B1 decided to
mind map the mind map they’ve received from Amsterdam using words in a form of
a text instead of a scheme. So, in a way we are deconstructing your mind map.
We grouped your
words into 3 segments:
PLAY
ANALYTICAL
APPROACH
ARCHITECTURE /
SETTING / THE BODY
PLAY
One
of the terms you used as a branch of “frame” is “play” in a theatrical
sense.
A theater play is definitely an action that is framed, presented, highlighted and
displayed-a performance. However, framed actions incorporate a whole field of
human activity (C. Simpson Stern and B. Henderson, Texts and contexts, 1993) which weren’t mentioned in the mind map
even though that is one of the primary notions of performance studies. E.g. Ngugi
Wa Thiong’o (Enactments of power,
1993) depicts the prison yard as ”a stage where everything, including movement,
is directed and choreographed by the state. The mise-en-scene, the play of
light and shadows, the timing and regulation of actions- even of eating and
sleeping and defecating- are directed by armed stage hands they call prison
warders.”
Performances
of everyday life- human social interactions- are rule-bound and lawful because
they operate according to known scenarios (manners, body language, politeness).
The words and actions that constitute the score have familiar associations;
they represent a consistent behavior, a grammar of action. Every performance is
framed by context, convention, usage and tradition (R. Schehner, Performance studies: an introduction,
2002).
Also,
in the mind map the term “play” is branching to “techniques”, “plot”, “time” and
“place”. Those are some of the keywords for traditional theater making, but we
assume much more to theater than that. As R. Barucha says, “theater is neither
a text nor a commodity but an activity that needs to be in ceaseless contact with
the realities of the world and the inner necessities of our lives” (Performance and the politics of culture, 1990),
we propose that theater is concerned with the breaking of frames and the overlapping
of spaces and energies.
ANALYTICAL APPROACH
A frame is a filter through which one sees the world. While history,
politics, culture, and society are all frames, I would argue that each of these
is developed in childhood, and that analysis leads to their re-framing, or deconstruction.
In our youth, before acquiring the ability to think critically and
analytically, we view the world as we are, as we know it, or as it has been
relayed. For example, my filters are white, middle-class, American, female,
Catholic, college-educated, etc.
On some occasions, frames can be contradictory. In the case of W.E.B.
DuBois,
“One ever feels this two-ness,- an American, a Negro; two souls, two
thoughts, two unreconciled strivings, two warring ideals in one dark body,
whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder”
-W.E.B. DuBois
From Critical Theory and Performance
Edited by Janelle G. Reinelt and Josepf R. Roach, Pg. 139
This "two-ness", the friction between one frame and another,
can be the cause of both personal and social turmoil. The American frame,
promoting freedom and equality, and the Negro frame, which during Mr. DuBois'
lifetime meant half-rights and segregation, cancel one another out. However,
this friction also provides room for self-reflection and analysis, ultimately
leading to a re-framing of filters. In the case of Diana Taylor, her American
frame was tested when she left Mexico for the United States.
“As a child growing up in a small mining town in the north of Mexico, I
learned that the Americas were one, that we shared a hemisphere. Many years
later, when I arrived in the United States to do my doctorate, I heard that
“America” meant the United States[…] I never accepted this steady attempt at
deterritorialization. I claim my identity as an "American" in the
hemispheric sense.”
-Diana Taylor,
The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the
Americas
Pg. xiii
This experience forced Taylor to (re)consider her
"American-ness"; to question what she had previously learned, and
more importantly, to question what was being prescribed to her in this new
land.
In the arts, the audience is regularly encouraged to consider, or
analyze, the origins and nature of their individual frames.
“The arts are important producers of our ideology. By ideology, Stuart
Hall means ‘the mental framework- the languages, the concepts, categories,
imagery of thought, and the systems of representation- which different classes
and social groups deploy in order to make sense of, define, figure out and
render intelligible the way society works’.
-Joost Smiers
Arts Under Pressure: Promoting Cultural Diversity in the Age of
Globalization
Pg. 11
This consideration, whether conscious or unconscious, creates a shift in
pre-established frames. Perhaps not in every frame, and perhaps not in ways
that are immediately evident to the individual; but, in some way, the frame has
moved from "what was known" to "what is now known", or "what
now makes sense".
ARCHITECTURE/SETTING/THE
BODY
The task of
architecture is to strengthen our sense of the real, not to create settings of
mere fabrication and fantasy. The essential mental task of the art of building
is mediation and integration. Architecture articulates the experiences of
being-in-the-world and it strengthens the sense of reality and self. It frames
and structures experiences and projects a specific horizon of perception and
meaning. In addition to inhabiting us in space, architecture also relates us to
time; it articulates limitless natural space and gives endless time a human
measure. Architecture helps us to overcome "the terror of time", to
use an expression of Karsten Harries, the philosopher.
Architecture,
according to Steven Hall, should be understood as a series of partial
experiences rather than a whole. Therefore, the challenge of architecture lies
in its effort to engage both inner and outer perception, perception of the
human body. So, in a way architecture is an experiential phenomenon. Experience
on the other hand leads to intimacy.
Architecture
concretizes "how the world touches us" as Merleau-Ponty writes of the
paintings of Paul Cézann. Merleau-Ponty explains the world-body relation with
another poetic metaphor: "Our own body is in the world as the heart is in
the organism: it keeps the visible spectacle constantly alive, it breathes life
into it and sustains it inwardly, and with it it forms a system. (Maurice Merleau Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, Routledge, London,
1992,203)
Architecture
defines horizons of perception, feeling and meaning; our perceptions and
experiences of the world are significantly altered by architecture.
Architecture is
usually understood as a visual syntax, but it can also be conceived through a
sequence of human situations and encounters. Authentic architectural
experiences derive from real or ideated bodily confrontations rather than
visually observed entities. Authentic architectural experiences have more the
essence of a verb than a noun. The visual image of a door is not an
architectural image, for instance, whereas entering and exiting through a door
are architectural experiences. Similarly, the window frame is not an
architectural unit, whereas looking out through the window or daylight coming through
it, are authentic architectural encounters.
Juhani
Pallasmaa consider architecture to be profound architecture only if it enables us to see the majesty of a mountain, the
persistence and patience of a tree, and the smile on the face of a stranger. He goes further when he says: „Architecture also directs our
awareness to our own sense of self and being. It makes us experience ourselves
as complete embodied and spiritual beings integrated with the flesh of the
world.“
This is at
the end great function of all art.
To talk about
architecture one has to consider all aspects of this discipline. Architecture
cannot be narrowed down only to a certain type of the building or certain
elements, fragments out of which it is made. Materials, textures, surfaces,
openings, atmosphere, memory of a space..all of this has to be considered.
When you think
about the materials
and surfaces you have to go beyond the first layer, you have to peel
them like an onion to get to core, to its value. Materials and surfaces have a language of their own. They tell you a story behind the story, they serve the same purpose like
the wrinkles on the skin. Stone speaks of its distant geological
origins, its durability and inherent symbolism of permanence. Wood speaks of
its two existences and time scales; its first life as a growing tree and the
second as a human artefact made by the caring hand of a carpenter. A frame of your kitchen window can
tell you all kind of stories if you are a good listener. Listen with your mind
and not with your ears. Look with your fingers and touch with your eyes. All
sensory experiences are related to the tactility, especially when it comes to
architecture. In order to really understand it, to experience it you have no
other way but to touch it. To be in it. Experience of space is crucial to our
perception of the world that surrounds us.
As we look at these
buildings, our eye touches, and before we even see it we are able to feel it, to
touch an object and judge its weight, temperature and surface texture. All our
organs and senses “think” in the sense of identifying, making choices and
processing the information, so in way buildings are the extensions of our
bodies, identities and minds.
The frame is the
experience of exchange and in art and architecture a peculiar exchange takes
place: “I give my emotions and associations to the work of art or space and
they lend me their aura that emancipates my perceptions and thoughts”. Considering
this statement given by Juhani Pallasmaa, architecture and film have a lot in
common, unlike theater. The main distinction between these art forms are the
subjects who are having this unique dialogue. While theater deals with present
bodies, bodies of the performer and the audience, who are occupying same space
at the same time architecture and film deal with different kind of bodies: the absent body – the auteur and the delayed audience – me/you. This is the new formed relationship where intimacy becomes
an echo down space and time. The intimacy is sometimes crushing and
sometimes relieving and sometimes exhilarating and sometimes exhausting. And it
always involves at least two human bodies: performer and spectator, the one who
is watching and the one who is being watched. However, if you are an actor on a stage this relationship changes,
suddenly you are becoming a spectator while the audience shifts to performers.
Frame through which you are looking is still the same, but the point of view
has changed and with it the perception of the one who is looking has changed
too. It is a chain reaction and if we are talking about the film, as art form, the
best example would be two Danish films, one short experimental and one feature:
The Perfect Human (1967) by Jørgen Leth and 5
Obstructions (2003) by Lars von Trier and Jørgen Leth. 5 Obstructions is a project
that emerged from The Perfect Human and as von Trier’s response to his mentor,
a form of a delayed dialogue and an arts therapy.
The topic of setting,
scenography and scene design in general is so wide and open so we will not get
in to that at this point. However, we will give another good example from the field of film art, Beyond the Clouds (1994),
film by magnificent Michelangelo Antonioni, where at the very end, the protagonist,
a photographer (played by John Malkovich), makes a significant comment on the
multiple and mysterious essence of the image: "But we know that behind
every image revealed, there is another image more faithful to reality, and in
back of that image there is another, and yet another behind the last one, and
so on, up to the true image of the absolute mysterious reality that no-one will
ever see."
Why is this
significant?
Today two types of
architecture could be distinguished: an architecture of image and architecture
of essence. The first one offers the mere images of form while the second one
is considerably richer, when experienced as embodied manner, providing us with
narratives of culture, history, tradition and human existence, life in general.
The first leaves us as spectators; the second one makes us participants with
full ethical responsibility.
We live in mental
worlds, in which the experienced, remembered and imagined, as well as the past,
present and future are inseparably intermixed and to narrow architecture in its relation to the keyword
FRAME to the limited field such as theater architecture, setting, stage
etc. is not what was expected of this word. Architecture
is a protagonist, a collaborator of life. It’s a narrative...the keeper of
memory. And let’s not forget, every
space has its story and every story happens in specific space. Space is a
protagonist rather than a mere projection.
example: The Perfect Human (fragment)
http://youtu.be/_N5oJn-joj0
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