Liberty & Free Time

Years ago, when someone 6-8 years senior to me had returned from his Masters and started working, I had naively asked him what his plans were. Almost hoping to hear some grand plan that would guide me and my understanding of my own future prospects. Instead he said “currently I am just busy trying to manage everyday logistics of existing”. It was a short response but honest. The memory of that question and its response does surface frequently as I too like many before and after get busy within my preoccupations of everyday existence.

On a completely disconnected note I found this:

https://amp.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2022/apr/10/we-got-a-kick-out-of-it-art-forgers-reveal-secrets-of-paintings-that-fooled-experts

The last paragraph reads “Asked what most surprised her about the couple, Fischer said: “That they bought liberty and free time with the money they organised for themselves through the scam. No Ferrari, no Prada dresses, but free space to go to museums, to look after the children, to pursue their passion for research.”

Kiran's Window

Voynich Manuscript

I have written before small, odd, confused articles on language (1, 2, 3, 4) and other speculations associated, one of which being erasure of language. To speculate on possibility of losing the memory of sounds and symbols that make up words and how to arrange these together. Being able to imagine an alternative history where Rosetta stone was never discovered and we are left with only encoded unrecognisable vast archives that look exquisitely rich in their meaning but undecipherable,quite similar to the symbol of human infertility, where Zizek talks about Art in the absence of its context in Children of Men.
I can only imagine the feeling cryptographers, ciphers, linguists and historians get when they study The Beinecke MS 408 or also popularly known as the Voynich manuscripts presently housed in Yale University's Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library building (designed by SOM). A treasure trove of history, symbols and science locked up meaningless without its codec. Some images below for visual intrigue and pleasure.

(All images for this post have been borrowed from the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript online Archive, Yale University.)

Oil painting

My first oil paint attempt on canvas. I learned how to paint air, clouds, tree, giraffe and squid. Oil painting allows the luxury to maintain the never drying canvas in a constant state of change, which I relished. The medium gives one enough space to wage internal battles between objectivity and subjectivity, the squid and the giraffe that come face to face over industrial Berlin.

This painting changed only on sunny days. Now it is taking a break and drying some place else only to re-continue changing after I meet it again...

Paper Architecture: Urban Utopias exhibition @ The Royal Academy of Arts

I had been to the Royal Academy of Arts recently with my friend Neha (Gupta-Chatterjee) to see the ongoing Paper City: Urban Utopias exhibition. My present readings of The Faber book of Utopias (edited by John Carey), Utopias Deferred: Writings from Utopie by Jean Baudrillard and Ruth Eaton's Ideal Cities had greatly increased my expectations from people who generally like to imagine and represent ideal conditions for human existence.
But quite contrary to my expectations and the impression that the larger than life and quite explicit name the exhibition labels itself with, it turned out to be an extremely ordinary exhibition tucked somewhere in the corridor between the ladies toilet and the restaurant. The drawings were done by a range of people from different backgrounds, from the C-grade student with a D-grade imagination, a house wife to Peter Cook(who according to me had successfully created one of the worst images in his career) and James Wines. The drawing by James Wines was quite beautiful, but the rest seemed personal graffiti oblivious of any historical or theoretical context of utopias or architecture or technology.
But the highlight of the exhibition was exactly that! Anyone and everyone had quite quickly contributed to this exercise of imagining their individual utopias, someone got them printed on A4 stacks of paper pads and hung them within an exhibition space for people to admire and tear off a copy of the ones they liked and take it home. I am sure its not an Avante Garde idea and is generously used in departmental stores but to have it in the Royal Academy with Pre-Raphaelite artist, John William Waterhouse RA (1849-1917) in the neighbouring hall is quite impressive. I guess one could even measure the popularity of each art work within the exhibition based on the number of copies. It could be a market survey for utopia!
This exercise somehow reminded me of some photographs I had seen on facebook of students from my Architectural school, painting a wall that was worked out like an event. Unaware of the impact an image can have within the public domain and the privilege of being in a position to design a more meaningful drawing in such a space (i don't mean painting a Monet but it could definitely had been a Banksy), most seemed to take pleasure in painting mediocre images of guitarists, flowers, cartoons and other things that seemed to fail in front of the pan splatters which did a better job of occupying the wall. But I guess one is allowed to do such things as a student and it is after all only a wall and maybe I am over reacting.
But any ways back to the topic, the exhibition also has a small competition as an extension which invites people to contribute their ideas for Paper Cities and will be judged by architect Peter Cook, illustrator Sara Fenelli, Blueprint editor Vicky Richardson and the RA’s Architecture Programme Curator Kate Goodwin.
(will be posting some images from the exhibition soon...)

Map maker's Archive of Urban Dreams

(The city of Saintes, France drawing by Joris Hoefnagel, 1560, in the centre of the city marked I. one can see the Saintes Cathedral or the Cathédrale Saint-Pierre de Saintes before going in state of ruins later)
Before Rene Descartes' Cartesian co-ordinate system secularised space along the three axes of sterile certainty, the task of mapping cities in the Early Modern Era was encouraging city maps being conceptualised as collages of spatial experiences, bird’s eye views, mental maps, landuses and also sometimes a calendar of day today/ seasonal events.

(map of densely packed Cairo, admitted to Matteo Pagano, 1549 showing the agrarian canal irrigation network from the Nile, the Pyramids and the Sphinx to the right and if one zooms into the far left just where the river forms a delta island one can even see the Nile crocodiles)
The foreground usually had the citizens/nobles/patrons of the map looking towards the city. The surrounding context of the river, sea, fort wall and the ports was drawn with intricate details not only to communicate but also assert identity.

(map of Bordeaux by Antoine du Pinet, 1564)
For people who derive pleasure in going through detailed old city maps, I found an online archive of mostly European cities (though you may find Goa, Istanbul, Cairo and other exceptions) published between 1572 and 1617 in volumes titled Civitates orbis terrarum edited and engraved by Georg Braun and Franz Hogenberg. The Archive allows searching a map by geography, dates and even by map makers. The maps are available for download in high resolution format (the ones I have used are low resolution preview quality), which is really good and are mostly copyrighted to The Hebrew University of Jerusalem & The Jewish National & University Library. A link above on the same page takes you to the Historic cities: Maps and Documents main page but the Braun and Hogenberg branch is the most elaborate one.

(The map of Venice admitted to Bolognino Zaltieri, 1565 is one of my favourite, showing details of water and land circulation network. I am not sure, but I believe the map also through the roof colours demarcates residential and public buildings)
The Venetian Canal system, the Pyramids of Egypt, the settlement along the Nile, the agrarian plots, the fort walls, streets, naval ships, and every house in the city drawn in axonometric grandeur to enable an observer a glimpse of cities in their nebular stage of development.

(map of Rome admitted to Pirro Ligorio, 1552 and 1570, showing the public buildings and the fort walls)

Les Machines

(Vladimir Gvozdariki's rhino kept reminding me of Albrecht Durer's rhino, so thought I should put the two together)
Every now and then biologists discover strange-new, never before seen animal specimens (my personal favourite being Macropinna microstoma) that have evolved in isolation from rest of the world and challenge taxonomical tables through their glass tentacles, sonar vision and telepathic brains. I have come to believe the same being true of Russian artists who seem to do their own thing untouched by global rhetoric art, making drawings and artwork that have reference points within their introvert floating islands.

(some very beautiful drawings by Vladimir Gvozdariki from his website of machine animals that seem to come out from some Industrial utopian world.)

One such newly discovered specimen is artist Vladimir Gvozdariki whose mechanical animal drawings continue to intrigue me. Like the animal machines of Les Machines de L'Ile Nantes the drawings seem to graft mechanical details to appendages, eyes and metal plates that form the skin.

(Vladimir Gvozdariki's drawing of elephant with a photograph of the Great Elephant of Les Machines de L'Ile Nantes in London. The Elephant Celebes by Max Earnst is one such drawing that collaged the animal and machine together in surreal dreamlike world)

The machine becomes the animal, as if the drawings mirror Rene' Descartes’ Animals are Machines, that further blur the dialectics between nature and machine.
Another artist fusing animals and machines is Mike Libby whose website "Insect Lab" describes its work as "Insect Lab customizes real insect specimens with antique watch parts and other technological components. From ladybugs to grasshoppers, each is individually hand adorned, and original- a unique celebration of the contradictions and confluences between nature and technology." But coincidentally these speculative futures and art projects seem to have just been appropriated by the US military attempting to develop "insect cyborgs"! Somehow some very powerful entrepreneurship always have a knack of destroying everything beautiful and putting it for sale on E-Bay.

Pictures of the Floating World (Ukiyo-e)

An art form that grew with the 'floating' and unbound (from the traditional Japanese class structure) merchant class between the 17th and 20th century came to be known as Ukiyo-e literally translating as pictures from the floating world. These being wood block prints could be mass produced and were affordable. The subjects for the images range from Japanese urban life, landscapes, everyday activities, public spectacles like sumo matches etc. As this art form also started with the intention of being illustrations to books, stories, theatre scripts that were being churned out by the merchant class, the paintings are easy to comprehend, simple but powerful in their compositions and carry some amount of text explaining the plot of the image. Around the mid 18th century certain technological advancements allowed production of full colour prints that came to be known as nishiki-e which are my personal favourites especially the ones of Hiroshige and Hokusai.
One of my Japanese friends Hiroshi also informed me that these prints were also used as covers of wrapping papers to protect the official document, making the protective cover as important as the document. Maybe it is exactly this combination of mass production, beauty and easy comprehension that must have made this art form most threatening to the state and higher classes that asserted strict rules against use of political subjects, individuals above the lowest strata of society (courtesans, wrestlers and actors) and sex as subjects for the prints. Going by present times and an urgent need for Agitprop this may be a very important tool for designers to contribute through.
Below are some of my favourite Ukiyo-e prints.

Utagawa Kuniyoshi (1797-1861)

Katsushika Hokusai (1760-1849)

Ando Hiroshige (1797-1858)

Fairy tales & Illustrations

In the book store not so surprisingly I often find myself spending more time in the children’s section. I relish going through very minutely detailed illustrations of surreal narratives that have taken root in various cultures and time periods, and stand to reflect the value systems embodied within every society. The text and illustrations feed on each other but at the same time possess the ability to be independent works. The illustrations sometimes do not necessarily illustrate the text but build their own narratives to play a game of curiosity and intrigue, where one leaves the text and gets engrossed within the illustration, absorbing every line, detail, colour and composition. But of recently I find the pages having become glossier and the illustrations less detailed, with the narratives sterilized by our political righteousness. The stories seem to have lost their sense of imagination, .Maybe these new glossy, simple, sterile fairy tales are reflections of our current society...
Some illustrations by Ivan Bilbin (1876 – 1942) and Arthur Rackham (1867 – 1939) two of my favourite illustrators, who played an important role in rendering some of the most beautiful stories with their imagination.

Rothko and Cildo Meireles (Tate Modern)

I and Nora had been to Rothko exhibition a week back, but somehow did not enjoy seeing his work. According to Rothko, “The progression of a painter’s work…will be towards clarity; toward the elimination of all obstacles between the painter and the idea, and between the idea and the observer…to achieve this clarity is, inevitably, to be understood.” Probably it is this removal of all obstacles and turning it into absolute clarity is what I did not understand. People were seen closely observing red on yellow, purple on black, black on grey and all kinds of colour combinations on huge canvases with mystified reverence. Adding to this was the gallery’s low lighting exactly “as had been requested by Rothko himself”. The exhibition also had Rothko’s work photographed under ultra violet light, to explain the numerous layers of colours, pigments and mediums that he used, which somehow seem to mystify the art work further. The exhibition illustrated the politics of art and the art gallery to its best.

In complete contradiction to this was Cildo Meireles’s work (born half a century after Rothko) which was absolutely stunning to engage with. Most exhibits were playful and at the same time political. For me Meireles managed the balance between politics and poetry beautifully. The rhetoric at no point in time took over the beauty of the form, which sometimes is very difficult especially when the art work is to represent a strong alignment within a highly political issue. It was nice. Inspite of the gallery having stationed public policing volunteers to stop people from taking photographs, I surreptitiously managed to take some snaps as a gesture of my support for the art work.

Francis Bacon

Yesterday I had the opportunity to see a collection of Francis Bacon’s artworks in an ongoing exhibition at the Tate Britain. The exhibition had a fairly big body of work that successfully represented the stormy life that Bacon fleshed on most of his canvases. Huge canvases representing the apathy and sorrowful existence of humanity had me successfully suffocated and tired. But within the representation of human existence as “raw material for carcases”, one can’t negate the fact that there was some odd sense of beauty that made people stare at it longer, trying to see details of deformation carefully collaged and constructed from (little known) photographic archive that Bacon had in his studio.

Of all the art works the two series of triptychs by the name Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion, first done in 1944 and the next done in 1988 were particularly striking to me. They allowed for a certain sense of dualism within repulsion and horror. The three figures (based on the Eumenides—or Furies—in Aeschylus’ Oresteia) are deformed, anthropomorphic creatures with hanging flesh, skinless muscles that sit on platforms and stools as they bare teeth at the observer.

In the first instance the three images come across as creatures filled with rabid rage waiting to tear away from their orange and red environments, but as one observes them for longer the creatures also seem to be writhing in pain, as if being ordered and twisted and contorted to fit within environments and act out a circus before visitors of the art gallery. This feeling of simultaneous fear and pity that the triptych provokes within the observer seemed to be much more valuable to me than some of his other works. Within these two series both being more or less identical I liked the later one but couldn’t help thinking, if it was my architectural education that naively demands a certain aesthetic of colour combination, proportions, finish and frame style.

ABBAU+

ABBAU (Final Master's Thesis Project images)
in collaboration with Konstantinos Dimitrianzos