Hello all, it's been great to hear about what you're up to, and I'm stoked about the blog. The level of work is impressive, not to mention a little intimidating. That said, consider this a postcard more than a post.
I've been spending the summer so far in Vermont, working for the sculptor Willard Boepple, re-finishing old metal beasts and finishing new ones, mostly in wood. It's been a wonderful experience of long hours in the sun, harsh chemicals and lots of paint. They have definite interaction with the ground, and they all seem like they're stretching their skins and jaws to move and speak.
I'm not a fan of all of them, and some I really dislike, but I've gotten very cordial with most of them, and the welds are impressive.
Currently, I'm working on a piece that resembles this one (20"x30"), but one that's 8 feet tall, in wood:
The end of the day usually ends with a swim in the nearby pool. Life is going well.
The rest of my day is spent (partly) thinking about my impending thesis, and what in the hell I'm going to do it on. And after many hours to myself, what has really come to interest me is the blurred line between furniture and architecture, or more specifically (vaguely), object and environment. This started with a sculpture project I did which combined an inhabitable space within a normally inhuman architectural space: grafting a chair and small bookshelf into a fireplace.
The book-burning implications aside, I hope that it addresses the relationship between the human body and the furnishings we use that are almost completely owned by the building they are inside. They're installed, for one, and some don't usually permit the living, breathing body inside them. But they do contain kinds of environments, and I want to access them.
This is an idea that was also spun into my head by Hunter, who brought up the strange architecture/furniture double life of a kitchen island. If it was movable you might call it furniture, but its solidified state places it somewhere in the realm of the staircase or, in this case, a mantelpiece.
What I'm really thinking about now is the relationship not just between the human body and furnishings, but also the spatial and functional influence of these things that fall somewhere between objects and environments. I would say every object has an implied philosophical structuring to it that, if given a voice, could enact massive changes to the built environment it inhabits. A pool table, if given its own mind, might want its entire room to be perfectly level, square, felted, and vacuum sealed to retain the highest level of perfection. In fact, the perfect pool table might have no table to speak of. It's probably a room with no gravity, no air and no friction. The balls just float around, bouncing into each other like molecules, finding the pockets in the corners on there own, after just one shot to give them inertia. A pool table is actually quite a fascist piece of furniture. Or Newtonian, i guess.
But maybe I think that because I've been playing too much pool lately.
And perhaps this is fueled more by my childhood love of transformers than architectural interest, but I envision a possibility of combining human interfaces with these influential or spatializing objects. For example, a fridge that when opened, reveals an upright, air-conditioned bed. Your feet go in the icebox and you remain beautifully, horrifically encased in a machine that is usually meant to preserve our life in a more indirect way. A bathtub in a dinner table is also a combination that keeps popping into my head, which ends up making the table more grounded and the human influence incredibly clear, filling the space we usually eat from with filth.
With all of these, I want to make sure there are no functional loose ends. In order for an amicable interaction to exist between body and building: the pool table can't kill us, we need to make a deal of some kind. We need air. And probably gravity. The bathtub should not be rendered unusable, but maybe re-directed, so that the water constantly drains and fills, maybe with the food that should be on the table? A fireplace needs a fire, but it could be re-appropriated as a gas lamp to read by. The fridge would have to tone it down a bit, and might have Fridgidaire a/c instead of chilling someone to death. Chill enough, though.
And yes Cara, this sounds a whole lot like your thesis statement, which is only a sign of how much I loved it. That said, I think my focus would be different and I'd like to find my own vocabulary to express what I'm trying to do.
In any case, I'd love to hear any and all comments you all might have.
7 comments:
I read this thing in the Mudder museum (it was a pretty big deal for me) about human evolution. Most mammals, and humans too at one point in their development, are able to birth their own young without assistance. Their bodies are designed to make this possible. When human evolved to become upright walkers the birth canal was moved around , such that the baby would come out upside down. The mother from her delivery position could not pull the baby out without bending it the wrong way. Human females cannot deliver without assistance, and this is something that is universal to all cultures and peoples. This got me thinking about the way that our bodies, their design and function, provide an underlying structure for culture and the way we relate to one another....
c
I want to program a house so that the furniture and program of each room rotates on a weekly schedule. The inhabitants would be forced to sleep in the kitchen, cook in the bathroom, etc. Suffice it to say my housemates aren't interested.
I'm most interested in your reasoning for tying up functional ends. I would argue that your objects are not functional, in that they exist outside the range of behavior that can be expected. Even if someone could lie in that fridge, realistically, aside from an "art" experience, they won't. Limiting the object to create a pretend "functional" object/situation out of what is actually an "art" object/situation could drastically reduce the potential conceptual, aesthetic, and symbolic allusions/intonations that a more macabre installation could achieve.
The object being owned by the room<->The room being owned by the object, illustrates two states of the "in-between space" you're interested in. I think the trick will be figuring out where the body resides in relationship to this range, because I think the "body" can be interpreted both physically (labor, energy, physical MAKING of the room and object) and humanistically (function, human reasoning, history)
Josh, Claire, thanks for your comments. I think I have something that might interest you, Josh, along the lines of a re-programmable house, but looked at from a terrifyingly technological standpoint:
http://bldgblog.blogspot.com/2009/06/coil.html
Claire, I hadn't realized about physically not being able to give birth on your own. I'm now looking into delivery beds and damn, there is so much material there. The catalogs they use to advertise them alone are fascinating and weird. They treat them like new cars and such.
Josh, thanks for your response, mostly about the "functionality" issue. I use quotes mostly because I wouldn't consider it a real kind of function, but I do see a strong connection about how these initially function-driven furnishings interact with their spatial limitations and our imposed constrictions on them in order to make them "user-friendly". To do away with the fire of a fire place is something that I am hesitant to do, but perhaps a fireplace means something else entirely, and the replacement of fire with the warmth (physical and mental) of the human body could suffice.
Perhaps my reluctance to make the fridge appear as a coffin (for whatever reasons) is the starting point for the need to tie up the loose functional ends.
I feel that the functions of these objects defines them so, instinctively, I don't want to abandon them . But maybe I need to edit them judiciously and get the most impact out of the pieces as art object/conditions as I can.
thanks for getting those gears working in my head.
transformer furniture:
http://www.treehugger.com/files/2009/06/giovanni-socci-transformer-furniture.php
I want to do some more thinking about this. I like where you are going.
Your thoughts are going in good directions and it's a treat to hear them.
Your writing made me think of a couple issues I've been thinking about lately, which may or may not be relevant...
One is intentionality. Space breaks down into levels of intentionality- what is a boundary, what is an object, what is a spatial directive vs. a thoughtless inconvenience. The same material carefully laid out as a wall in a room becomes a discarded hindrance in an alley. What are the clues by which we know we’re supposed to use something? What does the most minimal human directive or intervention look like? Is constant maintenance of a space required to strongly convey purpose to other people? What’s the function of unloved or abandoned space? I’m interested in the line that barely demarcates human intention, the cues we can ignore vs. those that always trigger trained spatial responses.
It sounds like you’re using contrasted parings – fridge-bed, for example—to help come to conclusions about humans’ spatial desires and needs. Can you get even further away from these literal starting points and closer what these categories of needs might be? When do we crave gravity? What is our relationship to materials that flow- water, soil, air – and those that are solid? If you’re looking for intuitive relationships to spatial material, maybe current structures of furniture are too confining. Abstracting human-space relationships from categories of furniture may help you decide on more meaningful types of intervention that you can then apply over the materials and categories you have to work with in the real world (what’s the purpose of a constantly refilling bathtub?)
As a general working practice, especially since you’re going into heady territory, it can help to loosen up your mind by pushing as far abstract as you can before coming back to something more concrete. Nothing like a few really bad experiments in an interesting new direction to help see your work with fresh eyes.
I’ve very excited to see your work develop. Happy thesis!
brilliant elizabeth!
Post a Comment