Art as Material
Many works of art are physical objects. Their materiality affects us. In this week's session of the '6 Ways of Thinking About Art' course at Tate Modern we focussed on some of the psychological associations of particular objects, their textures, and their scale.
Two theorists of sensed space, the architect Ernö Goldfinger and the philosopher Gaston Bachelard have made interesting observations about how rooms, the textures of materials, the sounds, smells, shapes, and evocative objects contribute to our experience of real, imagined and remembers spaces.
Goldfinger on The Sensation of Space
In a series of three articles published between 1941 and 1942, Ernö Goldfinger gave his account of our experience of enclosed space - a sense that begins in the womb. For him architecture is not a sculptural practice, but rather an art of enclosing. Architecture has to be experienced to be understood. The skilful architect can enclose space in such a way as to evoke a particular kind of emotion in the person experiencing it from within. Goldfinger's account is in some ways a gloss on his mentor, Auguste Perret's comment:
Architecture masters space, limits it, encloses it, circles it. It has this prerogative to create magical places totally the work of the intellect.
For Goldfinger our sensation of space is largely pre-conscious (i.e. we can bring ourselves to be aware of it). Like music it can affect us without our being aware of its details, or how it achieves its effects. Many different features contribute to our experience of space:
‘Memories and experience, not only of visual sensation but also of sound and touch and smell enter into it. The sound and vibration in a hall; the physical touch of the walls of a narrow passage; the atmosphere and temperature of a stuffy room; the smell of a damp cellar; all are, in various degrees, components of spatial sensation. Every element, plastic or pictorial, partially obstructing the view, and people in the crowd rubbing against you, are part of it’ Goldfinger ‘The Sensation of Space’
So for Goldfinger the skill of the architect lies in his or her ability to enclose space in various ways in order to evoke emotions.
Bachelard on the Poetics of Space
For Gaston Bachelard, in Chapter One of his quirky and jumbled The Poetics of Space, the early experience of a house, a bedroom, is rich and important. Our first house becomes a source of emotionally charged symbolic imagery that we revisit in dreams and daydreams and carry into every experience. Inhabited space is the non-I that protects the I (in contrast with the usual formulation where the child distinguishes itself - the I - from a more impersonal non-I - the external world).
‘We comfort ourselves by reliving memories of protection’
As he puts it:
‘Memories of the outside world will never have the same tonality as those of home and, by recalling these memories, we add to our store of dreams; we are never real historians, but always near poets, and our emotion is nothing but an expression of a poetry that was lost.’
Bachelard is surely right about how our early experiences of space and of objects permeate our present experience.
In the galleries we explored how in a range of work in the Arte Povera displays the physical substance of the materials affected us and frequently encouraged us to become childlike in our relation to the pieces. (Some of Freud's comments about the creative writer and play are also relevant here - see for example these extracts on the Brainpicker site). We ended by looking at Richard Serra's Trip Hammer, thinking about how the phsyical material (rusting steel), it's sense of weight, its industrial associations, it's harshness, and its scale (taking us back to the sense of being a child under a table perhaps), all contributed to our experience of it, as well as the obvious sense of danger from the apparent (or actual?) precariousness of the balance - it also combines the childlike desire to balance objects with, at some level, perhaps, the desire to know them down. You can watch Moby talking about this piece from 2.25 in this video:
Comments