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- "My ideas are
mine. No one has a right to them except on my
terms." ---Howard Roark|The
Fountainhead, Ayn
Rand
- "Do not try to
teach design. Teach principles." ---Frank Lloyd Wright
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_FIGURE|FIELD - It is
only 92 years since Braque's first exhibition of what the
critic Louis Vauxcelles would describe in terms of
"cubes" in the November 14, 1908 issue of Gil
Blas. And I'm getting ready for the centenary
celebration...
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- _5.14.2000
TRANSFIGURING
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Who among us, painter or
architect, feels that they have exhausted the lessons
of CUBISM? That they are in a
position to go beyond Cubism? That Cubism is not
relevant? Is it possible to go beyond what one does not
understand? What one has not systematically studied? Is
it possible for such a painter or architect to declare
with any credibility that Cubism is not relevant? Cubism
is an Everest that few have climbed. There are surely
other peaks to climb, other altitudes to attain, but not
because Everest has been mastered or is irrelevant.
Everest will always be relevant, its significance unique
and its instruction inexhaustible. Moreover, climbing
Everest is an individual achievement, not a collective
one. Nobody else can climb it for you. The same is true
of Cubism.
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Cubism is not a style. It is the
foundation of abstraction---the basis,
though not the boundary, of advanced correlations of significant
space and significant form seen
in light (The Substantiality of
Architecture). Though I had
been interested in Cubism for many years, and it had
inspired various drawings (for example, Avant Garde), it wasn't until perhaps 1995 that I began an
intensive study---well after completing my formal education at
Princeton and obtaining my license to practice
architecture, well after having designed and realized
several published buildings. I discovered in Cubism the
basis for a creative and intellectual thought-shift. It
illuminated practical theoretical principles;
some that could be applied literally, some that required
abstraction. Cubism now functions as a crucial element in
the deep structure of my creative and critical
consciousness. It is a primary emphasis in my
architecture theory seminar on the emergence of
modernism. It functions as an underlying pedagogical
reference in my architecture design studios. In my own
work, its influence extends, for example, from the
building-garden site projection (below, left) for (D)Ante |Telescope House, Silver Spring, Maryland, built in 1996 and
published in 1997 ("Global Architect Houses
51")---among other things, Cubism inspired the idea and
execution of drawing the landscape---to
various theoretical paintings and drawings (1991-96) that
also combine the lessons of Analytical and Synthetic
Cubism.
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- click on image to
enlarge
- It
is in this context that I make the following brief
comments about T R A N S F I G U R I N G.
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- Among the radical propositions of Cubism,
the idea of transfiguring---in the
literal sense of "changing the figure"---must
surely be considered one of the most architecturally
significant and relevant. Analytical Cubism,
specifically the work by Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso
between 1908 and 1911, transfigured Form. It exalted its
intrinsic autonomous significance. It reFORMED,
deFORMED and transFORMED
the aesthetic landscape.
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- 1
BRAQUE Harbor at Normandy 1909
- 2 PICASSO Portrait of Uhde 1910
- 3 BRAQUE Man with Guitar 1911
- 4 PICASSO The Poet 1911...............
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- Not unlike painting before it---and
quite unlike painting after it, including Synthetic
Cubism---Analytical Cubism employed Nature
(i.e., observable reality, such as boats and people) as
its starting point. Thus, Analytical Cubism constitutes a
pictorial or plastic transfiguration of the world as it
appears. It transfigured the familiar into the defamiliar.
The ordinary into the strange. The
simple into the difficult. The clear
into the ambiguous. The conventional
into the inventional. Specifically, it transfigured volumes
into planes---faceted, fractured, intercomplexified
planes that, by the very nature of their
inherent two-dimensionality, function to reaffirm the
truth/reality of the canvas's depthless field. Analytical
Cubism thereby transfigured the underlying assumption of
painting vis a vis the issue of spatial illusionism. In
other words, it not only transfigured objects,
it transfigured relationships between
objects. It not only transfigured form,
it transfigured space. It not only
transfigured the solid, it transfigured
the void. Out of the everydayness of
conventional figures, such as the human body, Braque and
Picasso arrived at entirely new visual constructs of
enigmatic density. Ultimately, they
advanced the process of abstraction whereby figures
are transfigured into fields,
and vice versa.
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- The
revolutionary influence in this regard was, of course, Cezanne.
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CEZANNE: Mont Sainte-Victoire Seen
from the Bibemus Quarry 1897
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- This painting, for example, reverberates
with the origins of Analytical Cubism's formal
vocabulary (compare the quarry with the Cubist
paintings above) and researches into negative
space and figure|field. The sky is just as
figurally intentionalized -- its precise form or shape
and contour is just as important---as is the
mountain. In a highly conscious way, mountain and sky
define and are defined by one another. In opposition to
traditional techniques, solid and void are non-hierarchically
related. Rather, they are equivocally related.
In a painting that is ostensibly about the mountain and
the quarry, as the title implies, I maintain that the sky
is no less a major figure, It is certainly the largest,
unsubdivided figure. Although it is what conventionally
defines the field (empty space), here
the sky no less assertively defines a figure
(solid object). (For extended discussion of related
themes, see especially Patrick Heron's remarkable essay,
"Solid Space in Cezanne," Modern Painters,
Spring 1996, 16-24; and my essays, 1907 Picasso Lessons and Significant Space.)
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- Analytical
Cubism, building on the strategies of Cezanne, as
discerned principally by Picasso and Braque, asserted an
uncompromising counterposition to the
geometric device of linear perspective, invented in the
Renaissance. It developed a new system
for organizing visual data. Linear perspective affirms
the illusion of the z-axis. Analytical Cubism affirms the
reality of the x-y plane. Linear perspective functions as
a literal-minded geometric system that depicts
recessional space as we comprehend it perceptually.
Analytical Cubism functions as an abstract-minded
geometric system that describes painterly space as we
comprehend it intellectually. The spatial
boundaries of linear perspective are defined by
the presumption or illusion of infinite depth into the
picture plane. Analytical Cubism's spatial boundaries are
defined by the intransigence of the painting's surface.
In linear perspective time and vantage point are fixed.
In Analytical Cubism, they are elastic.
(For example, in Braque's "Harbor at Normandy,"
above, how many boats are there? How many lighthouses?
Are they different boats and lighthouses, or are they the
same boat, the same lighthouse, transfigured -- seen from
different vantagepoints simultaneously?) The results of
either system are no less optical or visual -- or
architectural. It is simply the underlying intellectual
structure that is different.
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- Not only did Braque and Picasso invent a
new aesthetic system, a new system of representation,
they also invented vocabulary to describe it. Braque
differentiated between the space of linear perspective (visual)
and the space of Analytical Cubism (tactile):
"Visual space separates objects from one another.
Tactile space separates us from objects," declared
Braque.
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- Thus Braque and Picasso transfigured
visual space into tactile space. They transfigured a
system that relied on the suggestion of space opening out
into the distance into one that proposed a vertical
superposition of elements. To this end, they
transfigured three-dimensional volumes into
two-dimensional planes---a procedure
inherently architectural, as this is
precisely the basis of the notational system
of plan, section, and elevation. They transfigured
unambiguous autonomous figures within a
linear perspectival geometric field into equivocal, difficult,
and contingent interrelationships
between figures and fields---between
sub-figures and sub-fields, positive and negative, solid
and void.
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click on image to enlarge- 1 BRAQUE Still life with a violin 1912
- 2
DIEBENKORN Ocean Park #54 1972
- 3, 4, 5 by AUTHOR
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- In
addition, then, to igniting an explosive emancipation of FORM,
Analytical Cubism extended the Cezannian basis for transfiguring
the "void|solid"
relationship. This, I maintain, is its most fundamental,
architectural achievement. It gave rise to the clear and
practical architectonic exercises of Synthetic Cubism,
initiated in 1912 by Braque
in his pasted paper experiments, such as the one above,
and emulated by Picasso in his collages. (For a unique
perspective on the significance of Cubist
"collage" and the difference between
Braque and Picasso in this regard, see Collage Reading: Braque/Picasso; for an extended discussion of this perspective
and the practical principles of collage, literal versus
phenomenal, see also the essay Rooks Move: the phenomenon of
collage | the crisis of abstraction).
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- From 1912-1914, Braque and Picasso
produced exploratory works strategically different from
their earlier experiments in Analytical Cubism. Together
with Juan Gris, they continued the
exploration for several years after W.W. I , achieving a
high-point in Picasso's "Three Musicians,"
1921. I will write about this painting and Synthetic
Cubism in general in a future essay (EMPTY|FULL).
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- The collages and paintings of Synthetic
Cubism and the Mondrian/Matisse-inspired field paintings
of Richard Diebenkorn function as
primary fountainheads of my own plastic
researches. I read their artistic constructions,
and I read my own paintings, as maps and
windows. As site plans
and builidng facades. As horizontal and
vertical landscapes, which, if
deciphered, communicate practical ideas for making
architectures. They comprise didactic discourses
on space-making, space-marking,
and space-defining---on
formal/spatial transfigurations involving interlock,
displacement, contingency, periphery, centrifugality,
fragmentation, inversion and so forth. Ultimately,
Synthetic Cubism and Diebenkorn, continuing the rearches
done by artists before them, affect a transfiguration
of emphasis from figure to field, wherein the
field is no less important than the figure, and wherein
the identity of a visual construction, a painting or an
architecture, may be defined by its conscious
consideration of their significant
interrelationship. I work on the transfiguration
of
- Figure|Field.
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- click on image to
enlarge
- Renderings &
Model: Diebenkorn|Chess House _Scheme 2 1997
© 2000 |MADISON GRAY
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- click
on image to enlarge
