|
||||
|
Juhani
Pallasmaa LIVED SPACE
embodied
experience and sensory thought |
|||
The
World and the Mind |
||||
|
'How would the painter or the poet express anything other than his encounter with the world'1, writes Maurice Merleau-Ponty, whose writings analyze the intertwining of the senses, the mind and the world, providing a reliable ground for understanding artistic intention and effect. | |||
|
Art structures and articulates our being-in-the-world, or the inner space of the world (Weltinnenraum)2, to use the notion of Rainer Maria Rilke. A work of art does not mediate conceptually structured knowledge of the objective state of the world, but it renders possible an intense experiential knowledge. |
|||
|
It
is bewildering that while grasping what surrounds him, what he is observing,
and giving shape to his perception, the artist does not, in fact, say
anything else about the world or himself, but that they touch each other3, writes the Finnish painter Juhana Blomstedt.
The artist touches the skin of his world with the same sense of wonder
as a child touches a frosted window. |
|||
|
An artistic work is not an intellectual riddle seeking an interpretation or explanation. It is a complex of images, experiences and emotions, which enters directly our consciousness. An artistic work has an impact on our mind before it is understood. The artist finds his/her way behind words, concepts and rational explanations in the ever repeated search for an innocent re-encounter with the world. Rational constructions provide little help for artistic search because the artist has to rediscover the boundary of his own existence, time after time. | |||
|
'In my work, I have never had any use for
anything that I have known in advance'4, said the great Bask sculptor Eduardo Chillida
in our conversation once. |
|||
|
The
artist's exploration focuses on lived experiential essences, and this
aim defines his/her approach and method. As Jean-Paul Sartre states: `Essences
and facts are incommensurable, and one who begins his inquiry with facts
will never arrive at essences. ... understanding is not a quality coming
to human reality from the outside; it is its characteristic way of existing.'5
|
|||
Existential Space |
||||
|
We do not live in an objective world of matter and facts, as commonplace naive realism assumes. The characteristically human mode of existence takes place in the worlds of possibilities, molded by our capacity of fantasy and imagination. We live in mental worlds, in which the material and the mental, the experienced, remembered and imagined completely fuse into each other. | |||
|
As a consequence, the lived reality does not follow the rules of space and time of the science of physics. We could say that the lived world is fundamentally `unscientific', when measured by the criteria of western empirical science. | |||
|
The
lived world is closer to the reality of dream than a scientific description.
In order to distinguish the lived space from physical and geometrical
space, we can call it existential space. Lived existential space is structured
on the basis of meanings and values reflected upon it by an individual
or group, either consciously or unconsciously; existential space is a
unique experience interpreted through the memory and experience of the
individual. On the other hand, groups or even nations, share certain characteristics
of existential space that constitute their collective identities and sense
of togetherness. The experiential lived space is the object and context
of both the making and experiencing of art as well as of architecture.
|
|||
|
In my view, the artform closest to architecture is not music - as is often thought - but cinema. The ground of both artforms is lived space, in which the inner space of the mind and the external space of the world fuse into each other forming a chiasmatic bind. The lived space of cinema offers a great lesson for us architects, who tend to see our craft through a formal bias. | |||
|
Great
film directors show us that architecture can be utilized to evoke and
maintain alienation or domesticity, melancholy or terror, frustration
or bliss. |
|||
The
Reality of Imagination |
||||
Imagination is usually attached to a specific human creative capacity or the realm of art, but the faculty of imagination is the foundation of our mental existence and of our way of dealing with stimuli and information. Recent research by brain physiologists and psychologist at Harvard University6 show that images take place in the same zones of the brain as visual perceptions, and that the first are equally real as the latter. | ||||
|
|
|||
|
The experienced, remembered and imagined are qualitatively equal experiences in our consciousness; we may be equally moved by something evoked by the imagined as by the actually encountered. Art creates images and emotions that are as true as the actual encounters of life; fundamentally, in a work of art we encounter ourselves and our own being-in-the-world in an intensified manner. An artistic and architectural experience is fundamentally a strengthened experience of self. | |||
|
An
artwork made thousands of years ago, or produced in a culture completely
unknown to us, touches us because we encounter the timeless present of
being human through the work, and consequently, we encounter our own being-in-this-world.
One of the paradoxes of art is that although all moving works are unique,
they reflect what is general and shared in the human existential experience.
In this way, art is tautologic, it repeats the same basic expression:
How does it feel to be a human being in this world. |
|||
|
Art
offers us alternative identities and life situations, and this is its
great mental task. Great art gives us the possibility of experiencing
our very existence through the existential experience of some of the most
talented individuals of the humankind. This is the miraculous and merciful
equality of art. I cannot, however, experience the feelings of the gloomy
protagonist of Crime and Punishment; for instance, I
do not borrow his feelings. I lend Raskolnikov my feelings
and my waiting; Raskolnikov's agonized waiting is my experience
of my own frustration of waiting. But all artistic effect and impact is
based on an identification of self with the experienced object, or the
reflection of the self on the object. |
|||
|
`The taste of an apple is not in the apple,
but in the encounter of the apple and the palate', as Jorge Luis Borges
writes. We experience a work of art or architecture through our embodied
existence and identification. An artistic experience activates a primordial
mode of embodied and undifferentiated experience; the separation and polarization
of subject and object is temporarily lost. Both the glorious beauty or
the pitiful ugliness and lameness of the object of artistic representation
are momentarily identified with our own embodied experience. |
|||
|
|
|||
|
Many
of us can never mourn our personal tragedy with the intensity we suffer
the fate of the fictive figures of literary, theater and film, distilled
through the existential experience of a great artist. |
|||
The
Reality of Art |
||||
|
The
manner through which art affects our mind is one of the great mysteries
of culture. The understanding of the essence and mental workings of art
has become confused and blurred by the superficial use of the notions
of symbolization and abstraction. A work of art or architecture is not
a symbol that represents or indirectly portrays something outside of itself;
it is an image object that places itself directly in our existential experience. |
|||
|
The
idea of symbolization should be viewed critically and with suspicion.
Andrey Tarkovsky, for instance, whose films appear to be saturated by
symbolic signification strongly denies any specific symbolization in his
films. Rooms are flooded with water in his films, water soaks through
ceilings and it keeps constantly raining. Yet, he writes: 'When it rains
in my films, it simply rains'. |
|||
|
|
|||
|
A
work of art may, of course, have conscious symbolic contents and intentions,
but they are insignificant for the artistic impact and the temporal persistance
of the work. Even the most simple work of art by its appearance, is not
devoid of meanings or of connection with our existential and experiential
world. An impressive work is an image condensation that is capable of
mediating the entire experience of being-in-the-world through a singular
image. But as Anton Ehrenzweig writes 'a meaningful abstraction in art
differs from a meaningless ornament in the same way as a significant mathematical
formulation differs from a meaningless combination of letters and figures'.
In the words of Andrey Tarkovsky: `An (artistic) image is not a specific
meaning expressed by the director; the entire world is reflected in it
as in a drop of water'8. |
|||
|
Rainer Maria Rilke, one of greatest poets of all times, gives a memorable description of the utter difficulty of creating an authentic work of art and of its density and condensation, reminiscent of the core of an atom. ` For verses are not, as people imagine, simply feelings ... - they are experiences. For the sake of a single verse, one must see many cities, men and things, one must know the animals, one must feel how the birds fly and know the gesture with which the little flowers open in the morning.'9 The poet continues his list of necessary experiences endlessly. He lists roads leading to unknown regions, unexpected encounters and separations, childhood illnesses and withdrawals into the solitude of rooms, nights of love, screams of women in labor, and being beside the dying. But even all of this together is not sufficient to create a line of verse. One has to forget all of this and have the patience to wait for their return. Only after all our life experiences have turned to the own blood within us, `not till then can it happen that in a most rare hour the first word of a verse arises in their midst and goes forth from them'10. Architectural quality does not either derive from a formal or aesthetic game; it arises from experiences and an authentic sense of life. The tendency for aesthetization today, in fact, threatens authentic qualities of architecture. Architecture can move us only if it is capable of touching something buried deeply in our forgotten memories. | |||
next part | ||||
|
||||
1 Maurice
Merleau-Ponty, Signs, as
quoted in Richard Kearney. 'Maurice Merleau-Ponty', Modern Movements in European Philosophy. Mancester
University Press, Manchester ja New York, 1994, p. 82. 2 Liisa
Enwald, 'Lukijalle', Rainer
Maria Rilke, Hiljainen taiteen sisin: kirjeitä vuosilta 1900-1926
(The silent innermost core of art; letters 1900-19261. TAI-teos,
Helsinki 1997, p. 8. 3 Juhana
Blomstedt, Muodon arvo (The
significance of form), ed. Timo Valjakka. Painatuskeskus, Helsinki
1995. 4 Private
conversation between Eduardo Chillida and the writer, 1987. 5
Jean-Paul Sartre, The
Emotions: An Outline of a Theory. Carol Publishing Co., New York
1993, p. 9.
6 Dr.
Ilpo Kojo, 'Mielikuvat ovat aivoille todellisia' (Images are real
to the brain). Helsingin Sanomat,
16.3.1996. The
research group working at the Harvard University under Dr. Stephen
Kosslyn has established that the areas of the brain which participate
in the formation of images are the same areas where nerve signals
from the eyes, which produce visual perception, are processes. The
activity in the brain of this area looking related with images is
similar to the looking of actual pictures. 7 Jean-Paul
Sartre, What is Literature?.
Peter Smith, Gloucester, Mass., 1978, p. 3. 8 Andrei
Tarkovsky, Sculpting in Time.
Bodley Head, Lontoo 1986, p. 100. 9 Rainer
Maria Rilke, The Notebooks
of Malte Laurids Brigge. W.W., Norton & Company, London, 1992,
p. 26. 10 ibid.,
s. 27. |