By RICARDO FABBRINI*
Considerations on the book by Guilherme Wisnik.
Em inside the fog, Guilherme Wisnik ingeniously articulates aesthetic reflection and contemporary artistic and architectural production.[I] It is a book about the relationship between aesthetics and politics from the 1990s onwards, which transits through urbanism, architecture, installation, painting, or photography. Concepts from the criticism of the visual arts are transposed by the author, with aplomb, to the fields of architecture and urbanism. In a text that combines historical information and theoretical reflection, there are careful analyzes of works, which are taken as symptoms of changes in the artistic-cultural logic of capitalism in the last forty years.[ii]
In the comments on the unique works, the author investigates the extent to which art and architecture “still have the conditions to promote the appearance of the new and the astonishing in a world where such power seems to have been captured by the global dimension of the media spectacle” and technoscience. , “robbing art of all the prerogative of innovation”.[iii] At the heart of the book, there is the convergence between art and architecture in a poetics of materials.[iv] Using the essay “Transparency: literal and phenomenal” by Colin Rowe and Robert Slutzky, from 1963, who saw in transparency a “connection between the plastic poetics of painters and architects”, Wisnik shows, for example, the changes in architecture regarding to the glass.
From transparency, literal or phenomenal, the author unearths symbolism. It shows the progressive displacement of the structural skeleton based on iron and on the transparency of the glass of the rationalist architecture of the beginning of the 1980th century, for the glasses with historicist ornaments of the so-called post-modern architecture of the 1990s, and, from these, for the mirrored glasses of the architecture corporate like that of financial centers in the 2000s and XNUMXs; against which the milky glass would turn, which, by refusing to isolate the building from its surroundings, would operate as a form of resistance to hegemonic architecture.[v]
In the imagination of the pioneers of modern architecture, it is worth remembering that glass symbolized technological progress, democratic equality, and utopian transcendence. Its transparency, by allowing the integration between internal and external spaces, would have broken with the falsification of the ornate facades that covered up the life of its interior: “Modernity [as Wisnik summarizes from Anthony Vidler] was erected, in short, on the myth of transparency”.[vi] legatee of ethos Enlightenment that informed modern art and architecture, the transparency of glass was taken, therefore, as “an index of truth, simplicity, honesty and purity”. [vii]
It should be pointed out in this direction that the ideal of transparency materialized in galleries, train stations, in the pavilions of Universal Exhibitions at the end of the XNUMXth century; whether in the works of Paul Scheebart, Bruno Taut or Walter Gropius (according to Rowe and Slutzky), they go back to the very origin of Western philosophy – to Greek democracy.[viii] The value of literal transparency thus understood, according to the Western rationalist imaginary, a common and egalitarian space, symmetrical and secularized because it was no longer confined to the half-light of sanctuaries; after all, everything happened in Athenian democracy in the fifth and fourth centuries BC in broad daylight: the citizen who entered the agora from the polis, he saw everything while being seen by all; in addition, the expression of opinions; the debates held, the drafting of laws; as well as the judicial decisions based on them, were also guided by the “value of transparency”.
This ideal of social and political life symbolized by the transparency (or the absence of ambiguities) of glass, which became programmatic for supporters of functionalist architecture in the early XNUMXth century, was, however, the target of criticism. If glass is an “instrument par excellence of modern rational enlightenment”, it “historically presents itself as an enemy of both property and mystery”; which means that “behind its anti-auratic surface, nothing would remain hidden, in secret”.[ix]
According to Walter Benjamin, for example, glass is an aseptic and impersonal material, “cold and sober”, which abolishes memory and lived experience. [X] It is a material “so hard and so smooth” that “nothing sticks to it”, which means that it does not retain the marks left by the hand, and when the hand leaves them, they are easily erased. [xi] The “traces of men on earth” would have been eliminated in Scheerbart's “glass culture”, or in the Bauhaus cult of steel, since “they created spaces in which it is difficult to leave traces”, says Benjamin. [xii]
From transparent glass, we moved to mirrored glass. In the description of the Hotel Bonaventure, in Los Angeles, in 1976, by John Portman, the critic Fredric Jameson highlighted the mirrored glass that isolates the building from its surroundings, constituting itself as a “total space, a complete world, a kind of city miniature."[xiii] While Le Corbusier's architecture opens up to the city, not in the sense of welcoming it, but with the intention of transforming it, that is, of spreading its forms and way of life through the urban fabric, Portman's Hotel Bonaventure would have returned your back to the surroundings.
If the first is self-confident and willful, betting on the social power of the functional form-architecture; the second would be narcissistic since it is indifferent to everything that is external to it. Only the panoramic elevators located in the four towers that flank the central atrium of the Hotel – with miniature lakes, boutiques and escalators, as in shopping malls or amusement parks – is that the visitor can see the city, which ends up being reduced to a mere image, to a skyline spectral. If this image fascinates – still according to Jameson – it is because it stems from the “nihilistic passion for the ways in which the real disappears”, in Baudrilllard's expression. [xiv]
Certain contemporary architecture, however, has rejected both the transparent glass of modern architecture (with its symbolism) and the mirrored glass of corporate architecture of the global era, in favor of the “phenomenal transparency” of milky glass. From the translucency of this glass, located between the transparent and the mirrored, a “clouding” effect would result. It would be “in the ambiguous surfaces of the sandblasted glass”, in the “strange membranes” through which “things [inside or outside the building] appear as specters and shadows” that would reside the critical power of form, in Wisnik’s poetics of materials .[xv]
It is possible to assume, extending the author's poetics, that in the refraction of the beam of light that crosses a skin of milky glass, a deviation occurs (a kind of clinamen, in Lucrécio's term, or minimun détournément, in the expression de Guy Debord, Roland Barthes, or Gilles Deleuze) who, by veiling or distorting what is seen, return to that image, its enigma. These “translucent veils that allow us to glimpse something of the interior spaces enveloping them in mystery” would thus operate, in our view, as a form of resistance to the hegemonic images of the hypervisibility society: flat images; slaps; smooth; superficial; epidermal; pellicular; no recoil; no riddle, no hidden face; no other side; no pleats; no folds; without reverse; without a line of flight, in the terms used by Jean Baudrillard throughout his essay. In the blurry images, of dim light, filtered by the milky glass, we would have, in short, the denial of the world without flaws, of a continuity without cracks, proper to the order of simulacra, of the hyper-reality of the images, of high definition, extremely intense from the point sensory point of view.
This is what would happen in works such as the Art houseby Peter Zumthor (Bregenz, 1991), Goetz Gallery, by Herzog & de Meuron (Munich, 1992) or the Moreira Salles Institute (São Paulo, 2011), according to Wisnik. Looking from outside these buildings, it is possible to see in their interior, due to the light that passes through the semi-matte or cloudy skin of their envelopes, only shimmering silhouettes. In this set of works, the author also includes the Cartier Foundation for Contemporary Art, by Jean Nouvel (Paris, 1994), despite the singularity of this construction; because there are no turgid skins in it, as in the previous cases, but “parallel planes of glass, some only scenographic, without any real function other than that of creating ambiguous effects of vision”, which would result in “a rich perceptive shuffling between the building , the interior gardens and the urban context”.[xvi]
“With rare plastic sensitivity, Jean Nouvel [Wisnik concludes his commentary on Cartier Foundation] there manages to dissolve the reading of a solid volume through what he himself called poetics of fog and evanescence”. [xvii] It is possible to ask, however, despite the minimalist lightness common to these buildings, whether we would not have Cartier Foundation by Jean Nouvel, a formal virtuosity not found in other buildings. The dissolving effect of the building structure of the Foundation, in a strange misty atmosphere, would not be as scenographic – despite the immense formal distance that separates them – as the exhibitionist envelope, in titanium plates, of the Guggenheim Museum by Frank O´Gehry (Bilbao, 1997)?
In this respect, Wisnik departs from Hal Foster, for whom architecture's power of resistance (or its formal, ethical-aesthetic quality) resides in the dialectic between tectonics (the literal, or structure) and the skin (the image, or surface). This dialectic between “literality” and “phenomenal effect”, or materiality and immateriality, would only exceptionally, however, be assured, as in certain works by Herzog & de Meuron, Kazuyo Sejima (to which we will return), and Richard Gluckman; because the dominant in the global style of starchitects, still according to Hal Foster, would be the predominance of the “phenomenal” over the “literal”. This is evident, for example, in the Cartier Foundation, because here, the glass box would not operate as literal transparency or structural clarity in the sense of Miesian architecture, but as an envelope that overcomes, if not “humbles the structure”.[xviii] In this building, the glass palisade would cause the literal to become rarefied and the phenomenal to intensify like brightness, or fade like mist, according to the time of day. It would be an architecture, according to Foster, that would aim to produce atmospheres, “dazzling” the observer, as if his ideal model were an “illuminated jewel”; or luxury goods.[xx]
The fog is one topos, originating from the practice of painting. It is enough to remember the hazy forms – like the “smoke that mixes with the dusty air when it reaches a certain height” as Leonardo da Vinci described it in his book. Treaty of painting[xx]; Claude Monet's water lilies; you sfumatos by Odilon Redon; the vaporizations of JMW Turner; and, in the pictorialist line of photography, Alfred Stieglitz's clouds that lead to the erasure of the referent (of the object as a given place), placing the image beyond the inherent qualities of the referent, in such a way that it, the object, would no longer be observed “by its external appearance, but according to the rules of picturesque beauty”, in the terms of the XNUMXth century painter William Gilpin[xxx]; Armando Reverón's mother-of-pearl light paintings; or, finally, the watercolors of the Picturesque atlas of the skies of Hércules Florence, among so many pictorial references or pictorialist photographs, of mists.
There are several meanings attributed to the mists throughout the book. They are “both negative and positive signs in the current world”, “after all, the cloud (or mist) – the author emphasizes – is not univocal”, but plural.[xxiii] Fog is used, first of all, to represent events of destruction or death in the 6th and 1945st centuries. Hence, the author's mentions of the radioactive clouds caused by the dropping of atomic bombs on August 1960, XNUMX, over the cities of Hiroshima, and, three days later, over the city of Nagasaki, Japan (which were translated into serigraphs by series of sweetened mushrooms by Andy Warhol in the XNUMXs); the black cloud of debris produced by the implosion of the housing estate Pruitt-Igoe, by Minoru Yamasaki, in St. Louis, Missouri, at 15:32 pm, on July 15, 1972, which was taken by historian Charles Jencks, in a 1977 book, as marking the end of the “Plan Ideology” of modern architecture or the beginning of so-called postmodern architecture; and, finally, the yellow-white cloud composed of marble dust, concrete, steel and financial stocks, which engulfed several blocks of Manhattan, after the Al-Qaeda attack, on September 11, 2001, on the World Trade Center, designed by Yamasaki, Leslie E. Robertson and Emey Roth & Sons.[xxiii]
The fog, in inside the fog, is also an image for the current stage of financial or immaterial capital, because it has no ballast in the so-called real world. It is the image of the capitalism of the digital network, of the incessant movement of information and speculative capital throughout the global world: “It is not [just] an image of technological evolution without it being, more profoundly, a mutation of capitalism”, he said, in this direction, Gilles Deleuze.[xxv] The fog is cloud (cloud) “invisible and omnipresent”, loaded with big data and algorithms that hover above our heads[xxiv]. The cloud is as abstract as it is concrete given that it tracks all our actions: “Marketing is now the instrument of social control, and forms the impudent race of our masters” – “the company”. [xxv] The cloud is the society of control [and not the disciplinary society, in the "modern" sense], of a control that is "short-term and rapidly rotating", "continuous and unlimited", which "detects the position of each , licit or illicit” operating a “universal modulation”, still according to Deleuze. [xxviii]
The mist, finally – in Wisnik's condensation – figures the “digital sublime”.[xxviii] One can, in fact, evoke the feeling of the sublime in the face of the digital cloud, because the latter implies that which, being too large, escapes all measure, any attempt to subsume it to the categories of thought. The “digital sublime” or “capitalist sublime”, in the terms used by the author, corresponds to the apparently paradoxical notion of “immanent sublime” by Jean-François Lyotard. [xxix] The “sublime immanent” is, according to Lyotard, the “essential fact of postmodernity”, namely: that the logic of capitalism and technoscience is excessive, since it is the “infinite possibilities of transformations and operations of devices that set this same logic in motion”; which was characterized by Lyotard, in The postmodern condition as “system performances”, including “its own optimization”: the “growth of power and its self-legitimization through the production, memorization, accessibility and operability of information”.[xxx]
The feeling of the sublime in the face of the digital cloud would not, in short, “make one believe in the reality of this world”, but “would allow one to discover the sublimity that sustains it”: the ever-increasing libidinal investment in the “instrument-weapon” – in the term strategy used by Lyotard in his characterization of “post-modern” technical-scientific rationality. [xxxii] In the notion of digital sublime we have aupdate of the aesthetics of the sublime with the replacement of the “transcendent sublime” (which authors such as Jameson and Lyotard associate with the “aesthetics of modernity”) by the “immanent sublime”, which means that the Idea of an emancipating reason that aims at totality, was replaced by the idea of a pure artifice, which follows the logic of performance, in continuous expansion of technoscience. Therefore, the fog represents the excess of the digital world, with its spectral intensity, devoid of meaning, typical of the fetish, which is a source of fascination.
The mist also operates, in this book, as an image of indetermination. We are living, according to the author, within the fog, pushing away the idea of fatality or a one-way path in history. Guilherme Wisnik constructs, in other words, a dialectic of clouds: an opposition between the virtual world, based on the instantaneousness of information (the digital sublime) and the poetics of clouding, understood as internal forms of resistance to this same global world. If, on the one hand, fog is a metaphor for the “sublime capitalist”, based on the cloud of information technology, control algorithms and the volatility of financial actions, as we have seen; on the other hand, fog is also an index of vagueness in relation to the future, as evidenced in certain recent art and architecture: “After all, inside the cloud, that is, in the current world, the light is diffuse, not allowing the definition neither of centers nor of margins in its emission and reception. We thus inhabit – in Jeffrey L. Kosky's terms – a global blur, a global blur”.[xxxi]
To be in the middle of the fog is to live, therefore, the experience of the imponderability of becoming, that is, that something different from what is given is on the verge of coming about. This association of the fog with the advent of the new (of an “other new”, because it is no longer the old new modern), of what is glimpsed amid the veiling of the present, goes back, according to Wisnik, to the “Amerindian poetic myths” analyzed by Lévi-Strauss, according to whom, the dense fog that suddenly descends interposing men and their environment would have “a cosmogonic role, of interrupting and restoring the world, abruptly altering the order of things”: “it is the veil that covers reality for an instant, triggering a situation from which things would transmute and change position”. [xxxii] In the current world, the mists, as in the described myth, would also operate as signs of transformation, not because they would refound the existing world on new bases as in the Amerindian cosmogony, but because they would allow us to glimpse indices of freedom (of invention of possibilities) in the midst of naturalization of digital-neoliberal capitalism.
It is in the “poetics of clouding” (already introduced with regard to milky glass) that the author locates residual and emerging forms of resistance to hegemonic art and architecture in neoliberal capitalism, such as the photographs of Michael Wesely; installations by Olafur Eliasson; and Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa's SANAA office “constructions”; and the office Diller + Scofidio, by Elizabeth Diller and Ricardo Scofidio. These are some examples, taken from the author, that allow specifying the meaning he attributes to the poetics of clouding as a form of resistance.
With “special cameras” that “enormously filter the light that hits the film”, Michael Wesely “records scenes” that “extend for a very long time”. [xxxv] Dilating “the instant of the photographic click enormously into minutes, hours, days, months or years, the photographer thus gives a surprisingly tangible feature to temporal duration, normally alien to the instantaneous universe of photography” [xxxiv] This is the case of the photographs of the reconstruction of the set Potsdamer-Leipziger Platz, in Berlin, from 1997 to 2000, designed by Renzo Piano, Richard Rogers and Helmuth Jahn: “a mini city event” – in the expression of Otília Arantes [xxxiv] – “which is defined as a theme park [an international center for communication, media and services] located in the heart of the city, emulating a false condition of mixed public space”.[xxxviii] In these images, what we see is “a tangle of overlapping forms: buildings under construction merging into spectral forms, the skyline of the city behind, cranes and scaffolding everywhere, refracted glare and lights and the shifting design of the sun's path across the sky throughout the seasons”, in the author's ecphrasis.[xxxviii]
In a reaction to the reduction of Potsdamer Platz to a scenario of pure artifice high-tech which produces a strange fascination with the disappearance of history (after the fall of the Berlin Wall), Wesely's photographs aim to restore its physical concreteness and temporal density. These photographs would thus show, in the overlapping layers of time, the construction site with the scaffolding that structures the building – “the material process that is behind the scene as a result of a productive chain” – in a refusal to reduce architecture to form signifier or form-simulacrum (to spectacular images in late capitalism). [xxxix]
Photograph by Michael Wesely. Potsdamer Platz, Berlin, 1997-2000.
Two aspects stand out that are already indicated in the book, in which, in my opinion, the critical potential of Wesely's photographs resides, namely: the palimpsest and duration. In the overlapping veils in the photographs of Potsdamer Platz, we have something analogous to the “palimpsest”, writing about writing, or pentimento, in painting. In the latter case, the overlapping layers of the square under construction (which also evoke the ruins of an archaeological site) are like the glazes on a painting; like the successive veils of color that make it luminescent, since the veil is not opaque, but translucent. Just as in glazing or encaustic which, emphasizing the value of color (its luminosity), allows a glimpse of the tones of the lower layers of paint, in the photograph of the Potsdamer Platz from Wesely it is possible to apprehend “everything that was present in front of the camera during all the time” that its lens was kept open.[xl] In short: what you see, in this case, are the very thin translucent layers of color-light, situated between transparency and opacity.
Motivated by the author's text, believing myself to remain faithful to its content, it can be added that both in the "layers of time that are spatialized" [xi] In Wesely's photographs and in the pentimento, understood as a veneer of layers of paint, there is the same “affect-effect of indeterminacy”, which cannot be subsumed to the representational device, given that it introduces “the unrepresentable” in the very constitution of “ mimetic representation” (of the cranes and scaffolding of the Potsdamer-Platz), taking it to the brink of disappearance.[xliii] Thus, in both cases, the usual structure of perception would be destabilized by substituting the opposition, or even the reversibility, between figure and background (the optical space) by the porosity, if not indistinction, between the upper and lower surfaces. from below (the tactile space).
This is what can be seen, it is worth noting, in artists such as Paul Cézanne, Jean Fautrier, Jean Dubuffet, François Rouan, Jackson Pollock, Julian Schnabel, Anselm Kiefer, or even Gerhrad Richter (cited by the author). It is true that the effect of suspending the sharpness of forms in these artists' works is the result of handling the pigments, or the roughness of the impasto, while in Wesely's diaphanous photographs the clouding effect, or of light films, are obtained in photosensitive films. .
The second aspect that he attributes to the photographs of Potsdamer-Platz an enigma is the incorporation, in them, of duration. The use of cameras with a long-lasting aperture for the diaphragm extends the “decisive moment” in photography, in Henri Cartier-Bresson's expression, to the duration of the cinematographic (or video) long shot. Situated between the static image and the dynamic image, Wesely's photography thus enables, through the dilation of the instant, the crystallization of time, as duration, in a given image. Its intent is to extend the decisive instant by making it a time-image (or duration) and, in the same operation, bring the movement-image (specific to cinema) closer to the stillness of the photogram, thus tensioning the temporal regimes of the “photographic form” and the “photographic form”. cinema (or video)”. [xiii]
The still image of Potsdamer Platz aspires, in short, to the mobility of the filmic image in an attempt to apprehend the procedural dimension of things and facts, that is, the causal succession of events in time: or even, the gentrification process promoted by the “Strategic Planning” of the city of Berlin in the period of reunification following the Fall of the Wall, in line with the imperatives of post-industrial or financial capitalism. In Wesely's photography it is evident what the Potsdamer Platz high tech and glamorized, aims to hide: the predatory action of global corporate capital that erases the continuum of history. This photograph reacts, returning to the terms of “Inside the fog”, to the “lack of historical thickness” of iconic-architecture, or of the advertising image as a form-commodity, in the Global Cities, in favor of the “quality of use of the place in real life” [xiv]
It is possible to add, still with regard to duration, that Wesely's photography imposes a certain temporality on the viewer's enjoyment. Faced with the question: “what do your blurred images, in which all sharpness is suspended, expect from us?”; it can be answered that it is technique of the delay: the jealous and sluggish perception, that is, the time necessary for “in the observation of these images, everything that actually happened in it, or in front of it, begins to be born”: the construction of the square. [xlv] This opening of the image to the "intractable reality" (Jean Baudrillard), which refers to the notion of point in Roland Barthes, it can be synthesized in the interjection: “That was!”. [xlv] This expression, however, should not be understood as the fixation of an instant, as Barthes wants, but as the apprehension of the process of transforming the city (or erasing its history), of something that there occurred absolutely, irrefutably, in the present (continuous) facing the camera. These are photographs that attest, thus, to the stubbornness of the “Referent”, to assert itself as an “ontological reality”: the construction part da Potsdamer Platz (of its buildings and surroundings). [xlv]
For this reason, Wesely's photographs are beautiful pensive images, images that sensibly force thought (because there is no point in them that does not look at us) inquiring us, as opposed to extremely intense images from the sensory point of view, which are, however, empty , because they are disconnected from the lived experience or from the collective memory. In them, unthought thought is enclosed, thought not directly attributable either to the photographer's intention or to a specific object (the studium, according to Barthes. i.e. Potsdamer PLATZ as referent). The pensive image thus opens a “zone of indetermination” between “presence and absence”, in Baudrillard’s terms, or “between thought and non-thought, between activity and passivity, and even between art and non-art, insofar as it redefines the boundary between these terms”.[xlviii]
The pensive image opposes, in other words, “the power of pensiveness of the point to the informative aspect represented by the studium"; [xlix] that is, the pensive image triggers a scopic passion, or a “madness of the look”, in Barthes’s expression: a circularity made of a back and forth that does not cease between different modes of enunciation, between “the knowledge of a represented object” and the “not-knowing that forces thought”.[l] It is from this zone of indiscernibility (the “figurability”, as Lyotard would say), which is the imponderable itself, that results in the effect of “distance”, or of “a certain mystery”, of these images.[li] Wesely's photographs thus interrupt any performative organization, any convention or context that can be mastered by the conventionalism of the image-generating machine of digital and mass media, which is always tautological, because it is the result of the generalized interchangeability of fetish-images.
As a second example of the poetics of clouding, among those mentioned by the author, the installation in site specific, The weather project, by Olafur Eliasson, presented at Turbine hall da Tate Modern, in 2003. This installation was “consisting of a metallic semi-disk structured by scaffolding and illuminated with monofrequency lamps. In addition, the artist installed a mirror close to the ceiling of the hall, doubling the space and reflecting his images – the architecture, the people and the half sun itself, which, by duplicating itself, completed itself –, in addition to involving it in an artificial mist, whose air of mystery heightened the sense of the situation’s likely unreality”.[liiii] “The result – still in Wisnik’s terms – is that people flocked to the museum in large numbers during the London winter, with the intention of lying down on the floor of that artificial beach and receiving on their skin – even if only mediated by the eyes and through the brain, but in a very credible way - "the energy of those beneficent rays of the sun". [iii]
Installation by Olafur Eliasson. The weather project, Tate Modern, London, 2003.
It is also possible, in our view, to associate “that air of mystery” evoked by the mists – in the enjoyment of this installation by Eliasson – with the Kantian “feeling of the sublime”. At Turbine hall, an old power plant, now deactivated, the visitor is faced with the “absolutely big”; with something “compared to which everything else is small”, experiencing a “simultaneous feeling of fascination and terror”, in which “pleasure is only possible through displeasure”, just like the one who enters for the “first time” in the Church of St. Peter in Rome, on the example of Kant.[book] This fruition would thus be analogous to the feeling of the “mathematical sublime” characterized by Kant's inadequacy between imagination in its aspiration to infinite progress, to totality, as an idea of reason, and the faculty capable of evaluating such greatness. From this fruition, in the terms of Lyotard, who takes up Kant's “analytics of the sublime” in his own way, a feeling of suspension between the present time and that which is announced without ever coming true. In the flickering color-light of Turbine hall, what happens is what is announced in them, the question: “Will something happen?”.[lv] It is in sustaining this interrogation, in the expectation that something will emerge, or even, in the expectation of something that “happens in the event”, that the possibility becomes evident that places that have not yet taken place will take place. [lv] It is in fruition, suspending all relations of domination – as well as in the Kantian reflective judgment, in which there is no subjugation of sensibility by understanding, or of understanding by sensibility, but the free play of these faculties – that comes the expectation that something will happen. to arise due to an impulse that seems to force the form (that is, that precipitates the ambience of light in The weather project) outside itself, towards the formless, understood as an index of alternatives to the real. This does not mean taking this fruition as an experience of transcendence through the “presentation of the inexpressible” (in the sense of the romantic tradition and avant-garde art such as Mondrian, Kandinsky or Malevitch, in the examples of Lyotard himself), but as a “negative presentation” , insofar as there is in it an allusion to something that cannot be shown, or “presented” – presentation in Kant's term.[lviii]
This scattering of colors light by the artificial sun, from yellow, orange, red, or ochre, always iridescent, allows the viewer to sharpen his sensitivity as he walks through the street. Turbine hall. Moving through the wide empty space he apprehends it as totally nuanced; that is, he realizes that his surroundings are always “dark”, since he subtly changes his appearance, depending on the inclination of his gaze.
We are close, here, to Hélio Oiticica's attempt to expand the sensorial experience through the "embodiment" of "color-duration" - of the Bilateral from 1959 to penetrable of the 1960s – by allowing the participant to “see, feel, step on, touch the color” emanating from a material support, such as wooden plates, or boxes with pure color pigments [lviii]; although in The weather project of Eliasson, there is no release of the luminosity of the color-pigment, applied on wood or concentrated in a container, as in Oiticica, but rather, the construction of a space of light-color from monofrequency lamps, as in artists Robert Irwin, James Turrell, or Anthony McCall from the group Light and Space.
The perception by the user of subtle chromatic changes, as he moves, amidst the mists, through the Turbine hall, operates as a form of resistance to the simulation society, as it prevents the gaze from becoming hostage to the fatal fascination of the high-definition images of the digital world. In perceiving the nuances of the mist, a kind of epokhé, provisional suspension of the dominant visual language that is simply taken as natural, because certified by the endless reiterations of the “full screen”.[lix]
This careful and distended perception in time – already required, as we saw by Wesely’s photographs – is “an increasingly rare commodity, if not a true luxury” in the colonized world due to the immediate, purely operational decipherment of images, as occurs when browsing the Internet. ; after all, speed, performance, performance are the watchwords of digital capitalism.[lx] It is precisely, however, in the perception marked by hesitations, by the loss of time and by the lost time, by the patience in unveiling the secret of what is not immediately apprehended, because it is only hinted at, that we would have the denial of the temporality of production of clichéd images (that is, of voracity and haste); and as a result of “anxious hedonism”, which governs life in “hypermodernity”.[lxi]
The third example of the poetics of clouding is the XNUMXst Century Museum of Contemporary Art (1999–2004), in Kanazawa, Japan, from the SANAA office (Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa), described by Wisnik as follows: “On the outside, we see a centrifugal and continuous surface, a curved façade [a glass cylinder]; and, inside, a labyrinth of paths between rooms and patios, in which the circulation spaces (the interstices between the blocks) also become places to be, gaining an unprecedented protagonism”.[lxii] In this construction, the foundation is “the zero degree of materiality and tectonics”, in such a way that its walls are “almost without thickness” and its pillars are “almost implausibly slender”.[lxiii] Subtracting its weight and density from the building, SANAA invests in the “reflective and atmospheric quality” of the “often curved” glasses, in “their different degrees of translucency and opacity”,[lxiv] in such a way that “in the wake of the millenary cultural tradition of their country”, Japan, Sejima and Nishizawa, would know how to “build the void”[lxv].
The architecture of XNUMXst Century Museum of Contemporary Art would extract, still according to Wisnik, “an unforeseen sensuality from inexpressiveness”.[lxvi] His authorship would consist, paradoxically, “in transmitting a feeling of voluntary anonymity in a narcissistic and exhibitionist world”, as evidenced by the exuberant, or virtuosic, forms of the starchitects.[lxv] If in the latter we have the value of display in the production of form, in the former there would be its negation: an aesthetic of parsimony that would erase, with technical expertise, the structure of the building.[lxviii] In this direction, I would say that the Museum of the XNUMXst Century by Sejima and Nishizawa is an “unfolding architecture” (development, in Maurice Blanchot's term) [lxix]; and not an “architecture of deconstruction”, like that of Peter Eisenman or Michael Graves who in the 1970s deconstructed, by means of longitudinal and transversal sections, the “sign-system” of constructive or rationalist architecture, namely: the cube (in a operation similar to the deconstruction by Jacques Derrida of the notions of truth, subject or consciousness, which underlie the philosophy of representation).
Sejima's “on the verge of fading” architecture, “which derealizes its profiles in shadows and reflections”, opens, in other words, a central void, a time of silence, an unanswered question. [lxx] The “abstract immateriality of Sanaa's buildings”, in Wisnik's formulation, can be characterized, in my view, by the notion of “non-expression” (in the term used by Theodor Adorno regarding certain modern literature); or even: his buildings can be seen as an architecture of “expressionlessness”; or, finally, the “expression of non-expression”. [lxxi] This notion of “expression of the non-expression”, taken here as a correlate of the notion of suspension, already mentioned above, implies the idea of indetermination – of opening the form, in the aesthetic and political sense. [lxxiii]
In fruition of the architecture of the Museum of the XNUMXst Century dand Sejima, as a form of the “non-subjective of the subject”, we would have, finally, the pathos of suspension – a kind of disorientation of longing – which does not correspond to the idea of hope, in the sense of the utopian project of modern architecture – but as we said with regard to fruition in The weather project of Eliasson - of a feeling of expectation: "Will something happen?". Sejima's building is, therefore, an almost immaterial form in the face of which "there is still the experience of inaccessibility", since "this one exists", "is there", taking place in the form, as a mute presence before the viewer, “near him” and even “in him”: “a floating, postponed image”, a “silent turmoil”, now in the terms of Georges Didi-Huberman. [lxxiii]
The fourth example of the poetics of clouding that we highlight in “Dentro do fogio” is the “temporary pavilion” blur building designed by Elizabeth Diller and Ricardo Scofidio for the “Expo 2002, in Switzerland, with the consultancy of the Japanese artist Fujiko Nakaya”.[lxxiv] It is an artistic or architectural form of exception, therefore, resistant to the hegemonic corporate architecture in the global world, resulting from technological effects. Its form is of low definition, because it has a high level of opacity or indetermination, produced from high technology: “Built on the lake NeuchâtelOn yverdon-The-Bath (Switzerland), blur building it is [in the author’s characterization that we summarize here] “a platform constituted by a mesh of hollow metal structure, accessible by an extensive walkway, and surrounded by a permanent cloud of water captured in the lake that was sprinkled by computer-controlled micro-sprinklers” [lxxv]. Blurring the boundaries between art and architecture, this pavilion – a “media-integrated smoke building” – appears to be the result of transposing the sfumato from Leonardo da Vinci's paintings to architecture. [lxxvi] According to Elizabeth Diller it is an “immersive environment in which the world is put out of focus, while our visual dependency is brought into focus [at the center]”; that is, in the face of it there would be "nothing to see beyond our own dependence on sight."[lxxvii]
Temporary pavilion by Elizabeth Diller and Ricardo Scofidio. Blur Building. 2002 Expo, yverdon-The-bains, switzerland.
From this description by Diller, one can characterize the fruition of this platform as the perception of an architectural form in nascendi status. In an archeology of the look, the viewer, in a state of expectation, would apprehend an image-form that is still undefined, but that would be on the verge of coming to light. It is necessary to descend into the mists (to the glare) to then access, once again, the vision; that is, to see things, anew, as if they were seen for the first time. The mists are thus the negativity (the formless) that anticipates the image (the form), or even, the pre-image that is at the origin of the order of visible things. It is in this sense that this “architecture as atmosphere” by producing the “forced obstruction of vision” acquires a critical dimension, insofar as it opposes the “rapid visual consumption”, that is, the prompt recognition of signs, in contemporary society. spectacle (in which “the image [cliché] is the final form of the reification of the commodity”, as Guy Debord said). [lxxviii]
O blur building, an “architecture in absenteeism”, aimed to produce, according to architect Ricardo Scofídio himself, a “technological sublime” (which must be differentiated from the notions of “digital sublime”, “capitalist sublime” or “immanent sublime”, which were presented above). [lxxix] For the critic Mario Costa, in line with Lyotard's studies on Kant's “Critique of Judgment”, new technologies would be the privileged place for the production of “contrasting feelings”: “the negative feeling of terror or impotence” and the “contrary feeling of wonder, admiration, and esteem.” [lxxx] It would be the new technologies that could reveal “our physical nature its own limits”, at the same time that “our rational nature would perceive its own superiority”.[lxxxi]
They would produce “a negative and frightening experience” – continues Costa in a Kantian ambience – “the huge effort to overcome our limits” – revealing, paradoxically, “the unlimited and infinite character of our finitude”.[lxxxii] The microprocessed mists would enhance, in other words, the common experience of being finite and at the same time possessing, in Kant's expression, an “infinite thought”. [lxxxiii] They would allude to what is unrepresentable, to what goes beyond possible representation. The “faculty of reflective judgment” would activate, finally, the imagination “towards an infinite progress”, “to the pretension to the totality that cannot be the object of the senses” (in an effect similar to that of the pollens of golden light in the Turbine Hall in The weather project by Eliasson).[lxxxiv]
This new technical universe of the technological sublime that is displaced by “Diller + Scofidio” in blur building, from installations inside art galleries or museums to the architecture in their surroundings, in the heart of the city, thus opposes the large number of hollow images, images without presence, which represent nothing but emptiness, such as the from the movies blockbusters who take technical virtuosity as obligatory effectism; as well as the images of videogames that stimulate interactivity, understood here as interaction with the void, or as phantom conviviality: the currently hegemonic modality of passivity.
These are some examples of the poetics of clouding, in art and architecture gathered from inside the fog by Guilherme Wisnik, which we comment freely here, assuming the risk of infidelity to the author. In this poetics, the mist operates as a form of resistance to the “hypervisibility that underpins the system of false transparencies” in today's society.[lxxxv] In the works that he analyzes, the author approaching Hal Foster relates contemporary architecture to minimalism in the arts, although there is a distance in the way in which the two authors conceive minimal art.
In the recovery of the debate that goes back to the 1960s, about the enjoyment of a minimalist work, Foster states that when faced with the objects of artists such as Donald Judd or Dan Flavin, the viewer moves incessantly from the “objectified form” to their “sensible configurations”. and vice versa; which would not occur in the perception of the “immersive”, “technosublime” installations by the minimalists James Turrell and Robert Irwin, because in these there would be a “sensory abuse”.[lxxxvi] “Against contemporary trends of erasure and sublimation of tectonics and materiality in art and architecture”, Hal Foster thus emphasized the need to preserve “the tension between the literal and the phenomenal”, or, as we said, “between objective form and perceived form”. [lxxxvii]
It is worth remembering that Hal Foster's insistence on the evidence of material and structure – indices of the old capitalist industrial order – operated as a resistance to the generalized atrophy of the tectonic, as well as to the triumph of the skin or the sweetened image, in the architecture of the digital, self-generated project. per software of high technology blind to the presence of the user. Foster specified his conception of enjoyment by showing, for example, how Serra's mega-sculpture, The Matter of Time, at Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, by Frank O´Gehry, provides the user with an experience of time and place, perceptive and cognitive, changing his perception of weight, scale, or duration as he chooses, among the alternatives opened by the self-supporting plates, which direction to take, to then, with each new step inside these steel spirals, create a new “place”; while the scenographic façade of this Museum, which houses this mega-sculpture, would be a will-o'-the-wisp of titanium skins, whose "production is mythologized": a "large-scale form-commodity fetish", in the author's terms.[lxxxviii]
The “more phenomenal than literal” architecture, such as the poetics of the evanescent that puts the dialectic between tectonics (the structure, or literal) and the skin (the image, or surface) in crisis, defended by Hal Foster (who follows the lineage of the dominant tradition of modern architecture and a certain contemporary brutalist architecture) does not neutralize, according to Wisnik, the negative power of form, not least because – one can assume, reinforcing his position – there will always be some tension, albeit residual, between the materiality of form and the immateriality of mist.
In any case, it is necessary to distinguish the feeling of the sublime experienced by the viewer in the face of The weather project by Olafur Eliasson; or the feeling of the technological sublime in the face of blur building from Diller + Scofidio; or else, thepathos of suspension of faculties” before the platform of Sejima and Nishizawa; from the techno-sublime distraction light gives spectacle society. It is necessary to oppose, in other words, a disruptive aesthetic realization, located between art and architecture, which operates as an index of alterity, of technological, pyrotechnical and decorative effects, of electroentertainment, which only reaffirms the existing reality.
The forms of clouding poetics are, therefore, “spaces of expectation and indefinition”, which oppose both the technocratic space founded on the “order and efficiency” of corporate buildings, whether modern or contemporary, and the more “abstract and immeasurable” space of internet clouds, typical of “globalized, virtualized capitalism”.[lxxxix] This art/architecture of indetermination – as well as the vacant lots or the “dead lots” still to be found in contemporary cities – are “reservoirs of possibilities of use [yet] not confined by the instruments of power and abstract reason”.[xc]
Possibly these quick considerations do not do justice to the nuances of inside the fog, but one hopes at least that they have shown that this is a book that pleasurably challenges the reader, forcing his thinking beyond what is already known. As he activates his imagination by triggering the siren of his analogies, what was said above does not accurately translate the letter of this book of clear prose and rare warp, which has constituted itself, since its launch, as an obligatory reference for critical reflection on practices art and architecture crusades in digital-financial capitalism. Guilherme Wisnik not only highlights the existence of artistic and architectural forms of resistance, but takes them as a symptom of the drama experienced by perception in our time of generalized aestheticization: “Anyway, what is happening to the images?”.[xci]
In the poetics of clouding, in which the phenomenal effect triumphs over the literal, there is the establishment of a zone of indetermination that can be approximated to the game that combines presence and absence, which leads us, as we have seen, to the notion of figurability, in Lyotard: “desire exists insofar as the present is absent from itself, or the absent present”[xcii]; or even to his aesthetics of “immaterial presence”, conceived from his interpretation of Kant's “analytics of the sublime”.[xciii]
The enjoyment of the commented works is a feeling of amazement in waiting, a fundamental opening beyond their submission to the communication paradigm, given that these viewers would live the experience of a language that does not communicate, or rather, of a “communication… without communication”. ”, since it neither expresses the subject nor refers to the object (or referent). [xciv] It would be due to the translucency or flickering of architectural forms that they would rebel against the immoderation of beauty (to the immanent or digital sublime). In the form of immaterial presence, this art/architecture, by preserving a level of opacity, would open up a field of indeterminacy in relation to becoming, subtracting itself from everyday communication and the hegemonic image that reinforce the given reality.
*Ricardo Fabbrini He is a professor at the Department of Philosophy at USP. Author, among other books, of Art after the vanguards (Ed. Unicamp).
Partially modified version of “Poetics of materials in contemporary architecture”, published in the magazine Rhapsody: Almanac of Philosophy and Art, No 14.
Reference
William Wisnik. Inside the fog: contemporary architecture, art and technology. São Paulo, Ubu Editora, 2018, 192 pages.
REFERENCES.
ADORNO, Theodor. aesthetic theory. Translation by Artur Mourao. Lisbon: Ed. 70, 1982.
AGAMBEN, Giorgio. What is contemporary? and other essays. Translated by Vinicius Nicastro Honesko. Chapecó: Argos, 20009.
BAUDRILLARD, Jean. Full screen, myth-ironies of the age of the virtual and the image. Translation by Juremir Machado da Silva. Porto Alegre: Sulina, 3rd edition, 2005.
BOURRIAUD, Nicolas. relational aesthetics. Translated by Denise Bottmann. São Paulo: Martins Fontes, 2009.
BLANCHOT, Maurice. Literary space. Translation by Álvaro Cabral. Rio de Janeiro: Rocco, 1987.
COAST, Mario. The Technological Sublime. Translation by Dio Davi Macedo. Sao Paulo: Experiment, 1995.
DA VINCI, Leonardo. Treaty of Painting. Translation Angel Gpnzález Garcia. Madrid: Ediciones Akal, 7th. edition, 2010.
DELEUZE, Gilles. “Post-scriptum on control societies”. In: Conversations: 1972-1990. Translated by Peter Pál Pelbart. São Paulo: editora 34, 1992.
DIDI-HUBERMAN, Georges. What we see, what sees us. Translated by Paulo Neves. Sao Paulo: Ed. 34, 1998.
FAVARETTO, Celso. The invention of Hélio Oiticica. São Paulo: Edusp, 1992,
FOSTER, Hal. The art-architecture complex. Translation by Célia Euvaldo. São Paulo: Cosac & Naify, 2015.
FOUCAULT, Michael. “Other Spaces”. In: Said and written III: Aesthetics: literature and painting, music and cinema. Translation by Inês Autran Dourado Barbosa. Rio de Janeiro: University Forensics, 2001.
GILPIN, William. Essay on Prints. London: Creative Media Partners, 2019.
HANSEN, João Adolfo; “Postmodern & Culture”. In: CHALUB, Samira. Postmodern: semiotics, culture, psychoanalysis, literature, plastic arts. Rio de Janeiro: Imago Editora, 1994.
KANT, Immanuel. Faculty of Judgment Review. Translated by Valerio Rohden and Antonio Marques. Rio de Janeiro: University Forensics, 1993.
LIPOVETSKY, Gilles & SEBASTIEN, Charles. Hypermodern times. Translation by Mario Vitela. São Paulo: Barcarolla, 2004.
LYOTARD, Jean-Francois. Why philosophize?. Translation by Marcos Marcionilo. São Paulo: Parabola, 2013.
___________________, L'assassinat de l'experiénce par la peinture: Jacques Monory. Pandin: Le Castor Astral, 1984.
___________________, The postmodern. Translation by Ricardo Corrêa Barbosa. Rio de Janeiro: José Olympio, 1984.
___________________, The Inhuman: considerations on time. Translation by Ana Cristina Seabra and Elisabete Alexandre. Lisbon: Estampa, 1989.
___________________, Que Peindre?: Adami, Arakawa and Buren. Paris: Editions of Difference, 1987.
RELATIVE, Andrew. (org.). Image-machine: the era of virtual technologies. Translated by Eugênio Luz et alii. Rio de Janeiro: Ed. 34, 1993.
WISNIK, William. Critical status: adrift in cities. São Paulo: Publifolha, 2009.
_______________, & Julio Mariutti Space under construction: city, art, architecture. São Paulo: SESC Editions, 2018.
Notes
[I] WISNIK, William. Inside the fog, São Paulo: Ubu/Fapesp, 2018, p. 15;31-33;174; cf. also by the author & Julio Mariutti the article “Minimalismo pop”. In: Space under construction: city, art, architecture. São Paulo: Edições SESC-São Paulo, 2018, pp. 172-173.
[ii] In this book, the author mobilizes both art and architecture criticism and contemporary aesthetic reflection by authors from different theoretical backgrounds, such as Walter Benjamin; Gilles Deleuze; Roland Barthes; Jean Baudrillard; Jean-François Lyotard; Nicolas Bourriaud; Fredric Jameson, Hal Foster; Georges Didi-Huberman; or Slavoj Zizek.
[iii] Ibid, p. 167.
[iv] The book does not dwell on the debate over the terms modern and postmodern. Close to the periodization of Gilles Lipovetsky, Wisnik places the so-called “postmodern” architecture – which followed the end of the modern project in architecture that dated back to the beginning of the 1980th century – to the 1990s, reserving the term “contemporary architecture” to designate the post-modern architecture (from the 2000s to the XNUMXs); highlighting, of course, the controversy surrounding the term “contemporary”, as Giorgio Agamben has shown: “the contemporary is someone who does not allow himself to be blinded by the lights of his century, because he perceives the darkness of his time as something that concerns him and not stop questioning him”. (AGAMBEN, Giorgio. What is contemporary? and other essays. Translated by Vinicius Nicastro Honesko. Chapecó: Argos, 20009, p. 63; cf. also LIPOVETSKY, Gilles. & SEBASTIEN, Charles. Hypermodern times. Translation by Mario Vitela. São Paulo: Barcarolla, 2004, pp. 51-101; and, finally, WISNIK, 2018, p.301). Therefore, even without reconstituting the debate, now properly mapped out, about the supposed end of the modern project, or even about the proclaimed “death of art”, or at least of a certain idea of art – that of modern art linked by artists from vanguard and art critics of the XNUMXth century, to the notions of revolution and utopia – the author builds, among many aspects, a long-term history in architecture (from the beginning of the last century to the beginning of our century) in the perspective of a poetics of materials.
[v] Ibid., p.277.
[vi] Ibid., p.7.
[vii] Ibid, p 7.
[viii] Ibid., p. 28. See also the author's comments to Colin Rowe and Robert Slutzky, central to his argument: "Transparency: Literal and Phenomenal", perspective, no. 8, 1963, p. 167.
[ix] WISNIK, G. p.7.
[X] BENJAMIN, W. “Experience and Poverty”. In: Walter Benjamin, Magic and technique, art and politics: Essays on literature and cultural history. Selected works: volume 1. São Paulo: Brasiliense, 2nd. edition, 1986, p. 117.
[xi] Ibid.
[xii] Ibid., p.118.
[xiii] JAMESON, F. apoud WISNIK, G., p. 201. Cf. also “Postmodernism and the consumer society”. In: JAMESON, Friedrich. the cultural turn. Rio de Janeiro, 2006, pp. 17-44.
[xiv] BAUDRILLARD, J. Simulacra and simulation. Lisbon: Antropos: p. 197. This scenario of pure artifice that is the atrium of the Bonaventure Hotel, with its shiny and mirrored surfaces, so disorientates the sensorimotor body of the visitor that he is no longer able to locate himself inside it. This impossibility of cognitive mapping of the Hotel's “hyperspace” – which refers to Marc Augé's notions of “non-place” and Rem Koolhaas's “junkspace” – has been rapidly increasing in the last two decades, as the author shows; just look at “applications like Google Maps and Waze”, which lead to “an [even greater] downgrading of our cognition of space”. (WISNIK, p. 201).
[xv] WISNIK, p. 9.
[xvi] Ibid., p.15.
[xvii] Ibid.
[xviii] FOSTER, Hal. The art-architecture complex. São Paulo: Cosac & Naify, 2015, p. 151.
[xx] Ibid., p.152.
[xx] DA VINCI, Leonardo. Treatise on Painting. Madrid: Ediciones Akal, 7th. edition, 2010, pp. 344-345.
[xxx] See GILPIN, William. At Essay on Prints. London: Creative Media Partners, 2019.
[xxiii] WISNIK, p.307.
[xxiii] About the attack on Twin Towers, says Wisnik: “This is what we see in the impressive street photos of that day: a terrible man-made typhoon, on the monumental scale of a city of towers, like an apocalyptic post-natural catastrophe, raining dust and paper over the city. (shares, financial securities, floating capital?), in a kind of sinister carnival. And, beyond that, the black smoke from the fire in the towers – as if the city were suddenly transformed into an oil exploration field –, the white smoke from the moment of their falls, the yellowish cloud that hovered in the lowest strata of the city after that, settling like soot over the people, and the intense gray haze that covered New York for weeks, and which, symbolically, still lingers in the air, giving the impression that it won't dissipate anytime soon. A harbinger, perhaps, of the toxic cloud of burning financial capital that hit the city (and the world) seven years later, with the collapse of investment bank Lehman Brothers on September 15, 2008 – this other cloud being, of course, just symbolic. (WISNIK, p. 153). Allow me to add to this list of thanatological mists, the greenish clouds broadcast on TV, live, to the entire world, on January 17, 1991, caused by the bombing of Kuwait and Iraq by the United States, which was then leading an international coalition force, triggering, via satellite, the “War do Golfo”: “On TV, the Gulf War was an instantaneous spectacle that dispensed with any narrative mediation as an interpretation of the historicity of the event, since event and report were simultaneous. Death was never seen, but its natural fiction, amplified in the rationalized modes of its production as a fictional nature: the bombings over Baghdad were eclectically beautiful, post-utopian greens and blues of deconstructor missiles, yellow clouds of explosions and black curtains of ideology , darkened purples of neoliberal smoke against a fundamentalist cobalt blue sky, dialectically rhythmed by the Kurdish harmony of performative collapses – like a Spielberg set, a Greenaway film, a neobaroque canvas, a neokitsch video, the total opera, Wagnerian and portable, consumed at home in the total equalization of times, contemporary as the chivalry novel, the Roman empire, the political marketing of ethics and morals, flying saucers, the lack of subject matter and popcorn”. (Cf. HANSEN, João Adolfo; “Postmodern & Culture”. In: Samira Chalub (org). Postmodern: semiotics, culture, psychoanalysis, literature, plastic arts. Rio de Janeiro: Imago Editora, 1994, p. 80).
[xxv] DELEUZE, Gilles. “Post-scriptum on control societies”. In: Conversations: 1972-1990. São Paulo: publisher 34, 1992, p.223.
[xxiv] WISNIK, pp. 101.
[xxv] DELEUZE, Gilles, p.224.
[xxviii] Ibidem, p. 225.
[xxviii] WISNIK, pp. 101; 297.
[xxix] WISNIK, p. 297. Cf. also LYOTARD, Jean-Francois. L'assassinat de l'experiénce par la peinture: Jacques Monory. Pandin: Le Castor Astral, 1984, p. 74.
[xxx] LYOTARD, 1984, p. 108. Cf. also LYOTARD, Jean-Francois. the postmodern. Rio de Janeiro: José Olympio, 1984, p. XVII.
[xxxii] LYOTARD, JF. L´assassinat de l´experience par la peinture: Jacques Monory, P. 149.
[xxxi] KOSKY, Jeffrey L. apud WISNIK, p. 289.
[xxxii] WISNIK, pp. 119; 255.
[xxxv] WISNIK, p. 133.
[xxxiv] Ibid.
[xxxiv] ARANTES, Otilia. “Berlin reconquered”. In: Berlin and Barcelona: two strategic images. São Paulo: Annablume, 2012, p.125.
[xxxviii] Ibidem, p. 112.
[xxxviii] WISNIK, p. 137.
[xxxix] Ibidem, p. 139.
[xl] Ditto, p.133.
[xi] Ibid.
[xliii] LACAN, Jacques. Seminar, book 11: the four fundamental concepts of psychoanalysis. Rio de Janeiro: Zahar, 2008, p. 76.
[xiii] FATORELLI, Antonio. Contemporary photography: between cinema, video and new media. Rio de Janeiro: Senac Nacional, 2013, p.177.
[xiv] WISNIK, p.135
[xlv] KIAROSTAMI, Abas apud FATORELLI, A. contemporary photography, between cinema, video and new media, p. 127.
[xlv] BARTHES, Roland. The camera lucida: notes on photography. Rio de Janeiro: Nova Fronteira, 1984, p. 15.
[xlv] BARTHES, Roland. The camera lucida: notes on photography. Rio de Janeiro: Nova Fronteira, 1984, p. 15.
[xlviii] RANCIÈRE, Jacques. the emancipated spectator. Sao Paulo: WMF; Martins Fontes, 2012, p. 105.
[xlix] Ibid., p.41.
[l] Ibid., p.166.
[li] Ibid., p.89.
[liiii] WISNIK, p. 281
[iii] Ibidem, p. 283.
[book] KANT, Immanuel. Faculty of Judgment Review. Rio de Janeiro: Forense Universitária, 1993, pp. 26; 98. We make this parallel by noting that the sublime, for Kant, is not the object, but the disposition of mind through a representation that occupies the faculty of reflective judgment.
[liv] LYOTARD, Jean-Francois. Que Peindre?: Adami, Arakawa and Buren. Paris: Editions of Difference, 1987.
[lviii] LYOTARD, Jean-Francois. The Inhuman: considerations on time. Lisbon: Estampa, 1989, p. 95.
[lviii] FAVARETTO, Celso. The invention of Hélio Oiticica. São Paulo: Edusp, 1992, pp.66; 92.
[lix] BAUDRILLARD, Jean. Full screen, myth-ironies of the age of the virtual and the image. Porto Alegre: Sulina, 3rd edition, 2005.
[lx] BARTHES, Roland. O Neutral: notes from classes and seminars given at the Collège de France 1977-1978. São Paulo: Martins Fontes, 2003, p. 27.
[lxi] LIPOVETSKY, Gilles & SEBASTIEN, Charles. Hypermodern times. São Paulo: Barcarolla, 2004, p. 55.
[lxii] WISNIK, ibidem, p.25.
[lxiii] WISNIK, p. 27.
[lxiv] Ibid., p.25. It is interesting to point out that Kazuyo Sejima, in a critical way, associated the levels of “translucency and opacity” of his sinuous and spectral forms, with the lack of “depth and transparency” of the “contemporary digital world” (thus opposing the ideology according to which what prevails in the virtual world is “full visibility”). WISNIK, Ibid.
[lxv] Ibid.
[lxvi] Ibid., p.23.
[lxv] Ibid., p.27.
[lxviii] It is true that SANAA's “Museum of Contemporary Art of the XNUMXst Century” can also be seen, it is worth adding, as an exhibitionism in reverse: as an ostentation of restraint in form.
[lxix] BLANCHOT, Maurice. Literary space. Rio de Janeiro: Rocco, 1987.
[lxx] WISNIK, p. 27.
[lxxi] Cf. ADORNO, Theodor. aesthetic theory. Lisbon: Ed. 70, 1982.
[lxxiii] This attempt at depersonalization – which we attribute to Kazuyo Sejima – of deserting the form of the subject from architectural form, making language impersonal (in architecture) also refers to the notions of “mutism”; of “formless”, “neutral” or “dispossessing force”, present in Maurice Blanchot, Georges Bataille, Roland Barthes, or Michel Foucault.
[lxxiii] DIDI-HUBERMAN, Georges. What we see, what sees us. Sao Paulo: Ed. 34, 1998, pp. 129;169.
[lxxiv] WISNIK, p. 291.
[lxxv] Ibid.
[lxxvi] Ibid.
[lxxvii] DILLER, Elizabeth apud WISNIK, ibidem.
[lxxviii] RENDELL, Jane; apud WISNIK, p. 293.
[lxxix] WISNIK, p. 301.
[lxxx] COAST, Mario. The Technological Sublime, Experiment, 1995, p.22.
[lxxxi] Ibid.
[lxxxii] Ibid.
[lxxxiii] KANT, Immanuel. Criticism of the Faculty of Judgment, pp.139;142.
[lxxxiv] Ibid., p. 17;19;40.
[lxxxv] WISNIK, p. 273.
[lxxxvi] FOSTER, Hal. The art-architecture complex, P. 230-243.
[lxxxvii] WISNIK, p. 33; 85.
[lxxxviii] Ibid., p.152.
[lxxxix] WISNIK, p.21;129;223.
[xc] WISNIK, p. 129. It is possible to conjecture whether the notions of terrain wander or “dead lot” – like those occupied by the artist Gordon Matta-Clark, in New York, in the 1970s – that is, interstitial spaces or urban vacuoles, of an undefined and metamorphic nature, and therefore difficult to represent, they could not be so close to the notions of “platform” or “station” characterized by the critic and curator Nicolas Bourriaud as “spaces for the gestation of new ways of life”; how much of the notion of “heterotopia” understood by Michel Foucault as “counterpositions in real places”; that is, as “places that paradoxically would be outside of all places”, but that we would find inside existing social spaces. Cf. WISNIK, p. 129; BOURRIAUD, Nicolas. relational aesthetics. São Paulo: Martins Fontes, 2009, p.29; FOUCAULT, Michael. “Other Spaces”. In: Sayings and Writings III: Aesthetics: literature and painting, music and cinema. Rio de Janeiro: Forense Universitária, 2001, p. 415. After all, the users in the Turbine hall na Tate Modern, In London; at the Museum of Contemporary Art from SANAA in Kanazawa; or in the pavilion blur building de Diller+Scofidio at “Expo 2002”, in Yverdon-les-Bains, they would not be living another way the existing world, even if only for a certain time, giving concreteness to these notions of Bourriaud and Foucault? This conjecture, however, may be an abusive association, therefore alien to the author's intention.
[xci] BAUDRILLARD, Jean. Simulacra and simulation, pp. 105;201.
[xcii] LYOTARD, Jean-Francois. Why philosophize?. São Paulo: Parábola, 2013, p. 61.
[xciii] LYOTARD, Jean-Francois. The Inhuman: considerations on time, P. 90.
[xciv] Lyotard, JF. "Something like: communication… without communication”. In: Parente, A. (org.). Image-machine: the era of virtual technologies. Rio de Janeiro: Ed. 34, 1993, p. 93.
