barren day 11
Monkey’s wrench
The Gallery is quiet except for steady dripping and some trickles loitering in the drains. Thunder and lightning has broken and it’s pretty loud on this broken roof and dirty skylights. I was thinking of the Lightening Field (Walter de Maria; 1977) and all those land works that amass a multiple site because the images are so striking they are reproduced through experiences and memory. Like Nancy Holt’s Sun Tunnels (1976) and Richard Serra’s Shift (1970) they continue to occupy the site in memory and imagined experience if you haven’t seen them firsthand. This idea of multiple and simultaneous experiences seems exemplified that thunder followed by lightening work together in a partnership each with a direct signature of their own one visual and one audio which blends to make an atmosphere of heaviness and awe.
I’m not advocating that collaboration has the scale of thunder and lightning but it does occur to me that atmospheres and spaces are made by more than one sense and often more than one mind. We have been able to identify certain ways we collaborate adding to an idea one has started or simultaneously wanting to work with a particular material or problem solving. Similarly writers work with more than one voice to carve and define the experience and space of their novel. Primo Levi a favourite and The Monkey’s Wrench delivers this countenance of wit and blunt observation by the labourer Faussone and Levi’s alchemic narration combined to make pithy observations with a philosophical bent. It is a narrative of a work life and combines attributes from very different paths maintaining something of an architectural back scene through Faussone who builds towers and bridges.
What is appreciated by Levi is his deference to expertise – Faussone’s comment ‘ I don’t mind telling you rigging a crane is a great job, and a bridge crane even more; but they’re not jobs just anybody can do’ (Levi;pg9)One of the difficulties with experimentation is when you discover a skill you would like to use but it would take some time to learn. A few are invented but mostly desired skills end up being a list of parallel lives. When facing collaborative proposals or projects ideas sometimes runaway ignoring practical skill set and material resources because the imagination goes large. Especially when as artists and designers we are meant to market, business propose, blue sky think for every organisation spoken to and somehow able work, rest and play but go umpteen forests, be self sufficient, ride a bike to collect your child from nursery, go all over Ray Mears, design everything including your interiors to the coolest kitsch possible and become an expert baker, expert virus solution solver and have fly by night fingers for running three machines at once. This is the scenarios of everyday life and it has been easily transposed onto collaborations to superficial effect.
When spaces speak it demands a different type of interaction not one entirely planned, proposed and transferable skills of the mind which can cause detachment and allow for the resting of an idea fixed onto a space, something that is made to shoehorn. When spaces speak our senses have to be attuned with the mind so when I think of collaboration now I do not think so skills and ideas but the senses. These senses are finely tuned through experience and one that moreover simplifies and shifts spaces from constructions to atmospheres. Whilst the thunder and lightning bombarded this roof and the leaks grew leaky and louder, I could hear emptiness – the audio of spaces and architecture assert themselves as collaborative when producing spaces.
