CONCORDE
Wolfgang Tillmans

Concorde is perhaps the last example of a techno-utopian invention from the sixties still to be operating and fully functioning today. It's futuristic shape, speed and ear-numbing thunder grabs people's imagination today as much as it did when it first took off in 1969. It's environmental nightmare conceived in 1962 when technology and progress was the answer to everything and the sky was no longer a limit. It flies at more than double the speed of sound, at a maximum of 2 333km/h in an altitude of 16 000 m. It's empty weight is 85 900kg and it takes up to 94 750kg fuel at a capacity of 100 passengers. Due to rising fuel prices and environmental pressures, supersonic travel never really became a reality. Only fourteen Concordes, excluding prototypes, have ever been built and were flying between Paris, New York and London in just three hour and half. For the chosen few, flying Concorde was  a glamorous but cramped and slightly boring routine whilst to watch it in air, landing and taking-off is a strange and free spectacle, a super modern anachronism and an image of the desire to overcome time and distance though technology.

Unidentified Modern City

Gabriele Basilico & Dan Graham

As we all know Gabrielo Basilico left us the last 13th of february, provocating a big lack in photographs and architects' world (see here). Throwing an eye in bookshop to find something for an homage, I found a small book about a discussion between him and Dan Graham in Brescia.

Brescia is the second largest city, after Milan, it's a typical italian city of the Lombardia's industrial region, with an historic hearth and a peripheral postwar development area.  

Gabriele Basilico appears to observe the town, creating relation bewteen a building and the rest of the urban setting to which it belongs. Dan Graham focuses more on details, parts of the town, as if his observation identified with the state of flux of those accustomed to living in it. Both were especially more interested on the new part of the city, the one related to the economy development with typical high rise and mass-housing building, shopping mall and branded-shops links to this way of living. They have analyzed aspects Brescia has in common with numerous towns in other countries with the same architectural characteristics, regardless of the size : Lyon or Nice in France, Manchester or Liverpool in England, San Francisco in USA and Gwangju in Korea. The reflection on the urban space revealing its apparent anomie the identity of a middle class common to many town eslewhere in the world.  Photographs of Dan Graham are emblematic representation of modular, common place architecture that are infinitely replicated in Modern Towns, in the East and the West, in Europe, United States and Asia alike. And this possibility of repetition contains the seed of a new lifestyle identity. The repetitivness of the architecture holds a new identity - or absence of it - that represents a new community style.

The following conversation, in which the city of Brescia is a pretext,  explains their vision, culture and the most influenced references, from Walker Evans to Aldo Rossi, with a large tribute to Venturi. This dialogue helps to understand what motivations they have for taking photographs, and why their gaze are so different, but also so common. 

GB  Dear Dan, first of all I would like to thank you for accepting Minini Gallery’s exhibition in Brescia curated by Maurizio Bortolotti. They have asked us to conduct a written dialogue to bear witness to our work in Brescia, which will be published in a book.

The first question does not come easily. You are universally recognized in the world of art as an artist who has worked conceptually on various topics, with projects linked to intersubjectivity and relationships with space and places, using diverse languages ranging from video to performance to installation.

I photograph buildings and urban landscapes and for over 30 years I have been obessessed with recording the things I want to capture. At times I fell rather like a collector of pictures of towns who wants to complete his series but never manages to stop taking photographs…Could architecture be the subject that allows an exchange between us, and an interaction ?

I, with my obessively repetitive method, you, with your speculative and philosophical approach and the development of a theoretical way of thinking that continues to renew itself.

A person who has played a key role in terms of the quality of his work and its ethical dimension becomes a necessary reference at this point in the subject, which can occupy the entire life of an artist or a man. I am talking about Walker Evans, with his extraordinary ability to discover and recount people and places in a rigoursly aesthetic and highly respectful way. I would call him a man with a vision that is straightforward, fair, and refined at the same time.

There was an exhibition in Rotterdam in 1992 that showed your work in relation to that of Walker Evans. I have seen the catalogue unfortunately, so I am not in a position to make any comments. But I do want to ask you simply and directly : What effect did Evan’s personality have on you, and how do you relate it in your work as an artist and researcher ?

DG You ask me about my relation to Walker Evans.

Although I am not directly infleunced by his work, I feel an affinity in that his work makes use of the magazine page and is in the genre of photojournalism. We noth relate te seriality as a Minimal art and billboard images as in Pop art. I think we were both fascinated by the petit bourgeois on the edge of industrial slums. In other words, the edge of the city’s urbanism.

Your work seems to be involved with the postwar Italian city in terms of the new urban plan. Have you been influenced by Aldo Rossi’s book The Architecture of the City ?

GB Aldo Rossi was a person of great importance to me, as he was for architectural culture as a whole and for the debate after 1968. I met him in the 1960s when he was teaching at the Milan Polytechnic’s Faculty of Architecture where I was student.

His book The Architecture of the City ( 1966 ) was – and still is – a fundamental text around which the architectural debate revolves. Rossi’s analytical method of comparing single buildings with the urban fabric, of giving depth to history in dialoguing with the modern, his respect and study of the locus are some of the stenghts of his untiring research.

The notion of "urban fact", the theme of the relationship with the history of the city and monuments ( theory of permanence ), and insistent analysis of types are some of the topics that have related architecture to philosophy and art, and have animated scholars and schools of architecture for decades.

As regards the identity of place, the main theme of photographic research in the 1970s, Aldo Rossi wrote : "Every place is undoubtedly singular to the extent to which it possesses endless affinities or analogies with other places. Even the concept of identity, and hence foreign-ness, is relative", "I’ve always claimed that places are stronger than happenings. "In my opinion place and time are the first condition of architecture, so the hardest […]" After the 1980s, photography in Italy and the rest of Europe, commited to observing the new urban landscape, was influenced by American art and the theoretical debate that marked the previous decades. I remember Robert Venturi’s books Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture (1966) and Learning from Las Vegas (1972), important volumes in the open discussions of the post modern era, not only for architecture, but for the art world in general.

I have a question for you now : how has Robert Venturi’s way of thinking influenced your life?

DG Robert Venturi’s way of thinking was very important to me. He truly love the same art I loved – Ed Ruscha and Claes Oldenburg. His understanding of upper-lower-class-suburban vernacular architecture was extremly important to me. I think that there is a real relation Aldo Rossi’s use of poetic vernacular and Venturi’s use of poetry and wit in his work. My favorite Venturi is his musem for Benjamin Franklin for the American Biennial in Philadelphia. I’ve met Venturi and h’s a very sweet person. In an Interview I did with him he mentionned that he would like to retire to Northen New Jersey – the italian upper-middle-class suburbs that also influenced me. It interests him to see the neighboring New York skyline from New Jersey. ( His wife Denise Scott Brown says, « this is a nightmare I hope will never happen »)

GB  I have never been lucky enough to meet Robert Venturi, but his two books Complexity and Contradiction and Learning from Las Vegas causes a great deal in Europe. They can be said to have caused a revolution in thinking, in the criticism of modernism, making a clean sweep of that reverential fear that was the ideological credo of so many generations after Bauhaus.

Venturi has taught us to look at the world around us with new, disenchanted eyes, to observe and accept the landscape and the town with curiosity, with attention – I would almost say democratically – finally putting on the same plane refined architecture, that by the great designers, and ordinary, commonplace architecture, where the ephemeral, superstructural language of advertising has been integrated with or replaced building construction, concealing it.

This visual and critical approach, which wa can ultimately define es « democratic » - without or without rhetoric – has been fundamental for architecture and for art. Even photography has embraced it fully, as in the case of Ed Ruscha’s fascinating research in his Twenty-six Gasoline Stations (1963)

I have been working on towns and urban landscapes for 30 years or so. It all started in 1978 with a project on the industrial suburb of Milan, the town I was born and still live in. At that time there were already many abandoned areas next to factories still in operation. I was really fascinated by Bernd and Hilla Becher’s Anonyme Skulpture, the frontal rigor with which they photographed various types of industrial archeology in black and withe, their cataloguing, their taxonomic approach to the object, their maniacal, obsessive, and potentially infinite research.

My work on the outskirts of my town, which led a few years later to an exhibition and a book entitled Milano Rittrati di Fabbriche (1978-1980), never had the rigor or purity of the Becher’s work, not the equidistant viewpoint of Ed Ruscha. It is a work on spaces, streets, and places, and is undoubtedly influenced by the photographic style, which, from the 1930s onward, with the Farm Security Administration’s mission, had unequivocally conditionned the world of documentary photography. I ferer again here to the teachings of the Greater Walker Evans, with his comprehensive and rigorous approach, aestethic yet uncondescending, and to his definition/notion of "documentary style". Walker Evans’ pictures are the expression of an ethical vision ; in the words of my friend Luigi Ghirri, they are like "caressing the world".

Talking about these approaches and the influence of these important protagonists of culture and artistic research, it is evident that the field, the object of analyses and ideas, is stiil the town iself.

Seen the other way around, the town itself provides an opportunity for comparing only apparently diverging theories and thoughts, like those of Robert Ventury’s critical approach implies an ironic attitude, which is vital for a thorough, unprejudiced understanding of the identity of the new urban landscape.

The inventory of shpaes that Aldo Rossi rediscovered and relaunched as a fragment for a recomposition of the city – a Rossian Collage City as Colin Rowe calls it – does not appear to contain an ironic allusion, rather it is rooted in history, in the search for geometric rigor and essentially of architecture.

When I saw your photographs of Brescia, especially the objects you captured – shop windows, roads signs, parked cars, doors, windows, fences, bariers, fragment of a chaotic and confused urban landscape – my toughts inevitably went back to other pictures by Lee Friedlander came to mind, but they are obviously more constructed, more thoroughly « photographic » whereas yours are more like true documents, apparently less dependent on the construction of a style. Would you agree ? And What do you have to say about this ?

DG Venturi’s work didn’t directly influence my early photographs of New Jersey suburban houses, roadside factories, and signage, but after discovering his architetural work, such as the Guild House and the Lieb House on the New Jersey coast, two of my first architectural models, Alteration of a Suburban House and Video Projection Outside Home (1978) were in response to his work. Venturi’s Lieb House period work noted symbolism of the typical ornamental decoration outside Italian-American owned single-family houses, such as a plastic Madonna in the birdbath placed next door to the Lieb House.

My placement of a large videao projector on the front lawn of a house displaying whatever was on the family’s inside TV set was intented to create an emblem of the family’s lifestyle on the roadside for passing observers. It relates to the proposed « gold » painted TW antenna on the top of the Guild House for retired Quaker Families in Philadelphia, the intention of which was to symbolize the custom of retired residents watching television while resting in their rooms.

Venturi was directly influenced by Ed Ruscha’s photographs, as well as by Pop artist such Claes Oldenburg. I see a parallel between Rossi and Venturi’s work in that both deal with childhood memories of the vernacular suburban architectural landscape in a poetic (and in Rossi’s case, cinematic, phantasmagoric) manner. Rossi’s Modena Cemetery reminds me the interior of a suburban shopping mall. Venturi’s use of irony is more about  with than about being a caustic or critical. Finally, both architects are drawan to seaside houses or makeshift seasiders shelters.

The Man Without Content

Giorgio Agamben

Chapter #4 : The Cabinet of Wonder

In 1660, in Antwerp, David Teniers published the first illustrated catalog of an art museum under the title Theatrum pittoricum. In a series of etchings, the book reproduces the paintings owned by the archduke Leopold William and hung in his exhibition halls in the Brussels court. The author, addressing the "admirers of art" in his preface, warns that

the original paintings whose drawings you see here are not all of the same shape or of the same size. Thus we have had to make them the same, in order to reduce them to the size of the pages of this volume, so that we could present them to you in a more convenient form. If somebody should wish to know the proportion of the originals, he can measure it guiding himself with the feet or palms which are marked in the margins.

This warning is followed by a description of the halls themselves that could be a prototype of the guide found at the entrance of any modern museum, if it were not for the scant attention that Teniers pays the individual paintings rather than to the exhibition space as a whole:

Upon entering, one encounters two long galleries, where, along the windowless wall, the Paintings hang in good order; on the other side, where the windows are, one can admire several large Statues, for the most part ancient ones, set on high Bases, with their ornaments; be hind them, under and between the windows, are other paintings, several of which you do not know.

Teniers informs us that among these are found six canvases by Bruegel the Elder, representing the twelve months of the year "with an admirable art of the brush, vivid colors, and ingenious ordering of postures," and a large number of still lives; from there one moves into other halls and exhibition areas "where the rarest and most precious rooms show the most subtle masterpieces of the brush, to the wonderful delight of the discerning Minds; so that the people who wish to look at such lovely things to their hearts' desire would need several weeks of leisure, or even many months, to examine them as closely as they deserve."

Art collections, however, have not always had such a familiar aspect for us. Toward the end of the Middle Ages, in the countries of continental Europe, princes and learned men used to collect the most disparate objects in a Wunderkammer (cabinet of wonder), which contained, promiscuously, rocks of an unusual shape, coins, stuffed animals, manuscript volumes, ostrich eggs, and unicorn horns. Statues and paintings stood side by side with curios and exemplars of natural history in these cabinets of wonders when people started

collecting art objects; and, at least in Germanic countries, the princes' art collections preserved the traces of their origin in the medieval Wunderkammer until much later. We know that August I, elector of Saxony, who boasted that he owned "a series of portraits of Roman emperors, from Caesar to Domitian, executed by Titian from life," refused an offer of 100,000 gold florins made by Venice's Council of the Ten for a unicorn he owned, and that he kept as a precious object a stuffed phoenix, a gift from the bishop of Bamberg. As late as 1567, the exhibition room kept by Albert V of Bavaria contained, in addition to 780 paintings, 2,000 objects of various kinds, among them "an egg that a bishop had found inside another egg, manna fallen from the sky during a famine, a hydra, and a basilisk."

We have an etching that reproduces the Wunderkammer belonging to the German physician and collector Hans Worms, with the help of which we can gain a fairly precise notion of the appearance of a real cabinet of wonder. Alligators, stuffed gray bears, oddly shaped fish, stuffed birds, and canoes used by primitive peoples hang from the ceiling, at a considerable distance from the floor. The upper part of the back wall is taken up by spears, arrows, and other weapons of various shapes and origins. Between the windows of one of the side walls there are deer and elk antlers, animal hooves and skulls;

on the opposite wall, in near proximity to each other, hang tortoise shells, snake skins, sawfish teeth, and leopard skins. From a certain height all the way down to the floor, the walls are covered with shelves overflowing with shells, octopus bones, mineral salts, metals, roots, and mythological statuettes. Only seemingly does chaos reign in the Wunderkammer, however: to the mind of the medieval scholar, it was a sort of microcosm that reproduced, in its harmonious confusion, the animal, vegetable, and mineral macrocosm. This is why the individual objects seem to find their meaning only side by side with others, between the walls of a room in which the scholar could measure at every moment the boundaries of the universe. 

If we now lift our eyes away from the etching and turn them to a painting that reproduces a seventeenth-century gallery, for example the picture by Willem van Haecht that depicts the archduke Albert visiting Cornelius van der Geist's collection in Antwerp, in the company of Rubens, Gerard Seghers, and Jordaens, we cannot help noticing a certain similarity. The walls are literally covered, from the floor to the ceiling, with paintings of the most diverse sizes and materials, almost touching each other so as to form a pictorial magma that recalls Frenhofer's "wall of paint" and in which the single work would have had little chance of being noticed. Next to a door, in equal confusion, stands a group of statues, among which we can make out only with difficulty an Apollo, a Venus, a Bacchus, and a Diana. The dense group of artists and gentlemen gathered around a low table covered with small sculptures stands out among the other paintings that are piled up all over the floor. On the lintel of one of the doors, under a coat of arms above which is a skull, is an easily legible

inscription: Vive l'Esprit (long live intelligence).

It has been observed that we feel as though we were not in front of paintings but in front of one immense tapestry in which vague colors and shapes fluctuate, and the question comes naturally whether the same thing may not apply to these paintings as to the medieval scholar's shells and whale teeth: namely, that they acquired their truth and their authentic meaning only through their inclusion in the harmonic microcosm of the Wunderkammer. It seems, that is, that the single canvases have no reality outside the unmoving Theatrum pittoricum to which they are consigned, or at least that they acquire all their enigmatic meaning only in this ideal space. But while the microcosm of the Wunderkammer had its profound reason in its living and immediate unity with the great world of divine creation, it would be vain to seek an analogous foundation for the gallery: enclosed by the vivid colors of its walls, it rests in itself like a perfectly self-sufficient world where the canvases resemble the sleeping princess of the fairy tale, prisoner of a spell whose magic formula is inscribed on the door's lintel: Vive l'Esprit.

In the same year in which, in Antwerp Teniers published his Theatrum pittoricum, Marco Boschini Carta del navegar pittoresco (Chart of pictorial navigation) also appeared. This book interests the art historian because of the multifarious information on seventeenthcentury Venetian painting it provides us with and for the embryonic aesthetic judgments on individual painters that it sketches; but it is particularly interesting for us because, after leading the "Venetian Ship" across "the high seas of Painting," Boschini concludes his adventurous itinerary with the meticulous description of an imaginary gallery.

Boschini lingers for a long time on the shape that, according to the taste of the time, the walls and the corners of the ceilings must have:

L'opera su i sofiti, che xé piani

e' i fenze in archi, e in volti li trasforma.

Cusì de piani ai concavi el dà forma

e tesse a i ochi industriosi ingani.

El fa che i cantonali in forma acuta

salta fuora con angoli spicanti,

e in pe' de andare in drento, i vien avanti.

Questo è loquace, e no' pitura muta.

(The work on the ceilings, which are flat,

molds them into arches, and transforms them into vaults.

Thus he gives to concave spaces the look of flat ones

and weaves ingenious deceptions for the eyes.

He makes it so that the corner cupboards, in acute shape,

jump out with outstanding angles,

and instead of going in, come forward.

This is loquacious, and not mute painting.)

He does not even neglect to specify, for every room, the color and kind of wall coverings for this purely mental décor. Although architectural rules for the construction of galleries had already been put in writing, this is one of the first times that these precepts, instead of being contained in an architectural treatise, are given as the ideal conclusion to what we could define as a vast critical-descriptive treatise on painting. It seems that for Boschini, his imaginary gallery is in some way the most concrete space of painting, a sort of ideal connecting fabric that is able to ensure a unitary foundation to the disparate creations of the artists' genius, as though, once abandoned to the stormy sea of painting, they could reach dry land only on the perfectly set up scene of this virtual theater. Boschini is so convinced of this that he even compares the paintings sleeping in the halls of the gallery to balms, which, in order to acquire their full power, have to rest in their glass containers:

Balsamo è la Pitura precioso,

per l'intelletto vera medesina,

che più che 'l sta in te 'l vaso, el se rafina,

e in cao cent'anni lé miracoloso.

(Painting is a precious balm,

true medicine for the intellect,

and the more it stays in its vial the more refined it gets,

and by a hundred years later it is miraculous.)

Although we do not make use of such ingenuous images, it is probable that our aesthetic perspective on art, which makes us build museums and makes it appear normal to us that the paint ing should go immediately from the hands of the artist to a hall in the museum of contemporary art, is based on not too dissimilar assumptions. What is certain, at any rate, is that the work of art is no longer, at this point, the essential measure of man's dwelling on earth, which, precisely because it builds and makes possible the act of dwelling, has neither an autonomous sphere nor a particular identity, but is a compendium and reflection of the entire human world. On the contrary, art has now built its own world for itself. Consigned to the atemporal aesthetic dimension of the Museum Theatrum, it begins its second and interminable life, which, while it will keep increasing its metaphysical and monetary value, will also eventually dissolve the concrete space of the work until the latter resembles the convex mirror that Boschini wished to hang on a wall of his imaginary gallery, 

dove l'ogeto, in pe' de farse appresso e se fa un passo in drio, per so' avantazo.

(where the object, instead of coming closer, steps backward, to its advantage.)

We believe, then, that we have finally secured for art its most authentic reality, but when we try to grasp it, it draws back and leaves us empty-handed. However, the work of art was not always considered a collector's object. There have been epochs when the very idea of art as we conceive it would have appeared monstrous. Love of art for its own sake is almost never encountered in the Middle Ages, and when its first symptoms appeared, mixed up with the taste for pomp and precious objects, the common view considered them aberrations.

In these epochs, the subjectivity of the artist was identified so immediately with his material--which constituted, not only for him but also for his fellow men, the innermost truth of consciousness-that it would have appeared inconceivable to speak about art as having value in itself, and in front of the finished work of art it was im possible to speak of aesthetic participation. In the four large sections ( Mirror of Nature, Mirror of Science, Mirror of Morals, Mirror of History) of the Speculum Majus, in which Vincent of Beauvais lodged the entire universe, there is no room for art because it did not represent in any way, for the medieval mind, a realm of the universe among others. When the medieval man looked at the tympanum of the Vezelay cathedral, with its sculptures depicting all the peoples of the world in the single light of divine Pentecost, or the column in the Souvigny abbey, with its four sides reproducing the wonderful ends of the earth through the images of the fabulous inhabitants of those regions--the goat-legged Satyr, the Sciapodes who moves on one foot, the horse-hoofed Hippopode, the Ethiopian, the manticore, and the unicorn--he had the aesthetic impression not that he was observing a work of art but rather that he was measuring, more concretely for him, the borders of his world. The wonderful was not yet an autonomous sentimental tonality and the particular effect of the work of art, but an indistinct presence of the grace that, in the work, put man's activity in tune with the divine world of creation, and thus kept alive the echo of what art had been in its Greek beginnings: the wonderful and uncanny power of making being and the world appear, of producing them in the work. Johan Huizinga reports the case of Denis the Carthusian, who tells how once, upon entering the Church of Saint John at Bois-le-Duc while the organ was playing, he was immediately entranced by the melody and brought to a prolonged ecstasy: "Musical sensation was immediately absorbed in religious feeling. It would never have occurred to Denis that he might admire in music or painting any other beauty than that of holy things themselves."

And yet, at some point we see the stuffed crocodile suspended at the entrance to St. Bertrand de Comminges and the unicorn foot that was kept in the sacristy of the Sainte Chapelle in Paris leave the sacred space of the cathedral to enter the collector's cabinet, and we also see the sensibility of the spectator in front of the work of art linger for so long on the instant of wonder as to isolate it as an autonomous sphere from any religious or moral content.

Text : The Man Without Content, Giorgio Agamben, originally published in italian in 1994 under the title L'uomo senza contenuto; editions Quolibet

Picture : Pianta Della Basilica di San Marco in Venezia

HALL
Antoine Espinasseau

Dans les espaces de transition de la ville, le hall tient une place particulière. Urbain par nature - il n’existe que peu de halls à la campagne - il assure le passage d’une importance vers une autre, d’un état à un autre, très souvent entre le public de la rue et le privé du chez soi. Mot emprunté à l’anglais, il est admis en 1930 une prononciation française par le dictionnaire Barbeau Roche, son usage révélant une lacune linguistique et très peu d’équivalents français. L’antichambre évoque une proximité plus rapprochée, la salle d’attente s’exprime dans une temporalité plus longue. Le vestibule serait le terme le plus approprié mais s’apparente à un usage moins contemporain, référant à un type d’espace plus classique et à une connotation plus bourgeoise. 

Le hall connaîtra son âge d’or dans les années 1970, à une époque où la rationalisation des chaines de montages en béton préfabriqué permet de construire beaucoup d’immeubles à moindre coût. Il s’en est reproduit des centaines de milliers, dans les villes petites, moyennes, grandes, les stations de ski, et les périphéries plus hagardes. 

Face à l’uniformisation de cette typologie aux façades répétitives, très souvent posée dans un contexte qu’elle dénie, il a fallu imaginer un rapport au sol nouveau, qui permette de singulariser le bâtiment. Dans ces paysages gris est née une nature propre à ces rez-de-chaussée. Ils ont commencé à faire exister leur personnalité architecturale face au regard du piéton, et ont trouvé dans cette grande vague d’uniformisation, un moyen d’appropriation pour les usagers.De cette abstraction du contexte, ce sont développés des univers artificiels. Le vide des halls s’est peuplé d’ objets extrêmement singuliers, souvent construits dans des matériaux bruts de gros-oeuvre. La brique, le béton, le pavé, le verre, le parement de façade utilisés articulent la transition entre la massivité du volume extérieur vers les pièces intérieures. Dans ces atmosphères tempérées par le chauffage collectif, une nouvelle nature s’est aussi imposée : plantes vertes, palmiers, rocailles. La transition s’est transformée en voyage, toujours plus imaginatif, toujours plus exotique. Elle est devenue une invitation à l’exil, une coupure entre le monde de la rue et l’univers privé par un passage dans une sorte d’irréalité. 

Depuis l’entrée en vigueur du décret n°76-276 du 29 mars 1976 sur l’instauration d’un rapport entre surface hors d’oeuvre nette SHON et la surface hors d’oeuvre brute SHOB,  le hall s’est doucement réduit à un minima, désormais tenu à son strict nécessaire par les promoteurs. Avec des objectifs de coûts de construction les plus faibles, ces mètres carrés non utilisables sont devenus inutiles. Le hall a alors subi deux mouvements antagonistes : une réduction drastique ou un élargissement spectaculaire qui l’a fait muter au stade de lobby, très vaste espace d’apparat représentant le prestige du bâtiment. 

Le hall est donc devenu rare. Pourtant, dans ce moment métropolitain qui ne dure qu’un instant, ce sont créés des mondes, des univers silencieux dans le grondement de la métropole. Prendre le temps de s’arrêter sur ces petits espaces, c’est porter une attention sur une époque, des pratiques et des temps particuliers. Regarder les halls d’immeubles aujourd’ hui, avec tout le caractère désuet que cela peut revêtir, c’est aussi regarder tous ces espaces de la métropole qui semblent oubliés, ces décalages qui se produisent dans le mouvement général, ceux qui ne semblent jamais nous affecter, mais qui revêtissent une certaine forme d’importance car c’est là que s’inventent les libertés et les pratiques exotiques de la ville. Cachés mais visibles aux yeux de tous, réservés à un petit nombre, ce sont ces micro-univers qui génèrent la narration du quotidien.

Texte d'introduction de Flavien Menu 

pour la première exposition personnelle d'Antoine Espinasseau à la Galerie Florence Leoni, du jeudi 31 janvier à 18 heures au 14 mars 2012

FORD GALAXIE
Wim Eckert

In 2009 we again visited Brasilia for an informal study of the architecture of Oscar Niemeyer. After walking through endless lobbies and representational spaces, we decided to take a tour of the memorial to Brazil’s most beloved and probably also most hated president, Doctor Juscelino Kubitschek. He took office on January 31, 1956 after announcing a massive rebuilding program the morning following his election. 

The motto for his political agenda was « fifty years of progress in five» and his administration launched immense public programs including the construction of major highways, hydroelectric facilities, and public buildings. To stimulate industry, tariffs were increased, foreign exchange was revised to aid importation of needed capital, and credit from the Banco Do Brasil and the National Econoic Development Bank became liberally available. 

The country’s productive capacity soared and Brazil became a major industrialized nation. The most impressive program he oversaw, however, was the construction of an entirely new capital, Brasilia, seven hundred miles into the wild interior of the country. Once asked why he built Brasilia, Kubitschek laconically answered that he needed a place to which he could build roads. Brasilia therefore was the prefect alibi to deliver broad infrastructure to the underdeveloped parts of the country and was successfully inaugurated within only four years, just three months before the end of his presidential term.

In addition to this information, heroically displayed by the magnitude of Niemeyer’s architecture, one can also find an original mock-up of Kubitscheck’s office at the memorial. 

This leaves the impression that he left the building and forgot his glasses on the table just a minute ago. The awkward feeling of a strange mixture between a majestic mausoleum and a voyeuritsic peepshow is completed when one finds Kubitschek’s last car, a 1973 Ford Glaxie, sitting in an abandoned parking lot, fully enclosed by glass. It is as if Damien Hirst poured formaldehyde into garage he had mistaken for Snow White’s coffin.

The original advertisment by the Ford Motor Company in 1959 announced the Ford Galaxie as heralding the point in automobile production when nothing remained exclusively for the rich. The car had a strong, modern body which offered a new level of comfort. The upholsteries were so costly that they were matched by few cars at any price level, the interiors were richly paneled, the air was regulated by a silent flow ventilation system, and light permeated through the doors, ashtray, glove box and trunk.

The description of the Ford Galaxie’s interior strangely recalls Edgar Allan Poe’s description of his belowed wife’s coffin in his gothic novel The Fall of the house of Usher. Similar to Poe’s wife, Juscelino Kubitschek seemed alive when we entered the memorial museum. In fact, his ghost is present throughout Brasilia, a city which suffers from apparent death. Everything is exactly fifty years old, a freeze frame the same age as Kubitschek’s car. 

The car does not need to be seen as a symbol for the new capital and its former president. However, on august 22, 1976, Juscelino Kubitscheck died in a car accident near the city of Resende in the state of Rio de janeiro - in a Ford Galaxie. 

See also Miesology here

KODACHROME

Luigi Ghirri

In 1969 the photo taken from the space shuttle on its way to the moon is published in all newspapers ; this was the first photographs of the world. The picture pursued for centuries by man presented to our eyes, containing contemporarily all the preceding images, incomplete, all books written, all signs deciphered and not. It was not only the picture of the world, but the picture which contained all the pictures of the world : graffiti, frescoes, prints, paintings, writings, photographs, books, films. Simultaneously the representation of the world in one time only. 

On the other hand this total view, this redescription of everything, destroyed one more the possibility of translating the hieroglyphic whole. The power of containing everything vanished in front of the impossibility of seeing evetything at the same time. The event and its representation, to see and to be contained, reappeared to man as not sufficient to solve eternal questions. This possibility of total duplication, however, let us glimpse the possibility of deciphering the hieroglyph; we had the two poles of doubt and of the secular mystery, the picture of the atom and the picture of the world, finally in front of the other. The space between the infinitely small and the infinitely big was filled by the infinitely complex problem : man and his life, nature. The need for information or consciousness thus arises between two extreme points, oscillating from the microscope to the telescope in order to be able to translate and interpret reality or the hieroglyph.

My work rises from the necessity and the desire to interpret and translate the sign and meaning of this sum of hieroglyphs. So, not only a reality which is easily identifiable or highly loaded with symbols, but also thought, imagination, the fantastic and strange meanings.The photograph is extremely important for the aim I have set myself because of certain characteristic features of its language, which I shall try to explain.The cancellation of the space surrounding the framed part is for me as important as the represented part; it is because of this cancellation that the picture assumes a meaning and gets measurable.At the same time the picture continues in the visible part of the cancellation, and it invites is to see the rest of the not represented reality.This double aspect of representation and cancellation not only tries to evoke the absence of limits, excluding any idea of completness or finished thing, but it indicates something which cannot be delimitated, and that is the real.

On the other hand, the possibility of seeing and penetrating universe of reality passes through all the cultural representations and models known, and which have been given to us as definite and decisive, and our relationship with reality  and the life is the same relationship as the one of the picture from the satellite with the earth itself. So the photograph with its indeterminateness becomes a privileged subject in order to be able to get outside the symbolism of definite representations to which a certain value of truth has been given.The possibility of analysis in time, in the space of signs which form the reality whose completeness has always slipped our minds, thus permits the photograph, because of its fragmentary character to be closer to things which cannot be delimitated, and that is physical existence.

That is why I am not interested in the pictures and the decisive moments, the study or the analysis of their language as an end in itself, aesthetics, the concept or totalizing ideas, the emotions of the poet, the well-bred quotation, the search for a new aesthetics creed, the use of a style. I am occuped with seeing clearly, that is why I am interested in all possible functions, without separating anyone from the whole, but to assume then in a total way in order to be able to see and render recognizable from one time to another, the hieroglyphs I met. The daily encounter with reality, with the fictions and surrogates, the ambiguoous aspects, poetical or alienating, seems to deny any way out of the labyrinth, whose walls are always more illusive even to the point of confusing ourselves with them. The meaning that I try to give to my work is that of the verification of how it is possible to wish to face the way of knowledge, to make it possible at last to tell the real identity of man, of things, of life from the image of man, of things, of life. 

And more about Luigi Ghirri : here Note sur l'architecture 
                                                 and there  Atlante