Archive: Author: wade tillett

In order to continue our belief that we are non-void, we must inhabit the void. For to be the void inhabiting the non-void is to be nothing; no room is left for humanity and for existence.  This thesis builds from the belief that we are non-void inhabiting the void.  That by not objectifying ourselves, by not filling the void with non-void, we allow ourselves to exist within the void. “Man produces himself by refusing his image, in refusing to be reproduced.”34 By not objectifying life, perception, and humanity we leave ourselves with life, perception and humanity.   By not creating reality, we assure our own. By not objectifying our thesis, we leave ourselves with our thesis. 

By objectifying our anti-thesis exterior to ourselves, we create the thesis within ourselves.  Thus we want to create a world without belief so that we can believe.   We want to construct a world of nihilism fulfilled so that we can revel in the fulfillment of our own belief within ourselves. We want to create a world of design so that we can be the reality within it.

It is the blank canvas and cold hard examination room, which cause in us the urge of life, the artistic impulse, the kinetic potential. The feeling in the viewer is active and induced rather than empathetic and distant. It is in the coldest and most comfortless rooms that we feel ourselves most. By not imbedding the object with emotion, we leave those unspeakables unspoken, and those undescribables undescribed.

Loos understood that ornament embodies belief; it consumes the object which it is placed on.  It fills the void around the object so that the object no longer exists within a void, and therefore no longer exists. It is by the placement of a cold hard plain exterior without belief that we are left with belief within ourselves.

“Mies takes a step back and remains silent”35 The void is more saturated with kinetic potential the more that potential energy is intentionally left untapped. The architecture of exclusion created the non-architecture of inclusion.

“For any expression that is made up of few formal components and little apparent associative content ? any art, that is to say, which conceals art ? is likely to induce a perceptual horror vacui in the interpreter, tempting him to fill in the space that the art has emptied out, as it were, and thus to account for the emptying.”36

“The interplay of column and wall eventually ended with the total dissolution of the wall and the crystallization of a spatial void through which the body, wrapped in various layers of sheer glass, could experience the silence caused by the absence of any representational intention.”37

“Is this not torture? Setting the soul in marble and then mocking the living.”25

Objectification is our ability to place images of ourselves within reality, which are independent from ourselves.

Within the void, standing on the infinite beach staring out at the infinite sea, we see only our temporality, our inability to change, to make consequence, to conquer death.   And it is by placing within this void images of ourselves that we attempt to assure our own existence.

But it is our ability to control reality, to design, which objectifies our existence, strips our humanity from within us and fills the void around us, drowning us within our own attempt to see ourselves.  We no longer inhabit the void, but rather a void filled with objects of ourselves, of markers of existence, of tombstones, of churches and photographs.  And as we fill this void, as we extract from ourselves our perceptions and our humanity, our life and our beliefs, the only implication can be that we have less within ourselves, that we become void within our objects, spaces between our images of ourselves.

Architecture which objectifies ourselves, which has embedded meaning and representation within itself becomes a physical manifestation of cultural language. It is within cultural language that sarcasm arises out of the paradox of the object as language distorted, out of used up symbols used again.26 This leads to further distortion of the distortion and sarcasm of the sarcasm. “Irony can no longer be simply the subjective irony of the philosopher. It can no longer be exercised as if from the outside of things. Instead, it is the objective irony which arises from things themselves – it is an irony which belongs to the system itself because the system is constantly functioning against itself.”27 It is with this irony that Graves builds, and U2 sells, and society no longer knows when it is being sarcastic.28

“Can the architect draw his motifs and messages from a contaminated culture without danger? Does our delight in the deadpan outrageousness of some of the more spontaneous manifestations of popular taste lead to much more than a trendy dead end? Will the act of appropriation, engaged in by selective and sophisticated sensibilities, create anything better than a marginal product? Is this incorporation a truly creative procedure or a patronizing, elitist act? Do we co-opt these popular objects and images, or are we co-opted by them? Finally, does the debasement of the borrowed idea or fabric taken from high art corrupt high art as well, as Eco suggests? Are we producing still another kind of art and reality – or simply speeding the degenerative process?”29

“Architecture always represents something other than itself from the moment that it becomes distinguished from mere building.”30 Frampton claims the failure to make the distinction between architecture (language) and building (object) is one of the primary problems with contemporary architecture, as is the acceptance of industrialized construction (a primary producer of objects without language). He further states that a problem with architecture is its autonomous practice.31 The view that architecture can not just be an industrially constructed building is the very reason that the autonomous practice has resulted. By allowing architecture to be a mere building, we are freed of semblance and meaning.32

“To give a text an author is to impose a limit on that text, to furnish it with a final signified, to close the writing. Such a conception suits criticism very well, the latter then allotting itself the important task of discovering the author beneath the work: when the author has been found the text is ?explained? – victory to the critic. Hence there is no surprise in the fact that, historically, the reign of the author has also been that of the critic”33

“Disneyland is presented as imaginary to make us believe that the rest is real.”21

Can we give up thought, give up design? Better yet, can we create reality?

We can not. We are trapped within our thoughts, within our designs, within our own utopia.  Design automatically places ourselves within the product of our own dream, within the product of our own utopic hell.22 Designers can not reject design; this is an impossibility.

A rejection of design yields brushed on patinas, fake broken glass, intentional incompleteness and designed fragmentation.  To attempt to include reality in design is to make it not reality, but to make it design.  We can make the appearance of reality by designing failure and incompleteness, but a designed failure is a design. Designs which attempt to reject design are irreconcilably flawed by this fact.  Designers can not reject design, this is an impossibility.  It is reality which designers most want because it is reality that designers can never have. Reality is the difference between design and the objectification of design. Reality is the failure of design.

“The only legitimate relationship that architects can have with the subject of chaos is to take their rightful place in the army of those devoted to resist it, and fail.”23

We must attempt to create utopia. We have no other choice.

We must believe in reality. Utopia will not be achieved. We will never be able to agree on one utopic vision. Our effects will be violated with physical needs, worn by time, run down by lack of upkeep, and immediately obsolete.  It is not necessary to build failure into a design, because failure is inevitable. It was the disregard for the void, the perceived impenetrability, the necessity of simplicity, which created the complex relations that exist between objects. It is within this space that conflict and clash, degradation of utopia, and resultant reality, will continue to be produced. Complexity creates itself, there is no need to design it. Entropy is decay.

We must anticipate the outcome of our failed utopia. When designs are objectified, is the difference hidden or displayed? Is it possible to identify reality, failure within the simulacrum24 of reality and failure?

This anticipation the unavoidable condition of realization: the “omnipresent fourth dimension” of the simulacrum, of seeing ourselves, and seeing ourselves seeing ourselves.

Objectification produces something that is no longer dependent on our thoughts about it. This is the inherent flaw of objectification, of architecture’s thesis:  reality is independent of the mind. It is the difference between our designs and the objectification of our designs that allows us to distinguish reality; it is the difference between our designs and the objectification of our designs that is reality. Reality is the failure of design.

What if we abandoned design, architecture, and the modern project? What if we had no more suburbs or museums? What if we gave up thought and enjoyed music? What if we quit becoming and focused on being? After all, reality is the interesting part. What if we had 100% reality all the time? Would there be a reality? Would there be any difference?

There would be no reality because there would only be. Simple organisms have no concept of reality because there is no difference between thought and life, between becoming and being. It is the difference between becoming and being that allows us to realize being as enjoyable. It is our ability to become which separates us from simply being. It is our ability to be which causes us to search endlessly for a way to become an entity that can simply be. Thought necessarily includes the separation of self and world. And it is this separation which we wish to overcome.13

“If the prison is the generic form of architecture this is primarily because man?s own form is his first prison. ?man?s revolt against prison is a rebellion against his own form, against the human figure?. The only way for man to escape the architectural chain gang is to escape his form, to lose his head. This self-storming of one?s own form requires, in fact, an infinitely more underhanded strategy than one of simple destruction or escape.” Man must be dissembled; meaning must be dismembered. Bataille wrote, “Man will escape his head as a convict escapes his prison.”14

We escape our form by escaping our identity, by escaping our thoughts, by escaping our head. We overcome the separation of self and world by overcoming thought.

It is the abandonment of thought that allows us to see reality as it is: infinite. Without perception of time there is no time. There is only now and its web of interdependencies: Zen, immediate perception, apprehension and suspension, as in music, of now, of being, of immediate reality. And this results in direct interaction, materialization as conceptualization.15

Why is this level of direct perception of reality important to us? Have we not evolved away from the state of the dog and the small child? This state, and only this state, allows us to perceive reality as it is — this state includes the viewer as part of the now. This state provides the understanding, belonging, which allows us to feel and understand the now unlike any model can represent. Time is a continuous flow, a constant now. To experience this true time one must directly experience this ceaseless flow with immediate apprehension.16

Music exists in a continuous flow of the present and can only be understood with instant apprehension. When overcome with music, or emotion, or art, or life, we experience “complete mental silence,” the present is experienced directly. When listening to music there is no hidden meaning, rather “the music itself is the meaning.”17 It is with this apprehension that we “will see the material world melt back into a single flux, a continuity of flowing, a becoming.”18 “There is no other time than that of the enunciation and every text is eternally written here and now“19

It is our ability to change the things perceived within the state of direct perception while exterior to this state that provides the paradox.20 Objectification is to cause to have reality independent of the mind. This is the mystery of creation: that from the mind we can create something independent of the mind. We can create from the state of thought something which can be perceived while in the state of direct perception. Does not creation necessarily include thought? Is not the only way to influence physical reality to be exterior to it? Is not the only way to affect a system to be outside of it? Is Zen creation possible? How could one begin to create without thought? Why would one create without thought? If Zen creation were possible, would it not only be a result, a product of being, a trace, pure expressionism?

The self-animator projects our personal dreams to us through our senses.  The self animator is the end result of objectification, of total effect, of personalized utopia, of seeing ourselves.

I do not believe in architecture,

I do not believe in design,

I do not believe in technology,

I do not believe in objects.

I believe in life.

I believe in humanity.

I believe in reality, and that it will always be infinitely more interesting than design.

I believe that we must inhabit the void in order to continue our belief that we are non-void.

The void of circulation, the fractured space, the rhythm between the forms, is the nothing which unites us, the empty sea shared by humanity; not the deep root of Jung?s collective conscious, not the magic synthesis of modernity, not the topical connections of heterotopia, but that which is in between, which is leftover, which is, has, and always will be humanity?s common physical realm.

Malevich wrote, “I have conquered the pale depth of the colored sky, I have detached its color, put it in a creative sack, and tied the knot. Aviators of the future, fly! White, free and endless, infinity is before you.”55

“We?ll keep silence to listen to our bodies.

We?ll watch ourselves living.

The mind will fall back on itself to read its own history.

We?ll play wonderful games of ability and love.

We?ll talk a lot, to ourselves and to everybody.

Life will be the only environmental art.”45

Minimal design makes the viewer aware of themselves. Minimal design makes its own failure extremely evident. The person within the room of nothing becomes the difference, the failure, the reality within the design.

Architecture which is inhabited has failed because it has been degraded by reality, by function, by action, by time, by impermanence, by change.  This is why architecture photographs never include people.  Why white sheets are draped over furniture.    Why drawings are more compelling than the built object.

“There?s no need for shelters, since the climatic conditions and the body mechanisms of thermo-regulation have been modified to guarantee total comfort.

At the most we can play at making shelter, or rather at the home, at architecture.”

“In Art – Art without problematics – is found the source of inexhaustible LIFE; through this source, if we are true artists, freed from the dreaming and pictorial imagination of the psychological domain (which is the counter-space, the space of the PAST), we may attain to eternal life, to Immortality.”46

“The true painter of the future will be a mute poet who will write nothing but will recount, without speech and in silence, an immense picture without limits.”47

For art to take on its life source, its magic ability to cast us into the void, it must forsake time, memory, prediction.  Tzara (nihilistic dadaist), “Dada; every object, all objects, sentiments, obscurities, apparitions and the precise clash of parallel lines are weapons for the fight: Dada; abolition of memory: Dada; abolition of archaeology: Dada; abolition of prophets: Dada; abolition of the future.”48

In order to truly inhabit the void, to truly experience space, flux, flow, the viewer must be cast into the material world with equally material thoughts and actions.    “Freespaces are not idealized abstractions, but concrete, existential realizations. To inhabit them, one must be equally concrete in ones thoughts and actions. It is not merely a matter of responding to the material characteristics, of reacting, but of a direct engagement, requiring an initiative, amplified, rendered forceful by a confrontation with “useless” space.”49 It is within this realm, a realm of action and not reduction, of perception and not codification, of existence and not essence, that our soul is felt as it is, part of the continuous flux, flow, energy of an utterly physical, and temporal world.  “The soul can only reveal itself through direct action.”50

Art is the ability to look at life as new, fresh, changing every moment as if looking at it for the first time.  It is the ability to awaken to the environment and remain naive, relieve all preconceptions.51 It is a state of constant astonishment and awe.   “My art would be that of living.  Each second, each breath, is a work which is described nowhere, which is neither cerebral, nor visual; it’s a sort of constant euphoria.”52 A state without definitions, a perception of life, an understanding of flow, of void, of now:  art must defy its own boundaries, its own definitions, for art is concerned with forcing us into this perception throughout our lives.  Within the Dada event, “the violence, the informality, and the strenuous activity of these events were deliberately cultivated in order to bridge the gap between art and life, if not to destroy art altogether.”53 Klein echoes Duchamp in his desire to rid the world of art’s definition and live life as art:  “Lets forget art altogether”54

“The true painter of the future will be a mute poet who will recount, without speech and in silence, an immense picture without limits.” (Klein)

Wtihin the void, you feel your self.

It is like living in a museum, in which life is the art.

A tension, a difference, is what allows the viewer an awareness of their occupation of space.