies

    >>παραδοξότητα και παραλογισμός.

    “animation” –
    “the act of producing ‘moving 
    pictures’;
    the technique, by means of which 
    movement is given,
    on film, to a series of 
    drawings
    (esp. for an animated cartoon)”


    Τα 
    animated cartoons
    φαίνεται σαν να έχουν 
    ενσωματώσει
    τη θεωρία του 
    Einstein
    για Ασυνέχεια 
    στο χρόνο και στο χώρο


    ΤΑ ΥΛΙΚΑ ΠΟΥ ΑΡΧΙΚΑ ΧΡΗΣΙΜΟΠΟΙΗΘΗΚΑΝ
    Drawings,
    cut-outs,
    models,
    dolls,
    puppets,
    clay,
    projected silhouettes, and
    real objects,
    including
    fluids,
    colored gases and smoke,
    Hand-drawn animation films are made by
    drawing,
    etching,
    scratching,
    painting or
    attaching items directly onto a film’s surface without the use of a camera.











    computer animation

    Chapters

    1.       Pre-Production
    1.1.           Introduction
    1.2.           Storyboarding
    1.3.           Character and Model Design
    1.4.           Sound Design
    1.5.           Technical Tests
    1.6.           Production Scheduling
    2.       Modeling Basics
    2.1.           Introduction
    2.2.           Polygonal Modeling
    2.3.           Splines and Patches
    2.4.           Coordinate Systems
    2.5.           Viewing Windows
    2.6.           Geometric Primitives
    2.7.           Transformations
    2.8.           Common Modeling Techniques
    2.9.           Hierarchies
    2.10.       Booleans and Trims
    2.11.       Basic Deformations
    3.       Rendering Basics
    3.1.           Introduction
    3.2.           The Camera
    3.3.           Lights
    3.4.           Surface Characteristics
    3.5.           Shading Algorithms
    3.6.           Rendering Algorithms
    3.7.           Background Images
    3.8.           Surface Texture Mapping
    3.9.           Solid Texture Mapping
    3.10.       Final Rendering
    4.       Animation Basics
    4.1.           Introduction
    4.2.           Keyframing
    4.3.           Interpolations
    4.4.           Parameter-curve Editing
    4.5.           Dope Sheet Editing
    4.6.           Forward Kinematics
    4.7.           Inverse Kinematics
    4.8.           Motion Paths
    4.9.           Shape Deformations
    4.10.       Camera Animation
    4.11.       Animating Lights and Surface Properties
    4.12.       Pose-based Animation
    5.       Advanced Modeling
    5.1.           Introduction
    5.2.           Virtual Sculpting
    5.3.           Digitizing Techniques
    5.4.           Procedural Modeling
    5.5.           Stitched Patches
    5.6.           Subdivision Surfaces
    5.7.           Displacement Mapping
    5.8.           Hair and Fur
    5.9.           Paint-based Modeling
    5.10.       Higher-level Primitives
    6.       Advanced Rendering
    6.1.           Introduction
    6.2.           Atmospheric Effects
    6.3.           Fractals
    6.4.           Lighting Subtleties
    6.5.           Advanced Texturing
    6.6.           Texturing Polygons
    6.7.           Background Shaders
    6.8.           Non-Photorealistic Rendering
    6.9.           Reflection Maps and Environment Procedures
    6.10.       More Rendering Algorithms
    6.11.       Rendering for Output
    7.       Advanced Animation
    7.1.           Introduction
    7.2.           Animated Fillets
    7.3.           Limits and Constraints
    7.4.           Metaballs
    7.5.           Expressions and Driven Keys
    7.6.           Motion Dynamics: Principles, Rigid Bodies
    7.7.           Soft-Body Dynamics
    7.8.           Particle Systems
    7.9.           Cloth Dynamics
    7.10.       Motion Capture
    7.11.       Camera-Motion Mapping
    7.12.       Character Rigging: Movement Controls
    7.13.       Character Rigging: Deformation Controls    
    7.14.       Facial Animation                                      
    7.15.       Non-Linear Animation
    8.       Post-Production
    8.1.           Introduction
    8.2.           Compositing
    8.3.           Editing










     
























    http://www.youtube-nocookie.com/v/HolxfI4XgCE?hl=en_US&version=3

    http://www.youtube-nocookie.com/v/y__uzGKmxt8?version=3&hl=en_US

    http://www.youtube-nocookie.com/v/HfCDAIIR2Gc?version=3&hl=en_US

    2-3 έτος2D και 3D animation και montage, τεχνικές stop motion, pixellation κ.α.
    1. Σχέδια κλειδιά κίνησης και ενδιάμεσα, οργάνωση του χρόνου.
    2. Το ανθρώπινο περπάτημα
    3. Το ανθρώπινο τρέξιμο και το τρέξιμο στα τετράποδα, εναλλαγή ποδιών
    4. Κινήσεις σε τροχιά
    5. Κινήσεις με φτερά πουλιά, μυθολογικές φιγούρες κλπ
    6. Οι 12 βασικές αρχές του animation
    7. Τεχνικές του animation. Επέκταση χρήσης animation και live action
    8. Τεχνικές stop motion, pixellation
    9. Εργαλεία για την δημιουργία 2D και 3D μοντέλων
    4έτος

     Διαδραστική σύνθεση εικόνας σε πραγματικό χρόνο 

    1. Εισαγωγή στην σύνθεση εικόνας με βάση το Processing
    2. 2d και 3D γραφικά με Processing
    3. Βασικές διαδραστικές τεχνικές με Processing
    4. Επικοινωνία με άλλες εφαρμογές μέσω OSC
    5. Aναγνώριση εικόνας και κίνησης από κάμερα μέσω Processing
    6. Εισαγωγή στον προγραμματισμό συνθεσης εικόνας με openFrameworks
    7. Επικοινωνία μεταξύ λογισμικών ήχου και εικόνας σε πραγματικό χρόνο

     Ήχος 

    1. Εισαγωγή στις αρχές της ψηφιακής σύνθεσης ήχου
    2. Εισαγωγή στον προγραμματισμό ήχου με SuperCollider
    3. Τεχνικές σύνθεσης 1: προσθετική σύνθεση
    4. Μουσικές δομές 1: Εισαγωγή στα patterns
    5. Περιβάλλουσες καμπύλες (Εnvelopes)
    6. Βασικές τεχνικές διάδρασης και Γραφικά εργαλεία διάδρασης
    7. Tεχνικές σύνθεσης 2: Φίλτρα και αφαιρετική σύνθεση
    8. Eργασία με προηχογραφημένα ηχητικά δείγματα (Samples)
    9. OSC και επικοινωνία με άλλες εφαρμογές
    10. Τεχνικές σύνθεσης 3: FM, Wavetables, Granular Synthesis, Physical Modeling, Spectral Modeling





    hetrpias-shp-v-dmt

    Filed under: Notes — admin @ 13:06

    Filed under: Notes — admin @ 13:03

    LA COURSE AU PÉTROLE EN GRÈCE PEUT-ELLE DÉGÉNÉRER EN CONFLIT AVEC LE VOISIN TURC ?

    Engluée dans un marasme économique profond, la Grèce serait sur le point de prospecter ses fonds marins riches en pétrole pour sortir de la crise. Le voisin turc ne l’entend pas de cette oreille.
    On ne le sait pas mais, notre voisin Grec est un petit pays producteur de pétrole. Il produit environ 2000 barils de pétrole par jour soit 0,5 % de ses besoins. Cette proportion pourrait vite augmenter.
    Pour réduire son déficit et sa dépendance envers le marché de l’énergie, le gouvernement de Antonis Samaras semble avoir misé sur l’exploitation de gaz et d’or noir en eau profonde. En effet, plusieurs rapports s’accordent sur la présence d’un possible gisement extrêmement intéressant au sud de la Crète. 
    Même si rien ne confirme pour l’heure son existence, le gouvernement rêve déjà d’un appel d’offres vers les compagnies de forage internationales qui pourraient rapidement sortir la Grèce de sa torpeur économique et sociale.
    La réserve de pétrole pourrait atteindre 100 milliards de Barils.
    Un voisin turc toujours aussi gênant.
    Outre l’incertitude sur la quantité de pétrole enfouie au fond des eaux de la mer Égée, un autre obstacle se dresse devant la Grèce, le voisin turc.
    Source Figaro.fr

    Source : Figaro.fr
    La Grèce s’est déjà querellée avec la Turquie en 2000 après la découverte de réserves de gaz à Chypre. Ce gisement colossale (il peut ravitailler l’île tranquillement pour 150 ans) avait refroidi les relations entre les deux voisins qui s’étaient bien entendu jetés sur les puits d’hydrocarbures. 
     Treize ans plus tard, la Turquie a fait savoir à nouveau qu’elle conteste les possibles exploitations de pétrole en Mer Egée. Elle se veut même menaçante et se dit prête à organiser des manœuvres militaires.
     La Turquie n’a jamais reconnu le plateau continental grec ainsi que les frontières maritimes européennes…Il faut dire que Grecs et Turcs disposaient d’un accord mutuel gelant les prospections énergétiques en Mer Egée.
    Alors que les premiers résultats des forages seront connus d’ici trois ans, le gouvernement grec doit se montrer vigilant sous peine de faire face à une nouvelle crise, diplomatique cette fois-ci.

    vg

    Filed under: Notes — admin @ 11:41
    Professor Jim Al-Khalili investigates one of the most important concepts in the world today – information. He discovers how we harnessed the power of symbols, everything from the first alphabet to the electric telegraph through to the modern digital age. But on this journey he learns that information is not just about human communication, it is woven very profoundly into the fabric of reality

    http://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/FcMRkyoHKeA

    anthropocene

    Filed under: Notes — admin @ 11:33

    [vimeo http://www.vimeo.com/39048998 w=400&h=300]

    watchdogs-game video industry

    Filed under: Notes — admin @ 11:25

    http://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/FcMRkyoHKeA

    Transformations of the urban physical spaces into gamespaces
    Ilias Marmaras
    Artist
    Country: Greece
    URL: www.personalcinema.org
    Email: mbholgr@gmail.com
    In response to the theme of the “Hybrid City” symposium, I propose a talk on the transformations of the urban physical spaces into gamespaces, as a result of the new forms of resistance and political movements.
    My point is that the immersion of virtual worlds and the networks of the digital social media in the recent years have strongly influenced and transformed our perception of the urban landscapes, changed the social relations and gave birth to new forms of political struggle. We cannot talk anymore about separated environments like the “physical” as opposed to the “virtual”, but rather about a fusion that is perceived as a constant change. Consequently, in these new environments identities, subjectivities and performative actions are born and function in a dimension that can be seen and analysed as an ‘’imaginary dimension consisted of new forms of desire production’’ while at the same time older ways of understanding the social and the political power relations and hierarchies should be considered. A fusion that gave form for a period of time to such a gamespace happened in Greece, and especially in Athens, during the riots of December 2008.
    The events that took place during this period can be seen much more clearly if one goes further from the standard political analysis that is usually used to explain the causes and the results of such revolts and political movements by introducing terms and concepts used in the online video games, virtual worlds and in the social media. Terms as single user game, multiuser game or gameplay become very useful in order to understand the forms of participation, the ways of acting and the political demands of these ‘’urban wars’’. In my talk I will present the #griots days by using such terms. I will also depict the streams of information, the emerge of which became possible through the social media and to some extent in the virtual world of Second Life.
    A person who is suffering from compulsive disorder loses the earth under his or her feet, if someone moves something from its pre-fixed position inside his or her ‘’secure universe’’. This obsessed mapping, this identification of oneself through images and forms that represent or simulate the world, aim to effectiveness, aim to guarantee a kind of func24
    tionality. As in 3d videogames the player records the objects that compose the space and reserves them faithfully in her memory, and on this base evolves the suspense of changes and the whole action, in other words the gameplay, same processes run in the real world where the memory that dictates the ‘’why’’ and the ‘’where’’ that in their turn define the position of every object and the roles that we are supposed to play, is the memory that ensures the daily compulsion of maintaining the reality of public space.

    b02-ear-renverser/plnes grvyrd-net-pnt

    Filed under: Notes — admin @ 07:02
    Renverser l'insoutenable - Yves Citton

    Dictature des marchés, politiques d’austérité, inégalités sociales, catastrophes environnementales, crises démocratiques : de toutes parts nous arrivent les signes de la fin d’un monde caractérisé par des pressions insoutenables.
    Yves Citton ébauche un nouveau vocabulaire politique pour renverser cet insoutenable à la fois environnemental, éthique, social, médiatique et psychique. À la croisée de multiples (in)disciplines, cet essai drôle et enlevé prend le contre-pied du misérabilisme ambiant en révélant que le renversement de l’insoutenable est déjà inscrit dans les dynamiques collectives de nos gestes les plus communs. Il esquisse une politique des gestes qui prend sa source entre ces deux questions : Comment faisons-nous pression sans le vouloir ? Comment faire pression en le voulant ?
    Attentif au rôle de l’image et à la circulation des discours, Yves Citton livre ici les moyens de repenser notre place et notre action dans des processus sociaux dont la complexité nous dépasse. Il montre que l’on peut tirer parti des dispositifs médiatiques plutôt que de les subir et que, une fois fait le deuil du Grand Soir, l’urgence est de proposer des alternatives à la politique du pire.
    Yves Citton est professeur de littérature française du XVIIIe siècle à l’université de Grenoble III et membre de l’UMR LIRE. Il a notamment publié Mythocratie. Storytelling et imaginaire de gauche (2010), L’Avenir des humanités (2010) etZazirocratie (2011). Il est codirecteur de la revue Multitudes.

    plnes grvyrd-net-pnt

    surveillance cameras

    Filed under: Notes — admin @ 06:26
    This text is not ours… but is written by us all. It is a subversion with some updates of the Internationale Situationniste Manifesto [1960] plus minor additions borrowed from Marshall McLuhan, Julio Cortázar, Georges Perec and the Invisible Committee. Even though the resulting cocktail must appear explosive, most of their postulates seem urgent in current days when the management of our cities reveal the consequences of following capitalist guidelines more than equity, social and relational criteria. Such management has had its repercussion in the form, the representation and the human interactions within the city [1]. So, this is arena to take actions, we should realize that in the end the crisis is just a way of governing and it’s up to us to legitimate it or not.
    While transcoding implies any loose in the quality on the information due to the transfer between devices or supports, our intention is to generate communicating vessels from such Manifesto to the urban society we are interacting with. In this case, the fragmentary message characteristic of SI provides useful units of atomized information to transcode to contemporary citizens thus facilitating the occurrence of serendipitous connections to strengthen urban networks of dreams, desires, emotions and on site procastination.
    ———————
    “If you’re bored, you’re doing something wrong” 
    —Richard Dawkins
    The existing system cannot subdue the new human force that is increasing day by day alongside the irresistible development of technology and the dissatisfaction of consumerist imposed uses in our senseless social life.
    Distraction in this society cannot be distributed amongst a range of variants, but only rejected en bloc with this very society. The idea of progress has to be suspended until the whole system recover and start pulsing rhythmically with social relations.
    What are the organisational perspectives of life in a society which authentically “reorganises production and distribution on the basis of the free and equal association of the prosumers”? Work would more and more be perceived as means for socialisation of vital goods intended to strengthen social mesh instead of enhancing individualism. Thus liberated from all economic commitments, liberated from all the odious debts and responsibilities from the past, humankind will exude a new surplus value, incalculable in money because it would be impossible to reduce it to the measure of waged work. The guarantee of the liberty of each and of all is in the value of the game, of life freely constructed. The exercise of this collective ludic recreation is the framework of the only guaranteed equality with non-exploitation of man by man. The liberation of the game, its creative autonomy, its latent constructive conflict supersedes the ancient division between imposed work and passive leisure.
    Under the existing dominant society, which produces the miserable pseudo-games of non-participation, a true civic and urban activity is necessarily. The emergence of the species ludens [humans playing interactions in the streets of the city] as if moving within Constant’s New Baylon would leave behind the bourgeois metropolis and generate a megastructure of relations, affections and dissensions. Sometimes it might be classed as criminality. It might be semi-clandestine. Or it even might appears in the form of scandal.
    So what really is the situation? It’s the realisation of a better city, which more exactly is provoked by the human interactions not by increasing infrastructure. A step beyond individualism until reaching awareness of the collective realm:
    From
    Us
    to
    our family
    our neighborhood
    our education
    our job
    our government
    our city
    our regions
    our planet…
    the planet and us within the planet.
    Within this scenario every agent formerly known as architect will become a hacker, i.e., inseparably a producer-consumer of total city creation, which will help the rapid dissolution of the linear criteria of expertise. To address such activity it won’t be necessary to go to Academia… at least in the way we are used to do. Everyone will be a designer [from domestic to urban realm] so to interact, with a multidimensional connection of tendencies, experiences, or radically different “schools” — not successively, but simultaneously.
    Henceforth, we are attending to an autonomous organisation of the prosumers of the new culture, aside from the political and ideological organisations which currently exist, as we all together can dispute institutions’ capacity to organise anything other than the management of that which already exists.
    But institutions cannot prevent what they are not able to imagine. From the moment our collective organisation goes beyond the initial experimental stage and become aware of its critical mass, its most urgent objective should be the seizure of the cities. From there, connected at a world level, subvert the bureaucratisation of cities management now expressing the deep inter-relationship of systems engaged in the conservation and the reproduction of the same obsolete model [even disguised with techno-smart and environmentally friendly discourse].
    The riposte of the revolutionary citizens to these old conditions must be a new type of action. By means of autonomous communes that have been trained in local management of available resources and used to exchange experiences in open source platforms linked to other communities; the next step would be a putsch to the other pillar of the system: the financial framework currently favoring predatory tactics based in speculation and inequity relations between corporations and citizens and also between inhabitants of different regions while leaning their “wellness state” in the spoliation of other regions’ resources. As such financial system is completely destitute of any sensible usage outside our subversive perspective, we find our seizure of this apparatus justified before our contemporaries. And we will have it.
    We are resolved to take over financial system, at least in its world-manipulating form, and in contrary favouring the formation of local trade and exchange networks. Given the financial collapses of the beginning of the XXI century, this would be one of the works which would prove most significant in the clarification of a long series of demands and actions. This financial coup d’etat would led to the suppression of the surplus layer of politics interested more in meet the commitments with private corporations and speculative financial actors rather the service of citizens.
    What would be the main characteristics of the new culture and how would it compare with essential urbanity?
    – Against the spectacle of individual progress, the realised situationist urbanity introduces the recognition of “the other” and its differences as essential step towards collaboration.
    – Against preserved education, it is posed learning through direct experience with relational civic interactions, conflict management and “doing with others” strategies.
    – Against particularised design, it will be a global practice with a bearing, each moment, on all the available elements. Naturally this would tend to collective production which would be without doubt anonymous (the claim of exclusive authorship would reveal suspicious and works will no longer be stocked as commodities but as means to reach collective goals). The minimum proposals of these experiences will be a revolution in behaviour and a dynamic unitary urbanism capable of extension to the entire planet, and may become the key to access to all parallel universes created by a new conscious observation of all micro-ordinary events of the city.
    – Against unilateral art, situationist culture will be an art of dialogue, an art of interaction, an art of conflict as enabling force. The enclosed era of primitivism and isolated design solutions must be superseded by complete communication and open peer to peer tools to reach dynamic equilibrium between opposites in a given urban system.
    At micro-ordinary level, everyone will become a coder generating the conditions for its playful existence to insert and work within the urban system of interactions. It will happen that when opening the door and going where the street begins, it won’t appear the already known houses aligned in the moulded sidewalk, but a living forest where every moment “can be thrown like a magnolia and where the faces will born when looking at them”.[2] This violent emotive possession of the streets will provide exciting treasures for those drifters taking the challenge to explore alien quarters and neighbors.[3]
    We have just move inside what will historically be the evolutive urban dimension. The role of amateur-professional —of adhocrat— is again a specialisation up to the point of social and mental interaction, when everyone becomes a node in the sense that the new system will remain in the strength of its connections. This task will be slowly filtering into to the society without a permanent division of labour, thus generating activities for which we haven’t invented the names yet.
    To those who don’t understand us properly, we say with an irreducible will: “We await the turning point which is the inevitable liquidation of the world of economic progress, in all its fictional forms. Such are our goals, and these will be the future goals of urbanity.”

    THE POST-IDEOLOGICAL MAN
    Léopold Lambert.
    Too often when we evoke the work of George Orwell, we refer only to his two masterpieces, Animal Farm (1945) and Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) which are the least autobiographic of his writings. It results from that an over-emphasis on the literal symbols of those two books. People see video-surveillance cameras in the street and they invoke Big Brother like if it miraculously put a spell on them. Those cameras, however, are only the spectacular part of a much broader biopolitical system that administrates and normalizes behaviors and desires.
    Orwell’s own life is helpful here to determine potential means of resistance to such processes. Whether his books are simply inspired by his life, like for Burmese Days (1934), Keep the Aspidistra Flying (1936) and Coming Up for Air (1939) or frankly autobiographical like in Down and Out in Paris and London (1933), The Road to Wigan Pier (1937) or Homage to Catalonia (1938), his narratives humbly offer us a testimony of uncompromising courage.
    The post-ideology I am evoking in the title of my short text has nothing to do with the one our era chose for itself in a delusional or diverting attempt to declare “the end of history”. In that case, the post-ideology is an ideology itself. The example that Orwell gives us lies more simply in a systematic suspicion of any form of organization that has instigated a sort of moral tribunal within itself. That is why, for example, he always remained at distance of any form of communist or anarchist party even when he was fighting for the POUM (Partido Obrero de Unificación Marxista) during the Spanish Civil War. During the latest, he enrolled the militia “because at that time and in that atmosphere it seemed the only conceivable thing to do”[1].
    We are far from the self-proclaimed post-ideology that ambiguously creates a dangerous relativism to avoid the difficult question of ethics[2]. When he left for Spain, Orwell had no doubt that fighting against fascism is the only thing he has to do; for him it is “common decency”[3]. The evidence of such a fight comes from his systematic refusal to compromise with his ethics, to the point that he could not possibly satisfy himself to write as a mean of resistance. When he decides to experience the life of the poorest in Paris and London, when he examines meticulously the life conditions of Lancashire working class or when he engages himself to a civil war in another country than his, writing is only a way to report retrospectively. Writing is never a substitute to fighting for him, on the contrary of what many of us are often telling ourselves. The post-ideological human is the one that does not need ideology to give him (her) excuses not to think and fight.
    —–
    [1] Orwell, George, Homage to Catalonia, Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2010. P6
    [2] The notion of ethics here has to be understood in an extremely distinct way from the one of morals.
    [3] Orwell, George, Homage to Catalonia, Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2010. P50
    —–

    ΑΝΑΠΑΡΑΣΤΑΣΕΙΣ ΣΕΧΕΔΙΑΣΜΟΣ ΑΝΤΙΚΕΙΜΕΝΟΥ-perspectves-orthgrphics-top view-reprasantation-rn-jn-drwng-dsn-autocad-3dmax

    Filed under: Notes — admin @ 03:08

    *
    σχεδιασμός αντικειμένου:
    τρισδιάστατες αναπαραστάσεις—–http://users.ntua.gr/kdaflos/—–(διάδραση&αντικείμενο)
    the 3d sculptural object—-orientation (light)—– auditorial space (sound)
    3dprinters

    Filed under: Notes — admin @ 02:49
    http://www.archdaily.com/355340/fuel-station-mcdonalds-giorgi-khmaldze/515dd8bab3fc4b2ba700013f_fuel-station-mcdonalds-giorgi-khmaladze_socar_mcdonalds_12-jpg/

    Filed under: Notes — admin @ 02:17

    http://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/OLHuF-CoUWA

    5 Απριλίου 2013

    Filed under: Notes — admin @ 17:52

    This text is not ours… but is written by us all. It is a subversion with some updates of the Internationale Situationniste Manifesto [1960] plus minor additions borrowed from Marshall McLuhan, Julio Cortázar, Georges Perec and the Invisible Committee. Even though the resulting cocktail must appear explosive, most of their postulates seem urgent in current days when the management of our cities reveal the consequences of following capitalist guidelines more than equity, social and relational criteria. Such management has had its repercussion in the form, the representation and the human interactions within the city [1]. So, this is arena to take actions, we should realize that in the end the crisis is just a way of governing and it’s up to us to legitimate it or not.
    While transcoding implies any loose in the quality on the information due to the transfer between devices or supports, our intention is to generate communicating vessels from such Manifesto to the urban society we are interacting with. In this case, the fragmentary message characteristic of SI provides useful units of atomized information to transcode to contemporary citizens thus facilitating the occurrence of serendipitous connections to strengthen urban networks of dreams, desires, emotions and on site procastination.
    ———————
    “If you’re bored, you’re doing something wrong” 
    —Richard Dawkins
    The existing system cannot subdue the new human force that is increasing day by day alongside the irresistible development of technology and the dissatisfaction of consumerist imposed uses in our senseless social life.
    Distraction in this society cannot be distributed amongst a range of variants, but only rejected en bloc with this very society. The idea of progress has to be suspended until the whole system recover and start pulsing rhythmically with social relations.
    What are the organisational perspectives of life in a society which authentically “reorganises production and distribution on the basis of the free and equal association of the prosumers”? Work would more and more be perceived as means for socialisation of vital goods intended to strengthen social mesh instead of enhancing individualism. Thus liberated from all economic commitments, liberated from all the odious debts and responsibilities from the past, humankind will exude a new surplus value, incalculable in money because it would be impossible to reduce it to the measure of waged work. The guarantee of the liberty of each and of all is in the value of the game, of life freely constructed. The exercise of this collective ludic recreation is the framework of the only guaranteed equality with non-exploitation of man by man. The liberation of the game, its creative autonomy, its latent constructive conflict supersedes the ancient division between imposed work and passive leisure.
    Under the existing dominant society, which produces the miserable pseudo-games of non-participation, a true civic and urban activity is necessarily. The emergence of the species ludens [humans playing interactions in the streets of the city] as if moving within Constant’s New Baylon would leave behind the bourgeois metropolis and generate a megastructure of relations, affections and dissensions. Sometimes it might be classed as criminality. It might be semi-clandestine. Or it even might appears in the form of scandal.
    So what really is the situation? It’s the realisation of a better city, which more exactly is provoked by the human interactions not by increasing infrastructure. A step beyond individualism until reaching awareness of the collective realm:
    From
    Us
    to
    our family
    our neighborhood
    our education
    our job
    our government
    our city
    our regions
    our planet…
    the planet and us within the planet.
    Within this scenario every agent formerly known as architect will become a hacker, i.e., inseparably a producer-consumer of total city creation, which will help the rapid dissolution of the linear criteria of expertise. To address such activity it won’t be necessary to go to Academia… at least in the way we are used to do. Everyone will be a designer [from domestic to urban realm] so to interact, with a multidimensional connection of tendencies, experiences, or radically different “schools” — not successively, but simultaneously.
    Henceforth, we are attending to an autonomous organisation of the prosumers of the new culture, aside from the political and ideological organisations which currently exist, as we all together can dispute institutions’ capacity to organise anything other than the management of that which already exists.
    But institutions cannot prevent what they are not able to imagine. From the moment our collective organisation goes beyond the initial experimental stage and become aware of its critical mass, its most urgent objective should be the seizure of the cities. From there, connected at a world level, subvert the bureaucratisation of cities management now expressing the deep inter-relationship of systems engaged in the conservation and the reproduction of the same obsolete model [even disguised with techno-smart and environmentally friendly discourse].
    The riposte of the revolutionary citizens to these old conditions must be a new type of action. By means of autonomous communes that have been trained in local management of available resources and used to exchange experiences in open source platforms linked to other communities; the next step would be a putsch to the other pillar of the system: the financial framework currently favoring predatory tactics based in speculation and inequity relations between corporations and citizens and also between inhabitants of different regions while leaning their “wellness state” in the spoliation of other regions’ resources. As such financial system is completely destitute of any sensible usage outside our subversive perspective, we find our seizure of this apparatus justified before our contemporaries. And we will have it.
    We are resolved to take over financial system, at least in its world-manipulating form, and in contrary favouring the formation of local trade and exchange networks. Given the financial collapses of the beginning of the XXI century, this would be one of the works which would prove most significant in the clarification of a long series of demands and actions. This financial coup d’etat would led to the suppression of the surplus layer of politics interested more in meet the commitments with private corporations and speculative financial actors rather the service of citizens.
    What would be the main characteristics of the new culture and how would it compare with essential urbanity?
    – Against the spectacle of individual progress, the realised situationist urbanity introduces the recognition of “the other” and its differences as essential step towards collaboration.
    – Against preserved education, it is posed learning through direct experience with relational civic interactions, conflict management and “doing with others” strategies.
    – Against particularised design, it will be a global practice with a bearing, each moment, on all the available elements. Naturally this would tend to collective production which would be without doubt anonymous (the claim of exclusive authorship would reveal suspicious and works will no longer be stocked as commodities but as means to reach collective goals). The minimum proposals of these experiences will be a revolution in behaviour and a dynamic unitary urbanism capable of extension to the entire planet, and may become the key to access to all parallel universes created by a new conscious observation of all micro-ordinary events of the city.
    – Against unilateral art, situationist culture will be an art of dialogue, an art of interaction, an art of conflict as enabling force. The enclosed era of primitivism and isolated design solutions must be superseded by complete communication and open peer to peer tools to reach dynamic equilibrium between opposites in a given urban system.
    At micro-ordinary level, everyone will become a coder generating the conditions for its playful existence to insert and work within the urban system of interactions. It will happen that when opening the door and going where the street begins, it won’t appear the already known houses aligned in the moulded sidewalk, but a living forest where every moment “can be thrown like a magnolia and where the faces will born when looking at them”.[2] This violent emotive possession of the streets will provide exciting treasures for those drifters taking the challenge to explore alien quarters and neighbors.[3]
    We have just move inside what will historically be the evolutive urban dimension. The role of amateur-professional —of adhocrat— is again a specialisation up to the point of social and mental interaction, when everyone becomes a node in the sense that the new system will remain in the strength of its connections. This task will be slowly filtering into to the society without a permanent division of labour, thus generating activities for which we haven’t invented the names yet.
    To those who don’t understand us properly, we say with an irreducible will: “We await the turning point which is the inevitable liquidation of the world of economic progress, in all its fictional forms. Such are our goals, and these will be the future goals of urbanity.”
    “It is the business of the future to be dangerous” 
    —A.N. Whitehead
    ———————
    [1] Lara Schrijver. Radical Games. Popping th Bubble of 1960s’ Architecture. NAI Publishers. Rotterdam 2009.
    [2] Julio Cortázar. Historia de Cronopios y Famas. Afaguara. Buenos Aires, Argentina. 1965
    [3] Simon Sadler. The Situationist City. The MIT Press. Cambridge, Massachusetts 1998.
    Transcoding Situationism. Updating dérives around SI Manifesto* has been written for the Think Space CFP and will be presented on the 2nd Think Space UNCONFERENCE [22 – 24 February, 2013. Zagreb, Croatia]

    Filed under: Notes — admin @ 17:51

    Disposophobia | A claim for a “Perec-esque” inventory of urban stuff


    Objects III & IX. Stasus [2011]
    We have been always delighted by the breathtaking descriptions left from the mind of Georges Perec. In his bookThoughts of Sorts it can be found the piece “Notes from the Objects to Be Found on My Desk” an amazing travel through a one square meter surface in between stylographic pens, dictionaries and ashtrays. Perec also describes the way he arranges the stuff on his desk when cleaning and ordering and how everything around there has a conscious or unconscious reason to be, resulting in clear descriptions of real planning of territory.
    The same perception occurs when going through the work of Stasus formed by by James A. Craig and Matt Ozga-Lawn. They are behind the Issue 32 of Pamphlet Architecture by Princeton Architectural Press [1]. This issue features the project “animate landscapes” exploring the resilience of entities understood into the frame of a design process, from the physical space of the studio environment itself, to the embodied potentialities inherent to any objet trouvé. According to their authors they tried to discuss:
    …the resiliencies found in the material context of design work, including the studio space and objects that are manipulated within and interacting with it. We’ll be looking at how these objects may be tested in ways which challenge their inherent meanings and modes of identification, and how such testing may inform a coherent and rigorous design process. We’ll be analysing the resilience of a site, whether a complex urban site such as the one found in Warsaw, or the ‘site’ of a studio.
    In their blog we could find that this project – an experimental film institute – mediates between its postindustrial site in Warsaw and the Edinburgh studio in which it was developed. By identifying, interrogating, and ultimately reinforcing the physical and immaterial conditions of both landscape and studio, Stasus creates a new space that draws on the resilience of its constituent elements. Instigated by this approach, and waiting for the moment to review the pamphlet, we started exploring their site. It can be found there a series of projects dealing with the traces we leave as humans in domestic and urban spaces. The patient collection, description and arrangement tasks give as result an approach to architecture in the way a forensic dissects a body: considering that everything counts and the complete perception of space goes beyond the focused vision and that a crack in the floor is as important as a chapiter; thus blurring the assumed hierarchies of architectural composition.

    Reliquary. Stasus [2009]
    In projects like Reliquary and Objects III & IX Stasus resemble a sort of Perec; a writer collecting fragmentary domestic and urban pieces to arrange narratives resembling nests or sections of piano showing its cords and hammers. This careful compilation and later composition deal us to think on what is going to happen with all the stuff we have been incessantly generating and collecting in our homes and cities. What about all the things we will be unable to fit into our Domesticated Mountains? Our mental fixation to grow indefinitely has spatial urban effects materialized in over measured infrastructures and vacant housing buildings while the capitalist logic keep on generate evictions when seeing humans like “slow payers” instead of “persons”.
    And we keep accumulating. If every age has its favourite neurosis, just like Sylvia Lavin states in Architecture in Extremis, we are still installed in the age of hoarding. And maybe the proposals like those of Stasus are here to respond to the lack of union between architecture and hoarding that Lavin describes surprised. Maybe the time has come to start arranging all our domestic and urban debris in a sort of cabinets of curiosites with its own suggestive and disturbing aesthetics.

    Animated Landscapes I. Stasus [2007-2009]
    Contrary to the cannons of order and efficiency promulgated by human productivist mind frame, our compulsory accumulation activity could be a fertile ground to explore and enhance the rise of new architectural narratives. Again following Lavin:
    Disposophopbia produces architecture that does not consider function to be a generative principle, nor does it find pleasure in playing with program and meaning… Hoarding focuses attention away from both use and representation and toward the materiality of the things instead, subjecting them to a form of design that has its own techniques and logics.

    Animated Landscapes I. Stasus [2007-2009]
    Incorporating or modifying pre existing elements to architecture practice, instead of a tabula rasa approach, is something that appear to us more logic (in the sense of evolution of constructed environment). It has been done in this way from centuries, until industrialisation and urban explosion imposed accumulation of later disposable or underutilized spaces.
    And just like happens in our desk where we forget the stuff around us until some collapse occurs as a cup of coffe spilled on our keyboard. The same happens with the physical layer at urban scale when geological or economical collapse rage our cities: that is when we are forced to make inventories.

    Objects III & IX. Stasus [2011]

    Objects III & IX. Stasus [2011]
    But we don’t need to wait that the next disaster occur. Instead of acting in post-traumatic situations, we can start to describe, know and take care of spaces… just like writers do. With patience, reading every corner, every cornice and every crack. Looking for what happens in the shadows, under the bridges and skyscrapers we have been building all around. Finding pieces and situations to arrange new social and urban compositions with new potentialities just like the resilient spaces proposed by Craig and Ozga-Lawn.
    Under this point of view, we can follow Robert Smithson’s idea of scale [2], when he pointed “A crack in the wall, if viewed in terms of scale, not size, could be called the Grand Canyon. Size determines an object, but scale determines art. A room could be made to take on the immensity of the solar system.” With this understanding we can realize that our intervention in every single space, even the smallest ones, becomes important.
    So quit from standards and conventions, reach the periphery of order in your city where dynamic forces are beating. Rearrange the spaces to interpret that music. Maybe we will find the beauty in nooks and chaos, crossing them with the kind of fascination that John Deakin surely felt when submerging in Bacon’s studio.

    George Dyer photographed by John Deakin at Bacon’s Studio
    Maybe a good way to understand the importance of chaos and periphery and give a sense to our compulsive hoarding [if any] is to read again Sylvia Lavin’s words [3]:
    And while we may not live or die under the weight of architectural ideas that, like a hoarder’s pile of stuff, might be better placed in the trash, we do need to rearrange the inmediate past and curn it into an active and [different] productive archive. Imagining new definitions for architecture that include a bigger category of objects, a broader understanding of work… that engage systems of instability in the processes of design no longer need to weaken architecure’s cultural project but rather could make it more extreme.
    —–
    [1] James A. Craig, Matt Ozga-Lawn. Resilience. Pamphlet Architecture 32, September 2012.
    [2] Robert Smithson, the Collected Writings. University of California Press, April 1996.
    [3] Sylvia Lavin. Architecture In Extremis. LOG 22, June 2011.

    Filed under: Notes — admin @ 17:34

    “Any environmental design task is characterized by an astounding amount of unavailable or indeterminate information.”
    —Nicholas Negroponte, The Architecture Machine
    The North and South Poles are somehow a terra incognita for architects. The harsh conditions of this environments are related more with the power of ideas than materiality, while we are still speculating about how to conquer this territory of the virtually unknown, as Peter Cook pointed on MAP 001 Antartica. These territories, the Artic and the Antartic, has been inspiration for artists, poets, musicians and architects, who have been working to discover the secrets hidden behind the masses of ice that shape these lands.
    With all this facts in mind, it is interesting to revisit some history about built projects in this areas, such as theHalley VI Antartic Research Station or the Princess Elisabeth Station as examples to understand what have been done until now and to speculate on what can be done in the future. We have written before about the fascination of extreme environments and it seems that a good place to start researching about the environmental conditions of this kind of places is Svalbard, an archipelago in the Arctic, which constitutes the northernmost part of Norway. Svalbard is also known because of the Doomsday Vault, an emergency genebank located in the mountains above Longyearbyen or for the SOUSY Svalbard Radar, a so-called “mesosphere-stratosphere-troposphere”, a system to determine atmospheric parameters such as winds and turbulence from a few km altitude to over 100km and at a wide variety of spatial and temporal resolutions.

    2DIMREAL-HLWD-POLTCS-STDESIGN01-DAYS OF GLORY

    Filed under: Notes — admin @ 17:30

    2dim-realism

    Photograph of Mordecai Gorelik’s stage design for Charles Bickford’s stage adaptation of Carl Sandburg’s Casey Jones (Source: “A Locomotive Steals the Show: ‘No.4’ Is Hero of Dramatized ‘Casey Jones'” Life (Mar. 14, 1938), p. 41.) 

    “The white surface descends and the events of the three dimensional stage imperceptibly blend into two-dimensional illusions.”[1]  And so the German sociologist and film critic Sigfried Kracauer describes that moment just after the orchestra stops playing and right before the projectionist screens a film on the movie screen.  Here, it is as if the lowering of the movie screen saves the audience from the orchestra’s musical assault.   And yet Kracauer’s description of film as “two-dimensional illusions” presents something of a problem.  This is because cinematic set design—a broad term describing the various constructions and decorations used to evoke a film’s concepts and ideas—is also about presenting and conjuring the illusion of three dimensions.  Movies and stage plays both rely and capitalize on the audience’s ability to see things in three-dimensional space.  But the ability to manipulate two-dimensional objects to make them appear as three-dimensional objects is also an important aspect of set design.  This manipulation also had political dimensions.

    In a 1947 issue of Hollywood Quarterly, a craft-oriented journal covering the film industry, veteran stage designer Mordecai Gorelik issued a vituperative rant against RKO studio management.  “In some ways the Hollywood treatment of settings cases a revealing sidelight on the general Hollywood approach to reality,” Gorelik writes.[2]   Reminding the reader that a film set is first and foremost a “human environment” and a “highly important, if mute, aspect of the screen story,” Gorelik continues: “What happens to this part of life on its way through the camera lens?  As a Broadway designer who has also worked in pictures (as film production designer), I am bound to report that any attempt to bring reality to movie settings encounters stern resistance on the big lots.”[3]

    Concept Drawing by Mordecai Gorelik for None But the Lonely Heart (RKO, 1944) Image: Gorelik (1947)

    To prove his point that Hollywood producers did not value realism in set design, Gorelik recounted his experiences as a production designer for several RKO films.  He refers to the the original production designs and art department sketches of street scenes from Clifford Odets’ None but the Lonely Heart (1944) as  “cliché” designs executed by a “Prix de Rome type” who was eventually fired.[4]   Odets would eventually hire Gorelik, who then remade the street scene into a “typical example of rattletrap slum housing.”[5]   This was a shabby aesthetic that Gorelik would perfect for other films as well.  Thus for a British production at Ealing Studios, he designed a dark, squat antique store that called attention to “the pathetic smallness and the sordid poverty of the things on sale.”[6]

    Gorelik’s concept sketch for an antique store, Ealing Studios, London. Image: Gorelik (1947)

    Gorelik felt that his designs were openly antagonized.  For Jacques Tourneur’s Eastern Front drama, Days of Glory(1944), another RKO production, Gorelik designed a guerilla encampment made to resemble something that impoverished yet redoubtable Red Army cheloveks would mount in anticipation of a Nazi siege.  Gorelik recounts RKO’s set design philosophy at the time:

    The RKO method was to do a perfect carpentry job with dressed lumber from the studio stockpile and then chop up the result with axes and chisels in order to denote rude construction […] It was my painful duty to interrupt this process and have the stairway built of logs, saplings, charred timber, old doors, and other material that any reasonable person would consider more available under the conditions of the story.[7] 

    Gorelik felt that he was correcting instances of what he labeled “Belasco Naturalism,”[8] a form of “literal reproduction” that amounted to nothing but a “superficial ‘snapshot’ technique without selectivity, style, or dramatic content.”[9]   Gorelik understood that realism could not be achieved “by the literal reproduction of anything”, and thus he advocated a type of documentary quality, an American variant on neorealism’s imprimatur of showing “characters of great humanity caught up in everyday life” in a rich mix of cinematography, writing, and direction that created a cinema based on “the material signs of everyday existence, on the inherent qualities of place, on autobiography, on authentic sentiment.”[10]   This, too, was met with resistance from the studio.  Gorelik continues describing his art director’s heartaches on the set of Days of Glory:

    The same picture called for a peasant cart made of crude lumber.  I found just the right material for it on a nearby ranch – rough boards that had lain for years in the open.  The cart was built at the ranch and was brought to the studio.  Next day I saw it in one of the studio alleys.  It had been painted a fine, spanking battleship gray all over; all texture was gone, and you couldn’t tell the wood from the metal parts.  It became necessary to repaint the cart with artificial wood graining in an effort to restore some of its original appearance.[11] 

    Such anger and disappointment could perhaps be explained by the fact that Gorelik was one of the foremost stage designers in left-wing and radical theater groups during the 1930s. During that time, New Deal legislation initiated many programs in art stewardship, and theatre groups in American large cities took the initiative and started companies that specialized in the production of “social plays” that responded to the economic, social, and political woes spurred by the Great Depression.  In 1935, Gorelik was a member of the Theatre Union, the most well-known Socialist theater outfit of the era. The Union’s organizers were well-versed in contemporary theater trends, and although they were familiar with a poorly-received 1925 New York production of Bertolt Brecht’s The Threepenny Opera, they did not know much about the playwright’s other dramatic works.  Brecht was disliked among other theatre circles, but he also became famous for his film Kuhle Wampe (1932), a piece of anti-fascist agitprop, and along with Kurt Weill, was identified as part of a new generation of anti-Nazi “revolutionary figures.”  Also, by 1935, the once-maligned production of The Threepenny Operawas beginning to be viewed as a critical success.  Through Friedrich Wolf, director of the Theatre Union, and Benno Schneider, artistic director of the Yiddish left-wing theater group ARTEF, the Union arranged for Brecht’s arrival in the United States.  The two were familiar with Brecht’s most recent play, Die Mutter (The Mother) (1935), the playwright’s ambitious adaptation of the Maxim Gorki novel of the same name, and were busy securing rights and financing to produce the first English-language performance of this play.  Like many other German intellectuals of his generation, Brecht was in exile, seeking solace and protection from the burgeoning rise of Nazism in Germany.  Finally, in 1935, Brecht stole away on a worm-ridden dingy from Denmark to New York.  Upon landing, Brecht immediately contacted Wolf and Schneider, ready to begin work on the American production of The Mother.

    Brecht and the Theatre Union did not have an easy relationship.  At first, the production was marred by financial hiccups and major disagreements between Brecht and the show’s producers.  However, the relationship between Brecht and Gorelik was a different matter.  The two became close friends as collaborators.  Gorelik was a devotee of Brecht’s and admired the playwright’s ideas for the set and production design.[12]   When The Mother finally opened on 19 November 1939, the production featured many of the performative elements, such as projection screens, visible lighting apparatuses, and audience-actor participations, commonplace to Brecht’s Lehrstücke, or teaching plays.[13]   There was a small budget for set design for The Mother, but Gorelik nevertheless created a “small revolving stage partitioned through the center” that stood “just under a projection screen.”[14]   Gorelik continues describing his design: “At stage right were two grand pianos.  The stage was illuminated by a row of visible spotlights … The projection screen was in constant use as an editorial commentary.”[15]

    Mordecai Gorelik’s stage design for Brecht’s The Mother (1935). Image: Baxandall (1967).

    Gorelik’s anti-naturalist sentiments can also be traced to his work with Brecht on The Mother.  Brecht notes that American productions (presumably still under the sway of Belasco’s techniques) utilized a form of naturalism that did not serve the revolutionary potentials of theatre.  Brecht continues:

    Naturalism has a revolutionary aspect, for it shows the social conditions which the bourgeois theatre takes great pains to conceal.  Also, a call to fight is sounded, which proves that the fighters exist.  But only in a second phase does proletarian theatre begin, politically and artistically, to qualify itself for it social function.  The first phase shows that the class struggle does exist.  The second shows how it ought to be conducted.[16]

    The professional relationship with Brecht was also productive in other ways, for it was during this time that Gorelik was able to formulate his ideas for New Theatres for Old (1940), a book-length exegesis on this history of stage and set design and the first written treatise of the notion of “Epic Theater.”

    Epic Theater was a kind of experimental dramatic production that featured “a non-illusory style that was designed to impart an explicit socio-political message through the intentional destruction of theatrical verisimilitude.”[17]   At first, this notion may seem paradoxical, but the main idea behind Epic Theater (as with Brecht’s Lehrstücke) was to break down any type of slavish naturalism, unnecessary photorealism, or—to use Gorelik’s own language—literalism that would impede or dilute the essence, or “scenic gestus” of the production.  On the heels of The Mother, productions like Erwin Piscator’s and Lena Goldschmidt’s The Case of Clyde Griffiths (1936) (a stage adaptation of Theodore Dreiser’s An American Tragedy), Paul Green’s Johnny Johnson (1936), George Sklar’s Life and Death of an American (1939), and Marc Blitzstein’s The Cradle Will Rock (1937), used agitprop elements such as “direct appeals to audiences, choral effects, political slogans, non-illusory setting and staging, episodic structure, type characters”[18]  to deliver a clarified message to the audience.

    Gorelik believed that Epic Theatre was the latest and most important event in the evolution of the dramatic arts, a position he vehemently upheld in his New Theatres for Old.  In that book, Gorelik looked to the prehistory of Epic Theatre—Renaissance and Baroque drama—and identified two strains of set and stage design: the conventional and the illusory.  Illusory stage design was in essence a form of symbolism, a form of “attenuated naturalism” that suspended critical judgment and operated under a directive “according to which the environment was reduced to atmosphere, to ‘dreamlike mists,’ [whose] only function of was to create a powerful emotional impression on the beholder.”[19]

    Gorelik, on the other hand, characterized Epic Theater as a type of conventional theater.  Finally, here was a type of theatre that “organized experience into a rational structure” whereby each performance was transformed into an “impartial” forum where “facts were introduced, hypotheses were investigated, and fallacies were exposed.”[20]   Epic Theater relied upon the “objective logic of events” by applying principles of scientific Marxism to bring to drama “the experimental, unprejudiced and precise method of the scientific laboratory.”[21]   For Gorelik, the stage presented an opportunity to bring to light “the temporal affairs of the socio-economic world” and to provide “an instrument for the transvaluation of political consciousness … a means of promoting social change.”[22]   Gorelik did believe, however, that the principles of Epic Theater could be applied to the screen as well:

    No Epic play or film can hope to present facts which will not be questioned, no matter how well supported the evidence may be.  What is significant is the tendency to rely upon facts, to rely upon the objective logic of events rather than upon subjective emotion.[23] 

    But in his 1947 piece for Hollywood Quarterly, Gorelik seems to have made an about-face.  “What of the more subtle use of setting in achieving the style or dramatic content?”[24]  he asks.  Gorelik thus describes another design challenge on the set of None But the Lonely Heart:

    For the back alley of the Fun Fair in Lonely Heart the art factory offered a piece of prosaic naturalism, without regard to the fact that this alley was one of the most romantic locales in the story.  Again I was obliged to redesign, curving the walls of the alley, arching it with trees, placing shadowy hoods over doors and windows.  This shift towards a more poetic imagery was meaningless to the art regime.[25] 

    Perhaps Gorelik’s invocation of curved forms and manipulated shadows is a veiled reference to Hans Poelzig’s architecture and film set designs.  Yet Gorelik’s fluctuations between realism and “poetic imagery” suggests how this landmark figure was trying desperately to be employed by the “Hollywood Art Machinery” that seemed all too eager to reject him.

    This is not to say that global concerns made issues of theatrical realism totally irrelevant.  In 1943, just before Gorelik was working for Odets and Tourneur,  RKO’s “authenticity division” deployed several employees to assist the U.S. Army’s Chemical Warfare Service in building and designing the interiors for the “Typical German and Japanese Test Structures” at Utah’s Dugway Proving Ground.  Acting on information about wood construction techniques and architectural design in Germany and Japan provided by Erich Mendelsohn, Konrad Wachsmann, and Antonin Raymond, the RKO group was only one example of how entertainment and military interests conjoined in service of the war effort.  Gorelik was no exception.  He took up an additional job directing radio plays for the Office of War Information while working as a set designer.  During this time, in 1944, he also began a stint at Douglas Aircraft producing exploded axonometric drawings of airplanes.[26]  And after the war ended, he became a film instructor at a special university for discharged G.I.’s in Biarritz.

    Mordecai Gorelik holding a maquette of his stage design for Casey Jones (Source: “A Locomotive Steals the Show: ‘No.4’ Is Hero of Dramatized ‘Casey Jones'” Life (Mar. 14, 1938), p. 42.)

    Gorelik was fairly well-known.  So was his struggle against what he would call “Belasco Naturalism.”  Such issues of naturalism versus realism on stage are best encapsulated by a review in Life of Charles Bickford’s 1938 stage adaptation of Casey Jones.  The reviewer describes the centerpiece of the stage design: a giant replica locomotive designed by Gorelik (see image at the very top of this post):

    It is made of lath, covered with black velours.  Its fire is a red spotlight.  Its steam is real steam blown by a fan.  Its bell is a sound taken on the New York Central Line.  Its sway is produced by two stagehands operating levers on either end.  Its cost was 81,500.[27]  

    Most of the review features images of Gorelik’s stage design.  And in one instance, a small photograph shows the designer himself, holding a small scale model of the “No.4” locomotive, giving the reader a sense of how a three-dimensional object has been flattened to become more of a two-dimensional one.  The review ends with a poignant jab: “Casey Jones, its locomotive aside, is not a good play but it has the makings of a superb movie.”[28]

    __________________________

    Auras

    See and interact with the world in a new way

    Thanks to Aurasma, every image, object and even place can have its own Aura. Auras can be as simple as a video and a link to a web page or as complex as a lifelike 3D animation. Use the Aurasma app to unlock Auras and share the experience with friends. Or get experimenting and use the simple tools within the app to create and share your own Auras.


    China demolition: A house sits in the middle of a newly built road in Wenling city, China

    Wednesday, November 29, 2006

    ———————————————————————————–

    There was a task, however, for which a similar venture into form and structure would prove beneficial. In 1918, the film director Paul Wegener commissioned Poelzig to design the sets for a third film version of Der Golem (The Golem). Poelzig readily accepted the job – their “shared interests in the mysterious and fantastic” undoubtedly “made the collaboration on The Golem easy and fruitful.” As for the 1920 film, it was Wegener’s third version of the Austrian writer Gustav Meyrink’s 1915 novel of the same name. The novel and the film share very little in terms of story line, with Wegner creating an unusual blend of Jewish mysticism and expressionistic élan. Yet the film has a distinct urban flavor – set in the 16th century it tells the tale of the scrupulous and shrewd Rabbi Löw, the most outspoken of Prague’s Jewish community. In response to a premonition that a terrible disaster would befall Prague’s Jewish population (shortly afterwards, local secular authorities would issue an edict to expel and relocate the city’s Jewish population), Rabbi Löw consults his own circle and they decide to build a Golem, an anthropomorphic clay-hewn monster that will protect the people. However, the monster loses control and begins destroying Prague.

    Along with this wife, the sculptor Marlene Moeschke, Poelzig designed a whole city for Wegener’s production of The Golem. The director did not want Poelzig to design a typical Medieval village. 

    Entrusted with design of “buildings, streets, and interiors which were a formal equivalent of the ideas of mystery and the supernatural which underlie the film,” Poelzig created a three-dimensional space, “a concept foreign to motion pictures up to that time … which forced the camera eye to view it obliquely.”

    The finished sets thus have an angular, exaggerated feel, a true architecture of playacting. The only sense of verisimilitude that Poelzig deploys is not architectural – yet there is a sense that these structures convey a sense of psychological and spiritual dread. 

    For example, in the opening moments of the film, a group of Rabbinic elders watch the stars, awaiting the fateful premonition that a terrible event will befall Prague’s citizens. On a dark-indigo tint screen, a mysterious constellation of stars hovers above an array of sharp, cragged artichoke-shaped silhouettes. 


    There is no way in which a viewer can get a sense of the size or massing of these crags, but in silhouette, they look like a set of broken, upturned teeth.


    Poelzig replicates these angular, pointy motifs in his urban set pieces.

     In a long shot of a Prague city scene, steep, crooked, cracked gables retreat into the distance, creating a successive layering of light and shadow that only serves to frame and surround the masses of city dwellers in the middle. 

    The triangular shapes are twisted and mangled, inadvertently showing the sections of the individual buildings. 

    This layering of light and shadow is more evident in another frame, this one featuring a set of stairs reaching upwards underneath a large, arched bridge. 

    A closer inspection reveals a complex interplay of surfaces – whereas in the previous scene the houses reveal a type of plaster and wood-beam construction, here, it looks as if the surfaces were hand-cut from stone. 

    The tall, pointed, twisted city gate also combines the elements of light, shadow, and rough surface, creating an undulating structure that spins upward in an angle, coming together at a point that mimics the very same artichoke silhouettes from the night scene. 

    Poelzig also uses these elements in set pieces that emphasize landscape. 

    In one scene, for example, the Golem follows Rabbi Löw across a serpentine, rocky bridge.

     Far away, beyond the unseen end of the bridge a city’s gnarled and pointed towers and spires rise in the distance.

     On the side of the bridge, a witness to the curving, malevolent shapes unfurling across the landscape, a stone Madonna holds her own child. 

    The venerated creator and created, mother and child thus gazes on its tragic analogue: a monster following its inattentive creator into an uncertain future.


    The Golem
     can be interpreted as a tragic tale about the relationship between a creator and the maligned offspring created in its image. And this is not insignificant as different variations of this relationship become more and more evident. For example, there is Paul Wegener himself, who played The Golem in all three films. Here, the creator of the film depicts himself as the errant, uncontrollable creation in the movie. Hans Poelzig’s sets for the film are almost an inverse of this relationship. Poelzig’s own errant, maligned “playacting” architectures (such as the “plaster and wire” Schauspielhaus) find a home within the dark, twisted logic of Wegener’s film.







    ———————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————-more info about Hans Poelzig’s arch work———————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————–

    continuing the main theme as it is described above and focusing in the relation among the stage and the gaze, the architecture of the recorded space and the interpratation of the image we should consider the work of the arch Hans Poelzig “The Scenographic Poelzig”

    Like other expressionist architects of his era, including Bruno Taut and Erich Mendelsohn, Hans Poelzig (1869-1936) is of special interest because of the diversity of his projects. On the one hand, Poelzig’s most famous buildings include his Grosses Schauspielhaus (1919) as well as his competition entry for the Salzburg Festspielhaus (1920-1921). These buildings evoke some of Poelzig’s most famous techniques — a determined massing of organic forms, a full deployment of tonal shadows, as well as a distinct “building from the inside”, a result “of thinking, as it were, of the core of the apple before the skin.”
    The Grosses Schauspielhaus deserves some momentary and special analysis as it becomes the alembic through which many of Poelzig’s architectural ideas are distilled and rarified. Specifically, the remarkable contrast between the building’s interior and exterior is worth mentioning. The “Stalactite Grotto”, the Schauspielhaus’ auditorium is perhaps the most-photographed and therefore most well-known part of the building.

    ——————————————————————————————————————————————————————-speira

    From the top of the auditorium, the cupola begins as a small circle. This circle replicates itself, increasing in diameter as it approaches the seating. At each diameter increase, one takes note of a columnar formation, a colonnade (not a stoa) that clings and wraps itself to each level of the cupola. Yet this cladding of “columns” never reaches the next level below. They are perfectly, evenly spaced, but sitting in the auditorium, the interrupted columns give the impression that the cupola is actually comprised of stalactites. The accretion of substances from ages ago does not create these formations, but at least the illusion is there. One could very well think that the building was a cave, a structure formed by the persistent collection of Paleolithic detritus. This conceit continues on to last level, the largest and most outer ring of the cupola, that connects the auditorium seating at a series of supports. These supports, also clad in plaster stalactites, dwindle in size as they meet the ground. As Julius Posener, a student of Poelzig’s, once remarked, “The ‘supports’ do not look convincing.”

    And if these figurative stalactite forms envelop the auditorium, the orchestra, as well as the proscenia, then what of the non-performative circulation spaces? A series of brightly-lit foyers with curved ceilings provide apertures to the grotto. Upon exiting (or entering) the auditorium space, one would certainly notice sets of lighted columns. These columns provide a perfect foil to the auditorium supports inside: instead of dead accreted matter, these supports look like lighted fountains. The grooved cladding runs upwards, as the column thickens, and explode in showers of light that literally drip down the curved ceilings and onto the walls. Yet these forms, expressive as they are, do not do justice to Poelzig’s own conceptual sketches. These depict the forms as columns of pure light, sessile supports blooming (or blowing?) up in phalanxes of fire and light.


    Yet outside, walking toward the main entrance of the Schauspielhaus … a completely different building. Across the street from this entrance, two neoclassical buildings frame the looming Schauspielhaus in back, for Poelzig’s signature building stands meters above these structures. One may very well sense that the Schauspielhaus is therefore a stage, and moving closer toward that building, one notices its dominant verticality. At grade, an arched Romanesque portico greets opens onto the street. The verticality of the arch supports is replicated in a series of taller, narrower, more numerous arches that stretch upwards, meeting an ever-so-slight gabled form. Yet this gable, and these arches are anything but, for they are more pilaster-like in nature, reliefs lightly hewn into the stereotomic weight of the Schauspielhaus’ façade. This small gabled relief just outwards from another gabled shape restraining a series of arches that are over twice as tall as the smaller arches. And finally, toward the top, this part of the building meets a basilica-like structure running along the spine of the roof axis. And, if for a moment, one were to step back to the point of this perambulation, to that point where the neoclassical structures frame the stage that is the Schauspielhaus’ facades, one could very well be overwhelmed by the successive layering of arched elements – a seemingly-infinite regression of vertical lines extending beyond, and reaching upward.


    These inconsistencies – a distinct organic métier in the auditorium, a decidedly classicist formal gesture for the facades – can be linked to Poelzig’s own education. Under the tutelage of Karl Schäfer, Poelzig developed an intense fascination for the structural elements of Renaissance and Gothic architecture. Although his contact with these styles came through the writings of Viollet-le-Duc and Ungewitter, Poelzig cultivated an unusual understanding of the relationship between form and structure.


    Poelzig articulated this relationship in a 1906 speech made in Dresden
     at The Third German Exhibition of Applied Art
     (Die Dritte Deutsche Kunstgewerbe-Austellung). 

    At that time, Poelzig compared the use of historical cladding (and other historicist elements in architecture) as fermentation. This complex metaphor thus described a situation where an architect would use a historical reference without understanding the cultural genesis of that reference – a process comparable to drinking wine whose age had yet to be appreciated (i.e. unfermented wine). The term also described an era – like the one Poelzig worked in – where historic references were in a process of figurative fermentation.

    Again, the issue of cladding held a particular place in Poelzig’s imagination. The indiscriminate and uninformed articulation of surfaces incensed the architect. In 1906, Poelzig thus declared that “a true architecture is not to be achieved with the armoury of decoration, that the problems of modern architecture cannot be mastered by purely external means.

    ” Use of historical (or contemporary) reference for cladding must take into consideration the structural possibilities of glass and steel. A “tectonic solution” must therefore avoid a situation where ” supports remain shapeless and receive merely surface decoration.
    (?proimio LeCourb)


    ” Poelzig continues:

    We also forget that the utilization of structures from earlier times for a building designed to meet the demands of modern life must be accompanies by an unmistakably modern adaptation of these structures, and that the correct use of materials and construction consciously adapted to purpose produce inner advantages that cannot be replaced by decorative embellishments, however skillfully applied.

    However, some critics did not agree that Poelzig put his principles to practice. In 1920, 

    art critic Karl Scheffler (who recommended to Max Reinhardt that Poelzig be hired to design the Schauspielhaus), wrote:

    … for here everything from the first to the last is sham. This colossal, solid looking … building is a glittering stage set, a complicated, artistic, architectural mask of plasterboard. All the elements that seem to be growing, to carry, to support and vault are actually being carried, supported, vaulted. The entire mass of the building is suspended on the old iron frame. The whole thing is a web of wire with plaster thrown on it. The plaster has been modeled and then painted with bold colors. Here even the architecture is playacting. This kind of architecture, thrown up like this, has nothing to do with craftsmanship in the good old-fashioned sense of the word.

    *

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    ‘The Himalayas of the Soul’: The Upanishads

     

    Sunrise over the Himalayas

     

    “If a Bible of India were compiled, … eternal treasures of old wisdom and poetry would enrich the times of to-day. […] Amongst those compositions,…. the Vedas, the Upanishads and the Bhagavad-Gita would rise above the rest like Himalayas of the Spirit of man.” (Introduction of Juan Mascaro’s ‘The Himalayas of the Soul’, 1938)


     The Upanishads were first introduced into Europe around the time of the French revolution, a fact which Carl Jung saw as itself highly symbolic:

    The enthronement of the Goddess of Reason in Notre Dame seems to have been a symbolic gesture of great significance to the Western world- rather like the hewing down of Wotan’s oak by the Christian missionaries. For then, as at the Revolution, no avenging bolt from heaven struck the blasphemer down.
    It is certainly more than an amusing coincidence that just at that time a Frenchman, Anquetil du Perron, was living in India, and, in the early eighteen-hundreds, brought back with him a… collection of fifty Upanishads which gave the Western world its first deep insight into the… mind of the East. To the historian this is mere chance without any factors of cause and effect. But in view of my medical experience I cannot take it as accident. It seems to me rather to satisfy a psychological law whose validity in personal life, at least, is complete. For every piece of conscious life that loses its importance and value- so runs the law- there arises a compensation in the unconscious. We may see in this an analogy to the conservation of energy in the physical world… . […] Now the doctor in me refuses point blank to consider the life of a people as something that does not conform to psychological law. A people, in the doctors eyes, presents only a somewhat more complex picture of psychic life than the individual.
    And so we can draw a parallel: just as in me, a single human being, the darkness calls forth the helpful light, so does it also in the psychic life of a people. In the crowds that poured into Notre Dame, bent on destruction, dark and nameless forces were at work that swept the individual off his feet; these forces worked also upon Anquetil du Perron, and provoked an answer which has come down in history. For he brought the Eastern mind to the West, and its influence upon us we cannot as yet measure. Let us beware of underestimating it! So far, indeed, there is little of it to be seen in Europe on the intellectual surface: some orientalists, one or two Buddhist enthusiasts, and a few sombre celebrities like Madame Blavatsky and Annie Besant. These manifestations make us think of tiny, scattered islands in the ocean of mankind; in reality they are like the peaks of submarine mountain-ranges of considerable size.” (Jung, Modern Man in Search of a Soul, 1932). 

     Arthur Shopenhauer discovered Anquetil du Perron’s annotated Latin translation in 1814, just prior to his writing ‘The World as Will and Representation’ (1818). In the Introduction he wrote:

    the access to [the Vedas], opened to us through the Upanishads, is in my eyes the greatest advantage which this still young century enjoys over previous ones, because I believe that the influence of the Sanscrit literature will penetrate not less deeply than did the revival of Greek literature in the fifteenth century

    Writing in 1868, in his ‘The Philosophy of the Unconscious’, Eduard Von Hartmann said

    the Hindus… have in effect implicitly possessed the whole history of philosophy, presenting in figurative and undeveloped form what we exhibit only too abstractly through only too many writers and volumes.

      Anquetil du Perron, for his part, said of the Upanishads that they represented “the production of the highest human wisdom”.

    The following excerpts were taken from Juan Mascaro’s 1938 translation of the Upanishads titled ‘The Himalayas of the Soul: Translations from the Sanskrit of the Principal Upanishads’, reissued in 1967 as a Penguin paperback with a new introduction with the title ‘The Upanishads’.
    The Milky-Way over the Himalayas


    Isa Upanishads

     

     There are demon-haunted worlds, regions of utter darkness. Whoever in life denies the Spirit falls into that darkness of death.

    Who sees all beings in his own Self, and his own Self in all beings, loses all fear.
    When a sage sees this great Unity and his Self has become all beings, what delusion and what sorrow can ever be near him?

    Into deep darkness fall those who follow the immanent. Into deeper darkness fall those who follow the transcendent.

    O life-giving sun, off-spring of the Lord of creation, solitary seer of heaven! Spread thy light and withdraw thy blinding splendour that I may behold thy radiant form: that Spirit far away within thee is my own inmost Spirit. 

     

    Kena Upanishads  

     

    Who sends the mind to wander afar? Who impells these words? Who is the spirit behind the eye and the ear?
    It is the ear of the ear, the eye of the eye, and the word of words, the mind of mind, and the life of life.

    What cannot be spoken with words, but that wherey words are spoken. […] What cannot be thought with the mind, but that whereby the mind can think. […] What cannot be seen with the eye, but that whereby the eye can see. […] What cannot be heard with the ear, but that whereby the ear can hear.

    He comes to the thought of those who know him beyond thought, not to those who imagine he can be attained by thought. He is unknown to the learned and known to the simple.

    He is seen in Nature in the wonder of a flash of lightning. He comes to the soul in the wonder of a flash of vision. His name is Tadvanam, which translated means ‘the End of love-longing’.


    Katha Upanishads

     

    When the wise rests his mind in contemplation on our God beyond time, who invisibly dwells in the mystery of things and in the heart of man, then he rises above pleasures and sorrow.

    When the wise realize the omnipresent Spirit, who rests invisible and permanent in the impermanent, then they go beyond sorrow.

    The light of the Atman, the Spirit, is invisible, concealed in all beings. It is seen by the seer of the subtle, when their vision is keen and is clear.

    Sages say the path is narrow and difficult to tread, narrow as the edge of a razor.

    When the wise knows that it is through the great and omnipresent Spirit in us that we are conscious in waking or in dreaming, then he goes beyond sorrow.

    There is a Spirit who is awake in our sleep and creates the wonder of dreams. He is Brahman, the Spirit of Light, who in truth is called the Immortal. All the worlds rest on that Spirit and beyond him no one can go.

    As fire, though one, takes new forms in all things that burn, the Spirit, though one, takes new forms in all things that live. He is within all, and is also outside.

    The Tree of Eternity has its roots in heaven above and its branches reach down to earth. It is Brahman, pure Spirit, who in truth is called the Immortal.

    Brahman is seen in a pure soul as in a mirror clear, and also in the Creator’s heaven as clear as light; but in the land of shades as remembrance of dreams, and in the world of spirits as reflections in trembling waters. 

    One hundred and one subtle ways come from the heart. One of them rises to the crown of the head. This is the way that leads to immortality; the others lead to different ends.


    Prasna Upanishads

      

    The sun is life and the moon is matter. 

    ‘Life is the fire that burns and is the sun that gives light.

    Even as a man casts a shadow, so the Spirit casts the shadow of life… .

    In the heart dwells the Atman, the Self. It is the centre of a hundred and one little channels. […] From each one of them come a hundred channels more.

    Rising by one of them, the living power of Udana leads to the heaven of purity by good actions, to the hell of evil by evil actions, and if by both again to this land of man.


    Then Sauryayani Gargya asked: Master… Who is that Spirit that beholds the wonder of dreams? Who enjoys the mystery of sleep with no dreams? Who is that Spirit on whom all the others find rest?
    The sage replied: As when, before darkness falls, the rays of the setting sun seem all to become one in its circle of light, though at the hour of sunrise they all spread out again, even so all the powers of the senses become one in the higher power of the mind. […] Then people say ‘he sleeps’.
    But in the city of the body the fires of life are burning: they sleep not. Apana is like the sacred home-fire for ever kept burning from father to son. 

    Even as birds, O beloved, return to their tree for rest, thus all things find their rest in Atman, the Supreme Spirit.
    All things find their final peace in their inmost Self, the Spirit… .

    As when rivers flowing towards the ocean find there final peace, their name and form disappear, and people speak only of the ocean, even so the… forms of the seer of all flow towards the Spirit and find there final peace, their name and form disappear and people speak only of Spirit. 


    Mundaka Upanishads

     

      Perform them [the actions of devotion] always, O lovers of the true: they are your path of holy action in this world.
    When the flames of the sacred fire are rising, place then in faith the sacred offerings.

    The dancing flames of the sacred fire are seven: the black, the terrific, that which is swift as the mind, that which is dark with smoke, the deep red, the spark-blazing and the luminous omniformed flame.
    If a man begins his sacrifice when the flames are luminous, and considers for the offerings the signs of heaven, then the holy offerings lead him on the rays of the sun where the Lord of all gods has his high dwelling.
    And when on the rays of sunlight the radiant offerings raise him, then they glorify him in words of melody: ‘Welcome’, they say, ‘welcome here. Enjoy the heaven of Brahma won by pure holy actions.’
    But unsafe are the boats of sacrifice to go to the farthest shore… . The unwise who praise them as the highest end go to old age and death again.
    Abiding in the midst of ignorance, but thinking themselves wise and learned, fools aimlessly go hither and thither, like blind led by the blind.

    Imagining religious ritual and gifts of charity as the final good, the unwise see not the Path supreme.

    But those who in purity and faith live in the solitude of the forest, who have wisdom and peace and long not for earthly possessions, those in radiant purity pass through the gates of the sun to the dwelling-place supreme where the Spirit is in Eternity.

    This is the truth: As from a fire aflame thousands of sparks come forth, even so from the Creator an infinity of beings have life and to him return again.
    But the spirit of light above form, never-born, within all, outside all, is in radiance above life and mind, and beyond this creation’s Creator. 


    Mandukya Upanishads

     

    Atman, the Self, has four conditions.
    The first condition is the waking life of outward-moving consciousness, enjoying the…outer gross elements. 
    The second condition is the dreaming life of inner-moving consciousness, enjoying the… subtle inner elements in its own light and solitude.
    The third condition is the sleeping life of silent consciousness when a person has no desires and beholds no dreams. That condition of deep sleep is one of oneness, a mass of silent consciousness made of peace and enjoying peace. 
    This silent consciousness is all-powerful, all-knowing, the inner ruler, the source of all, the beginning and end of all beings. 
    The fourth condition is Atman in his own pure state: the awakened life of supreme consciousness. It is neither outer nor inner consciousness, neither semi-consciousness, nor sleeping-consciousness, neither consciousness nor unconsciousness. 
    This Atman is the eternal Word OM. Its three sounds, A, U, and M, are the first three states of consciousness, and these three states are the three sounds. 
    The first sound A is the first state of waking consciousness, common to all men. 
    The second sound U is the second state of dreaming consciousness. 
    The third sound M is the third state of sleeping consciousness. […] 
    The word OM as one sound is the fourth state of supreme consciousness. It is beyond the senses and is the end of evolution. It is non-duality and love. He goes with his self to the supreme Self who knows this, who knows this. 
         

    Svetesvatara Upanishads

    I sing the songs of olden times with adoration: may my own songs follow the path of the sun. Let all the children of immortality hear me, even those who are in the highest heaven. 
    The chariot of the mind is drawn by wild horses, and those wild horses have to be tamed. 
    These are the imaginary forms that appear before the final vision of Brahman: a mist, a smoke, and a sun; a wind, fire-flies, and a fire; lightnings, a clear crystal, and a moon.
    There is ONE in whose hands is the net of Maya… . He is the same at the time of creation and at the time of dissolution. 
    Like a tree everlasting he [Brahman] stands in the centre of heaven, and his radiance illumines all creation.
    May God, who in the mystery of his vision and power transforms his white radiance into his many-coloured creation, from whom all things come and into whom they all return, grant us the grace of pure vision. 
    There are two birds, two sweet friends, who dwell on the self-same tree. The one eats the fruits thereof, and the other looks on in silence. 
    Of what use is the Rig Veda to one who does not know the Spirit from whom the Rig Veda comes, and in whom all things abide?
    He is… the root and the flower of all things. 
    In the unfolding of his own nature he makes all things blossom into flower and fruit. He gives to them all their fragrance and colour. 
    He is the wandering swan everlasting, the soul of all in the universe, the Spirit of fire inthe ocean of life. 
    If ever for man it were possible to fold the tent of the sky, in that day he might be able to end his sorrow without the help of God.          

    Maitri Upanishads

     

    There is a Spirit who is amongst the things of this world and yet he is above the things of this world. He is clear and pure, in the peace of a void of vastness. He is beyond the life of the body and the mind, never-born, never-dying, everlasting, ever ONE in his own greatness. He is the Spirit whose power gives consciousness to the body: he is the driver of the chariot.
    At the end of the worlds, all things sleep: he alone is awake in Eternity. Then from his infinite space new worlds arise and awake, a universe which is a vastness of thought. In the consciousness of Brahman the universe is, and into him it returns. 
    There is something beyond our mind which abides in silence within our mind. It is the supreme mystery beyond thought. Let one’s mind… rest upon that and not rest on anything else. 
    There are two ways of contemplation of Brahman: in sound and in silence. By sound we go to silence. The sound of Brahman is OM. With OM we go to the End: the silence of Brahman. The End is immortality, union and peace. 
    Even as fire without fuel finds peace in its resting-place, when thoughts become silence the sould finds peace in its own source. 
    …a m ind which longs for truth finds the peace of its own source… . 

    When the mind is silent… then it can enter into a world which is far beyond the mind: the highest End. 

    The mind should be kept in the heart as long as long as it has not reached the Highest End. This is wisdom, and this is liberation. Everything else is only words.  

     

    Kaushitaki Upanishads

     

    When a man is speaking, he cannot be breathing: this is the sacrifice of breath to speech. And when a man is breathing he cannot be speaking: this is the sacrifice of speech to breath. 
    The breath of life is the consciousness of life, and the consciousness of life is the breath of life.  

    Taittiriya Upanishads

     

    If a man places a gulf between himself and God*, this gulf will bring fear. But if a man finds the support of the Invisible and Ineffable, he is free from fear. 
    i.e., ‘The Cloud of Unknowing’, circa late 14th Century.
      

    Chandogya Upanishads

     

    Wherefrom do all these worlds come? They come from space. All beings arise from space, and into space they return: space is indeed their beginning, and space is their final end.

    Even as all leaves come from a stem, all words come from the sound OM. OM is the whole universe. OM is in truth the whole universe.

    There is a Light that shines beyond all things on earth, beyond us all, beyond the heavens, beyond the highest, the very highest heavens. This is the Light that shines in our heart.

    There is a Spirit that is mind and life, light and truth and vast spaces. […]  He enfolds the whole universe, and in silence is loving to all.
    This is the Spirit that is in my heart, smaller than a grain of rice, or a grain of barley, or a grain of mustard-seed, or a grain of canary-seed, or the kernal of a grain of canary-seed. This is the Spirit that is in my heart, greater than the earth, greater than the sky, greater than heaven itself, greater than all these worlds.

    He enfolds the whole universe and in silence is loving to all. This is the Spirit that is in my heart, this is Brahman.

    We should consider that in the inner world Brahman is consciousness; and we should consider that in the outer world Brahman is space. These are the two meditations.

    There lived once a boy, Svetaketu Aruneya by name. One day his father spoke to him in this way: “Svetaketu, go and become a student of sacred wisdom. There is no one in our family who has not studied the holy Vedas and who might only be given the name of Brahman by courtesy.”

    The boy left at the age of twelve, and, having learnt the Vedas, he returned home at the age of twenty-four, very proud of his learning and having a great opinion of himself.

    His father, observing this, said to him: “Svetaketu my boy, you seem to have a great opinion of yourself, and think you are learned, and are proud. Have you asked for the knowledge whereby what is not heard is heard, what is not thought is thought and what is not known is known?”

    “What is that knowledge, father?” Asked Svertaketu.

    “Just as by knowing a lump of clay, my son, all that is clay can be known, since any differences are only words and the reality is clay; Just as by knowing a piece of gold all that is gold can be known since any differences are only words and the reality is only gold…”

    Sventaketu said: “Certainly my honored masters knew not this themselves. If they had known, why would they not have told me? Explain this one to me, father.”

    “So be it, my child. Bring me a fruit of the banyan tree.”
    “Here it is father.”
    “Break it.”
    “It is broken, Sir.”
    “What do you see in it?”
    “Very small seeds, Sir.”
    “Break one of them, my son.”
    “It is broken, Sir.”
    “What do you see in it?”
    “Nothing at all, Sir.”

    Then his father spoke to him: “My son, from the very essence in the seed which you cannot see comes in truth this vast banyan tree. Believe me, my son, an invisible and subtle essence is the Spirit of the whole universe. That is reality. That is Atman. THOU ART THAT.”

    In the centre of the castle of Brahman, our own body, there is a small shrine in the form of a lotus-flower, and within can be found a small space. We should find what dwells there, and we should want to know it.
    And if anyone asks, ‘What is it that dwells in a small shrine in the form of a lotus-flower in the centre of the castle of Brahman? What should we want to find and to know?’ we can answer:
    ‘The little space within the heart is as great as this vast universe. The heavens and the earth are there, and the sun, and the moon, and the stars; fire and lightening and winds are there; and all that now is and all that is not: for the whole universe dwells within our heart.’

    The Milky-way over the Himalayas

    ‘What you see when you look into another person’s eyes, that is the Atman… .’
    ‘And who is he whom we see when we look in water or in a mirror?’
    ‘The same is seen in all…’ 

    ‘The spirit that wanders in joy in the land of dreams, that is the Atman, that is the Immortal beyond fear: that is Brahman.’

    ‘The spirit who is sleeping without dreams inthe silent quietness of deep sleep, that is the Atman, that is the Immortal beyond fear: that is Brahman.’

    The wind has not a body, nor lightning, nor thunder, nor clouds; but when those rise into the higher spheres then they find their body of light. In the same way, when the soul is in silent quietness it arises and leaves the body, and reaching the Spirit Supreme finds there its body of light. 

    Know that when the eye looks into space it is the Spirit of man that sees: the eye is only the organ of sight. […] When one says “I am speaking,” it is the Spirit that speaks: the voice is the organ of speech. When one says “I am hearing,” it is the Spirit that hears: the ear is the organ of hearing. And when one says “I think,” it is the Spirit that things: the mind is the organ of thought. It is because of the light of the Spirit that the human mind can see, and can think, and enjoy…”    


    Brihad-aranyaka Upanishads



    The source of all forms is the eye, for it is by the eye that all forms are seen. The eye is behind all forms, even as Brahman is behind the eye. 

    To Janaka king of Videha came once Yajnavalkya meaning to keep in silence the supreme sercret wisdom. But once, when Janaka and Yajnavalkya had been holding a discussion at the offering of the sacred fire, Yajnavalkya promised to grant the king any wish and the king chose to ask questions according to his desire. 

    What is the Soul? asked… the king of Videha

    Yajnavalkya spoke: 
    It is the consciousness of life. It is the light of the heart. For ever remaining the same, the Spirit of man wanders in the world of waking life and also in the world of dreams. He seems to wander in thought. He seems to wander in joy. 
    But in the rest of deep sleep he goes beyond this world and beyond its fleeting forms.
    For in truth when the Spirit of man comes to life and takes a body, then he is joined with mortal evils; but when at death he goes beyond, then he leaves evil behind.
    The Spirit of man has two dwellings: this world and the world beyond. There is also a third dwelling-place: the land of sleep and dreams. Resting in this borderland the Spirit of man can behold his dwelling in this world and in the other world afar, and wandering in this borderland he beholds behind him the sorrows of this world and in front of him he sees the joys of the beyond. 

    When the Spirit of man retires to rest, he takes with him materials from this all-containing world, and he creates and destroys in his own glory and radiance. Then the Spirit of man shines in his own light.


    Abandoning his body by the gate of dreams, the Spirit beholds in awakening his senses sleeping. Then he takes his own light and returns to his home, this Spirit of golden radiance, the wandering swan everlasting. 
    Leaving his nest below in charge of the breath of life, the immortal Spirit soars afar from his nest. He moves in all regions wherever he loves, this Spirit of golden radiance, the wandering swan everlasting. 

    So they say that one should not wake up a person suddenly, for hard to heal would he be if the Spirit did not return. They say also that dreams are like the waking state, for what is seen when awake is seen again in a dream. What is true is that the Spirit shines in his own light. 

    Even as a great fish swims along the two banks of a river, first along the eastern bank and then the western bank, in the same way the Spirit of man moves along beside his two dwellings: this waking world and the land of sleep and dreams. 

    As a man in the arms of the woman beloved feels only peace all around, even so the Soul in the embrace of Atman, the Spirit of vision, feels only peace all around. 

    …in the ocean of Spirit the seer alone beholding his own immensity. 

    …when the Spirit that lives in the eye has returned to his own source, then the soul knows no more forms. 

    Even as a caterpillar, when coming to the end of a blade of grass, reaches out to another blade of grass and draws itself over to it, in the same way the Soul, leaving the body and unwisdom behind, reaches out to another body and draws itself over to it. 

    The Soul is Brahman, the Eternal. 
    It is made of consciousness and mind: it is made of life and vision.

    As the slough of a snake lies dead upon an ant-hill, even so the mortal body; but the incorporeal immortal Spirit is life and light and Eternity. 

    ‘I have found the small path known of old that stretches far away. By it the sages whoknow the Spirit arise to the regions of heaven and then beyond to liberation.’ 

    …let the lover of Brahman follow wisdom. Let him not ponder on many words, for many words are weariness. 

    This is the world of the Spirit, O king. Thus spoke Yajnavalkya. 
    O Master. Yours is my kingdom and I am yours, said then the king of Videha.     
               

    Stars over the Himalayas

    Filed under: Notes — admin @ 03:50

    http://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/A22DvXLCJmo

    4 Απριλίου 2013

    Foucault–ftis-pssion-madnss-eterotopies-stultifera navis

    Filed under: Notes — admin @ 19:23

    André Devambez (1867-1944), Le seul oiseau qui vole au-dessus des nuages (The Only Bird That Flies Above the Clouds), 1910, H. 45; W. 68cm, © ADAGP, Paris-RMN (Musée d’Orsay)/Hervé Lewandowski. A reproduction of this painting would appear in L’Illustration (September 17, 1910)


    Introduction (‘The Passion of Foucault’, by James Miller, 1992):In an interview years later with the Italian journalist Duccio Trombadori, Foucault spoke with rare candour about the origins and personal significance of Madness and Civilization. Like all his books, it was, he confided, a means of “realizing direct, personal experiences.” “I had had a personal, complex, and direct relationship with madness,” he explained to Trombadori in 1978, “and also with death.”[Foucault] returned to the Hopital Sainte-Anne, one of the biggest and most modern psychiatric facilities in France, this time [not as a patient but] to do research. An unofficial intern, he helped conduct experiments in an electroencephalographic laboratory, learning how to analyze abnormalities in the electrical activity of the brain in order to diagnose brain injuries, epilepsy, and various neurological disorders. He also routinely visited the hospital with his students from the Ecole Normale in order to watch the public examination of patients by young doctors practicing their clinical technique. “I had a very strange status there,” Foucault later recalled. “Nobody worried about what I should be doing; I was free to do anything. I was actually in a position between the staff and the patients.” The ambiguity of his position, one imagines, was also heightened by his own recent brush with madness. “I had been mad enough to study reason,” he later quipped: “I was reasonable enough to study madness.” Maintaining “a distance from the staff,” he began to experience a “kind of malaise.” He spent a lot of time simply watching: “I felt very close to and not very different from the inmates.” He observed the patients, and he observed how the doctors treated them. But “it was only years later when I started writing a book on the history of psychiatry that this malaise, this personal experience, took the form of a historical criticism.”First published in France in 1961, the book had been completed in draft form by 1958, when Foucault left Sweden for a job as cultural attache in Warsaw, Poland. Foucault had done his primary research while living in Uppsala.As the deceptively modest subtitle puts it, the text offers a ‘History of Madness in the Classical Age.’ (As if to emphasize the sober historigraphic aspirations of his work, Foucault in the second French edition replaced the original title with this subtitle.).When Foucault arrived in Sweden in 1955, he had discovered that the library at the University of Uppsala, where he was teaching, contained a trove of documents about the history of psychiatry. He had developed a routine: every day… he disappeared into the archives, trolling for inspiration.What stirred his imagination was varied and often unusual: in the opening pages alone, his footnotes refer readers to a nineteenth-century biography of a saint; an eighteenth-century history of Paris; German, English, and French accounts of leprosariums, most published in the nineteenth century; a sixteenth-century manuscript about hospitals for venereal disease; a 1527 book on penitence and purgatory; the medieval archives of the hospital of Melun; a variety of twentieth-century studies of the sixteenth-century Lowlands painter Hieronymus Bosch; Erasmus’s Praise of Folly; Montaigne’s Essays; Cervantes’ Don Quixote; Shakespeare’s Macbeth; Calvin’s Christian Institutes; and… Antonin Artaud’s strange posthumous work, The Life and Death of Satan the Fool.The text itself sprawls over nearly 600 pages. Flamboyantly learned, it is also deeply personal.A reader’s first impression is of a work of magisterial authority, full of subtle distinctions and meticulous analysis. … bold generealizations are hazarded, only to be hedged, qualified, carefully cicumscribed; the author’s own convictions are insinuated more than argued, with a handful of memorable images leaving an impression that outweighs page after page of detail, often intricate historical documentation.Foucault needed to choose his words carefully, for they would serve several functions simultaneously. A tacit monument to his own effort to “become what one is,” [Nietzsche] the book also had to serve as Foucault’s these principale, roughly the French equivalent of a doctoral dissertation… .Foucault’s own genius- and hermetic complexity of the work it animates- is evident from the outset of Madness and Civilization. Setting the tone for the rest of the book is the stunning first chapter. A bravura feat of symbolic historiography, it weaves together archival research and mythic images in a rich and multifaceted allegory of madness… .Among the first readers of Madness and Civilization were the professors assigned by the Sorbonne to evaluate the learning and scholarship of Foucault’s doctoral thesis. Everyone was dazzled by the author’s erudition and command of hitherto untapped archival sources. Despite reservations that only multiplied the longer they pondered the text, they all appreciated as well its exceptional intelligence. But the book’s central argument- and, even more, its intricate literary form- they found puzzling, even vaguely disturbing.The first scholar to review the massive 943 page typescript was Georges Canguilhem, who had been appointed by the Sorbonne to clear the text for publication… .…if Foucault was right, Canguilhem observed, then “every previous history of the origins of modern psychiatry was vitiated by the anarchonistic illusion that madness was already given- however unnoticed- in human nature.”That Foucault’s hypothesis was historically fruitful, Canguilhem could not deny: the arguments and documentation in Foucault’s manuscript had persuaded him that the development of the scientific concept of madness could not be separated from a history of ‘social ethics’.That Foucault’s… treatment of madness had an unusual kinship with literature was obvious to both Canguilhem and Henri Gouhier, the Sorbonne historian who presided over Foucault’s oral defense of his thesis. Canguilhem, for one, had urged Foucault to tone down his rhetoric and to drop certain passages that seemed to him too sweeping and peremptory, but the younger man had refused. Foucault was wed to the form of his work and would not change a word.The peculiar and highly literary style of the work was, in fact, its single most disquieting feature. During Foucault’s public thesis defense, Gouhier expressed his reservations, noting that the author “thinks in allegories.” Foucault’s thesis, he complained, repeatedly evoked the experience of madness “through mythological concepts” and fictional characters… . “It is these personifications,” Gouhier acutely remarked, “that allow a sort of metaphysical incursion into history, and which in a fashion transform the narrative into epic, and history into an allegorical drama, bringing to life a philosophy.” “Mister Foucault is certainly a writer,” the jury conceded in its offical written report on the oral thesis, but the author’s indisputable talent left his interlocutors feeling uneasy. Again and again, Foucault seemed “to go spontaneously beyond the facts.” Again and again, his style seemed to express “a certain ‘valorization’ of the experience of madness in the light of cases like that of Antonin Artaud.”The Book’s message to historians is clear enough: after reading Madness and Civilization, it is impossible, as Canguilhem immediately grasped, to write a history of mental illness that assumes madness as a biological given. Foucault described Madness and Civilization as being written “under the sun of the great Nietzschean inquiry“. When asked in an interview “Which Nietzsche do you like?” Foucault replied, “Obviously, not the one of Zarathustra, but the one of The Birth of Tragedy, of the Geneology of Morals.”
    Publication history (from ‘Rewriting the History of Madness: Studies in Foucault’s ‘Histoire de la Folie’, Edited by Arthur Still and Irving Velody, 1992)
    Publication history (from ‘Rewriting the History of Madness: Studies in Foucault’s ‘Histoire de la Folie’, Edited by Arthur Still and Irving Velody, 1992)Publication history (from ‘Rewriting the History of Madness: Studies in Foucault’s ‘Histoire de la Folie’, Edited by Arthur Still and Irving Velody, 1992)Foucault’s thesis was published in book form as: Folie et déraison: Histoire de la folie à l’âge classique (Paris: Plon 1961). A truncated pocket edition was published as Histoire de la folie à l’âge classique in 1964 (Paris: UGE) [note: Foucault oversaw the abridgement himself]. The first edition was subsequently reissued in an expanded form by Gallimard in 1972, with a new preface by Foucault, and now included two essays as appendices; but the revised title Histoire de la folie à l’âge classique was retained. Meanwhile, Richard Howard’s translation of the shortened version with some additional material appeared in 1965 under the title Madness and Civilization (New York: Pantheon). Richard Howards translation of the abridged text, ‘Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason’, was the only version available in English until Routledge published a complete translation of the original text, including the new preface and other additional material, in 2006 with the title ‘History of Madness’. “Foucault’s ‘History of Madness'”, Jean Kalfa wrote in the introduction to his translation, “has yet to be read.” In making this selection from the chapter Stultifera Navis I have drawn upon both existing translations, Howard’s translation of the abridged text and Kalfa’s translation of the unabridged text. I have privileged Howard’s translation over Kalfa’s and only used the latter to fill in the gaps left by the former, except in some rare instances where I favoured the second translation to the first, but only after deferring to the French original, so that the result is a hybrid text, an attempt to construct an authoritative version which draws upon the best of both.From the preface to the 1972 edition: “My desire is that this object-event, almost imperceptible among so many others, should recopy, fragment, repeat, simulate and replicate itself, and finally disappear without the person who happened to produce it ever being able to claim the right to be its master…”

    Gallery of images (in chronological order):     Danse Macabre in St. Mary’s Church, Lübecker, by Bernt Notke (destroyed in a bombing raid in 1942)

    Danse Macabre in St. Nicholas’ Church, Tallinn, by Bernt Notke

    Danse Macabre at the Chaise-Dieu, circa 1470.

      The title page of the Office of the Dead from the Hours of René d’Anjou (15th century).

    Thierry Bouts, Hell, 1450.

    Hans Memling, Triptych of Earthly Vanity and Divine Salvation, 1485.

      Death Taking The Pope And The Emperor From The Danse Macabre by Guy Marchant 1486.

    Michaelangelo, The Torment of St. Anthony, circa 1488

    Durer’s Frontpiece to Sabastian Brants Ship of Fools 1494. 

    Bernardino Parenzano, The Temptation of St. Anthony, 1494.

     ‘Of Useless Books’, woodcut for the Latin edition of Brants Ship of Fools, 1497.

    Albert Durer, The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, 1498

    Josse Bade, Navicula Stultarum Mulierum, 1498.
    Hieronymus Bosch, Diptyche with The Ship of fools, circa 1500.
    Hieronymus Bosch, The Temptation of St. Anthony triptych, circa 1505.

    Cranach the Elder, The Temptation of St. Anthony, 1506 

     Marginal drawing of Folly by Hans Holbein in the first edition of Erasmus’s Praise of Folly, 1515.

    Matthias Grunewald, The Temptation of St. Anthony from the Isenheim Altarpiece, 1516.
    Niklaus Manuel Deutsch, The Temptation of St. Anthony, 1520.
    Pieter Bruegel the Elder, The Triumph of Death, circa 1562.
    Pieter Bruegel the Elder, The Lepers, 1568.

    Fools cap world map, c 1590.


    Stultifera Navis-
     
     At the end of the Middle Ages, leprosy disappeared from the Western world. In the margins of the community, at the gates of cities, there stretched wastelands which sickness had ceased to haunt but had left sterile and long uninhabitable. For centuries, these reaches would belong to the non-human. From the fourteenth to the seventeenth century, they would wait, soliciting with strange incantations a new incarnation of disease, another grimace of terror, renewed rites of purification and exclusion.From the High Middle Ages to the end of the Crusades, leprosariums had multiplied their cities of the damned over the entire face of Europe. […] …we shall hear their names again in the history of another sickness… .  A strange disappearance, which was doubtless not the long sought effect of obscure medical practices, but the spontaneous result of segregation and also the consequence, after the Crusades, of the break with the Eastern sources of infection. Leprosy withdrew, leaving derelict these low places and these rites which were intended, not to suppress it, but to keep it at a sacred distance, to fix it in an inverse exhaltation. What doubtless remained longer than leprosy, and would persist when the lazar houses had been empty for years, were the values and images attached to the figure of the leper as well as the meaning of his exclusion, the social importance of that insistent and fearful figure which was not driven off without first being inscribed within a sacred circle.If the leper was removed from the world, and from the community of the Church visible, his existence was yet a constant manifestation of God, since it was a sign both of His anger and of His grace: “My friend,” says the ritual of the Church of Vienne, “it pleaseth Our Lord that thou shouldst be infected with this malady, and thou hast great grace at the hands of Our Lord that he desireth to punish thee for thy iniquities in this world.” And at the very moment when the priest and his assistants drag him out of the church with backward step, the leper is assured that he still bears witness for God: “And howsoever thou mayest be apart from the Church and the company of the Sound, yet art thou not apart from the grace of God.” Brueghel’s lepers attend at a distance, but forever, that climb to Calvary on which the entire people accompanies Christ. Hieratic witnesses of evil, they accomplish their salvation in and by their very exclusion: in a strange reversibility that is the opposite of good works and prayer, they are saved by the hand that is not stretched out. The sinner who abandons the leper at his door opens his way to heaven. “For which have patience in thy malady; for Our Lord hateth thee not because of it, keepeth thee not from his company; but if thou hast patience thou wilt be saved, as was the leper who died before the gate of the rich man and was carried straight to paradise.” Abandonment is his salvation; his exclusion offers him another form of communion.Leprosy disappeared, the leper vanished, or almost, from memory; these structures remained. Often, in these same places, the formulas of exclusion would be repeated, strangely similar two or three centuries later. Poor vagabonds, criminals, and “deranged minds” would take the part played by the leper, and we shall see what salvation was expected from this exclusion, for them and for those who excluded them as well. With an altogether new meaning and in a very different culture, the forms would remain-essentially that major form of a rigorous division which is social exclusion but spiritual reintegration.The role that leprosy had played was first taken by venereal disease. Such diseases were the natural heir to leprosy in the late fifteenth century, and the disease was treated in several leper hospitals. Under Francois I, an attempt was made to confine it to the hospital of the Parish of Saint-Eustache, and then in the parish of Saint-Nicolas, both of which had served as lazar houses. Twice more, under Charles VIII and again in 1559, various buildings and outhouses at Saint-Germain-des-Pres previously used for lepers were converted for venereal diseases. Soon the disease was so common that the construction of special buildings was being considered ‘in certain spacious areas surrounding towns and suburbs, segregated from passers-by’. A new leprosy was born, which took the place of the former, but… these new lepers too struck fear into the hearts of the old.Lepers were far from overjoyed at being forced to share their space with these newcomers to the world of horror: ‘This astonishing and contagious disease is much to be feared: even the lepers themselves reject it in horror, and refuse to permit those who have contracted the disease to keep their company’. But despite their longstanding right to stay in these segregated areas, there were too few of them… , and the venereal, more or less everywhere, had soon taken their place.Yet in the classical age it was not venereal diseases that would take over the role that leprosy had played in medieval culture… . […] It is not in venereal disease that the true heir of leprosy should be sought, but [in madness].But only after a long latency period of almost two centuries did that new obsession take the place of the fear that leprosy had instilled… , and elicit similiar reactions of division, exclusion and purification, which are akin to madness itself. But before madness was brought under control towards the mid-seventeenth century, and before ancient rituals were resuscitated in its honour, it was linked obstinately to many of the major experiences of the Renaissance.A brief overview of this presence and some of the essential figures is now in order.The simplest of these figures is also the most symbolic.Something new appears in the imaginary landscape of the Renaissance; soon it will occupy a privileged place there: the Ship of Fools, a strange “drunken boat” that glides along the calm rivers of the Rhineland and the Flemish canals.The Narrenschiff, of course, is a literary composition, probably borrowed from the old Argonaut cycle, one of the great mythic themes recently revived and rejuvenated, acquiring an institutional aspect in the Burgundy Estates. Fashion favored the composition of these Ships, whose crew of imaginary heroes, ethical models, or social types embarked on a great symbolic voyage which would bring them, if not fortune, then at least the figure of their destiny or their truth. Thus Symphorien Champier composes a Ship of Princes and Battles of Nobility in 1502, then a Ship of Virtuous Ladies in 1503; there is also a Ship of Health, alongside the Blauive Schute of Jacob van Oestvoren in 1413, Sebastian Brant’s Narrenschiff in 1494, and the work of Josse Bade-Stultiferae naviculae scaphae fatuarum mulierum in 1498. Bosch’s painting, of course, belongs to this dream fleet.But of all these romantic or satiric vessels, the Narrenschiff is the only one that had a real existence–  for they did exist, these boats that conveyed their insane cargo from town to town. An itinerant existence was often the lot of the mad. The towns drove them outside their limits; they were allowed to wander in the open countryside, when not entrusted to a group of merchants and pilgrims. The custom was especially frequent in Germany; in Nuremberg, in the first half of the fifteenth century, the presence of 63 madmen had been registered; 31 were driven away; in the fifty years that followed, there are records of 21 more obligatory departures… . Frequently they were handed over to boatmen… . Sometimes the sailors disembarked these bothersome passengers sooner than they had promised… . It is not easy to discover the exact meaning of this custom. One might suppose it was a general means of extradition by which municipalities sent wandering madmen out of their own jurisdiction; a hypothesis which will not in itself account for the facts, since certain madmen, even before special houses were built for them, were admitted to hospitals and cared for as such; at the Hotel-Dieu in Paris, their cots were set up in the dormitories. Moreover, in the majority of the cities of Europe there existed throughout the Middle Ages and the Renaissance a place of detention reserved for the insane; there was for example the Chatelet of Melun or the famous Tour aux Fous in Caen; there were the numberless Narrtunner of Germany, like the gates of Lubeck or the Jungpfer of Hamburg. Madmen were thus not invariably expelled. One might then speculate that among them only foreigners were driven away, each city agreeing to care for those madmen among its own citizens. Do we not in fact find among the account books of certain medieval cities subsidies for madmen or donations made for the care of the insane? However, the problem is not so simple, for there existed gathering places where the madmen, more numerous than elsewhere, were not autoch-thonous. First come the shrines: Saint-Mathurin de Larchant, Saint-Hildevert de Gournay, Besancon, Gheel; pilgrimages to these places were organized, often supported, by cities or hospitals. It is possible that these ships of fools, which haunted the imagination of the entire early Renaissance, were pilgrimage boats, highly symbolic cargoes of madmen in search of their reason: some went down the Rhineland rivers towards Belgium and Gheel; others sailed up the Rhine toward the Jura and Besancon.But other cities, like Nuremberg, were certainly not shrines and yet contained great numbers of madmen- many more, in any case, than could have been furnished by the city itself. These madmen were housed and provided for in the city budget, and yet they were not given treatment; they were simply thrown into prison. We may suppose that in certain important cities- centers of travel and markets- madmen had been brought in considerable numbers by merchants and mariners and ‘lost’ there, thus ridding their native cities of their presence. It may have happened that these places of ‘counterpilgrimage’ have become confused with the places where, on the contrary, the insane were taken as pilgrims. Interest in in cure and in exclusion coincide: madmen were confined in the holy locus of a miracle. It is possible that the village of Gheel developed in this manner- a shrine that became a ward, a holy land where madness hoped for deliverance… .What matters is that the vagabond madmen, the act of driving them away, their departure and embarkation do not assume their entire significance on the plane of social utility or security. Other meanings much closer to rite are certainly present; and we can still discern some traces of them. […] …the expulsion of madmen had become one of a number of ritual exiles.Thus we better understand the curious implication assigned to the navigation of madmen and the prestige attending it. […] …to hand a madman over to sailors was to be permanently sure he would not be prowling beneath the city walls; it made sure that he would go far away; it made him a prisoner of his own departure. But water adds to this the dark mass of its own values; it carries off, but it does more: it purifies. Navigation delivers man to the uncertainty of fate; on water, each of us is in the hands of his own destiny; every embarkation is, potentially, the last. It is for the other world that the madman sets sail in his fools’ boat; it is from the other world that he comes when he disembarks. The madman’s voyage is at once a rigorous division and an absolute Passage. In one sense, it simply develops, across a half-real, half-imaginary geography, the madman’s liminal position on the horizon of medieval concern—a position symbolized and made real at the same time by the madman’s privilege of being confined within the city gates: his exclusion must enclose him; if he cannot and must not have another prison than the threshold itself, he is kept at the point of passage. He is put in the interior of the exterior, and inversely. A highly symbolic position, which will doubtless remain his until our own day, if we are willing to admit that what was formerly a visible fortress of order has now become the castle of our conscience.Water and navigation certainly play this role. Confined on the ship, from which there is no escape, the madman is delivered to the river with its thousand arms, the sea with its thousand roads, to that great uncertainty external to everything. He is a prisoner in the midst of what is the freest, the openest of routes: bound fast at the infinite crossroads. He is the Passenger par excellence: that is, the prisoner of the passage. And the land he will come to is unknown— as is, once he disembarks, the land from which he comes. He has his truth and his homeland only in that fruitless expanse between two countries that cannot belong to him. […] One thing at least is certain: water and madness have long been linked in the dreams of European man.…more than once in the course of time, the same theme reappears: among the mystics of the fifteenth century, it has become the motif of the soul as a skiff, abandoned on the infinite sea of desires, in the sterile field of cares and ignorance, among the mirages of knowledge, amid the unreason of the world—a craft at the mercy of the sea’s great madness, unless it throws out a solid anchor, faith, or raises its spiritual sails so that the breath of God may bring it to port. At the end of the sixteenth century, De Lancre sees in the sea the origin of the demoniacal leanings of an entire people: the hazardous labor of ships, dependence on the stars, hereditary secrets, estrangement from women—the very image of the great, turbulent plain itself makes man lose faith in God and all his attachment to his home; he is then in the hands of the Devil, in the sea of Satan’s ruses. […] …neglecting an immense literature that stretches from Ophelia to the Lorelei, let us note only the great half-anthropological, half-cosmological analyses of Heinroth, which interpret madness as the manifestation in man of an obscure and aquatic element, a dark disorder, a moving chaos, the seed and death of all things, which opposes the mind’s luminous and adult stability.But if the navigation of madmen is linked in the Western mind with so many immemorial motifs, why, so abruptly, in the fifteenth century, is the theme suddenly formulated in literature and iconography? Why does the figure of the Ship of Fools and its insane crew all at once invade the most familiar landscapes? Why, from the old union of water and madness, was this ship born one day, and on just that day?Because it symbolized a great disquiet, suddenly dawning on the horizon of European culture at the end of the Middle Ages. Madness and the madman become major figures, in their ambiguity: menace and mockery, the dizzying unreason of the world, and the feeble ridicule of men.First a whole literature of tales and moral fables, in origin, doubtless, quite remote. But by the end of the Middle Ages, it bulks large: a long series of “follies” which, stigmatizing vices and faults as in the past, no longer attribute them all to pride, to lack of charity, to neglect of Christian virtues, but to a sort of great unreason for which nothing, in fact, is exactly responsible, but which involves everyone in a kind of secret complicity. The denunciation of madness (la folie) becomes the general form of criticism.In farces and sorties, the character of the Madman, the Fool, or the Simpleton assumes more and more importance. He is no longer simply a ridiculous and familiar silhouette in the wings: he stands center stage as the guardian of truth-playing here a role which is the complement and converse of that taken by madness in the tales and the satires. If folly leads each man into a blindness where he is lost, the madman, on the contrary, reminds each man of his truth; in a comedy where each man deceives the other and dupes himself, the madman is comedy to the second degree: the deception of deception; he utters, in his simpleton’s language which makes no show of reason, the words of reason that release, in the comic, the comedy: he speaks love to lovers, the truth of life to the young, the middling reality of things to the proud, to the insolent, and to liars. Even the old feasts of fools, so popular in Flanders and northern Europe, were theatrical events, and organized into social and moral criticism, whatever they may have contained of spontaneous religious parody.In learned literature, too, Madness or Folly was at work, at the very heart of reason and truth. It is Folly which embarks all men without distinction on its insane ship and binds them to the vocation of a common odyssey (Van Oestvoren’s Blauwe Schute, Brant’s Narrenschiff); it is Folly whose baleful reign Thomas Mumer conjures up in his Narrenbeschwonmg; it is Folly which gets the best of Love in Corroz’s satire Centre fol amour, or argues with Love as to which of the two comes first, which of the two makes the other possible, and triumphs in Louise Labe’s dialogue, Debat de folie et d’amour. Folly also has its academic pastimes; it is the object of argument, it contends against itself; it is denounced, and defends itself by claiming that it is closer to happiness and truth than reason, that it is closer to reason than reason itself… . Finally, at the center of all these serious games, the great humanist texts: the Moria rediviva of Flayder and Erasmus’s Praise of Folly. And confronting all these discussions, with their tireless dialectic, confronting these discourses constantly reworded and reworked, a long dynasty of images, from Hieronymus Bosch with The Cure of Madness and The Ship of Fools, down to Brueghel and his Dulle Griet, woodcuts and engravings transcribe what the theater, what literature and art have already taken up: the intermingled themes of the Feast and of the Dance of Fools. Indeed, from the fifteenth century on, the face of madness has haunted the imagination of Western man.A sequence of Dates speaks for itself: the Dance of Death in the Cimetiere des Innocents doubtless dates from the first years of the fifteenth century, the one in the Chaise-Dieu was probably composed around 1460; and it was in 1485 that Gyuot Marchant published his Danse Macarbe. These sixty years, certainly, were dominated by all this grinning imagery of death. And it was in 1494 that Brant wrote the Narrenschiff; in 1497 it was translated inot Latin. In the very last years of the century Hieronymus Bosch painted his Ship of Fools. The Praise of Folly dates from 1509. The order of succession is clear.Up to the second half of the fifteenth century, or even a little beyond, the theme of death reigns alone. The end of man, the end of time bear the face of pestilence and war. What overhangs human existence is this conclusion and this order from which nothing escapes. The presence that threatens even within this world is a fleshless one. Then in the last years of the century this enormous uneasiness turns on itself; the mockery of madness replaces death and its solemnity. From the discovery of that necessity which inevitably reduces man to nothing, we have shifted to the scornful contemplation of that nothing which is existence itself. Fear in the face of the absolute limit of death turns inward in continuous irony; man disarms it in advance, making it an object of derision by giving it an everyday, tamed form, by constantly renewing it in the spectacle of life, by scattering it throughout the vices, the difficulties, and the absurdities of all men. Death’s annihilation is no longer anything because it was already everything, because life itself was only futility, vain words, a squabble of cap and bells. The head that will become the skull is already empty. Madness is the deja-la of death. But it is also its vanquished presence, evaded in those everyday signs which, announcing that death reigns already, indicate that its prey will be a sorry prize indeed. What death unmasks was never more than a mask; to discover the grin of the skeleton, one need only lift off something that was neither beauty nor truth, but only a plaster and tinsel face. From the vain mask to the corpse, the same smile persists. But when the madman laughs, he already laughs with the laugh of death; the lunatic, anticipating the macabre, has disarmed it.The substitution of the theme of madness for that of death does not mark a break, but rather a torsion within the same anxiety. What is in question is still the nothingness of existence, but this nothingness is no longer considered an external, final term, both threat and conclusion; it is experienced from within as a continuous and constant form of existence. And where once man’s madness had been not to see that death’s term was approaching, so that it was necessary to recall him to wisdom with the spectacle of death, now wisdom consisted of denouncing madness everywhere, teaching men that they were no more than dead men already, and that if the end was near, it was to the degree that madness, become universal, would be one and the same with death itself. This is what Eustache Desbchamps prophesies:We are cowardly and weak, Covetous, old, evil-tongued.Fools are all I see, in truth.The end is near, All goes ill…   The elements are now reversed. It is no longer the end of time and of the world which will show retrospectively that men were mad not to have been prepared for them; it is the tide of madness, its secret invasion, that shows that the world is near its final catastrophe; it is man’s insanity that invokes and makes necessary the world’s end.In its various forms—plastic or literary—this experience of madness seems extremely coherent. Painting and text constantly refer to one  another— commentary here and illustration there. We find the same theme of the Narrentanz over and over in popular festivals, in theatrical performances, in engravings and woodcuts, and the entire last part of the Praise of Folly is constructed on the model of a long dance of madmen in which each profession and each estate parades in turn to form the great round of unreason. It is likely that in Bosch’s Temptation of Saint Anthony in Lisbon, many figures of the fantastic fauna which invade the canvas are borrowed from traditional masks; some perhaps are transferred from the Malleus maleficarum. As for the famous Ship of Fools, is it not a direct translation of Brant’s Narrenschiff, whose tide it bears, and of which it seems to illustrate quite precisely canto XXVII, also consecrated to stigmatizing “drunkards and gluttons”? It has even been suggested that Bosch’s painting was part of a series of pictures illustrating the principal cantos of Brant’s poem.As a matter of fact, we must not be misled by what appears to be a strict continuity in these themes, nor imagine more than is revealed by history itself. It is unlikely that an analysis like the one Emile Male worked out for the preceding epochs, especially apropos of the theme of death, could be repeated. Between word and image, between what is depicted by language and what is uttered by plastic form, the unity begins to dissolve; a single and identical meaning is not immediately common to them. And if it is true that the image still has the function of speaking, of transmitting something consubstantial with language, we must recognize that it already no longer says the same thing; and that by its own plastic values painting engages in an experiment that will take it farther and farther from language, whatever the superficial identity of the theme. Figure and speech still illustrate the same fable of folly in the same moral world, but already they take two different directions, indicating, in a still barely perceptible scission, what will be the great line of cleavage in the Western experience of madness.The dawn of madness on the horizon the Renaissance is first perceptible in the decay of Gothic symbolism; as if that world, whose network of spiritual meanings was so close-knit, had begun to unravel, showing faces whose meaning was no longer clear except in the forms of madness. The Gothic forms persist for a time, but little by little they grow silent, cease to .. teach anything but their own fantastic presence, transcending all possible language (though still familiar to the eye). Freed from wisdom and from the teaching that organized it, the image begins to gravitate about its own madness.Paradoxically, this liberation derives from a proliferation of meaning, from a self-multiplication of significance, weaving relationships so numerous, so intertwined, so rich, that they can no longer be deciphered except in the esoterism of knowledge. Things themselves become so burdened with attributes, signs, allusions that they finally lose their own form. Meaning is no longer read in an immediate perception, the figure no longer speaks for itself; between the knowledge which animates it and the form into which it is transposed, a gap widens. It is free for the dream. One book bears witness to meaning’s proliferation at the end of the Gothic world, the Speculum humanae salvationis, which, beyond all the correspondences established by the patristic tradition, elaborates, between the Old and the New Testament, a symbolism not on the order of Prophecy, but deriving from an equivalence of imagery. The Passion of Christ is not prefigured only by the sacrifice of Abraham; it is surrounded by all the glories of torture and its innumerable dreams; Tubal the blacksmith and Isaiah’s wheel take their places around the Cross, forming beyond all the lessons of the sacrifice the fantastic tableau of savagery, of tormented bodies, and of suffering. Thus the image is burdened with supplementary meanings, and forced to express them. And dreams, madness, the unreasonable can also slip into this excess of meaning. The symbolic figures easily become nightmare silhouettes. Witness that old image of wisdom so often translated, in German engravings, by a longnecked bird whose thoughts, rising slowly from heart to head, have time to be weighed and reflected on; a symbol whose values are blunted by being overemphasized: the long path of reflection becomes in the image the alembic of a subtle learning, an instrument which distills quintessences. The neck of the Gutemensch is endlessly elongated, the better to illustrate, beyond wisdom, all the real mediations of knowledge; and the symbolic man becomes a fantastic bird whose disproportionate neck folds a thousand times upon itself—an insane being, halfway between animal and thing, closer to the charms of an image than to the rigor of a meaning. This symbolic wisdom is a prisoner of the madness of dreams.A fundamental conversion of the world of images: the constraint of a multiplied meaning liberates that world from the control of form. So many diverse meanings are established beneath the surface of the image that it presents only an enigmatic face. And its power is no longer to teach but to fascinate. Characteristic is the evolution of the famous gryllos already familiar to the Middle Ages in the English psalters, and at Chartres and Bourges. It taught, then, how the soul of desiring man had become a prisoner of the beast; these grotesque faces set in the bellies of monsters belonged to the world of the great Platonic metaphor and denounced the spirit’s corruption in the folly of sin. But in the fifteenth century the gryllos, image of human madness, becomes one of the preferred figures in the countless Temptations. What assails the hermit’stranquility is not objects of desire, but these hermetic, demented forms which have risen from a dream, and remain silent and furtive on the surface of a world. In the Lisbon Temptation, facing Saint Anthony sits one of these figures born of madness, of its solitude, of its penitence, of its privations; a wan smile lights this bodiless face, the pure presence of anxiety in the form of an agile grimace. Now it is exactly this nightmare silhouette that is at once the subject and object of the temptation; it is this figure which fascinates the gaze of the ascetic— both are prisoners of a kind of mirror interrogation, which remains unanswered in a silence inhabited only by the monstrous swarm that surrounds them. The gryllos no longer recalls man, by its satiric form, to his spiritual vocation forgotten in the folly of desire. It is madness become Temptation; all it embodies of the impossible, the fantastic, the inhuman, all that suggests the unnatural, the writhing of an insane presence on the earth’s surface-all this is precisely what gives the gryllos its strange power. The freedom, however frightening, of his dreams, the hallucinations of his madness, have more power of attraction for fifteenth-century man than the desirable reality of the flesh.What then is this fascination which now operates through the images of madness?First, man finds in these fantastic figures one of the secrets and one of the vocations of his nature. In the thought of the Middle Ages, the legions of animals, named once and for all by Adam, symbolically bear the values of humanity. But at the beginning of the Renaissance, the relations with animality are reversed; the beast is set free; it escapes the world of legend and moral illustration to acquire a fantastic nature of its own. And by an astonishing reversal, it is now the animal that will stalk man, capture him, and reveal him to his own truth. Impossible animals, issuing from a demented imagination, become the secret nature of man; and when on the Last Day sinful man appears in his hideous nakedness, we see that he has the monstrous shape of a delirious animal; these are the screech owls whose toad bodies combine, in Thierry Bouts’s Hell, with the nakedness of the damned; these are Stephan Lochner’s winged insects with cats’ heads, sphinxes with beetles’ wing cases, birds whose wings are as disturbing and as avid as hands; this is the great beast of prey with knotty fingers that figures in Matthias Grunewald’s Temptation. Animality has escaped domestication by human symbols and values; and it is animality that reveals the dark rage, the sterile madness that lie in men’s hearts.At the opposite pole to this nature of shadows, madness fascinates because it is knowledge. It is knowledge, first, because all these absurd figures are in reality elements of a difficult, hermetic, esoteric learning. These strange forms are situated, from the first, in the space of the Great Secret, and the Saint Anthony who is tempted by them is not a victim of the violence of desire but of the much more insidious lure of curiosity; he is tempted by that distant and intimate knowledge which is offered, and at the same time evaded, by the smile of the gryllos; his backward movement is nothing but that step by which he keeps from crossing the forbidden limits of knowledge; he knows already— and that is his temptation—what Jerome Cardan will say later: “Wisdom, like other precious substances, must be torn from the bowels of the earth.” This knowledge, so inaccessible, so formidable, the Fool, in his innocent idiocy, already possesses. While the man of reason and wisdom perceives only fragmentary and all the more unnerving images of it, the Fool bears it intact as an unbroken sphere: that crystal ball which for all others is empty is in his eyes filled with the density of an invisible knowledge. Brueghel mocks the sick man who tries to penetrate this crystal sphere, but it is this iridescent bubble of knowledge—an absurd but infinitely precious lantern—that sways at the end of the stick Dulle Griet bears on her shoulder. And it is this sphere which figures on the reverse of the Garden of Delights. Another symbol of knowledge, the tree (the forbidden tree, the tree of promised immortality and of sin), once planted in the heart of the earthly paradise, has been uprooted and now forms the mast of the Ship of Fools, as seen in the engraving that illustrates Josse Bade’s Stultiferae Naviculae; it is this tree, without a doubt, that sways over Bosch’s Ship of Fools.What does it presage, this wisdom of fools? Doubtless, since it is a forbidden wisdom, it presages both the reign of Satan and the end of the world; ultimate bliss and supreme punishment; omnipotence on earth and the infernal fall. The Ship of Fools sails through a landscape of delights, where all is offered to desire, a sort of renewed paradise, since here man no longer knows either suffering or need; and yet he has not recovered his innocence. This false happiness is the diabolical triumph of the Antichrist; it is the End, already at hand. Apocalyptic dreams are not new, it is true, in the fifteenth century; they are, however, very different in nature from what they had been earlier. The delicately fantastic iconography of the fourteenth century, where castles are toppled like dice, where the Beast is always the traditional dragon held at bay by the Virgin, in short where the order of God and its imminent victory are always apparent, gives way to a vision of the world where all wisdom is annihilated. This is the great witches’ Sabbath of nature: mountains melt and become plains, the earth vomits up the dead and bones tumble out of tombs; the stars fall, the earth catches fire, all life withers and comes to death. The end has no value as passage and promise; it is the advent of a night in which the world’s old reason is engulfed. It is enough to look at Durer’s Horsemen of the Apocalypse, sent by God Himself: these are no angels of triumph and reconciliation; these are no heralds of serene justice, but the disheveled warriors of a mad vengeance. The world sinks into universal Fury. Victory is neither God’s nor the Devil’s: it belongs to Madness.On all sides, madness fascinates man. The fantastic images it generates are not fleeting appearances that quickly disappear from the surface of things. By a strange paradox, what is born from the strangest delirium was already hidden, like a secret, like an inaccessible truth, in the bowels of the earth. […] In such images— and this is doubtless what gives them their weight, what imposes such great coherence on their fantasy—the Renaissance has expressed what it apprehended of the threats and secrets of the world.During the same period, the literary, philosophical, and moral themes of madness are in an altogether different vein.The Middle Ages had given madness, or folly, a place in the hierarchy of vices. Beginning with the thirteenth century, it is customarily ranked among the wicked soldiers of the psychomachy. It figures, at Paris as at Amiens, among the evil soldiery, and is among the twelve dualities that dispute the sovereignty of the human soul: Faith and Idolatry, Hope and Despair, Charity and Avarice, Chastity and Lust, Prudence and Folly, Patience and Anger, Gentleness and Harshness, Concord and Discord, Obedience and Rebellion, Perseverance and Inconstancy, Fortitude and Cowardice, Humility and Pride. In the Renaissance, Folly leaves this modest place and comes to the fore. Whereas according to Hugues de Saint-Victor the genealogical tree of the Vices, that of the Old Adam, had pride as its root, Folly now leads the joyous throng of all human weaknesses. Uncontested coryphaeus, she guides them, sweeps them on, and names them: “Recognize them here, in the group of my companions…. She whose brows are drawn is Philautia (Self-Love). She whom you see laugh with her eyes and applaud with her hands is Colacia (Flattery). She who seems half asleep is Lethe (Forgetfulness). She who leans upon her elbows and folds her hands is Misoponia (Sloth). She who is crowned with roses and anointed with perfume is Hedonia (Sensuality). She whose eyes wander without seeing is Anoia (Stupidity). She whose abundant flesh has the hue of flowers is Tryphe (Indolence). And here among these young women are two gods: the god of Good Cheer and the god of Deep Sleep.” The absolute privilege of Folly is to reign over whatever is bad in man.  […] Louise Labe merely follows Erasmus when she has Mercury implore the gods: “Do not let that beautiful Lady [recalling Erasmus’ personification of Folly as a woman] perish who has given you so much pleasure.”But this new royalty has little in common with the dark reign of which we were just speaking and which communicated with the great tragic powers of this world.True, madness attracts, but it does not fascinate. It rules all that is easy, joyous, frivolous in the world. It is madness, folly, which makes men “sport and rejoice,”… . All within it is brilliant surface: no enigma is concealed.No doubt, madness has something to do with the strange paths of knowledge. The first canto of Brant’s poem is devoted to books and scholars; and in the engraving which illustrates this passage in the Latin edition of 1497, we see enthroned upon his bristling cathedra of books the Magister who wears behind his doctoral cap a fool’s cap sewn with bells. Erasmus, in his dance of fools, reserves a large place for scholars: after the Grammarians, the Poets, Rhetoricians, and Writers, come the Jurists; after them, the “Philosophers respectable in beard and mantle”; finally the numberless troop of the Theologians. But if knowledge is so important in madness, it is not because the latter can control the secrets of knowledge; on the contrary, madness is the punishment of a disorderly and useless science. If madness is the truth of knowledge, it is because knowledge is absurd, and instead of addressing itself to the great book of experience, loses its way in the dust of books and in idle debate; learning becomes madness through the very excess of false learning.O ye learned men, who bear great names,Look back at the ancient fathers, learned in the law.They did not weigh dogmas in shining white books,But fed their thirsty hearts with natural skill. (Sebastian Brant, Stultifera Navis, Latin Translation) According to the theme long familiar to popular satire, madness appears here as the comic punishment of knowledge and its ignorant presumption.In a general way, then, madness is not linked to the world and its subterranean forms, but rather to man, to his weaknesses, dreams, and illusions. Whatever obscure cosmic manifestation there was inmadness as seen by Bosch is wiped out in Erasmus; madness no longer lies in wait for mankind at the four comers of the earth; it insinuates itself within man, or rather it is a subtle rapport that manmaintains with himself. The mythological personification of madness in Erasmus is only a literary device. In fact, only “follies” exist—human forms of madness: “I count as many images as thereare men”; one need only glance at states, even the wisest and best governed: “So many forms of madness abound there, and each day sees so many new ones born, that a thousand Democrituses would not suffice to mock them.” There is no madness but that which is in every man, since it is man who constitutes madness in the attachment he bears for himself and by the illusions he entertains.Philautia is the first figure Folly leads out in her dance, but that is because they are linked by a privileged relation: self-attachment is the first sign of madness, but it is because man is attached to himself that he accepts error as truth, lies as reality, violence and ugliness as beauty and justice. “This man, uglier than a monkey, imagines himself handsome as Nereus; that one thinks he is Euclid because he has traced three lines with a compass; that other one thinks he can sing like Hermogenes, whereas he is the ass before the lyre, and his voice sounds as false as that of the rooster peckinghis hen.” In this delusive attachment to himself, man generates his madness like a mirage. The symbol of madness will henceforth be that mirror which, without reflecting anything real, will secretly offer the man who observes himself in it the dream of his own presumption. Madness deals not so much with truth and the world, as with man and whatever truth about himself he is able to perceive.In the domain of literary and philosophic expression, the experience of madness in the fifteenth century generally takes the form of moral satire. Nothing suggests those great threats of invasion that haunted the imagination of the painters. On the contrary, great pains are taken to ward it off; one does not speak of such things. Erasmus turns our gaze from that insanity “which the Furies let slip from hell, each time they release their serpents”; it is not these insane forms that he has chosen to praise, but the “sweet illusion” that frees the soul from “its painful cares and returns it to the various forms of sensuality.” This calm world is easily mastered; it readily yields its naive mysteries to the eyes of the wise man, and the latter, by laughter, always keeps his distance. Whereas Bosch, Brueghel, and Durer were terribly earth-bound spectators, implicated in that madness they saw surging around them, Erasmus observes it from far enough away to be out of danger; he observes it from the heights of his Olympus, and if he sings its praises, it is because he can laugh at it with the inextinguishable laughter of the Gods. For the madness of men is a divine spectacle: “In fact, could one make observations from the Moon, as did Menippus, considering the numberless agitations of the Earth, one would think one saw a swarm of flies or gnats fighting among themselves, struggling and laying traps, stealing from one another, playing, gambling, falling, and dying, and one would not believe the troubles, the tragedies that were produced by such a minute animalcule destined to perish so shortly.” Madness is no longer the familiar foreignness of the world; it is merely a commonplace spectacle for the foreign spectator; no longer a figure of the cosmos, but a characteristic of the aevum.For his contemporaries and for the generations that followed, Bosch was above all a moralist, and his work was a series of moral lessons. His figures were born of this world, but they demonstrated the monstrous contents of the human heart. ‘The difference between the paintings of this man and those of others is that others usually portray man as he appears from the outside: Bosch alone dares paint them as they are within,’ said Joseph de Siguenca. And it was that unsettling irony, that desire of wisdom to denounce all folly, that the same early seventeenth-century commentator saw in almost all of Bosch’s paintings, in the clear symbolism of the burning torch (the never-sleeping vigil of contemplative thought) and the owl, whose strange, fixed stare ‘keeps watch in the calm and the silence of the night, consuming oil, not wine.’The paths taken by the figure of the cosmic vision and the incisive movement that is moral reflection, between the tragic and the critical elements, now constantly diverge, creating a gap in the fabric of the experience of madness that will never be repaired. On the one side is the ship of fools, where mad faces slowly slip away into the night of the world, in landscapes that speak of strange alchemies of knowledge, of the dark menace of bestiality, and the end of time. On the other is the ship of fools that is merely there for the instruction of the wise, an exemplary, didactic odyssey whose purpose is to highlight faults in the human character.For [‘Bosch, Brueghel, Thierry Bouts and Durer’] madness unleashes its fury in the space of pure vision.  Fantasies and threats, the fleeting fragments of dreams and the secret destiny of the world, where madness has a primitive, prophetic force, revealing that the dream-like is real and that a thin surface of illusion opens onto bottomless depths, and that the glittering surface of images opens the way to worrying figures that shine forever in the darkness. The inverse relation, no less painful, is that the reality of the world will one day be absorbed into the fantastic Image, at that delirious moment between being and nothingness which is pure destruction. When at last the world will be no more, but night and silence have not yet closed over, and all will flame up in a blinding flash, in the extremity of disorder that will precede the ordered monotony of the end of all things. The truth of the world resides in that last fleeting image. This weave of experience and secrecy, of immediate images and hidden enigmas, is unfurled in fifteenth-century painting as the tragic madness of the world.By contrast, in Brant, Erasmus and the whole humanist tradition, madness is confined to the universe of discourse. […] For… [the man of wisdom], it becomes a mere object, and in the worst possible manner, as it often winds up an object of ridicule: they tamed it by the act of praising it.This conflict between critical consciousness and tragic experience underlies all that was felt and formulated on the theme of madness at the beginning of the Renaissance. But it was short-live, and a century later, this grandiose structure, which at the beginning of the sixteenth century was so evident and clear-cut, had almost entirely disappeared. […] In short, the critical consciousness of madness was increasingly brought out into the light, while its more tragic components retreated ever further into the shadows, soon to almost vanish entirely. Only much later can a trace of the tragic element be again discerned, and a few pages in Sade and the work of Goya bear witness to the fact that this disappearance was merely an eclipse; the dark, tragic experience lived on in dreams and in the dark night of thoughts, and what happened in the sixteenth century was not a radical destruction but a mere occultation. The cosmic, tragic experience was hidden by the exclusive privileges of a critical consciousness.  […] Behind the critical consciousness of madness in all its philosophical, scientific, moral and medicinal guises lurks a second, tragic consciousness of madness, which has never really gone away.It is that tragic consciousness that is visible in the last words of Nietzsche and the last visions of Van Gogh. It is that same element that Freud began to perceive at the furthest point of his journey, the great wound that he tried to symbolise in the mythological struggle between the libido and the death instinct. And it is that same consciousness that finds expression in the work of Antonin Artaud.It is only by examining such extreme discoveries that we can finally come to understand that the experience of madness common since the sixteenth century owes its particular face, and the origin of its meaning, to that absence, to that dark night and all that fills it. The linearity that led rationalist thought to consider madness as a form of mental illness must be reinterpreted in a vertical dimension. Only then does it become apparent that each of its incarnations is a more complete, but more perilous masking of tragic experience – an experience that it nonetheless failed to obliterate. When constraints were at their most oppressive, an explosion was necessary, and that is what we have seen since Nietzsche.How did it end up being the case that madness was appropriated by reason, so much so that at the dawn of the classical age all the tragic images previously associated with madness suddenly passed into shadow? How ended the movement that caused Artaud to write: ‘the Renaissance of the sixteenth century made a clean break with a reality that had laws both natural and superhuman, and the Renaissance humanism that resulted was not an expansion but a restriction for mankind’?A brief resume of this evolution is perhaps in order, for a clear understanding of what the classical age did to madness.1       Madness becomes a form related to reason, or more precisely madness and reason enter into a perpetually reversible relationship which implies that all madness has its own reason by which it is judged and mastered, and all reason has its madness in which it finds its own derisory truth. Each is a measure of the other, and in this movement of reciprocal reference, each rejects the other but is logically dependent upon it.In the sixteenth century, this tight-knit dialectic gave a new lease of life to the old Christian theme of the world being madness in the eyes of God.“…should we once begin to raise our thoughts to God… what strangely imposed upon us under the name of wisdom will disgust by its extreme folly; and what presented the appearance of virtuous energy will be condemned as the most miserable impotence.” (John Calvin, The Institutes of the Christian Religion) ‘Everything has two faces,’ says Sebastien Franck, for God is resolved to oppose himself to this world, leaving appearances here and keeping the truth and essence of things to himself. For that reason things are the opposite of the way they appear in this world: an open Silenus. (Sebastien Franck, Paradoxes)The abyss of folly into which men are plunged is such that the appearance of truth that men find there is in fact its complete opposite. But there was more: the contradiction between truth and appearances was present in appearance itself, for if appearance was coherent with itself, at least it would be an allusion to the truth, or some form of hollow echo. So it was rather within things themselves that this reversal was to be found, a reversal that henceforth was to be without a clear direction or pre-established end. The movement was not to be from an appearance towards truth, but towards another one, which negates it, and then towards all that denied or contested that negation, so that the process could never come to an end.  […] All human affairs, he [Erasmus] says,like the figures of Silenus described by Alcibiades, have two completely opposite faces, so that what is death at first sight, as they say, is life if you look within, and vice versa, life is death. The same applies to beauty and ugliness, riches and poverty, obscurity and fame, learning and ignorance, strength and weakness, the noble and the base born, happy and sad, good and bad fortune, friend and foe, healthy and harmful- in fact you’ll find everything suddenly reversed if you open the Silenus. (Erasmus, Praise of Folly. Editors note: see also entry for the Silenus of Alcibiades in Erasmus’ Adages)All is plunged into immediate contradiction, and man is urged to embrace only his own madness: when measured against the truth of essences and God, human order is nothing but madness. And in this human order, the movement through which man tried to break free of his earthly bonds becomes just another form of madness. IN the sixteenth century, more so than at any other moment, Paul’s second epistle to the Corinthians shone with incomparable prestige: ‘I speak as a fool’. The renunciation of the world becomes an act of folly, like the total abandonment of the self to the obscure will of God, a mad quest that seemingly has no end, as the mystics had long acknowledged. […] ‘When man abandons the realm of the senses, his soul falls prey to a kind of dementia’ [Nicholas of Cusa]. … the weak reason of man, which is but folly, [is lost] in the abysmal madness of the wisdom of God:It is unutterable in any language, unintelligible to every intellect, and immeasurable by every measure. […] This is because that Wisdom by which, in which and from which all things exist is unthinkable in any thought. (Nicholas of Cusa, The Lyman on Wisdom and the Mind) So closed a great circle. Compared to Wisdom, the reason of man is nothing but folly: compared to the shallow wisdom of men, the Reason of God is caught up in the essential movement of Madness. On the great scale of things, all things are Madness; on the small scale of things, the whole itself is madness. Which means that if madness can only exist in reference to some form of reason, the whole truth of reason is to allow a form of unreason to appear and to oppose it, only to disappear in turn in a madness that engulfs all.
    Such is the worst madness of man: the inability to recognise the misery of his confinement, the weakness that prevents him from ascending to the true and the good, and not knowing which part of madness is his own. His turning his back on unreason is a sure sign of his condition, in that it prevents him from ever using his reason in a reasonable manner. For if reason does exist, it lies precisely in the acceptance of the unbroken circle joining wisdom and folly, in the clear consciousness of their reciprocity and the impossibility of dividing them. True reason is not free of the contamination of madness, but on the contrary, it borrows some of the trails first carved out by madness.Be present, then, you daughters of Jove, for a bit, while I show that no one can reach the heights of wisdom, and the very ‘inner sanctum’, as they themselves say, ‘of happiness’, except with the guidance of Folly. (Eramsus, Praise of Folly)But such a path, even when it fails to reach any final wisdom, and when the promised citadel reveals itself to be nothing more than a mirage or a new incarnation of folly, remains the path to wisdom when those who follow it are well aware that it leads to madness. The vain spectacle, the frivolous sounds and the maelstrom of noise and colour that make up the world is only ever the world of madness, and that must be accepted.Here, in the midst of that colourful, noisy immediacy, in that easy acceptance which is also an imperceptible refusal, the essence of wisdom is to be found more surely than in any lengthy search for the hidden truth. Subtly, through the welcome it reserves for it, wisdom invests madness, besieges it, becomes conscious of it and is able to situate it.Where else could it be found, other than within reason itself, as one of its forms, and perhaps even one of its resources? […] ‘Wisdom and folly are surprisingly close. It’s but a half turn from the one to the other. That much can be discerned from the actions of men who have lost their wits.’ [     ] […] Visiting Tasso in his delirium, Montaigne felt… disappointment even more than pity, but the most powerful emotion he experienced was admiration. ‘Is there anyone who does not know how imperceptible are the divisions separating madness from supreme and extraordinary virtue?’ Montaigne experiences a paradoxical admiration, for in the depths of that madness, reason finds the strangest resources. For if Tasso, ‘fashioned in the pure poetry of the atmosphere of antiquity, who showed more judgement and genius than any other Italian for many a long year’, now finds himself ‘in so wretched a state, surviving himself’, it was also becausehis agile and lively mind has overthrown him; the light has made him blind; his reason’s grasp was so precise and so intense that it has left him quite irrational; his quest for knowledge, eager and exacting, has led to his becoming like a dumb beast… . (Montaigne, Essays)If madness comes to sanction the efforts of reason, it is because madness was already part of those efforts: the liveliness of images, the violence of passion, the great retreating of the spirit into itself are all part of madness, but are also the most powerful, and therefore the most dangerous, tools that reason can use. There is no reason so strong that it does not put itself at risk in venturing into madness to carry out its task to the full: ‘there is no great spirit who is not tempered by a touch of madness… many wise men and countless brave poets have ventured into madness, and some have become lost there.’ Madness is a hard but essential moment in the labour of reason. Through it, and through its apparent victories, reason makes itself manifest and triumphs. Madness, for reason, was nothing more than a secret life and a source of strength.Little by little, madness finds itself disarmed… : invested by reason, it is as though it is welcomed [by it] and planted within it. Such was the ambiguous role of sceptical thought, or rather of a form of reason that was vividly conscious of the forms that limited it and the forces that contradicted it: it discovered madness as one of its own figures – one way of warding off anything that may have formed an exterior power, irreducible hostility or a sign of transcendence; while by the same token placing madness at the heart of its workings and indicating it to be an essential moment in its own nature. […] ‘Men are so necessarily mad, that not being mad would be being mad through another trick that madness played.’ [Pascal] That thought is the distillation of the long process of reflection that began with Erasmus: the discovery of a form of madness immanent within reason; and from there a process of doubling – on the one hand a ‘mad madness’ that turns its back on the madness that properly belongs to reason, and which through that rejection, redoubles its power, and through that redoubling falls into the simplest, most hermetic and most immediate forms of madness; and on the other hand a ‘wise madness’ which welcomes the madness of reason, listens to it, recognises its right of abode and allows itself to be penetrated by all its vivid power, thereby protecting itself from madness in a manner far more effective than any obstinate refusal, which is condemned to failure in advance.Now the truth of madness is at one with the victory of reason and its definitive mastery, for the truth of madness is to be interior to reason, to be one of its figures, a strength and a momentary need to ascertain itself.Perhaps that provides one explanation for its multiple presence in the literature of the end of the sixteenth and beginning of the seventeenth century, an art which, in its effort to master this reason in search of itself, recognizes the presence of madness, its own madness, circumscribes it, invests itself in it and finally triumphs over it. These are the games of a Baroque age.But in art as in thought, a whole process is accomplished which will lead to the confirmation of the tragic experience of madness inside a critical consciousness. Let us ignore this phenomenon for the moment and consider… those figures [of the tragic experience of madness] to be found in Don Quixote as well as in Scudery’s novels, in King Lear as well as in the theatre of Jean de Rotrou or Tristan l’Hermite.Let us begin with the most important, and the most durable— since the eighteenth century will still recognize its only just erased forms: madness by romantic identification. Its features have been fixed once and for all by Cervantes. But the theme is tirelessly repeated: direct adaptations…. , reinterpretations of a particular episode… , or, in a more indirect fashion, satire on novels of fantasy… . The chimeras are transmitted from author to reader, but what was fantasy on one side becomes hallucination on the other; the writer’s stratagem is quite naively accepted as an image of reality. In appearance, this is nothing but the simple-minded critique of novels of fantasy, but just under the surface lies an enormous anxiety concerning the relationships, in a work of art, between the real and the imaginary, and perhaps also concerning the confused communication between fantastic invention and the fascinations of delirium. “We owe the invention of the arts to deranged imaginations; the Caprice of Painters, Poets, and Musicians is only a name moderated in civility to express their Madness.” (Cervantes, Don Quixoti, Part  II, Chap. 1)Immediately following this first form: the madness of vain presumption. But it is not with a literary model that the madman identifies; it is with himself, and by means of a delusive attachment that enables him to grant himself all the qualities, all the virtues or powers he lacks. He inherits the old Philautia of Erasmus. Poor, he is rich; ugly, he admires himself; with chains still on his feet, he takes himself for God. […] Measureless madness, which has as many faces as the world has characters, ambitions, and necessary illusions. Even in its extremities, this is the least extreme of madnesses; it is, in the heart of every man, the imaginary relation he maintains with himself. It engenders the commonest of his faults. To denounce it is the first and last element of all moral criticism.To the moral world, also, belongs the madness of just punishment, which chastises, along with the disorders of the mind, those of the heart. […] The justification of this madness is that it is truthful. Truthful since the sufferer already experiences, in the vain whirlwind of his hallucinations, what will for all eternity be the pain of his punishment: Eraste, in Corneille’s Melite, sees himself already pursued by the Eumenides and condemned by Minos. Truthful, too, because the crime hidden from all eyes dawns like day in the night of this strange punishment; madness, in its wild, untamable words, proclaims its own meaning; in its chimeras, it utters its secret truth; its cries speak for its conscience. Thus Lady Macbeth’s delirium reveals to those who “have known what they should not” words long uttered only to “dead pillows.”Then the last type of madness: that of desperate passion. Love disappointed in its excess, and especially love deceived by the fatality of death, has no other recourse but madness. As long as there was an object, mad love was more love than madness; left to itself, it pursues itself in the void of delirium. Punishment of a passion too abjectly abandoned to its violence? No doubt; but this punishment is also a relief; it spreads, over the irreparable absence, the mercy of imaginary presences; it recovers, in the paradox of innocent joy or in the heroism of senseless pursuits, the vanished form. If it leads to death, it is a death in which the lovers will never be separated again. This is Ophelia’s last song, this is the delirium of Ariste in La Folie du sage. But above all, this is the bitter and sweet madness of King Lear.In Shakespeare, madness is allied to death and murder; in Cervantes, images are controlled by the presumption and the compensations of the imaginary. These are supreme models whose imitators deflect and disarm them. Doubtless, both testify more to a tragic experience of madness appearing in the fifteenth century, than to a critical and moral experience of Unreason developing in their own epoch. Outside of time, they establish a link with a meaning about to be lost, and whose continuity will no longer survive except in darkness. But it is by comparing their work, and what it maintains, with the meanings that develop among their contemporaries or imitators, that we may decipher what is happening, at the beginning of the seventeenth century, in the literary experience of madness.In Shakespeare or Cervantes, madness still occupies an extreme place, in that it is beyond appeal. Nothing ever restores it either to truth or to reason. It leads only to laceration and thence to death.Madness, in its vain words, is not vanity; the void that fills it is a “disease beyond my practice,” as the doctor says about Lady Macbeth; it is already the plenitude of death; a madness that has no need of a physician, but only of divine mercy. The sweet joy Ophelia finally regains reconciles her with no happiness; her mad song is as close to the essential as the “cry of women” that announces through the corridors of Macbeth’s castle that “the Queen is dead.” Certainly Don Quixote’s death occurs in a peaceful landscape, which at the last moment has rejoined reason and truth. Suddenly the Knight’s madness has grown conscious of itself, and in his own eyes trickles out in nonsense. But is this sudden wisdom of his folly anything but “a new madness that had just come into his head”? The equivocation is endlessly reversible and cannot be resolved, ultimately, except by death itself. Madness dissipated can be only the same thing as the imminence of the end; “and even one of the signs by which they realized that the sick man was dying, was that he had returned so easily from madness to reason.” But death itself does not bring peace; madness will still triumph —a truth mockingly eternal, beyond the end of a life which yet had been delivered from madness by this very end. Ironically, Don Quixote’s insane life pursues and immortalizes him only by his insanity; madness is still the imperishable life of death… . [alt trans. The senselessness of his life pursues him, and ironically he is immortalized only by his madness, which becomes his imperishable life in death… .]But very soon, madness leaves these ultimate regions where Cervantes and Shakespeare had situated it; and in the literature of the early seventeenth century it occupies, by preference, a median place; it thus constitutes the knot more than the denouement, the peripity rather than the final release. Displaced in the economy of narrative and dramatic structures, it authorizes the manifestation of truth and the return to reason.Henceforth it is no longer considered in its tragic reality, as the absolute tear in the fabric of this world that opens on to the other, but simply in the irony of the illusion it brings. [….] Madness is deprived of its dramatic seriousness… . Its dramatic function exists only insofar as we are concerned with a false drama, a chimerical form where faults are merely supposed, murders are illusory and disappearances lead inevitably to reunions.Yes despite this absence of seriousness it is still essential- even more essential than before, for if it brings illusion to its climax, it is from this point that illusion is undone. In the madness to which the error of their ways confines them, the character involuntarily begins to unravel the web. Accusing himself, he speaks the truth in spite of himself. In Melite, for example, all the stratagems the hero has used to deceive others are turned against himself, and he becomes their first victim, believing that he is guilty of the deaths of his rival and his mistress. But in his delirium, he blames himself for having invented a whole series of love letters; the truth comes to light, in and through madness, which, provoked by the illusion of a denouement, actually resolves the real imbroglio of which it is both cause and effect. […] It conceals beneath error the secret enterprise of truth. It is this function of madness, both ambiguous and central, that the author of L’Ospital des fous employs when he portrays a pair of lovers who, to escape their pursuers, pretend to be mad and hide among madmen; in a fit of simulated dementia, the girl, who is dressed as a boy, pretends to believe she is a girl— which she really is—  thus uttering, by the reciprocal neturalization in which these two ruses cancel each other out, the truth which in the end will triumph.Madness is the purest, most total form of qui pro quo; it takes the false for the true, death for life.   […] It has merely to carry illusion to the point of truth. Thus it is, at the very heart of the structure, in its mechanical centre, both a feigned conclusion, pregnant with a secret ‘starting over,’ and the first step toward what will turn out to be the reconciliation with reason and truth. […] Madness is the great trompe-l’oeil in the tragicomic structures of preclassical literature.This was understood by Georges de Scudery, as he shows in the Comedie des comediens, where by turning the theatre into a theatre he situates his play, from the start, inside the illusion of madness. One group of actors takes the part of spectators, another that of actors. The former must pretend to take the decor for reality, the play for life, while in reality these actors are performing in a real decor; on the other hand, the latter must pretend to play the part of actors, while in fact, quite simply, they are actors acting. A double impersonation in which each element is doubled, thus forming that renewed exchange of the real and the illusory which is itself the dramatic meaning of madness. ‘I don not know,’ Mondory says in the prologue to Scudery’s play, ‘what extravagance has today come over my companions, but it is so great that I am forced to believe that some spell has robbed them of their reason, and the worst of it is that they are trying to make me lose mine, and you yours as well. They wish to persuade me that I am not on a stage, that this is the city of Lyons, that over there is an inn, and there an innyard where actors who are not ourselves, yet who are, are performing a Pastoral.’ In this extravaganza, the theatre develops its truth, which is illusion. Which is, in the strict sense, madnessThe classical experience of madness is born. The great threat that dawned on the horizon of the fifteenth century subsides, the disturbing powers that inhabit Bosch’s painting have lost their violence. Forms remain, now transparent and docile, forming a cortege, the inevitable procession of reason. Madness has ceased to be—at the limits of the world, of man and death—an eschatological figure; the darkness has dispersed on which the eyes of madness were fixed and out of which the forms of the impossible were born. Oblivion falls upon the world navigated by the free slaves of the Ship of Fools. Madness will no longer proceed from a point within the world to a point beyond, on its strange voyage; it will never again be that fugitive and absolute limit. Behold it moored now, made fast among things and men. Retained and maintained. No longer a ship but a hospital.Scarcely a century after the career of the mad ships, we note the appearance of the theme of the “Hospital of Madmen,” the “Madhouse.” Here every empty head, fixed and classified according to the true reason of men, utters contradiction and irony, the double language of Wisdom:. . . the Hospital of incurable Madmen, where are recited from end to end all the follies and fevers of the mind, by men as well as women, a task no less useful than enjoyable, and necessary for the acquisition of true wisdom. Here each form of madness finds its proper place, its distinguishing mark, and its tutelary divinity: frenzied and ranting madness, symbolized by a fool astride a chair, straggles beneath Minerva’s gaze; the somber melancholies that roam the countryside, solitary and avid wolves, have as their god Jupiter, patron of animal metamorphoses; then come the “mad drunkards,” the “madmen deprived of memory and understanding,” the “madmen benumbed and half-dead,” the “madmen of giddy and empty heads”… . All this world of disorder, in perfect order, pronounces, each in his turn, the Praise of Reason. Already, in this “Hospital,” confinement has succeeded embarkation.Tamed, madness preserves all the appearances of its reign. It now takes part in the measures of reason and in the labor of truth. It plays on the surface of things and in the glitter of daylight, over all the workings of appearances, over the ambiguity of reality and illusion, over all that indeterminate web, ever rewoven and broken, which both unites and separates truth and appearance. It hides and manifests, it utters truth and falsehood, it is light and shadow. It shimmers, a central and indulgent figure, already precarious in this baroque age.Madness traces a very familiar silhouette in the social landscape. A new and lively pleasure is taken in the old confraternities of madmen, in their festivals, their gatherings, their speeches. Men argue passionately for or against Nicolas Joubert, better known by the name of Angoulevent, who declares himself Prince of Fools, a title disputed by Valenti le Comte and Jacques Resneau: there follow pamphlets, a trial, arguments; his lawyer declares and certifies him to be “an empty head, a gutted gourd, lacking in common sense; a cane, a broken brain, that has neither spring nor whole wheel in his head.”This world of the early seventeenth century is strangely hospitable, in all senses, to madness. Madness is here, at the heart of things and of men, an ironic sign that misplaces the guideposts between the real and the chimerical, barely retaining the memory of the great tragic threats—a life more disturbed than disturbing, an absurd agitation in society, the mobility of reason.But new requirements are being generated:A hundred and a hundred times have I taken up my lantern,
    Seeking, at high noon . . , (Regnier, Satire XIV)



    Goya’s The Sleep of Reason Brings Forth Monsters.
































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    15 x 37 x 25 cm
    Rahm Instruments. Model PV. Serial Number 881. New York

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    c. 1960
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    12 x 37 x 23 cm
    Allstrom 110-160 volt. Made in Germany

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