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SIER
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OLIVEIRA
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LEVI BISMARCK
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AMARAL
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NO ART IS MAD. NO ART IS ARCHITECTURE.
Pedro Levi Bismarck
NO ART IS MAD. NO ART IS ARCHITECTURE. PUNCTUM.
In the
beginning it wasn’t the verb, but the images, still without man
Bragança de Miranda, Corpo e
Imagem
Declassifying
For Barthes, Photography
is unclassifiable, is invisible and is mathesis
singulares: no «corpus», just a few bodies [1]. But it will always and mostly be an adventure – the
pressure of the unspoken that asks to be said [2]. La Photographie
commence dans la plaie, commence dans le punctum.
Studium-Punctum
The punctum is
with the studium, according to Barthes, one of the essential
elements that take part in the photographical image reading. If the studium is
the cultural and distracted reading of the object (the field
of the education, where one recognizes the main photography functions), the punctum is
the element that disturbs the studium. It's the wound (la
plaie), the sting, and the deep cut that opens the image interior
space. It’s the casualty that escapes from the composition. It’s what I
don’t seek but comes into sight, it’s the chance that disturbs me and opens me
up to the image secret abyss. What I don't see, what I don't want to see, but
what I can touch, that I know I will touch.
If the studium is
what allow us to observe and understand the photography, the punctum is
the wound without which the image cannot survive, the expansion force that
opens the photography. It’s the point-sauvage that
distinguishes the image, that opens up space in direction of the observed
thing. But is, mostly, the point where I stop seeing through the others eye and
I move myself; where I free myself from the image to build my own way of
looking. As Barthes writes, doesn’t matter anymore the studium or
its vulgar rhetoric (technique, report, art) just the absolute
subjectivity – the silence where I can close my eyes and make speak the image [3]. And in this critical moment, as Barthes says: “I am
just a savage, a child – or a maniac; I put aside all the knowledge, all the
culture, I abstain myself of being someone’s eye heir” [4].
Punctum-singularis
Moreover, the Barthes punctum is
also the image irruption of time, or rather, it's the instant awareness of time
in the image undifferentiated surface. That is, the absolutely precious and
inalienable place where the image becomes mine (where I
recognize it and inscribed in it a meaning). Where it finishes its universality
and starts its own subjectivity. In short: where my image is
at last free – free to be abolished, free to be annihilated.
And free because it’s now mine. Let’s say that its end is its deconstruction as
an image and its reconstruction as a power/potency (absolutely
subjective). This is its mythical conditional, its reachable purpose, because
it’s there that its power breeds – in its absence, in the irrevocable silence
that stays after its passage. “Is the passage of the image that creates time
and the human passes through in this sliding of the image over the «real»” [5]. The image universal nature is no more than an
illusion, it only exists as mathesis singularis [6]. And I will only be free as I conquer its subjectivity destructing
(deconstructing) its supposedly universal nature. The end of
the image cannot be other than its (own) end.
Punctum-invisibilis
This is also the meaning
of the punctum in the architectural image: the casualty that
escapes from the composition, the savage-point that
annihilates the homogenous and universal image, and provokes the awareness of
the real. The poetical device that turns the image into potency, that
turns the image into space – open, traveled,
experiencible. A space utterly subjective and utterly of the self (the free
place of the self) [7], without mediation or
a priori representations, but represented in the course of its
spatial action. A space, as Ignasi de Solà-Morales writes, constantly
produced by the instant and devoured by the action [8].
Let’s say that the
architectonical punctum, it's the wound that
opens up in the fix and immutable image, the detail that opens it and destroys
it, and that give us the time in the experimentation of space. If
architecture starts in the image, its end is the image destruction. And so the punctum is
the key moment where architecture is no longer image (supposedly universal and
alleged representation) and transforms itself in a poetical device of
habits, movements, desires, of the (un)expected and of the (im)possible. A system
of events, as writes Ignasi, that will work over changing and
not strict categories, able to leverage the multiple experience and world
awareness. And so, architecture is the spatial action invariable game
annihilating the pure and flat representations, the continuous action over the
space, the body and matter unpredictable instant. It will always be, as would
say Jorge Luis Borges, the fruit and the mouth simultaneously.
If the punctum give
us precisely the invisibility of the image, the singular beauty of architecture
is in its most enigmatic nature, that is, its utterly non-representable quality.
What distinguishes it from art, or any other art, and that makes its own
intimate poiesis, that is, the poetical motion of the bodies and matter in the
always ephemeral conquer for interiority, the lowermost place of the self in
the arise of death, beyond death, in love. The moment where architecture
becomes invisible, silently invisible – the silence where I can close
my eyes and make my image speak, my own images.
Punctum-locus
For Barthes the punctum is,
still, this mad point that allow us to touch the reality, that
moves me savage and without culture inside it. Mad because gives the
reality without mediation, because confirms shockingly
that what I see really existed [9]. But mad,
also, as Barthes writes, because the photography is beyond de representations
codes, doesn't want to be restitution, nor catharsis, nor wants to
transform the mourning in work. The photography is the terrible presence of
the real before us, savage, uncodified, simple (and I say:
beauty). And so, according to Barthes, the last effort of society has been
precisely the attempt of making the photography serious, fighting
its own (un)reality and smooth the mad savage that threat each and
single image. And it did, in one hand, making of the photography
an art (because no art is mad) and in other hand, generalizing it,
“because generalized, it completely unrealizes the human world of conflicts, of
desires, on the pretext of illustrating them” [10].
Punctum-fugit
And so, the question posed
in the final paragraph of La chambre claire: Mad or Serious? Photography
can be both says Barthes: “serious, if its realism remains on, smooth by
esthetical and empirical habits, or mad, if this realism is absolute and if, so
to speak, original, making return to the loving and terrified conscience the
imprint of Time” [11]. But isn’t that as well the question that we can
dispose over architecture? That is, serious if doesn’t
question the esthetical and empirical habits, if it is the
imitation without thickness of the image; or mad, if it wants
to go beyond the studium, if is utterly realistic (that is,
seeks first of all to understand the reality), if it works in the matter of
space and the in the body of time. Because the wound (and the drama) of the punctum
architecturae is precisely this: the awareness that the studium rules
and codes are not enough (they don't transform the white sheet in project, nor
transform by itself desire into reality, image into potency and space).
It will be always necessary the unclassifiable, invisible, singular and
immediate (without mediation) openness of the punctum, where
it’s us savages and without culture face to face to the mad
map of reality. But the only one that still give us the (im)possible
possibility, the unspoken adventure, of accessing and
understanding the reality (and the studium itself), where
we abstain to be others eye and where we conquer our irreparable
interiority (and individuality) – our own vanishing point (our punctum
fugitis). Because, if the madness of photography is to be the terrible
presence of the real, the one of architecture is to be, itself, the
production of the unnamed real. Beyond its own art and beyond the images
trivialization, this is its own madness. And so, as Barthes concludes, in this
world of increasingly seductive images, but smoothed and homogeneous, it is to
us to choose: “submit its spectacle to the civilized code of the perfect
illusions or [then] confront in it the inaccessible awake of the reality [12].
(Dziga
vertov, 1929)
I see the
endless images of Vertov, but I don't see them. I am now in the other side. I
am the machine, I am the camera itself. I am placed inside it. I am myself
inside it. And I forget. I forget of its time. I forget its limit. I forget
that they are images. I am the camera itself. I am the lens itself.
I am now
Vertov.
[1] Unclassifiable because that classification
would be necessarily reductive. Invisible, because it’s a presentation of
the reality and not a representation. Singularis,
because any discourse on this will never be able to start from «Photography»
itself, but from a photography. Barthes, Roland. Camera
Lucida.
[6] This is precisely the problem of the image
contemporary spectacle: there are more images that the ones we can destroy.
Consuming just some of them we left the others accumulating, diming the margins
of the real. Cf: Susan Sontag, Sobre la fotografia e
Bragança de Miranda, Corpo e Imagem.
______________________
Pedro
Levi Bismarck
Architect. Porto
Other Articles in the
same issue:
ANDRÉ SIER
PEDRO OLIVEIRA
ANDRÉ TAVARES
THE DOTTED LANDSCAPE
Pedro Oliveira
THE DOTTED LANDSCAPE
DOTS IN THE FIELD OF THE
METAPOLIS
A
new reality
It is quite clear that the urban landscape has
significantly changed in the last years. The verified complexity has been
nominated in many different ways, but to the vast and polycentric shape that we
call city (?) there are always three explicative phenomenon
associated: tertiarization, globalization of the economy and culture and,
proliferation of the information and communication networks. In fact, the
technologies of the Information Era have changed irreversibly and transversely
our notions of space-time. They were exemplary manipulated by the market logic,
that, hungry of growth and change, potentiated all this events. Once that we
are in a period of crisis, ideal to re-think paradigms, let's focus on the
natural frustration with the market-driven architecture and urbanism. The
concepts of reintegration/recycling/revolution at the spatial, objectual,
functional, social, disciplinary levels, synthesize a reaction to this
frustration. The obsolesced less is more and of the more
is more gave place to the more from less. The tendency to
a bigger social solidarity, to the intensification of the Human-Nature
relationship and the approximation of natural (Ecology) and artificial models
(material and immaterial networks of the Informational Era) starts to emerge,
at the beginning of the XXI century.
Dots in the field of the Metapolis (1)
The contemporary theories of the most variate
disciplines converge to the vision of a network-based existence, fill of
interdependencies, in which all is interrelated. At the urban scale, this
vision is easily visible in the definition of the Metapolis, polycentric. This
new definition supposes a large-scale space where different centers, usually
near an older city, are created, giving a response to the new needs. The
attractiveness of a determined City-Region or Metropolitan Area is dependent
not only of their physical mobility (material) but also from the social,
economic and knowledge mobility (immaterial) - that allow us to "surf in
the flows of fashion, happenings and environments." (2) If we make the
experience of mapping the intensity of the social, economical and cultural
relations and superposed it on the infrastructural urban network (in its formal
vision) we would easily verify how they establish networks that are superposing
and juxtaposing and creating nodes or dots of convergence. The bigger the
intensity of the crossing is, the bigger is its attractiveness. In this
formalization, a bit abstract, of the physical and metaphysical
movements/flows, it's curious to see how the dots are the spaces of greater
dynamism and intensity, contrarily to their usual definition of staticity. As a
matter of fact, the concepts of constant movement and dynamism are fundamental
in the contemporary society - "In the end the urban truth is in the
flow". (3).
Old Conditions, new constructions
It matters, therefore, to think about what
defines and characterizes each dot. Accessibility is the first
and primordial condition to the appearing of a certain setting - it's valid in
old cities as in new centers, this search for a location near a natural or
artificial infrastructure that allows them to establish relationships with each
other. Functional Diversity constitutes the second condition,
defining itself as the possibility of a series of relations and synergies of
great intensity in a short space (of time). And, at last, Symbolism,
or the integration of forms and signs that build the support to orientation,
fruition and construction of collective memory. The three vertices comprehend a
great ability to transfigure from case to case, assuming different degrees of
importance in each node or dot - exemplifying, symbolism, in its conventional and
more memory-present shapes, is much more present in an older center than in a
new centrality (that uses the aestheticization of architecture and of the day-to-day life,
filling us with information and superficial stimulation).
The new paradigm is built up on the concepts of
dynamism (the passage between dots or urban zapping) and of
complementarity (the existence of a macro-logic, that gathers the needs of a
large amount of population), as something associated to these dots or nodes.
Towards a better knowledge in the way of building our cities, there's a third
concept that deserves our attention: limit. The new centralities that appeared
in the second half of the XXth Century share the fact they used the
architectural materials of postmodern architecture, from which one can
distinguish the aggressive way of closing on themselves. These enclaves impose
to/on the territory, generating situations of great artificiality and
perverting the spatial relations - being near no longer means that there are
significant relationships.(4) Their relation to context don't translate, at
all, the ideas of dynamic networks of interdependence between people, nature
and technologies. It seems obvious, as well, that a radical opposition to this
model (ie the total abolition of frontiers) doesn't constitute a reasonable
solution. The porosity in urban tissues or the utilization of permeable
membranes (in substitution of the post-modern walls and fences) are a possible
solution and start to appear in some recent architectures.
A possible way out
Given the complex reality that was reviewed
along the text, it's important to point a recent theory (that surely will be
followed up by others who diverge in form but not in content), - Integral
Urbanism, by Nan Ellin. It suggests methodology and attitudes that are able
to give a more capable and complete answer to the contemporary problematic,
focusing in five points: connectivity, hybridization, porosity,
authenticity and vulnerability. This text ends with the beginning of
Ellin's book, that explains the multiple sense of Integral Urbanism:
Integral - Essential to completeness, lacking
nothing essential, formed as a unit with another part.
Integrate - To form, coordinate, or blend into a
functioning or unified whole (...)
Integrity - adherence to artistic or moral
values; incorruptibility; soundness; the quality or state of being complete and
undivided; completeness. (5)
Notes
(1)
Ascher, François, Metapolis, ou, L'avenir des villes, 1995. The idea of Metapolis appeals to the definition
of “a group of spaces where the totality or part of the inhabitants, of
economical activities, or the territories, is integrated in the daily functioning
of a metropolis. It constitutes generally one set of job, residence and other
activities, and the spaces that compose it are deeply heterogeneous and not
necessarily contiguous. A metapolis has, at least, some hundred thousand of
inhabitants.”
(2)
Gadanho, Pedro, A arquitectura como performance, article in
Magazine DIF 70. Also see Graham, Stephen
and Marvin, Simon, Splintering Urbanism, 2001.
(3) Ellin, Nan, Integral Urbanism, 2006.
(4) Graham, Stephen and Marvin, Simon, Splintering
Urbanism, 2001.
(5)
Ellin, Nan, Integral Urbanism, 2006.
- Illustrated from: Kempf,
Petra, You Are The City – Observation and Transformation of Urban
Settings, Lars Muller Publishers -
_______________
Pedro
Oliveira
Architect.
Porto
Other Articles in the
same issue:
ANDRÉ SIER
PEDRO OLIVEIRA
PEDRO LEVI BISMARCK
ANDRÉ TAVARES
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