Reading - Public Intimacy

Wilson, Jane and Louise - Platform II, Gorilla VI - A Free and Anonymous Monument - Young British Artists (YBA) - Architecture - Computer print




Chapter2 - Modernist Ruins, Filmic Archaeologies
Public Intimacy
Giuliana Bruno


The chapter covers several interesting points towards architecture, screen installation, post-industrial era and human as spectators from the study of Jane and Louise Wilson's A Free And Anonymous Monument. 


1. memory
P44:
"It is as if the space itself were recollection, speaking of some place you, too, knew intimately."
P45:
"If memory here is actually fabricated, it is also inhabited, and Pasmore is the primary dweller of this mnemonic architecture."


The article brought the idea of how memory's related to the visual presentation of places, especially places that people are familiar with. And that memory brings intimacy between the work and the viewer.




2. scale, viewer, architectural journey
P46:
"The relief becomes an architectural environment of great complexity which, like the interior of a building, is experienced internally; as such it takes on a subjective quality which is multi-dimentional in implication."
P47:
"One could even say that such a viewer, turned spectator, would activate the artwork."
"As Le Corbusier notably exemplified in his notion of an 'architectural promenade' architecture 'is appreciated while on the move,..., an architectural constantly changing views, unexpected, at times surprising.'"


The problem of imitating real-scale town led to the question about the viewers' perspective while they experience the building environment. And instead of digging into the method of maximising art scale, Pasmore noted that the core of the experience should be internal and multi-dimentional. Which makes the viewers spectators that receive mobile experience. They engage by seeing peripatetically.




3. transit, fractured spaces
P57:
"As an outcome of modernity, space has been radically mobilised and new horizons of seeing have opened up."
"Cinema is moreover a quintessential public space: an inclusive place of social gathering and public transit as well as a site of spectacle."


By introducing screen, video, a new horizon generated as well as a new human-human and human-space interaction structure. Take cinema for example, it declines the specificity of site and make it movable and transited into another space, and that creates doubleness of sites and people, although one's usually fractured and discontinuous.




4. soundscape
P65:
"Its vision is reflected in the multi form structure of the editing: a fractured composition with a disjoint pulse. As the images of the Apollo Pavilion unfold, the rhythm itself of the installation appears composite and unstable, with visuals dancing on screens at different beats."
P70:
"The sound guides you though the work, and it can direct you or misdirect you. It can make you take tours or detours. The sound ultimately locates you. And to located the mood."
P72:
"In the installation, absences are sounds too, that make rhythm."


Here, some samples of soundscape were pointed out: The sound of pulse is a microscopic human-related sound that is intimate to people; The abstract ambience sound that is suggestive and firmly connected to human emotion; The absence of sound that creates breath, void, which emanate the internal sound that shows personality, mind and soul. Above all, sound cane be fabricated into rhythmic choreography.




5. mental architecture
P68:
"Exposed here is a electric reservoir of energy: light as a force of life."
"As we travel through the installation,we enter the lab's intestines."
"With such invisible mechanic built into its body, the building feels corporeal. This space is an organism in its own right."
"We rather feel a humming tension: the suspended state of lingering, hovering inside of our head. We are pending, waiting, floating in mental space. A mental architecture is indeed represented here: a pensive state of mind. This is a true, enlightened interior space."


The implication of the relationship between human body and architecture form; human organism and architecture interior; and human state of mind and space lighting landscape was rather intriguing as a step-by-step way that mental architecture was understood. The euphemism used to describe mental statement shows a strong connection between human and space.