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Saturday 31 March 2012

The Austere Beauty of Mathematics

"Where there is numbers there is beauty"

Proclus

Ernst Haeckel - Acanthophracta / Michael Hansmayer Studio - Tetrahedron / Platonic Solids - Tetrahedron


Ernst Haeckel - Polycittaria / Michael Hansmayer Studio - Dodecahedron / Platonic Solids - Dodecahedron


Ernst Haeckel - Phaeodaria / Michael Hansmayer Studio - Hexaedron / Platonic Solids - Hexaedron

Ernst Haeckel, famed for being an early and major advocate of Darwin's theory, was an important biologist and proto-geneticist who is nowadays mainly remembered for his book Kunstformen der Natur, extremely accurate hand drawings of several hundred of species, most of them observed through a microscope. The book was intended to reflect a worldview and his own interpretation of evolution, and went on to become a major influence (some say the defining influence alongside Beardsley-style japonism) onto Art Nouveau. Many of the species he discovered (Radiolaria) are notable for their perfect polyhedral structures.


Michael Hansmeyer's Zurich based studio specializes in computational architecture, which in this case seems to mean essentially fractal generative modelisations. The particular series presented here, Subdvivisons: Platonic Solids, answers the traditional assumption that architecture consist in a permutation of the primitive solids: the fundamental "building blocks" of reality, or at least of classical aesthetics, are submitted to a single algorithm that develops it fractally towards infinitely complex forms. 



According to Proclus, platonic solids were discovered by Pythagoras, although archaeology have proven him wrong - Pythagoreans believed in the absolute reality of numbers and therefore were likely to hold the solids as manifestation of the essence of reality, while Plato associated them in the Timaeus with the four elements constituting the material world. 


"Mathematics, rightly viewed, possesses not only truth, but supreme beauty — a beauty cold and austere, like that of sculpture, without appeal to any part of our weaker nature, without the gorgeous trappings of painting or music, yet sublimely pure, and capable of a stern perfection such as only the greatest art can show. The true spirit of delight, the exaltation, the sense of being more than Man, which is the touchstone of the highest excellence, is to be found in mathematics as surely as poetry"

Bertrand Rusell

Hexen 2.0 - Part 2


Adorno viewed disenchantment not so much as a process but an ideology, a class-anchored  form of thought that heralded the struggles of the bourgeois revolution. As such it is not inescapable, but must be understood to be combated.”

H. C. Greisman (1976), “’Disenchantment of the World’: 
Romanticism, Aesthetics and Social Theory”, The British Journal of Sociology 27, 4.


Last Wednesday on the 28th of March I attended at WORK Gallery, who is currently hosting an exhibition of her work, a discussion between Suzanne Treister and Adrian Danatt. Suzanne Treister I have already presented in a previous post, and Danatt, whom I never had the chance to hear about before, is apparently a prominent art critic known, according to Wikipedia, for gifting dead birds to his hosts.
No such antics this time but a discussion which, if sometimes hazy, gave us the opportunity to confirm a certain number of assumptions concerning Treister's new project as well as debunking a few others. 
Black Dog treated me to a a beer, a book and a tarot set for review purposes, which I will further discuss later (not the beer). The exhibition itself  presents on one hand preliminary adventures of Rosalind Brodsky in video form -several hours of free association forming a continuous story-line over the years- while the rest comes as an addition to the Science Museum exhibition and echoes an element of 2039, with a bibliography of Treister's researches, presented in the form of extremely detailed mirrored pencil drawings of the book covers. 


Hexen 2.0 : Litterature

We heard during the panel discussion, that the mirroring was an artifice aimed at implicating the audience with the work, requiring more involvement from the spectator to actually decipher the artwork, a recurrent theme in the Hexen series. Yet most of the discussion seemed to focus less on the particular form implied by the multimedia and modular approach of the artist, than on the difference between hidden and occult, and more interestingly, on the difference, between 2.0 and 203. 

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There are many reasons to love conspiracy theories: Franck E. Dec dickian's rants sudden surge in popularity exemplify conspiracy theory as refined and strangely media-conscious outsider art. 


Hexen 2.0 : HISTORICAL DIAGRAMS: The Computer - From the 
ANTIKYTHERA MECHANISM to QUANTUM TELEPATHOLOGY

Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, the Mutus Liber and maybe Campanella’s City of the Sun are only a few examples of the rich esoteric litterature that florished from the middle age to the end of the 18th century and gained mainstream recognition as works of art: all of those books in their intrinsequely symbolic nature have acquired a particular status in artistic and litterary history, not only for being the backdrop onto which an endless succession of ideologies has been projected, but also for being in their mystery, a unique form of work coupling enough structure to hint clearly at a meaning and too few clues for any answers to be definitive. 


Hypnerotomachia Poliphili (1499)

Art itself is often open to those interpretations – we create our own meaning, we decrypt or project ideologies and intentions onto artefacts that remain ultimately unknown, often even to the artist – it comes as no surprise that “secret history” that particular discipline in conspiraciology looking at history to divine in it a secret meaning or an underlying organisation, is so fond of art: from the arcadian sheperds to the Chartres cathedral, we are faced with signifiers whose original meaning has been lost but whose power lies in the multitude of interpretations it recieved, in a word, it's history.

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What Danatt seemed unwilling to admit is that when dealing with “fringe culture” be it in the form of conspiracy theory or pseudo-science (as discussed in a recent Margaret Wertheim's awesome article for New York Review of Books), we deal with a mass of information that are sometimes individually verifiable but whose agencement, whose structure, is fictional. Conspiracy is essentially a matter of connecting the dots.


HEXEN 2.0 : Tarot: Three of Pentacles: 
Electronic Social Engineering

Like those children games that reveal, as we trace the lines between the numbers, a figure or a character, when looking at history we are faced with a choice: we can either docilely follow the numbers to find the figure that we were meant to find, or we can refuse the given order of things and try to decrypt new forms, new patterns.


HEXEN 2.0 : Tarot: Four of Pentacles: Tim Berners Lee

This is a game (games seems a recurrent theme in Treister’s older work) – and it's fragmentary presentation encourage the visitor to participate himself in this exercise of world building, ushering the audience in the alternate consensus of the project, in order not only to trigger an emotional response towards the artwork, but also an intellectual response towards the content. 

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Treister insisted repeatedly during the conversation that Hexen 2.0 contains no elements of fiction - I have my reserves on this, but I guess one can blame the séance "vidéo" at the Science Museum on form rather than content, like the alchemical references or the format of the tarot : it is easy to believe her, anyone who has researched towards historical fiction for long enough ends up experiencing the eerie Belbo syndrome and finding that history, and reality itself, writes a plot better than one could ever come up with. 


Ernst Haeckel, detail from Phaeodaria, from Art Forms in Nature

As Umberto Eco depicted, there is a point where the new facts your researches provide seem to fit chillingly well with the pieces of the puzzle you have selected before and brings you in front of the choice between believing your own creation or denigrating it as pure fiction. So Treister decided to let her research roam free, obliterating the formally narrative aspects and the fiction it required, to leave only actual facts, presented in a modular fashion and leaving for the audience the job to build the missing narrative, possibly through their own involvement with the entities, movements or characters described, or at least with their many proxies in our daily lives. 

Saturday 24 March 2012

Avant-Garde Fascism - The mobilization of Myth, Art and Culture in France, 1909-1939


Mark Antliff starts his book with a rather in depth discussion of the current state of scholarly study of the generic fascism phenomenon. In a welcome recupitulation of the main actors and orientations in this subject he posit as his goal the incorporation of the Sternhell/Griffin “philosophical” take and a more pragmatic and economical take exemplified exemplified by Jacques Julliard of whom I have little to no experience.


Wheras this introduction in itself constitutes a valuable summary, it seems the focus will remain throughout most of the book on the idealistic aspects of the doctrines, which obviously for a volume treating of the links between art, modernism and the different avatars of fascism, seems unavoidable.

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The meat of the book is essentially structured in four chapters, each covering a decade of the french fascist thought and it’s interconnection with the arts and design movements of that time, but also with the previous manifestations of the antiparlementarian politics, and in doing so tracing a complex set of genealogies, some connected and some independant.

George Sorel (1847-1922)

The first of those four periods concern Sorel himself and describe his evolution, seemingly crucial in it’s constant radicality and his opportunistic shifts in allegiance, prefiguring what seems to me the quintessentially composite nature of later fascisms. Assessing the real importance of Sorel’s thought in european fascisms must be a tricky exercise as must be the Strasserite legacy in germany or the corporatist in Italy but in the particular case of France Mark Antliff makes it clear that the movement between anarcho-syndicalism and royalist/neo-christian milieu, with their shared reaction against the bourgeois dreyfusards, constitute the turning point where the pre-existent reactionary ideology become infused with the revolutionnary leftist credentials.

Georges Seurat, The Eiffel Tower, 1889

The artists then associated with the movement range between late symbolists and neo-catholics. Wheras it is easy to see how symbolists shared Sorel’s fascination for the myth, the movement was also, as typically fin de sciecle, rather diverse in it’s political –and racial- expressions. When Sorel shifted towards the Action Francaise, he was introduced to the more refined mystique of the likes of Charles Peguy or Georges Seurat or Maurice Barres. Other than the stark nationalism and the christian mythology this is were, under the influence of Arts and Crafts maybe, we can trace the roots of corporatism.

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We move on to examine George Valois and his french fascism, whose approach, of particular interest, makes a move towards a defining feature of the era, modernist “makroprojekt” and the tendancy towards fully planned, all encompassing, urbanism. In the tradition of utopias and phalansteres, we learn that the Citée Francaise has become a corner stone of the fully re-imagined society, reflects the classless and corporatist ideals of a french fascism borrowing as much from the Cercle Proudhon (the missing link between Sorel and later fascists) and the blossoming movement in Italy.

Plan Voisin by Le Corbusier, 1925

This chapter also examines the interesting relationship between Le Corbusier and the different fascist groups – with whom we can suppose he shared a certain sense of ambitious aesthetic, without agreeing of their some time populist synthesis. Reinforced concrete, as the defining feature of modernist architecture, was promoted alongside a rationalisation of space and construction, which in the industrial arena, under the guise of tailorism, was to pose the first contradiction with the corporatist and craft-oriented ideals of the previous generation.

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The study of the third “generation”  is built around the character of Philippe Lamour whom crystallizes the cult of youth, not in the common form of the volkish fascination for the body and for sports, but in the glorification of the machinism. This one period is of particular interest on the level antisemitism: Also present from the root in Sorel and co. it seemed less central in the modernist strain like the one of Lamour, who welcomed Robert Aron and other right wing jewish thinkers. This same generation of fascist who seemed somewhat more focused on a politic of novelty, somewhat cosmopolite, would also be the ones contemporary to a fully blown third reich with whom french fascism always had ambiguous and often hostile relationships at the time.

Germaine Krull, Eiffel Tower, 1928

The defining feature Antliff identifies is an interesting manifestation of the cult of youth: generational warfare. In their concern with overcoming the class conflict that plays in favour of their communist rivals, the focus of the mythic opposition is transfered onto the opposition between the middle-aged “bourgeois” who never experienced the first world war, and a coalition between a dynamic youth and the veterans, spiritually rejuvanated by the experience of the war. The art popular in that third wave, in continuation with the modernist fascination of Valois, extended on other, more daring forms, in the persons of Germain Krull, Eisenstein, Man Ray or even Bunuel – Partly in reflection of it’s fascination for innovation and youth, under the aegis of Lamour fascism will seemingly find in this period it’s more cultural expression.

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The fourth and final wave of fascists Mark Antliff examines is at the dawn of the second world war: the particular case of the war time fascism and of the collaborationist agenda are left for an other book. Thierry Maulnier look back at the roots of french fascism, before it’s more modernist manifestation, in the form of the Cercle Proudhon: feeling cornered by the socialist Front Populaire, those late fascists draw a parallel with the situation of Sorel and the early Sorelian when confronted with the rising power of parliamentary socialism.

Aristide Maillol, Les Trois Nymphes, 1930-8

Revolving largely around their opposition to the art forms profusely promoted by the Left in power, 
their cultural policy was one of classicism, centered around Racine, whose martial epics fitted their ideology as much as his formalism pleased their conservative taste, and incorporating sculptors like Despiau, Maillol and architect Perret. The continuous reference to Ancients in terms of litterature, art or architecture echoed their doctrine of Classical Violence, drawing on a an existing association between fascism and the Roman and Greek civilizations, idealised into self-less citizen soldiers.

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The dissection of fascism into different movements, different tendencies that are studied independantly, has been a constant in the study of fascism of Ernst Nolte, Paxton or Sternhell. Mark Antliff emphasizes the chronological evolution between those diverse manifestations. Placing the “classical violence” of Maulnier in the late 30’ after the resolutely modernist urbanism central to Valois in the 20’ helps making sense of the contradictory elements in the general idea of fascism. It is tempting to project onto the fascist phenomenon the usage of post-modernism, as this would resolve the paradoxes and pose it as an accessible reaction against modernity, but fascism, on it’s own scale, has an history of it’s own and ignoring this reality comes down to falling for it’s own mythical presentation, as outside of human time.

The relationship of fascism to time and it’s fictionalised, mythological quality is obvious, as exemplified in Antliff’s or Griffin’s suscription to the the idea of palingenesis, but here we see the loop being looped within fascism itself: the fourth part of Maulnier and his classical violence, goes back to the root, avoiding in part the maybe more liberal heritage of Lamour and Valois, to rejuvenate fascism itself.

Fascism like most mythical ideologies is essentially a negation of time, replaced for the sake of a narrative by the controlled and sublimed dimension of myth. As evidenced in this book, what is most striking is that even towards it’s own contemporaneous history fascism seems to be adopting the same policy. 

Thursday 15 March 2012

Hexen 2.0 - Part 1

The Hexen series is such a dense work – in terms of it’s concept and it’s content – that in order not to bore you or me to death, I will have to take radical decisions onto what deserves my attention and what does not.

Hexen 2.0: Cybernetic Séance

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In 2007 a first exhibition entitled Hexen 2039 introduced me to Rosalind Brodsky, the fictional alter ego of the artist Suzanne Treister, a delusional art teacher supposedly time travelling to research, in that first project,  sound based technology developped by the american military to enforce mind control. The work itself took the form of a collection of drawings, films and installations, describing in detail a conspiracy spanning over decades and covering with dazzling cohesion, military secrets, psychich phenomena, counter-culture mythology, pop cimematography and the occulture in it’s more historical expression.

Hexen 2039: U.S. Psychological Operations Equipment

The result was a body of visual work that acted as a mere anchor point for what the art-work really was about, that is a theory, an interpretation of accepted historical facts assembled together as to hint towards a secret, occulted order of things.

Hexen 2039 Diagram

This approach was asking some very interesting questions, first, in the way the visual (or more generally physical) act as a representation of the conceptual content of an art-work, but also crystallizing the nebula of questions anyone interested in conspiracy theory or historical fiction is bound to ask: what separates history from fiction?

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Hexen 2.0 in terms of media, takes a form relatively similar to it’s precursor, that is a series of graphic works, including diagrams, ink prints and tarot cards, as well as a film and, apparently nowhere to be found at the science museum, pencil renditions of the project’s rich bibliography.

   
Hexen 2.0: Macy Conference Attendees: Gematria

In it’s content, though, it is rather different: the mood, first of all, is a lot more serious – many facets of the 2039 installment were blown out of proportion, leaving both a near humorous after taste and a sense that the art works could be read as a form of psychotherapy addressing the relationship between for exemple paranoia and creativity. Here everything is a lot more credible, and the elements of pure fiction, if there are any, are much more difficult to identify.

Hexen 2.0: HISTORICAL DIAGRAMS: From Diogenes of Sinope to 
Anarcho-Primitivism and the Unabomber via Science-Fiction

Whereas in the first project Treister looked at delusion to provide the other-worldly in her work, here she obviously look at the liminal and the extreme, from primitivism to system theory. And as a matter of fact, science in it’s more speculative and theoretical form connects necessarily with ideology, granting ideas the aura and the power to pose as the boogeyman central to any conspiracy theory.

Hexen 2.0: Tarot: XIV Temperance: Arpanet

She then takes us on a roller-coaster of utopianism, neoluddism, psychedelics, secret governmental projects, system theory, emergence, the internet and all that virtuality has promised for the years to come. This is all very interesting, the filliation in her history of ideas is presented via the large scale diagrams, sort of Mutus Liber inspired spidergrams (a lot more interesting graphically than the first series), while her portrait gallery present the founding father of cybernetics , the secret chiefs of her theory, and the tarot itself bring a more in depth examination of the cloud of inter-related elements of her narrative.

Hexen 2.0: Tarot: Six of Wands: Hackers

But what really strikes a chord, the format aside, is that pretty much every fragment of her narrative echoes an interest of mine: Hexen 2039 went from Austin Osman Spare to brown noise and 2.0 starts with ternary computers to Zerzan. Although this unapologetic omnipresence of counter-culture first seems gratifying, with a bit of distance it seems to be asking what is our true relationship to fiction, history and that grey area that lay in between.

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The entirety of the artwork can be perceived on two different levels : one I would call fictional, where the artifacts are understood to be artworks, relating to each other and telling a story about people and their interactions, with all the symbolic meanings this entails, and one I would call meta-narrative, if you can forgive the pretentious jargonization. In this meta-narrative we take the art work not as a fiction but as a documentation of a real world conspiracy.

Hexen 2039: Graphite drawing - U.S. Army Civil Affairs and Psychological 
Operations Command (Airborne) Fact Sheetwith Gematria

In the first project Hexen 2039, the entirety of the artistic production could be interpreted as, obviously, an artwork, or as the documentation of a historical phenomenon, if the conspiracy described was to be taken seriously. This ambivalence seems to have largely disappeared from the second occurence, where Rosalind Brodsky (who provided the meta-narrative uniting the fictious and the real) is nowhere to be found. Also, the tarot itself seems to be a slightly indulgent form of narrative exposition as at the time (I am still to buy the book) it does not seems to tie in with the meta-narrative.


This ambiguous position between fact and fiction made Hexen 2039 a truly immersive piece of work: further research from the visitor could seamlessly continue the artwork into the rich body of conspiracy theories it could be connected with, and definitely Hexen 2.0 begs to be approached in the same way, which is a fascinating feat in itself and can provide anyone with months of coherent narrative. Yet on my way to the Science Museum I was hoping that Treister would have come up with new ways to blur the frontier between her work and the real world – Surely I should be glad else I would have to start wrapping my scalp in tinfoil.  

Red Harvest: What Russia's Famines Taught us about the Living World



Tonight's lecture at Pushkin House, third installment I believe in the series "Russia's other culture: Science and technology in the 20th century" covered the cross-road between two subject matters that contributed more than a few of the modern myths, namely genetics and the Soviet union.



As expected, we ended up discussing Stalin's army of monkey-men.



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The gentleman giving the talk, who's name, in good collectivist fashion, does not seems to appear on the venue's website, covered a large area of mainly Russian history, starting with the apparently proverbial Vernadsky to give us a quick insight first in 19th century agriculture and a few basics on evolutionary theory and it's precursors and offshoots, from Lamarck to saltation. His name was confirmed to be Simon Ings

Peter Kropotkin, (1842-1921)

He concluded, and this turns out to be of particular interest for me, with a discussion of Kropotkin's interests in naturalism (of which I had no knowledge) and in particular in his savory introduction of the concept of mutual aid, in order to explain why do animals (and humans) collaborate to ensure their survival, in the face of the survival of fittest. As concept goes, individual might indeed compete to acquire limited resources but will cooperate when faced with their environment. Although the phenomenon can be commonly observed in many groups of animals, the question of "why" or "how" does this happens was apparently left unanswered, which as often ends up filled with vague enough notions to produce myths.
Followed a classy exposé of the developement of evolutionary theory, biology and ultimately genetics in Russia and the Soviet Union, from the academy of agricultural sciences and Vavilov to Pavlov, with the tragedies we came to expect from the Stalinian era.

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From the wealth of anecdotes, one deserve particularly to be reported: Ilya Ivanov revolutionized the russian agriculture by achieving the horse artificial insemination, multiplying the number of foal per stallion by no less than 25, which, for a rural country where the horse was still the main energy, meant a drastic improvement. Surfing the wave of his popularity he experimented with a variety of interspecies hyrids like the zebroid.

Eclyse, a German zebroid

After WW1 the development of vaccines required testings on monkeys and chimps in particular as their genome is so similar to the human one, and to further their biological experimentation Ivanov was sent to find monkeys around the world - He apparently convinced Lunacharsky, commissar to enlightenment, to extend this to an experimentation of breeding human-monkeys hybrids. Ivanov was allowed by the french government to buy some chimps and to conduct his experiments in French Guinea. According to Wikipedia, the monkeys inseminated failed at reaching pregnancy, and Ivanov was never allowed by the french government to inseminate humans with monkey semen.

Ilya Ivanov

As often at this time a change of cultural policy decided of the scientist fate who was to die in exile after the interruption of the project - after the soviet government itself apparently engineered public discontent concerning the ethics of the experiment, and undoubtedly with the help of the world medias, blew it out of proportions into Stalin's army of monkey-men, which was to inspire, among others, Planet of the Apes.

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The second myth was not propagated by occidental pop culture but by the memory of the Holodomor and other catastrophic famines: Trofim Lysenko came from a peasant background and his radical ideas concerning agricultural theory, that was to be called vernalisation, akin to the idea of freezing the grain before planting it, made him an excellent candidate to the role of heroic, mythic stackanovite.
Lysenko seemed to have believed in a form of Kropotkin's Mutual Aid theory which he extended to vegetable realm, apparently stating in one mail exchange that he believed that seeds would sacrifice themselves for the survival of the specie rather than compete with each others for resources as stated in the more traditional forms of agronomy.
Protected by the state apparatus, his (many) opponents in his field censored, he was offering a quick solution to the recurrent problem of famines in the under-industrialized soviet agriculture, and his poorly (if at all) tested theories were applied wasting billions of rubles of grain. The most spectacular aspect of the story remains the many years which, faced with the terrible consequences of the policy, the soviet establishment categorically refused to acknowledge lysenkoism as a hoax.

Trofim Lysenko

Much more than the monkey army myth this fits with our concern - Lysenko seemed to extend the moral values central to soviet and fascist philosophies, that is the sacrifice of the individual for the collective, from the world of ideas into the world of things. One of the definitions of myth this could hint at is the historical event in which the ideal reality manifest itself in the physical world, through human means or not.

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I have a particular love for Lunacharsky and faced with the absence of translation of his opus "Religion and Socialism" (yiddish aside) I decided to learn Russian. He was one of the main proponents of the short-lived but very interesting God-Builders movement that would later be declared anathema by Lenin. Embrassing the secular religious aspects of marxism, I suspect (from the rare fragments I have had the chance to read) it had to do with an interpretation, in the line Feuerbach, of religion as an expression of human creativity, if not of religion as art.
Seeing Lunacharsky involved in the legendary monkey-man epic, I cannot help but extrapolate a cosy little theory:
In order to reconcile religion and science, one must reconcile the idea that man comes from the monkey and tha god made man in his image. The sole possible conclusion to this syllogism is that god was a monkey. Then maybe, just maybe, in endorsing the creation of a superman/supermonkey, Lunacharsky was hoping to further, litterally, his agenda of God Building. Maybe.

Tuesday 13 March 2012

The Circle of Things

"I have destroyed the ring of the horizon and stepped out of the circle of things."
Kasimir Malevitch 

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Georges Vantongerloo, Composition, 1918

Robert van t’Hoff, Spatial-plasticism model, 1918  

Kazimir Malevitch, Architekton Gota,  1922

John Storrs, Study in architectural form, 1927

"The man in the coffin is one with the horizon, the ring of the Universe"
Gabriele D’Annunzio, Notturno, 1916 
quoted here

Monday 12 March 2012

Rite without Myth

"I manipulate the rite without the myth"
Lygia Clark


Frank Lloyd Wright - Price Tower - 1952-56


Lygia Clark, Espaço Modulado, 1958



Frank Lloyd Wright - Suntop Homes - 1939