Kuntera

“What is vertigo? Fear of falling? Then why do we feel it even when the observation tower comes equipped with a sturdy handrail? No, vertigo is something other than the fear of falling. It is the voice of the emptiness below us which tempts and lures us, it is the desire to fall, against which, terrified, we defend ourselves.”

-Milan Kundera, "The Unbearable Lightness of Being"

Isn't it bloody annoying when you realise some author has already said everything you were painstakingly trying to spit out, and has said it more succintly and precisely than you could of ever dreamed of? Bastards.

"Zenith to us in our antipodes..."

As an unfortunate but inevitable result of turning my first year at art school into a veritable "booze cruise" as the saying goes, I am in now in the postion where I must re-submit (live) or re-sit (die). And so I am re-visiting the former battleground, "Body as a Site of Cultural Representation" and taking up arms once again. As a result, I thought I would give this whole spewing-all-you-have-digested-from-various-books-articles-writers-artists-into-the-collective-cyberspace-bog another shot.

And so, the body. And by the body, I mean the flesh, that corporeal part of ourselves that we can grab, scratch, caress, twist, stroke, squeeze, slap. The vehicle through which we can experience physical pleasure and pain, reminding us we are alive. It is strong and elastic. It is weak and malleable. Hence, it also reminds us we are human.

Paradoxically (and when dealing with these matters, one must be ready to embrace paradox) we denegrate our bodies to being just that, bodies, when we refer to them as flesh. We become slabs of meat, indistinguishable from a carcass hanging in an abattoir, subject to decay and, ultimately, death.

How can something so full of vitality be so mortal? How can we reconcile such disparate spheres as life and death? Especially when these spheres eclipse and overlap each other in such an irreconcilable fashion? When distance meets nearness, poles bend back on themselves, compass points spin without cease. And as we look into the void, we feel vertigo.

Growth and decay

Here are some images from my first photographic expedition aound the Mack. I mainly tried to focus on interesting textures around the building because of their potenital to inspire me in making textiles and also because the simultaneous accumulation and deterioration found on these surfaces seem to be evidence of a community in action.

I particularly like the images below of the surfaces of desks (and my feet). The desks are where the overspill of paint, the marks from scalpels and the doodles of bored students have accrued, therefore becoming silent testaments to the GSA's interwoven artistic community. They are a shared history of sorts.

So "Place - Context - Site" then?

Take a monumental and historical building. For this recipe, I recommend the Mackintosh. Add three words, specifically three words that relate to the core concerns of environmental art. Mix well. Season with a blank wall and an empty blogspot. Then bake thoroughly. Hopefully, you should have made yourself a pretty daunting project brief.

Yeah, so I probably took that too far.

Anyway, my initial plan of attack was to define those crucial three words. What follows is the definition that proved most important to my thought processes. I'd post all three but I'm not sure everyone shares my enthusiasm for dictionaries. Which is probably a healthier attitude to have in all honesty.

___________________

Context

n

1. the parts of a piece of writing, speech etc. that precede and follow a word or passage and contribute to its full meaning: it is unfair to quote out of context
2. the conditions and circumstances that are relevant to an event, fact etc.

[C15: from latin contexus a putting, from contexere to interweave, from com together + texere to weave, braid]

___________________

The words emboldened were those which sparked connotations, connections and catalysts in my mind. They seemed to be at the nexus of the Mackintosh building's function as a foundation for an artistic community to grow upon. I began to think of the forming of a community as a gradual knitting together of peoples, ideas, experiences, emotions and so on, until a rich and many-layered tapestry is formed, strongly bound together despite its delicate formation process.

Much like a weave.

So I have an idea but I'm also pretty gutted I didn't take textiles.