Day 197: The City of To-Morrow And Its Planning

THE Barbarians had descended, and had installed themselves among the ruin they had made, and in every European country these innumerable hordes began their barbaric life and the slow rise of nations. Nothing remained of antiquity but the mighty vestiges of Roman buildings.

From the covered wagon we must pass on to the temple and the city. Roman cement has preserved the great domes, the arches, the monolithic vaults, of which one side was destroyed by fire but the other half still hangs suspended in the void. Here is the exemplar; the rude craftsman of the North is faced with classical culture.

For his buildings he takes a ready-made model. A savage does not simply take over the alien fruits of another civilization. This will be made obvious. Man never copies, he is unable to do so; it would indeed be against all natural law. The fruits of civilization only ripen when all its technical resources are evolved, and these are the result of a slow accumulation of the mind’s constructive efforts; from zero man climbs to his highest point, passing sometimes painfully, sometimes easily, through the various intermediate stages: this is, in fact, the actual capital of a society, long in accumulating but sooner or later to be the nourishment of a spirit thus determined and claiming to shine forth and to be classed with the noblest epochs of this world. So we have this feeling of things which are rooted in profound acquired bases, which is what we mean when we use the word culture. There are certain moments when this feeling is so acute, its ingredients so resolved, it shines so crystal clear, that a mere word suffices to illuminate the whole question; so we speak of Greek culture, Latin culture, Western culture and so on.

You cannot ransack another man’s inheritance. No one has ever seen a cypress suddenly install itself, in full growth, in a forest of oak trees; all that could be seen would be a tiny sapling taking two hundred years to grow into a fine tree. This is one of Nature’s laws. You cannot absorb culture from text-books, or out of the treasures pillaged in great cities; it implies centuries of effort.

So, to begin, the rude craftsmen of the North who wanted to copy the antique started out, like children, from what they saw, and not from what they knew. Their starting-point was the Pantheon, for this seemed good to them, but their poor imitations fell to pieces; they knew nothing of the Roman cement, they had no technical means, no implements. They grew discouraged, and about the year 1000 they laid down their tools, resolved to do no more. If the priests no longer enjoyed their labour, at least they had their riches; they were expecting the end of the world—which did not arrive. Then was planted the seed of knowledge, and one age succeeded another. A technique was invented, tools were acquired, and as a result of this healthy discipline man’s thought was brought to bear on the works of reason. A feeling was born, virgin and pure, true and real. In 1300 the cathedral was born!

Here is an amazing fact! From the Pantheon1 we arrive at the cathedral; out of the old classical culture came the Middle Ages.
This is how cultures grow; they are based on personal effort, on ingestion and digestion. When digestion has taken place, then we have acquired a feeling for things. And this very feeling is nourished by what has been ingested. There is no question of stealing when it is a question of the creations of the mind.

In its sudden release, its superiority to mere will, its close harmony with the native gifts of a race, sensibility or feeling is a culmination and demands expression; it commands and leads men; it determines their point of view and the deep meaning of things.

We leave the Pantheon; but that is hardly true ! We arrive at the cathedral. From classical culture to the Middle Ages. The Middle Ages. The Barbarian is there, with his striving after culture. This year of 1300 is not a culmination, the Barbarian is still too near at hand. The road continues. We too are on that same road and would wish to mark a further stage.

Sensibility comes into play….
Sensibility or feeling is a categorical imperative which nothing can resist. Sensibility—some words have an odd fate—is precisely not a thing of the senses and it cannot be measured. It is something innate and violent; a goad, an “urge.” In weaker terms we might call it intuition.

But intuition, apart from simple manifestations of instinct, can be defined, for our comfort, on a basis of rational elements; it might well be expressed by intuition is the sum of acquired knowledge. (And it might be said too of instinct that it is the sum of knowledge acquired through the ages.)

Here we have our feet firmly planted on the ground and in an environment where we can move freely and govern our own actions.
If intuition is the sum of acquired knowledge (which may go back a long way—atavism, the legacy of the ages, and so on), then feeling or sensibility is the emanation of these acquisitions. Its basis, therefore, is a rational one, and it is a rational fact; it is, that is to say, what each man has earned for himself; for every work has its reward.

You cannot steal another man’s sensibility.

We must specify clearly if we are to bring together into one formidable array the various means which our own age has placed in our hands—that is to say, the equipment with which we must set up our framework for the work itself. We shall become conscious then of a feeling which is set free, and arising out of our small and fixed daily occupations, a sensibility which can lead them in the direction of an ideal form—towards a style (for style is a state of mind)—towards a culture, that is. These are the many-sided efforts of a society which feels it is ready for the crystallization of a new attitude after one of the most fruitful periods of preparation that mankind has ever known.

Culture manifests itself in a full realization of the equipment at our disposal, by choice, by classification, and by evolution. All this establishes a hierarchy of our sensibilities and so dictates the means by which these can be stimulated. It is natural that, in seeking happiness, we should strive towards a sense of equilibrium. Equilibrium means calm, a mastery of the means at our disposal, clear vision, order, the satisfaction of the mind, scale and proportion—in fact it means creation. Disequilibrium witnesses to a state of conflict, to disquietude, to difficulties not resolved, to a state of bondage and of questioning. It is an inferior and earlier stage of preparation. Lack of balance is the equivalent of a state of fatigue, and balance the equivalent of a state of well-being.

~~The City of To-Morrow And Its Planning -by- Le Corbusier

Day 159: Book Excerpt: The Iconography and Ritual of Siva At Elephanta

The earliest European references to Elephanta date from the sixteenth century, although several earlier travelers are known to have been in the immediate area. Marco Polo visited the nearby town of Thana around 1292-1293, upon returning from his famous stay in China. in his account, Polo remarked that "Tana is a great kingdom lying towards the west, a kingdom great both in size and worth. The people are Idolaters, with a language of their own, and a king of their own, and tributary to nobody." The use of the term "Idolaters" would seem to indicate that the region was predominantly Hindu.   
Shortly after Polo's visit, in 1322, a Franciscan friar named Odoric from Pordenone in northern Italy visited western India before going to China. He too stopped in Thana, where he noted the recent martyrdom in 1321 of four Friars Minor, whose executions had been ordered by a Moslem governor. Odoric also notes that Thana was a great place in days of old, for it was the city of King Porus, who waged so great a battle with King Alexander. The people thereof are idolaters, for they worship fire, and serpents, and trees also. The land is under the dominion of the Saracens, who have taken it by force of arms, and they are now subject to the Empire of DILI [Delhi].
   
The earliest recorded European visit to Elephanta itself was apparently made in 1534 by Garcia da Orta, a Portuguese physician and scientist, in the company of the Portuguese sea captain Martim Afonso de Sousa. Orta included his record in his remarkable book, Coloquios dos Simples e Drogas da India (Colloquies on the Simples and Drugs of India), published at Goa in 1563. After describing cave-temples on the island of Salsette, he surveys Elephanta briefly as follows:   

       
Another pagoda, the best of all, is on an island called Pori, which we call the Isle of the Elephant. On it there is a hill and in the upper part of it is a subterranean house worked out of the living rock, and the house is as large as a monastery. Within there are courts and cisterns of good water. On the walls, all round, there are sculptured images of elephants, lions, tigers, and many human images, some like Amazons, and in many other shapes well sculptured. Certainly it is a sight well worth seeing, and it would appear that the devil had used all his powers and knowledge to deceive the gentiles into his worship. Some say that it is the work of the Chinese when they navigated to this land. It might well be true seeing that it is so well worked and that the Chinese are sutis. It is true that, at the present day, this pagoda is much defiled by cattle getting inside but in the year 1534, when I came from Portugal, it was a very fine sight. I saw it at the time when Bataim was at war with us. Soon afterwards the King of Cambaya ceded it to [Governor] Nuño da Cunha.

A more detailed description of the Elephanta cave is found in the logbook of Dom João de Castro, who later became the fourth Portuguese viceroy and a governor of India. He visited the island between December 12 and 18, 1538. His enthusiastic chronicle, Roteiro de Goa a Diu (Journey from Goa to Diu), written when the armada was enroute from Goa to the fortress at Diu, is regarded as "the first, careful scientific description of these shores." He first notes the topography of the island, then its myriad of birds and wild groves, and the lifelike statue of an elephant from which the island takes its name. He then observes the remarkable quality and variety of carvings in the temple, that seemed impossible to be made by human hands. Castro made measurements of the temple and remarked on the "two huge, ferocious guardians" flanking each door of the shrine; that within this chapel was an altar "with a large ball (obviously the linga*) that must symbolize the world''; in one of the other chapels that encircle the interior, a man is shown from the waist up with three faces and four armsin one right hand a hooded cobra is held, in the left the shape of a rose, in another the world is raised ("o mundo alevantado"), and the remaining hand is broken; in another chapel is a giant-like man with eight armstwo of them are raised to support the sky of the chapel ("o ceo da capela"), another holds a sword aloft, the fourth holds a bell shaped object, the fifth holds a boy by one foot with the head down, the sixth has a vase-like shield ("vaso como escudela") and has a covering of ashes ("nele emborilhado"), a chain of skulls of little boys, and a cobra, and the other two arms are broken; another chapel has a large bodied woman like a giantess, entirely naked, with a breast only on the right side, "thus like it is written of the Amazons"; and he briefly notices the cistern and the east wing. He seems to have been overwhelmed by the incomparable novelty and history of the cave, an understanding of which was beyond him. He does not posit any identifications of the reliefs, nor does he mention the existence of any inscription or plaque.
The next Portuguese account of Elephanta is by Diogo de Couto, an official chronicler at the time. It was written in 1603 but with reference to a visit he made to the monument some fifty years earlier, that is, perhaps only ten years or so after Castro's trip to the island. His account is more detailed than the latter's, and he mentions that an inscribed stone was removed from the entrance and sent to the king of Portugal. He observed a bright lime and bitumen coating over the whole temple interior.

~~The Iconography and Ritual of Siva At Elephanta -by- Charles Dillard Collins

Day 157: Book Excerpt: The Art-Architecture Complex

We enter a dark space to the whirr of a sixteen-millimeter film projector, and a pencil of white light cuts across the empty room to a distant wall. It registers as a dot, yet slowly the dot becomes an arc, and a small section of a cone is carved out of the space. As the thirty minutes of the film elapse, the arc grows into a circle, and a full cone of light is described in the room; then the process begins again. During the time of this describing we cannot help but touch the light as though it were a solid and investigate the cone as if it were a sculpture—cannot help but move in, through, and around the projection as though we were its partner, even its subject. Such is the experience of Line Describing a Cone (1973) by Anthony McCall, a classic of “structural film.”
Fast-forward thirty-three years. Again we enter a dark space, but there is no sound, as the projector, now digital, is silent. There are two such machines, located above us, with the projected figure, also double, on the floor at our feet. This figure is far more complex than a line describing a cone: it has no obvious beginning or end, and its development cannot be readily anticipated; in fact it can scarcely be understood. As a result, over the sixteen minutes of this projection, we tend to observe the tracing on the floor more assiduously than we do with a horizontal piece like Line Describing a Cone, in order to tease out the logic of its configuration in time, a logic that also defines the moving veils of light that fall from above—though we know this correlation more than perceive it. Gradually (it requires more than one iteration), we see that one of the two figures is an ellipse that contracts and expands while the other figure, a wave, travels toward it; there is also a line that rotates through the wave, complicating both forms. At the same time a very slow filmic wipe connects the two figures such that the one is always eclipsing the other, making breaks, which produce apertures in the veils of light, and forging connections, which produce closures, in the process. Gradually, too, we see that, in the course of a cycle, one figure turns into the other: ellipse becomes wave and vice versa. This is the experience of Between You and I (2006), one of several vertical projections McCall has made since 2004.
Between the first series of films represented by Line and the second represented by Between, there was a long hiatus in this work (largely due to the falling away of support for structural film in the art world of the 1980s and 1990s); nonetheless, McCall calls them all “solid-light films.” Solid light is a beautiful paradox, one that conjures up the old debate about its nature (i.e. is light a particle or a wave?), and McCall invites us to play with the paradox—to touch the projections as if they were material even as our hands pass through them with ease, to see the volumes as solids even though they are nothing but light. The play is sensuous, to be sure, but it is also cognitive, for we are prompted to ask (as McCall does, rhetorically, here), “Where is the work? Is the work on the wall [or the floor]? Is the work in space? Am I the work?”
In effect this is also to ponder, “What is the medium?” It is film, evidently enough, but film denatured, stripped bare, reduced to projected light in darkened space. At the same time film is expanded here, in the sense that it is made both to draw lines and to sculpt volumes. In the process it is also questioned, particularly in the recent projections, which are digital and so, technically speaking, not filmic at all (they have none of the slight flicker of the early pieces, for example); the vertical pieces disrupt the horizontal orientation of cinema as well. “I was certainly always searching for the ultimate film, one that would be nothing but itself,” McCall has recalled, and this ambition is in keeping with the modernist project of artistic reflexivity and autonomy. Finally, however, what is disclosed here is less any essence of film than the recognition that mediums do not operate in this way—that they are not so many nuts to crack, with a meat to eat and a shell to discard, but a matrix of technical conditions and social conventions in a differential relation to the other arts. Thus this search for the “ultimate film” implicates other mediums, too, which, like Richard Serra and others before him, McCall shows to be arrayed in an aesthetic field, one that significant practice always works to reconfigure and to renew.
Of course, the first art implicated here is cinema, even though McCall pares away most of the attributes associated with it, not only illusionistic space and fictional narrative but also the spectatorial precondition of this imaginary “elsewhere” (as he calls it)—that is, the viewer fixed in place (seated in fact), with eyes locked on the screen, and mostly oblivious to apparatus, ambience, and audience alike (the cone of projected light in particular). It is “the first film to exist in real, three-dimensional space,” McCall has asserted of Line, and it “exists only in the present.” This here-and-now-ness holds for his other films as well, and yet, as suggested, the effect is not to deliver film into a stable state of autonomous purity but to place it in correspondence with various arts—cinema first (especially in the horizontal projections), then sculpture (especially in the vertical projections), but other mediums and disciplines, too.
“The body is the important measure,” McCall says of the dimensions of his projections. Not only do they assume its scale, but they also incite us to move with the light—to play and/or to experiment with it—as it moves in turn; again, we interact with a McCall film as though we were somehow its subject. This bodily reference is one key connection with sculpture; another is that the films also carve volumes out of space. Non-traditional genres are elicited as well; for example, when the projectors engage the floor, the films implicate installation, too. On this score, beyond sculpture and installation, the solid-light films invite us to think about the architectural parameters of the given venue, which they both obscure and illuminate in ways that make us sense the space haptically as well as optically—that is, to feel our way around it with our hands out and our eyes wide open. One could say more about the rapport of the projections with other disciplines. Again, just as the films sculpt space, they also trace lines, and so implicate drawing as well. In fact they are drawings in light, literal photo-graphs in motion (which is, after all, what film is), and so photography is also engaged. In many ways the great pleasure afforded by the work comes as we move from an experiencing of the different phenomenologies of these media to a puzzling over their provisional ontologies and back again. Sensuous and cognitive, the space of the solid-light films is thus philosophical, too.

~~The Art-Architecture Complex -by- Hal Foster

Day 121: Book Excerpt: The Colosseum

By the sixth century, even if it still hosted the occasional animal hunt and was kept partially in working order, the Colosseum was almost certainly in a dilapidated state. Without regular upkeep, dilapidation gave way to ruin. Its surviving structure was an obvious and easy target for those who wanted building materials, whether on a small scale (heaving off a block of travertine for use as a doorstep) or in order to provide the stuff of some of the grandest building schemes of the papal court. For most of the Middle Ages and early Renaissance the Colosseum was not so much a monument as a quarry.

To describe this activity as ‘robbery’ is to give the wrong impression. For the most part, there was nothing illegal or unofficial about the removal of this stone. The Colosseum’s succeeding owners (a motley crew, which included feudal warlords, the local Roman council and various organisations of the Catholic Church) regularly gave or sold permission for ‘quarrying’. Papal records up to the seventeenth century repeatedly include the formula ‘a cavar marmi a coliseo’ (‘to quarry stone from the Colosseum’). The scale of the removal is now hard to contemplate. One entry in the records notes that in just nine months in 1452 under Pope Nicholas V 2522 cartloads of stone were removed; it was apparently intended for use in lime-making in his schemes for the Basilica of St Peter’s. Only a few years before, in 1448, one of the most learned humanists, Poggio Bracciolini, had ruefully observed, not without some exaggeration, that most of the Colosseum had been turned into lime. The same point was made rather more wittily in a well-known quip about the Barberini family’s plundering of the monuments of classical antiquity, in particular the famous temple known as the Pantheon: ‘Quod non fecerunt barbari, fecerunt Barberini’ (less neatly in English, ‘What the barbarians did not do, the Barberini have done’). Papal records from the seventeenth century show Pope Urban VIII allowing this same family (of which he himself was a member) to take fallen travertine from the Colosseum for the building of their Palazzo Barberini.

Earthquakes and other natural disasters no doubt helped in this process of quarrying; with each new tremor more building material would become easily available. But, however it fell down, the great missing stretch of the main perimeter wall of the monument ended up in the architectural masterpieces of renaissance Rome. Apart from its luck in withstanding earthquakes, the surviving northern wall of the perimeter seems to have been preserved partly at least in the interests of papal ceremonial: it lay directly on the road from the church of St John Lateran (to the east of the Colosseum) to the centre of the city, one of the main routes for religious processions. Rather than plunder this impressive backdrop, they allowed the dismantling of what was then the back of the monument to the south.

There is something satisfying as well as slightly sad in the thought of stone from Vespasian and Titus’ amphitheatre having a second life in the steps of St Peter’s or the Palazzo Venezia (from whose balcony Mussolini famously addressed the crowds in the square below). Part of the attraction of the city of Rome is exactly this type of use and re-use, and the way the ancient city is literally built into the modern city that followed it. Yet there is an unsettling irony in some of the connections here: not least is the fact that several of the buildings whose design was inspired by the Colosseum were actually built with stone taken from the Colosseum. If the process had continued there would have been little left to inspire.

Ruins are not just plundered, however; they are also colonised. At the same time as stone was being removed from the site by the cartload, other parts of the building were being taken over for all sorts of domestic and commercial use. Some of this was the predictable kind of squatting. From the sixth century there are traces of animal stalls and shacks and haylofts (something of a well-deserved come-down, we cannot help thinking, for those parts of the building through which senators had once glided without having to cross the path of the lower orders). This kind of occupation continued for centuries, documented in legal records of ownership which refer to small houses, gardens, courtyards and boundary walls nestling in and around the building, and to their owners as blacksmiths, shoemakers, lime-pit workers and so forth. It was here that one early sixteenth-century artist found inspiration for an image of the Nativity, turning this shanty village into a convincing recreation of the humble stables of Jesus’s birth. But it is now hard to recover much substantial evidence of these medieval settlements. The problem, as usual, is that most of the post-classical material was removed by archaeologists in the nineteenth century, who had eyes only for the classical amphitheatre and its decoration (though occasionally they mistook a medieval wall for an ancient one and preserved it!). What is left are some scattered fragments of pottery, glass and metals, and the traces of inserted partitions, patched-up floors and the predictable troughs and mangers. This farmyard air (and smell) continued well into the eighteenth century when – the grandiose industrial schemes of Sixtus V having come to nothing – a manure dump, for use in making saltpetre, was established in 1700 in the north corridors of the Colosseum. The dump remained there for a century, seriously corroding the stonework in the process.

~~The Colosseum -by- Keith Hopkins and Mary Beard