Regulars at Gray's will have already seen this plastered all over the building ad nauseum, but here it is to lend official-ness to this post.
This week had been all about the lead-up to the showing. Monday I scouted out the area that my series is based at and shot preliminary images. Later I ate a mountain of haggis on a plate, and was coerced by my Indian flatmate and the people in my flat to eat more, a chapati with delicious home-cooked curry. Thoroughly stuffed and nearly immobile, I converted the excessive food-energy into creative power for putting together the above poster.
Yesterday after throwing the posters up around Gray's with Sam, I shot the images that I'll use for the exhibition. I'm pretty proud with the way they turned out. Printing them for tomorrow is now under way. Tonight I'm going to try shooting some video for the exhibition, so I may have a screen running depending on whether the quality turns out to be satisfactory.
Accompanying the images I'll have an elegant little quote from Calvino's Invisible Cities, a book seemingly designed to deliver eminently quotable profundities at least six times per page. Also I thought I'd put up here the following select quotes; I think they deal with what's going on in my exhibition work much more deftly than all that nebulous rubbish I spouted in the last post. I don't think I'll put these up for the exhibition as it would just make it seem bloated and didactic, but they give good background context in a blog setting:
"Besides the notion of the everyday, the term 'generic' has cropped up in various discussions of contemporary urban space. Thus, instead of zooming in on unique elements, such as historical monuments or geographical peculiarities that establish the identity of places, architects and urban planners have come to devote considerable attention to generic elements. Although these elements are essentially exchangeable and can be located anywhere, they determine the outlook and the functioning of a city to a large extent. (...)
This interest in exchangeable components of present-day cityscapes stands in diametrical opposition the strong emphasis that was still put on the significance of "place" in architectural theories of the 1970s. In both Kevin Lynch's empirically oriented research and Christian Norberg-Schulz's ideas influenced by Heideggerian phenomenology, it is above all the importance of the genius loci that was stressed. Marking a place as unique was even considered to be the archetypical architectural act and the true raison d'être of architecture."
- Steven Jacobs, Post-Ex-Sub-Dis (Introduction)
"The new suburbs are no longer just soulless places – anonymous, standardized and uniform – they have in fact developed their own identities. But these identities are fashioned from whole cloth, like movie sets(...) Developments usually have no connection to the original context of the sites where they are built, they are amalgams of cultural, imaginary and borrowed identities. The housing in these places suffers the same fate and is full of grafted-on symbols and references to histories that have nothing to do with our own. We are witness to the appearance of simulated villages, a style that could be called fake-authentic, a pastiche of vanished ways of life. Picturesque features are fabricated, pseudo-heritage values are invented and the target is clients who like to think they are buying something special with a local flavour. Some people even think that these artificial landscapes are real, leading to confusion between what is really part of our cultural heritage and what is only the market value of substitution. This generates false perceptions of who we are."
- Isabelle Hayeur, Model Homes artist statement
"While authors such as Lynch and Norberg-Schulz considered the identity of a place to be vital to the quality of the city, (architect and writer Rem Koolhaas) sees identity as paralysing: 'The stronger identity, the more it imprisons, the more it resists expansion, interpretation, renewal, contradiction. Identity becomes like a lighthouse- fixed, overdetermined; it can change its position or the pattern it omits only at the cost of destabilising navigation. (Paris can only become more Parisian - it is already on its way to becoming hyper-Paris, a polished caricature)' "
- Steven Jacobs (quoting Rem Koolhaas' S,M,L,XL p.1248), Post-Ex-Sub-Dis (Introduction)
This historical identity/generic space debate I find quite fascinating, and I'll put together a more in-depth take on the subject in a later post. For now though, go see our exhibition!
For folks reading this from back across the pond or anyone else who can't make it, pictures/documentation will go up afterward.