SupraSpace: On the Concept of Space and Place in Art and Visual Culture International Conference

Tel Aviv University, Art History Department, May 16 - 17, 2012

Deadline: Jan 10, 2012

SupraSpace: On the Concept of Space and Place in Art and Visual Culture International Conference

Space has been subject to aesthetic, art-historical, philosophical, anthropological, geographical and political investigations, each with its idiosyncratic definitions. Space maintains a close relation with illusionism, narrativity, and the performative qualities of art. Space is especially interconnected with time, making it impossible to separate one from the other. In the current dynamic reality in which we live, it is hard to remain confined to just one modality of spatial thinking that will capture all of its complexity; yet this problem is

not limited to our contemporary globalized moment, but is also relevant to different historical periods. Consequently, in order to engage effectively with the problem of space, recent studies have demonstrated

multiple methods of conceptualization, while emphasizing the dialectical relations and tensions between them.

Within the realms of art and culture, the discourse on space has often engaged with problems of representation (artistic genres such landscape, narrative space, chronotopos, interior/exterior, etc), or with political issues relating to territorial conflicts and borders. This conference seeks to investigate the dynamic formation, throughout history and art history, of sites, places, and environments, in which interactive relations, identities and signs are ceaselessly rewritten and redefined. These kinds of processes produce spaces that hover between the specific and the generic, the local and the global, the historical and the contemporary, the real and the virtual, along with the symbolized and the abstract. At the same time, these modalities emphasize the fact that any designation of places and sites is inseparable from the different ways in which they are experienced, perceived, imagined, and represented.

We invite papers that consider diverse conceptualization of space and forms of representations, as well as the varied ways in which lived environments trigger different forms of interventions and reconfigurations: legal, political, social, aesthetic and technological.

Abstracts are invited by 10 January 2012 and should be sent to:

supra.tau.conference@gmail.com

All abstracts must be in English and should be limited to 300 words.

Head your abstract with your name, professional affiliation, and the paper’s title. Submit with the abstract a one-page curriculum vitae, home and work addresses, and e-mail address.

Each paper should be limited to a 20 minute presentation, followed by dialogue and questions. All applicants will be notified of the acceptance or rejection of their proposal by 15 February 2012.

Suggested topics for papers (but not limited to):

Space before and after Giotto

Liturgical space

Sacred spaces

Medieval non-space

Perspective/Camera Obscura

Space and (non) rationalism in post-Albertian art theory

Emotional space

Pictorial space and voyeurism

Islamic space and its absence

Place and non-place

Art and culture in public space

Urban Planning and Architectural Space

The absence of place

Spatio-temporal dimensionalities

Memory and monuments

Narrative, meta-narrative and space

De-territorialization and Re-territorialization

Finite – infinite space

Information technology and space

Body and territory

Cosmopolitanism and globalization

Spaces of display

Heterotopia and utopia

WEB PAGE:

http://arthist.net/archive/1791

The Hyperion Factor

Hyperion treatment plant, aerial picture. From http://www.lasewers.org/

This week, I´m reading Crome Yellow, by Aldous Huxley, so I have his writings in my mind. And I suppose it was my perception what made me go back to City of Quartz, a book by sociologist Mike Davis. I still didn´t finish it, and I opened it randomly and found these paragraphs, from page 197, edition New York, 1992:

The sewer. 

Intermediate pump station

Cryogenic air separation facility

Egg shaped digesters

¨As Huxley recalled it, a few months before the outbreak of World War Two he and Thomas Mann were walking along the south shore of Santa Monica Bay, ¨miraculously alone¨and rapt in discussion of Shakespeare, when they suddenly realized that ¨as far as the eye could reach in all directions, the sand was covered with small whitish objects, like dead caterpillars¨. The ¨caterpillars¨ were, in fact, ¨Malthusian flotsam¨- ¨ten million used condoms¨ Huxley estimated -washed back on shore from Los Angeles´s main sewer outfall at Hyperion Beach. Whithout recording his famous companion´s reaction to this bizarre sight, Huxley contrasted the scene on the same beach fifteen years later: ¨the sands are now clean... children dig, well-basted sunbathers slowly brown... etc.¨ This ¨happy consummation¨ had been brought about by one of the marvels of modern technology, the Hyperion Activated Sludge Plant¨. 

In an otherwise ironic essay about hygiene and class distinction, Huxley took for granted that Hyperion really was ¨the triumphant solution¨ to an ancient urban problem. Indeed, other writers have evoked teh ¨euphoric feeling¨ of this Grand Coulée of sewerage plants which transforms the waste of three million people into what has been described as ¨the largest freshwater stream in Southern California¨. 

All pictures from  http://www.lasewers.org/treatment_plants/hyperion/tour/index.htm

Expectations for New York´s cityscape

Hudson Yards project by Kohn Pedersen Fox assoc. Picture by KPF

¨More than a century ago, the author O. Henry said about New York City, “It’ll be a great place if they ever finish it.” The point, of course, is that the city will never be finished: It’s always been driven by the tireless impulse to tear down and build up. Rather than revel in its history like many cities, New York pushes for the new — though a reverence for the mammoth structures of its industrial glory has led to innovative plans for adaptive reuse. As the Bloomberg years wane and the recession grinds on, a number of high-profile projects remain unfinished. Construction spending (including infrastructure) has dropped in the city from a peak of $33 billion in 2008 to a projected $26 billion this year. New building permits are down considerably; the city issued 2,110 in the first half of 2008, compared to 764 in the first half of this year. “Huge question marks remain, especially for publicly funded projects,” warns Richard Anderson, president of the New York Building Congress. Still, grand ambitions persist. From affordable housing and open space — hallmarks of PlaNYC, one of the mayor’s legacies — to cultural facilities and commercial development, the transformation of the cityscape may slow, but it will never stop.¨

REFERENCE

http://archrecord.construction.com/features/2011/New-York/City-Reimagined/

A discussion about the architecture of Romanticism

Frontispiece of Marc-Antoine Laugier. Allegorical engraving of the Vitruvian primitive hut. From http://thearchitectureofearlychildhood.blogspot.com/

I´m reading Crome Yellow, a book by Aldous Huxley, an ironic novel about the pretentious British upper-class trying to forget what happened at the World War I.

In chapter XI, there is a discussion about an ostentatious villa -Crome Yellow-, where the group is reunited. Supposedly, the house was rebuilt with the grandeur of brick technology, pretty far from the Romanticism of SXIX.

From page 59:

¨The great thing about Crome,¨ said Mr. Scogan, seizing the opportunity to speak, ¨is the fact that it´s so unmistakably and aggressively a work of art. It makes no compromise with nature, but affronts it and rebels against it. It has no likeness to Shelley´s tower, in the ¨Epipsychidion,¨which, if I remember rightly-

¨Seems not now a work of human art,

But as it were titanic, in the heart

Of earth having assumed its form and grown

Out of the mountain, from the living stone,

Lifting itself in caverns light and high.¨

No, no; there isn´t any nonsense of that sort about Crome. That the hovels of the peasantry should look as though they had grown out of the earth, to which their inmates are attached, is right, no doubt, and suitable. But the house of an intelligent, civilised, and sophisticated man should never seem to have sprouted from the clods. It should rather be an expression of his grand unnatural remoteness from the cloddish life. Since the days of William Morris that´s a fact which we in England have been unable to comprehend. Civilised and sophisticated men have solemnly played at being peasants. Hence quaintness, arts and crafts, cottage architecture, and all the rest of it. In the suburbs of our cities you may see, reduplicated in endless rows, studiedly quaint imitations and adaptations of the village hovel. Poverty, ignorance, and a limited range of materials produced the hovel, which possesses undoubtedly, in suitable surroundings, its own ¨as it were titanic¨ charm. W now employ our wealth, our technical knowledge, our rich variety of materials for the purpose of building millions of imitation hovels in totally unsuitable surroundings. Could imbecility go further?.¨

Abtei im Eichwald. Oil on canvas by Caspar David Friedrich. Google images 

Painting by Frank Forsgard Manclark, 'The Leith Artist' - Romantic Edinburgh. edinphoto.org.uk

Advances on vertical urban agriculture

Figure 12: Project for West Haymarket, Lincoln, VAST 2008, by Brown, Nelson and Patzlaff, UNL. Rendering. Source: Abel/UNL.

Figure 13: Project for West Haymarket, Lincoln, VAST 2008, by Brodersen, Burke an Stovall, UNL. Rendering. Source: Abel/UNL.

¨Since 2008 a substantial level of urban agriculture has also been included in VAST projects. Already threatened in many countries by drought and reduced capacity, the effects of global warming on food production around the world are likely to hit consumers especially hard in the future, as souring fuel prices in turn raise the cost of importing food from distant sources overseas, which may themselves be sorely stressed by climate change. However, as with trigeneration and other forms of distributed energy, the benefits of closing distances between the points of production and consumption are applicable to any part of the world, as in North America, where great distances typically separate consumers from producers. As fuel costs rise and alternative sources shrink, the economics of producing food within cities on expensive sites will also doubtless become more favorable in future. The growing use of intensive farming techniques such as hydroponics and aeroponics, which greatly increase the efficiency of food production whilst reducing the amount of water and space required, will also ultimately help to lower costs. However, aside from subsidized or experimental projects, the high capital investment entailed in building purpose-designed structures would appear to limit the development of stand-alone vertical farms in cities for some time yet.

The approach to vertical farming in VAST projects has instead been to create flexible spaces for food production within large scale, mixed-use developments where opportunities exist for offsetting the higher costs of providing space for one function against the lower costs of another. This has been combined with on-site systems of water collection and power generation, including, as with some of the UNL and UNSW projects, integrated wind turbines. One team at UNL, for example, capitalized on the favourable conditions in Nebraska for wind power - the state is proudly described locally as the future 'Saudi Arabia of wind power' - filling open spaces between the vertical elements of their design with large arrays of vertical axis turbines, or 'wind harps' (Figure 12). Another UNL team proposed a regular infrastructure of farming towers and wind-turbines combined with multi-functional blocks of space on the city grid that could be extended throughout Lincoln (Figure 13).¨

Project for Barangaroo, Sydney, VAST 2009, by Lei, Guo and Zheng.

Excerpt from the article The Vertical Garden City: Towards a New Urban Topology, by Chris Abel:

http://www.planetizen.com/node/50957

50th Anniversary of the Berlin Wall

Some remaining parts of the Berlin Wall, August 2011

The Berlin Wall has now been torn down for nearly as long (22 years) as it stood (28 years). Yet it was such a powerful symbol of the Cold War that it still evokes a strong response today, a half-century after it was constructed in the summer of 1961.

Germans will gather this weekend (after August 12, 2011) at the spot where the wall stood and reflect on how it shaped their lives and their society. While most of the wall is gone, a section still stands in the center of the city on a street called Bernauer Strasse. When the city was divided, this area was a no-man's land, covered in barbed wire and constantly monitored from watch towers.

NPR's Bilal Qureshi recently visited the street, in what is now one of the city's most fashionable neighborhoods. Trams and bikes glide along in front of renovated apartment buildings. And that no-man's land has been turned into a park.

Excerpt and pictures from npr.org

http://www.npr.org/2011/08/11/139561087/remembering-the-berlin-wall-50-years-on

1961

1989

1989

Brazilian architect Oscar Niemeyer launches book

Pampulha Church of São Francisco de Assis in Pampulha, Brazil by Oscar Niemeyer. From http://www.dwell.com/articles/three-buildings-cathy-leff.html

Brasilia Cathedral. From http://ashfieldhansendesign.blogspot.com

Brazilian architect Oscar Niemeyer launches book

RIO DE JANEIRO (AP) — Brazilian architect Oscar Niemeyer has launched a book with photos and sketches of the churches and chapels he has designed over his long career.

"The Churches of Oscar Niemeyer" was launched Tuesday night in Rio de Janeiro.

The 103-year-old Niemeyer is responsible for more than 600 modernist projects around the world. They include the sweeping concrete structures that house Brazil's government in the capital of Brasilia, and U.N. headquarters in New York.

Niemeyer has won numerous awards, including the Pritzker Architecture Prize in 1988. He is still working.

Copyright © 2011 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.

Piedras sagradas como hierofanía

Stonehenge. Bajada de mbyers.net

En la mentalidad “primitiva” o arcaica, los objetos del mundo exterior, tanto, por lo demás, como los actos humanos propiamente dichos, no tienen valor intrínseco autónomo. Una piedra será sagrada por el hecho de que su forma acusa una participación en un símbolo determinado, o también porque constituye una hierofanía, posee mana, conmemora un acto mítico, etcétera. El objeto aparece entonces como un receptáculo de una fuerza extraña que lo diferencia de su medio y le confiere sentido y valor. Esa fuerza puede estar en su substancia o en su forma; transmisible por medio de hierofanía o de ritual. Esta roca se hará sagrada porque su propia existencia es una hierofanía: incomprensible, invulnerable, es lo que el hombre no es. Resiste al tiempo, su realidad se ve duplicada por la perennidad. He aquí una piedra de las más vulgares: será convertida en “preciosa”, es decir, se la impregnará de una fuerza mágica o religiosa en virtud de su sola forma simbólica o de su origen: “piedra de rayo”, que se supone caída del cielo; perla, porque viene del fondo del océano. Será sagrada porque es morada de los antepasados (India, Indonesia) o porque otrora fue el teatro de una teofanía (así, el bethel que sirvió de lecho a Jacob) o porque un sacrificio, un juramento, la consagraron. (Mircea Eliade. El Mito del Eterno Retorno. Cap.1)

Piedras incas. Google images