Material Agency.

16th century brick poised for action in spotlight of sunshine

Have spent the first part of my holiday rebuilding the terrace wall with largely reclaimed 16th century bricks. These warm red-ochre hand-molded terracotta forms, with the look and feel of loaves of bread, seem to find their place in the gaping 'wound' of the damaged wall through their own material agency, nudging into each other and bedding down with lime mortar to heal the damage caused through the removal of the outside toilet and store-rooms. The skin of the wall has a surface of patterns and rhythms as structurally logical and aesthetically balanced as the internal dynamism of a musical score or literary composition. It bears all the scars of fire, water, violence, damage, time and decay with almost the same vulnerability and sensitivity as human flesh as well perhaps as the marks or repair and regeneration.  

When the whole wall is re-pointed and given a traditional lime painted finish it will form a large and visible presence, in the only 'outside' room inside the house. Viewed from the kitchen or living room windows it defines the unlimited space of sky in its finite frame through the changing play of light, form, texture, pattern, and colour across its surface where one can read human and material agency across time and space. Perhaps it will also form the wall for a climbing rose in a small enclosed kitchen herb garden or 'hortus conclusus'.

'The current engagement with matter in art and cultural history is however more far reaching and fundamental...... It has come about in part through a dissatisfaction with the oddly disembodied sign or image of recent art history, but it is also linked to a much larger cultural interest in things, which may in turn be spurred partly by the increasingly disembodied nature of information and images in the digital age. Against globalized networks of data, a focus on the importance of the handmade and specific object can be seen like an act of resistance, even a form of grace'  

This above quote comes from the introduction to 'The Matter of Art. Materials, practices, cultural logics c 1250-1750,' edited by Christy Anderson, Anne Dunlop and Pamela H. Smith and published by Manchester University Press. Reading the essays inside by various contributors reinforces the conviction that experiential knowledge and understanding can transcend abstract thought and language, something artists know intuitively by making things out of material processes and academics learn through theory rather than practice. Meaning emerges though the creative interaction and relationships between many agents, 'animate' and 'inanimate' including the materials, the process and the context as much if not more than any prior concept or idea 'imposed' on them by an individual. For some kind of enriched creativity to happen the right conditions, internally and externally, need to be present, recognized and actively cultivated. Cause and effect are not linear here but complex and perhaps ultimately mysterious, beyond the grasp of logical reasoning alone. 

Meaning in the context of the wall of a house as an active agent is inseparable from the sense of 'dwelling' in a mind/body in time and space.  

 In their essay 'Non-Human Agencies: Trees in Place and Time' by Owain Jones and Paul Cloke the writers quote Ingold's discussion of Breugel's painting 'The Harvesters' (below) to illustrate their assertions about the nature of non-human agents in creating a sense of place or 'dwelling'. 

1565 The Harvesters, Pieter Breughel the Elder. oil on panel.

.......In other words, dwelling is a complex performative achievement of heterogeneous actors in relational spatial/temporal settings.  Ingold (1993) illustrates these ideas in a discussion of Bruegel’s painting, 'The  Harvesters'.  In this picture, an old pear tree takes centre stage as farm labourer rest and eat in its shade in between harvesting a field of grain; behind these is a view of a valley and a distant village and landscape. Ingold says of the tree by its presence it constitutes a particular place. The place was not there before the tree, but came into being with it. [N]o other tree has quite the same configuration of branches, diverging, bending and twisting in exactly the same way. In its present form, the tree embodies the entire history of its development from the moment it first took root. And the history consists in the unfolding relations with manifold components of its environment, including the people who have nurtured it, tilled the soil around it, pruned its branches, picked its fruit, and – as at present – use it as something to lean against. The people, in other words, are as much bound up in the life of the tree, as is the tree in the life of the people (pp. 167–8).

Carl Knappett l Lambros Malafouris Editors Material Agency Towards a Non-Anthropocentric Approach. 2008 PDF file

'Fleshing' the skeleton

Have been continuing as an 'artist in residence' to work on this painting in the classroom. Perhaps the best way to teach art is to model the creative process itself for the students, turning the classroom into an atelier. Finding the balance and relationship between drawing, which itself is a kind of skeletal structure, and oil paint, the more colourful 'flesh' or 'skin' of the picture, is what this works seems to be about.

As a work I can share the challenges and frustrations or reworking the paint surface with charcoal drawing and oil paint after a period of relative neglect when the picture was lying dormant and the idea was gestating and maturing underground like a plant over winter.

It strikes me that much of the work of an artist is invisible, taking place unseen and hidden, in ways that are mysterious  even perhaps to the artist himself. It is difficult to 'account' for this process, especially when I may have 20 odd unfinished works waiting to be rekindled at an opportune moment when they may or may not reach some kind of resolution. A bit like the orchid in my bathroom which has stood on the shelf being happily inactive for many years and which has suddenly sprouted a string of flowers for no apparent reason.

Whilst the spinal column and ribcage are some of the most beautiful forms in nature and the hidden structure that supports the musculature of the back is the aid to our most powerful and graceful movements, to many people a skeleton is either a morbid or sinister subject matter, despite its rhythmic abstract qualities and the focus it can provide as a scaffold for drawing both the shapes and relationships between positive forms and the negative space between them.

Both familiar and strange at the same time, our skeleton, like our body, the locus of both attraction and loathing, pain and pleasure, is the our only way of knowing the world, and is a source of endless wonder and fascination.  

As one of subjects of meditation in the Satipatthana Sutta in the section on the body, the nine cemetery contemplations, are encouragements to contemplate the true nature of material form as it goes through the process of decay and decomposition, as an aid to realization.

 "A body dead one, two or three day." This is the first contemplation.

"Whilst it is being eaten by crows." This portion of the Discourse where the devouring of the body of various kinds of animals is stated refers to the second contemplation.

"A skeleton together with (some) flesh and blood held in by the tendons." This is the third contemplation.

"A blood-smeared skeleton without flesh but held in by the tendons." This is the fourth.

 "A skeleton held in by the tendons but without flesh and not besmeared with blood." This is the fifth.

"Bones gone loose, scattered in all directions." This is the sixth.

 "Bones white in color like a conch." This is the seventh.

 "Bones more than a year old heaped together." This is the eighth.

 "Bones gone rotten and become dust." This is the ninth.

The art of illusions

    

The Innocent Eye Test 1981, Mark Tansy.

 I am not a realist painter. In the nineteenth century, photography co-opted the traditional function of realist painters, which was to make faithful renditions of “reality.” Then the realist project was taken over by Modernist abstraction, as later evidenced in the title of Hans Hofmann’s book Search for the Real. Minimalism tried to eliminate the gap between the artwork and the real. After that, the project itself dematerialized. But the problem for representation is to find the other functions beside capturing the real.

In my work, I’m searching for pictorial functions that are based on the idea that the painted picture knows itself to be metaphorical, rhetorical, transformational, fictional. I’m not doing pictures of things that actually exist in the world. The narratives never actually occurred. In contrast to the assertion of one reality, my work investigates how different realities interact and abrade. And the understanding is that the abrasions start within the medium itself.

I think of the painted picture as an embodiment of the very problem that we face with the notion “reality.” The problem or question is, which reality? In a painted picture, is it the depicted reality, or the reality of the picture plane, or the multidimensional reality the artist and viewer exist in? That all three are involved points to the fact that pictures are inherently problematic. This problem is not one that can or ought to be eradicated by reductionist or purist solutions. We know that to successfully achieve the real is to destroy the medium; there is more to be achieved by using it than through its destruction. 

Mark Tansey, quoted in Mark Tansey: Visions and Revisions, by Arthur C. Dante

 

In the history of paintings of paintings, pictures that are 'self aware' so to speak, Velasquez' 'Las Meninas' is undoubtably the greatest piece of visual rhetoric concerned with the problematic multidimensional realities of pictorial illusion, time and space, and the relationships between artist, subject/s and viewer/s ever explored through the medium of paint on a flat surface. The painting seems to transcend the limits of its own frame by knowing and understanding them so well. When we study it carefully we see that the perceptual reality which the artist has constructed so convincingly is merely an illusion caught between the mirrored gazes of our own eyes and those of the artist and his subjects, a trick of light and shadows, a game of 'smoke and mirrors' and the alchemy of medium itself - paint.  

When we see the illusion for what it is we know that the pictorial 'reality' is only as deep as the surface of the paint, the context of the frame and gallery is another parallel reality, and our own moment of interaction with the picture, through a variety of digital reproductions acting as intermediaries, another parallel world colliding with these coordinates through time and space.

Things in their true nature and illusions are of the same basic substance ........... (Thich Nhat Hahn) 

In the Satipatthana Sutta in the section on 'mental objects', the five 'khandas' or aggregates which we confuse and grasp at as 'me' and 'mine' are compared to various illusions.  'rupa' or material form is compared to  foam;  'vedanna' or feeling to bubbles;  'sanna', cognition or perception, to a mirage; and 'sankara' or volitional formations, physical or psychological forces that fashion things, to a plantain tree with no heart wood, and finally 'vinanna' or consciousness to a magician's illusion. By seeing clearly into the nature of the arising and cessation of these various phenomena we can discern that they are impermanent and not-self, and that there is no lasting satisfaction in conditioned phenomena which are inherently unstable. 

When we consider that the constructed reality of the painting has long outlasted the artist, his subjects and most of the people who have viewed it since 1656, we can appreciate the singular power of art as a focus for contemplation of both conditional and ultimate realities. 

Hortus Conclusus

To see the World in a Grain of Sand 

And a heaven in a Wild Flower,

Hold infinity in the palm of your hand

And Eternity in an hour. 

William Blake

In the Begijnhof in Bruges every high gable end window overlooking rooftops and chimney stacks or low door opening to a walled courtyard or hidden garden suggests the satisfactions of a deliberately chosen interior life of solitary seclusion, and the disciplines of work and contemplation, amongst a community of like minded individuals, gathered around the paradox of space at the centre of things, at once limited and confined yet infinite and liberating. 

In Rob Aben and Saskia de Wit's 'The Enclosed Garden, History and Development of the Hortus Conclusus and its Reintroduction into the Present-day Urban Landscape', the theme of orientation and alignment of body to cosmos and inner to outer space through the architecture of the enclosed garden, often at the heart of the city, monastery, large or small house, is developed as they describe the evolution of its design from the Middle Ages in both Christian and Islamic traditions with analysis of specific examples up to and including the present day. 

' In the enclosed garden there are palpable references enabling one to orient oneself in time, space and society. 'Cosmic orientation', the primitive experience of being on this earth, is provided by the opposition between earth and heaven, high and low, vertical and horizontal, light and dark. the sun's path and that of the stars aid orientation and give and sense of direction. 'Temporal orientation' is gained from the rhythm of the seasons, of day and night and their utterly different effect on our experience of space, and from the tangible presence of the past. 'Territorial orientation' proceeds from the visible topography, the simultaneous presence from close to far off, the references to the far distance from out of the enclosed space, and the dualities of centre and periphery and inside and outside. These various aspects of orientation take on architectural shape in the physical enclosure, a structure introduced into unspecified natural space: organizing the surface on the one hand and giving spatial form on the other.'

Elsewhere in relation to literary archetypes for heavenly paradises in either a garden or a city they indicate that the Dutch word 'tuin' (garden) and the English word town are related etymologically.  I would suggest this grounds Luc Schuiten's utopian vision of the 'vegetal city' in a much older tradition. 

http://www.vegetalcity.net/en/

In Keith D Lilley's 'City and Cosmos' the Holy Blood procession in Bruges, (which took place last Thursday 5th of May) performs a per-ambulatory geography of the Holy Blood that is (according to Boogaart)

'...symbolically and cosmologically significant, tracing an outline of the world in and through the city, taking in the whole city and encompassing it with the holy blood of Christ the Redeemer.'

'There is therefore a social and spatial parallelism in the ordering of city and cosmos as traced out by the geography of the Bruges procession. The procession began at the city's spiritual and symbolic centre, its axis mundi, the place the city's ruling 'head' resided. Then with its movement from the centre to the edge, from inside to outside the city, and in encompassing its perimeter, the procession traced out the moral topography of the cosmic body, with its 'purer' inner core contrasting with its outer margins, the place of the lower orders. Hence through its shared forms and hierarchical ordering, unifying the city's body yet reinforcing its divine order in the social hierarchy, the procession of the Holy Blood drew onto the city a 'map' of the cosmos.'  

Bruges 'egg' shape suggests enclosure and containment, something warm, protective and nurturing, a place for incubating life.  

 In Gaston Bachelard's 'The Poetics of Space', physical and psychological worlds converge in the archetypal 'house', rather than garden or the city, where both body and cosmos, dreams and reality are comfortably accommodated. In the chapter, 'The house, from cellar to garret and the significance of the hut' he writes,

'For our house is our corner of the world. As has often been said, it is our first universe, a real cosmos in every sense of the word.'

'And always, in our daydreams, the house is a large cradle.'

'Life begins well, it begins enclosed, protected, all warm in the bosom of the house.' 

Quoting Anne Balif on page 72, in the chapter 'House and Universe', he writes,  

"...asking  a child to draw his house is asking him to reveal the deepest dream of shelter he has found for his happiness. If he is happy, he will succeed in drawing a snug, protected house which is well built in deeply rooted foundations". It will have the right shape, and nearly always there will be some indication of inner strength. In certain drawings, quite obviously, to quote Mme. Balif, " it is warm indoors, and there is a fire burning, such a big fire, in fact, that it can be seen coming out of the chimney." When the house is happy, soft smoke rises in gay rings above the roof. 

My own effort to dream up and create renovated fireplace is still a work in progress but the soft contours of NHL 3.5 hydraulic lime plaster give the consolidated walls a traditional, breathable surface that is both beautiful and consistent with the original lime mortar between the old bricks and under the stripped later layers. There is sanding and building to be done tiles and a top to be added to the mantle and surround and the floor has to come out and terracotta tiles have to be laid on a lime-crete slab and breathable insulation layer.

 

and of houses, bodies and the cosmos, time and space the Buddha had this to say......

  "I tell you, friend, that it is not possible by traveling to know or see or reach a far end of the cosmos where one does not take birth, age, die, pass away, or reappear. But at the same time, I tell you that there is no making an end of suffering & stress without reaching the end of the cosmos. Yet it is just within this fathom-long body, with its perception & intellect, that I declare that there is the cosmos, the origination of the cosmos, the cessation of the cosmos, and the path of practice leading to the cessation of the cosmos."

Rohitassa Sutta  AN 4.45 Trans. Thannissaro Bhikkhu

"Seeking but not finding the house builder,

I hurried through the round of many births:
Painful is birth ever and again.

O house builder, you have been seen;
You shall not build the house again.
Your rafters have been broken up,
Your ridgepole is demolished too.

My mind has now attained the unformed Nibbâna
And reached the end of every sort of craving."

Dhp.153 - 154. Trans. by Ñanamoli Thera

In Praise of Folly

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

This summer the early music festival in Bruges is entitled, 'Lof Der Zotheid' after the 15/16th cen. Dutch humanist Desiderius Erasmus' book of the same name in which the personification of the goddess 'Folly' narrates the full extent of her power over gods and mortals, providing an mask for Erasmus, made even more complex by subtle double ironies, to lampoon the absurdities of his own day in church and state. 

I decided to re-read my old school copy in preparation. The pursuit of 'happiness' through ignorance and self-delusion was, its seems, the same then as it is now - as Folly says,

"What difference is there, do you think, between those in Plato's cave who can only marvel at the shadows and images of various objects, provided they are content and don't know what they miss, and the philosopher who has emerged from the cave and sees the real things ? "

Fortunately early music can be heard at other times of year as well and Paul Van Nevel's Huelgas Ensemble gave a powerful performance on Saturday evening of the 17th century Portuguese composer Joao Lourenco Rebelo's Vesper Psalms and Lamentations at the concertgebouw. 

Meanwhile I was delighted to find this hand-thrown terracotta water jug for only 6 euros in a flea market on the Langstraat last week. Although I doubt it is very old (the glaze seems too shiny and new) it fits well the profile of the pot fragments that were dug out of the terrace with it's medieval profile and moreover is eminently useful. 

With the brick floor laid in the hall and drying ready for a clean and 'polish' I shifted focus to the walls which have already been prepped and worked up a leveling coat of NHL 3.5 as a preliminary to adding a finishing layer with finer sand. I have quite a few square meters of wall to cover before the end of June but I can reasonably manage around 5 or 6 in a day. P worked on fitting up the cupboards and surface for the sink, oven and washing machine for the new small kitchen so I can can tile and plaster behind. When I can get the plumber and electrician to connect gas and electric to the mains here I can cook !  

In 'Loft Der Zothied' Erasmus scholarly theology and classical humanism is balanced by robust common sense and waspish humour and irony that perhaps owes as much to the folk wisdom of his day as it does to his formidable formal schooling and academic career. One can surely detect a similar vision of human folly in Breugel's 'Netherlandish Proverbs' in which the artist creates a typical landscape  peopled by theater of fools embodying through their outlandish behaviour a rich variety of popular idiomatic folk wisdom. 

Nederlandse Spreekwoorden, Flemish Proverbs,  1559 oil-on-oak-panel Pieter Bruegel the Elder

1

Niemant en kent hem selven niet, diet wel aenmerct die siet groot wondere 

(There is hardly anyone who knows himself, he who comprehends this discovers great wonders.)

Accidental archeology

'treasure chest' with pottery fragments and other 'finds'. 

In M. R. James' ghost stories the over-curious antiquarian, archeologist or scholar of ancient manuscripts, invariably a solitary academic bachelor, in his pursuit of hidden or forgotten knowledge or treasure, digs too deep into the past uncovering and disturbing a festering, half forgotten evil intent, locked inside seemingly innocent, inanimate objects or otherwise pleasant and innocuous places.  Seeming to feed off his obsessive fascination, it seethes with a generative power, haunting him quite literally with the manifestation of the supernatural in ghosts that are almost physical, tangible apparitions full of foreboding and psychological terror.  Had James been Roman Catholic, instead of Anglican, he might have found it easier to reconcile the rational to the supernatural without using the veil of fiction to explore these problematic states.

Septic tank finally in the ground !

Ghosts, oil on canvases.

Digging the terrace in the summer to place the new septic tank and drains revealed an evil, muddy horror reminiscent of the trenches of the first world war, in which a great uncle died at only 17 years old, the boy pictured right in the painting I made below entitled 'ghosts', which when I was making it felt like a 'haunting'. However, neither ghosts nor treasure came out of this excavation but what it did reveal is a small quantity of pottery, some of it almost certainly medieval and later and other curious things including bones, shells and rusty handmade nails. Clearly the pottery, clay pipes, bones and shells along with evidence of an old bread kiln shows domestic activity centered around food that included a diet of bread, meat and shellfish, and tobacco for smoking. The green salt glazed tiles and the decorated yellow and brown medieval style tile fragment and the fragment of Dutch style delftware all seem more interesting than the mostly brown crocks but I was delighted to discover a stoneware bottle neck with the face of what look like 'The Green Man'. I am hoping to identify each fragment more accurately with some local help and excited to begin digging the French drain against the back wall of the house to see what else comes up from the past. Scraping back layers of accumulated decoration from walls and cleaning mud off fragments of long forgotten or lost detritus is deeply satisfying because of its intensely physical nature and the sense that this is a direct encounter with the past as a continuous presence in the here and now. I think there is something of this in M. R. James ghost stories too.

The Green Man ? Bottle neck of stone ware jar or flagon

Equivalence ?

Clearly context is crucial to the meaning and function of any work of art. Carl Andre's famous or infamous ( depending on your point of view) 'Equivalent VIII' more popularly referred to as 'The Tate Bricks' which caused such a controversy in the British press when it was exhibited for a second time at the Tate Gallery in 1976, owes much of its meaning to the fact that it was displayed in a gallery space and not on a building site - a principle of modernism that can be traced to Marcel Duchamp and his famous 'ready-mades'. 

Marcel Duchamp 'Fountain' 1917

Andre's seminal minimalist aesthetic is clearly in retrospect historically significant and his visual influence is arguably evident in artists as similar and diverse as Sean Scully or Agnes Martin whose works are ostensibly concerned with regular patterns of equivalent units although this is perhaps only a superficial visual similarity. 

Carl Andre. Equivalents VIII. Firebricks, 120-unit rectangular solid, 2 high x 6 header x 10 stretcher, 2 1/2 x 4 1/2 x 9 (6.4 x 11.4 x 22.9) each, 5 x 27 x 90 1/8 (12.8 x 68.5 x 229)

 'Although each of the eight shapes was different, they all occupied the same amount of space in cubic centimetres, which accounted for their visual equivalence. He therefore entitled this exhibition Equivalents. ..........Andre added on 12 May 1972 that none of these pieces was sold from the Tibor de Nagy exhibition and he afterwards returned all but 200 of the bricks to the brickyard to get his money back. The original bricks were sand-lime bricks from the Long Island City Brickworks. When he decided to reconstruct the pieces several years later he found that this brickworks had closed, so he used firebricks instead. These are approximately the same size, but yellowy-brown instead of bluish white.'  (From the Tate Gallery catalogue entry.)

Untitled
1977
Agnes Martin
American, 1938-2004
India ink, graphite, and gesso on canvas
72 x 72 inches

Sean Scully, Wall of Light Burren 2003 Oil on linen, 75 x 85 inches,

 Sean Scully has documented in photographs and texts his interest in the patterns of dry stone walls on Aran or brick warehouse facades in New York and Agnes Martin was apparently a dab hand when it came to making the abobe walls of her residence in New Mexico. My own current preoccupation with patterns and brick owes as much to practical necessity as it does to aesthetics although the two are not easily separated. 'Shower' below  is still waiting to have the glass panel installed before it is fully finished but it represents a significant step forward from the outside toilet it has replaced.

'Shower'.  media: ceramic tile, lime mortar, metal and plastic, size 200x160 x80 cm

The reclaimed brick floor in a herringbone pattern is half finished. A remarkable number of these 17/18th century handmade bricks have the worker's finger marks baked into the clay, many of them quite small that suggests they were using child labour in the brick kilns to press-mold and stack them before and after firing. Now that the damp bricks are being used up the woodlice that came into the house with them and which I have been gently ejecting have started to leave. These benign little creatures do not damage sound wood or carry disease but they do like the damp corners which have almost all disappeared inside.

laying the bricks in lime mortar on the prepared lime slab and 'breathable' insulation layer.

lunch break: cooking mushrooms and pasta on the stove using methelated spirits

  

 'P' salvaged the blue stone window sill in the bathroom and I lime mortared around it to create the profile. 

 I was also up the ladders again this time in the garden of the Hof Van Pittem to re-point the top of the party wall I share with my ecclesiastical neighbour. It would be very nice if I could open a small door under the stairs and access this lovely garden from the hall but this is pure fantasy! On the other side I have further brick repairs to make in the summer.

You can see clearly the staining and profile of an old 17th cen. or earlier bread kiln and chimney stack that occupied the corner of the terrace, the remains of which were discovered in the old storage space behind the outside toilet which was demolished last summer to enlarge the terrace and prepare for the rebuilding of the kitchen and bathroom. I plan to repair this section wall with lime mortar and the remaining old bricks.