When I visited Bauhaus Archive in Berlin, I was fascinated by the spirit embedded in artist work and notes from Bauhaus movement. I like they play with form, line, colour and material as a mean of the understanding structural composition. From Paul Klee’s watercolour painting, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy’s 3D structure and Oskar Schlemmer’s Triadic Ballet, I adored the live geometry and mechanical beauty. Sometimes it seemed as if objects dissolved into materials and it appeared as a volume of colours. Consequently, I tried to define 3 elements for my practice to find my structural composition: volume, material and colour.
Assuming object and space as a whole as if there is no order of placing objects into background space, whole structure arises as a volume. Not in a general understanding of the capacity of container, but in opened boundary as a whole mass/ an organic form of object-in-space.
Then I want to focus on materials and how they convey energy from space-time they have been through. They may reveal their energy in the process of deconstruction/reconstruction. I will try to degrade its character of general understanding from given object. It is to find the immaterialised elements in the object in order to deconstruct the objects and alter the given structure of it.
Finally, colour interplays with both volume and material. According to Klee, “Colour can be neither weighed nor measured. Neither with scales nor with ruler can any difference be detected between two surfaces.” I want colour element in my work to help dematerialise an object. Then the structure of immaterialised objects would possibly create the volume of entire space.
Bauhaus Archive
Laszo Moholy-Nagy, Light Prop for an Electric Stage
A Note at Bauhaus Archive
The Poetics of Space
Bachelard draws origin, myth, legend, reverie, dreams and memory out of our inner space and interpret them into dream geometry. He set them free from personal experience or psychological metaphor and let them extend to another dimension, in his term, dimension of intimacy or cosmic anthropological universe where we become detached as we get older.
In my interpretation, Limestone cave and wondering around in it is a perfect form of visualising the dream geometry. Chemical weathering under acidic water over times, growing forms and expanding capacity of space little by little, it holds memory and legend. It becomes wonderer’s dwelling and shelter.
As for more intimate space, there are attics and stairs. An attic is the space between two ceilings as well as a reservoir for vanished memories. Stairs is the passageway from habitat to dreamer’s place. Probably it brings more imagination to me when it is “down the stairs” than it is “up to the stairs”. When it’s “down the stairs”, it draws less vertical movement in one’s sentiment and conveys more imagination.
The third space is drawers, so-called hybrid objects by Bachelard. It is in-between space and object. Drawers are concealed container of memory and hidden space for intimacy. Then again, when it opens, the hidden space is not inside anymore. It opens to the outer space, so that the boundary between space and object truly blurs.
When memory and thoughts interact with space, it engraves another space into the space. It changes the elasticity of atmosphere in the space and evokes prehistoric memory and memory of sense. Then it becomes the beginning of one's creative mind.
limestone cave in Korea
a cafe in Korea
You cannot lay down your memory, Boijmans van Boeningen, Rotterdam
Blink
A most intriguing episode from Doctor Who series creates the weeping angel, unknown creatures survived as long as universe and evolved to have quantum-lock system in their biology. It means they don’t exist when they are observed. At the moment they’re seen by other living creatures, they are freezed into rock. They can feed time energy only when they are not observed. So to defend life against them should not blink. Its motive of the story is from the brief theory of observer effect and uncertainty principle in quantum mechanics. Borrowing the concept from the theory of physics is very clever and convincing to plant strong image about the unseen.
Then its invisible and variable properties connect with the imaginative quality of water at night, which I find a link to Bachelard’s text in Water and Dreams: His interpretation between their fluidity and the aspect of ambivalent matter can meet the idea of the matter at quantum level as in-between wavelength and substance. In his quote, night takes away the evidence of our existence: it can transform to the action of “blink” in the episode as well as in the psyche. Blinking is a fleeting moment of night to the subject. The moment fetches subconscious fear of drowning in the dark as if dragged by the invisible, which is the property of water at night.
Apart from actual scientific theory, thinking of the visible turning to be invisible is the opposite way of the origin of art. I amused by concepts going forward and backward in the episode. My brainstorming in dream geometry started like this, from the idea of interrelation or intervention among different concept which is integrated into time and space.
The Refusal of Time
I like video art when it illustrates artist's storytelling of archival work connected from their narrative to macrocosm. William Kentridge - The Refusal of Time in Whitechaeple gallery is a good example as Elizabeth Price – K at the infinite mix.
The Refusal of Time is five channel video projections with installation. As entering the installation room, Kentridge’s voice and dialogue forms the power of presence. The sound coming out of steel megaphones perfectly meets nostalgic light from projections in the dark on panoramic image. It weaves information of fatalistic life ceremony and scientific paradigm. It turns to journey for cycle of life, journey to space travel and journey across historical events. They present time as duration. Kentridge is walking across 5 channel screen and a crowd of people are marching like carnival parade as if it is our fate in the time of universe. Projection light once drops on the screen like tears for nothing or meteor shower.
A big machine is another performer occupying in the middle of the room. It almost seems to be generated by sound. Simultaneously, its theatrical movement manifests sense of sound. It stands dominantly and moves dramatically in a sequence like a highly functioning loom responding to worker’s time. The installation looks like a dance stage for destined ceremony at some point. Then it transmits to the sound collage of time clicking, piano device, metronome beats and machine operating. Here sound is so powerful to turn to the being in space.
Over its running time, I still belong to the room like timber on the wall or wooden box at the corner. Maybe time in Thick Time is not time as duration. It is probably the refusal of conventional time, the concentrated time in one’s presence.
the Refusal of Time
exhibition catalog