A lineage of sanctified spaces: non-space, ultra-space, ideal space

“To put this another way, the viewing of art followed a similar trajectory to that of music listening, moving from social event to more interiorised behaviour.”

[…]

“The strategies undertaken by architects and curators to keep the empty and unobtrusive gallery environment separate from the world outside have occupied many art theorists. In 1976, for instance, Brian O’Doherty contended that the gallery had acquired “a limbo-like status”, an “eternity of display” that parallels that of the works exhibited. Describing the traditional gallery space as a “white cube”, he claimed that “[a] gallery is constructed along laws as rigorous as those for building a medieval church”:

Some of the sanctity of the church, the formality of the courtroom, the mystique of the experimental laboratory joins with the chic design to produce a unique chamber of aesthetics. So powerful are the perceptual fields of force within this chamber that, once outside it, art can lapse into secular status.

Thomas McEvilley has charted for the “white cube” a lineage of sanctified spaces that extends long beyond the Medieval church to include Egyptian tomb chambers, which also “held paintings and sculptures that were regarded as magically contiguous with eternity and thus able to provide access to it or contrast with it.” […] McEvilley describes the modern gallery as a space “where access to higher metaphysical realms is made to seem available”: as a portal for the metaphysical, these spaces must be sheltered from the appearance of change and time.

This specially segregated space is a kind of non-space, ultra-space or ideal space where the surrounding matrix of space-time is symbolically annulled. Arguing along similar lines, Miwon Kwon describes the gallery in a way reminiscent of the reverential behaviour encouraged by the “inner world of the performance” (Small): “the seemingly benign architectural features of a gallery/museum […] were deemed to be coded mechanisms that actively disassociate the space of art from the outer world, furthering the institution’s idealist imperative of rendering itself and its hierarchization of values, ‘objective’, ‘disinterested’, and ‘true’.”

(page 100)

Holly Rogers. Sounding the Gallery: Video and the Rise of Art-Music. Oxford: OUP, 2013.

Found while browsing the stacks at the Belzer Library, SFU.

Speech almost without words

“Dialogue launches language, the mind, but once it is launched we develop a new power, “inner speech,” and it is this that is indispensable for our further development, our thinking. “Inner speech,” says [Lev] Vygotsky, “is speech almost without words…it is not the interior aspect of external speech, it is a function in itself…While in external speech thought is embodied in words, in inner speech words die as they bring forth thought. Inner speech is to a large extent thinking in pure meanings.” We start with dialogue, with language that is external and social, but then to think, to become ourselves, we have to move to a monologue, to inner speech. Inner speech is essentially solitary, and it is profoundly mysterious, as unknown to science, Vygotsky writes, as “the other side of the moon.” “We are our language,” it is often said; but our real language, our real identity, lies in inner speech, in that ceaseless stream and generation of meaning that constitutes the individual mind. It is through inner speech that the child develops his own concepts and meanings; it is through inner speech that he achieves his own identity; it is through inner speech, finally, that he constructs his own world.”

(page 72-73)

Oliver Sacks, Seeing Voices. Berkeley: U of California P, 1989.

Some secret language which we feel and see, but never speak

“Is there, we ask, some secret language which we feel and see, but never speak, and, if so, could this be made visible to the eye? Is there any characteristic which thought possesses that can be rendered visible without the help of words? It has speed and lowness; dartlike directness and vaporous circumlocution. But it has also, especially in moments of emotion, the picture-making power, the need to lift its burden to another bearer; to let an image run side by side along with it. The likeness of the thought is, for some reason, more beautiful, more comprehensible, more available than the thought itself.”

(page 57)

Virginia Woolf, “The Cinema.” Essay in The Crowded Dance of Modern Life.

Found secondhand at McLeod Books on Pender St.

A translation of one sensory input into another

“Despite this “emergent” intervention – this vibrating “chord” – however, the end product is most often a translation of one sensory input into another rather than a simultaneous audiovisual flow: time can vibrate within a painted instant, but it nevertheless remains without actual teleological motion.”

(page 63)

Holly Rogers. Sounding the Gallery: Video and the Rise of Art-Music. Oxford: OUP, 2013.

Found while browsing the stacks at the Belzer Library, SFU.

An active and questing disposition in the mind

The origin of questioning, of an active and questing disposition in the mind, is not something that arises spontaneously, de novo, or directly from the impact of experience; it stems, it is stimulated, by communicative exchange – it requires dialogue, in particular the complex dialogue of mother and child.”

(page 64-65)

Oliver Sacks, Seeing Voices. Berkeley: U of California P, 1989.

Thought could be conveyed by shape

“For a moment it seemed as if thought could be conveyed by shape more effectively than by words. The monstrous, quivering tadpole seemed to be fear itself, and not the statement, ‘I am afraid.’ In fact, the shadow was accidental, and the effect unintentional. But if a shadow at a certain moment can suggest so much more than the actual gestures and words of men and women in a state of fear, it seems plain that cinema has within its grasp innumerable symbols for emotions that have so far failed to find expression. Terror has, besides its ordinary forms, the shape of a tadpole; it burgeons, bulges, quivers, disappears. Anger is not merely rant and rhetoric, red faces and clenched fists. It is perhaps a black line wriggling upon a white sheet.”

(page 56)

Virginia Woolf, “The Cinema.” Essay in The Crowded Dance of Modern Life.

Found secondhand at McLeod Books on Pender St.

Vibrating between media, abolishing the distinctness of media

“Perhaps, then, it is not accurate to categorise and separate the arts according to their immediate temporal or spatial qualities. Rather, something extra comes into play when they combine, something similar to Pound’s “ideograms” or the gestus described by Brecht and Weill: an ideogram or a gestus, explains Albright, “is not an element within any specific artistic medium; it is not an icon, not a word, but a chord, vibrating between media, abolishing the distinctness of media.” Albright’s understanding of these gestures able to speak across genres is reminiscent of Cook’s hypothesis concerning audiovisual dialogues in film: form him, the crux of the question is not whether or not music and image can say the same thing but, rather, what their “emergent” language is when combined.”

(page 62)

Holly Rogers. Sounding the Gallery: Video and the Rise of Art-Music. Oxford: OUP, 2013.

Found while browsing the stacks at the Belzer Library, SFU.

A truce with the wide world

“That thing the nature of which is totally unknown to you is usually what you need to find, and finding it is a matter of getting lost. The word ‘lost’ comes from the Old Norse los, meaning the disbanding of an army, and this origin suggests soldiers falling out of formation to go home, a truce with the wide world. I worry now that many people never disband their armies, never go beyond what they know.”

(page 6-7)

Rebecca Solnit, A Field Guide to Getting Lost.

Recommended and lent to me by my sister; later I bought my own copy.

Tuning our bodies to rhythm

“Rhythm, as noted before, is a principle based on the human body. The heart beat, the blood circulation, and respiration each follow their own rhythm, as do the movements we carry out when walking, dancing, swimming, writing, and so forth. The same goes for the sounds we make when speaking, singing, laughing, and crying. The inner movements of our bodies that we are incapable of perceiving are also organized rhythmically (Baier 2001). The human body is indeed rhythmically tuned.

We have a particular capacity for perceiving rhythms and tuning our bodies to them. When the temporality of a performance is organized and structured through rhythm, different “rhythmic systems” clash. The rhythm of the performance collides with the various rhythms of each individual spectator. In such cases an analysis of the rhythmic tuning is particularly relevant because the autopoietic feedback loop can show whether and to what extent the performance succeeds in drawing the audience into its rhythm, so that the actors receive fresh impulses from the spectators. It also reveals whether and to what extent several spectators with similar rhythmic tunings might influence the other spectators and actors. Whichever direction this process might take in any individual case, it can be assumed that the autopoietic feedback loop largely organizes itself according to rhythmic shifts, variations, and changes. The feedback loop bases itself on the alternating rhythmic tuning, also realized in the direct and reciprocal physical interaction of actors and spectators. This suggests that a rhythmic structure provides the autopoietic feedback loop with particularly favourable conditions for its fulfillment. Furthermore, it draws the audience’s attention to just this process. By organizing and structuring the performative generation of materiality, rhythm also enables this materiality to emerge as an agent in the feedback loop’s autopoiesis. Through rhythm, the performative generation of materiality and the feedback loop’s autopoiesis are productively engaged with one another in a manner perceptible to the audience.”

(page 136-7)

Erika Fischer-Lichte. The Transformative Power of Performance: A New Aesthetics. Trans.: Saskya Iris Jain. New York: Routledge, 2008.

An embodied phenomenological sonoric ethereality

“The slippage between the physical activity to produce musical sound and the abstract nature of what is produced creates a semiotic contradiction that is ultimately “resolved” to a significant degree via the agency of human sight. Music, despite its phenomenological sonoric ethereality, is an embodied practice, like dance and theatre.”

(page 50)

Richard Leppert qtd in: Holly Rogers. Sounding the Gallery: Video and the Rise of Art-Music. Oxford: OUP, 2013.

Found while browsing the stacks at the Belzer Library, SFU.