Mystory

MYSTORY 4

4) Anecdote Form (based on Labov)

The linguist William Labov analyzed the parts of the anecdote

1) Abstract
A short (one or two sentence) summary of the story that narrators provide before reconting the story proper. It encapsulates the point of the story.

2) Orientation
Servies to identify the time, place, persons, and their activity or situation and occurs immediately before the first narrative clause. It often includes a portrait of the main character, or context for the situation.

3) Complicating Action & Resolution
These are the core of the narrative. The former begins with the first narrative clause, and the latter ends with the last such clause.

4) Evaluation
Evaluation is the means used by the narrator to indicate the point of the narrative, why it was told and what the narrator was getting at, to ward off the question “so what?”. Evaluative comments may be distributed through the entire narrative. They may be inserted as direct observations by the narrator (external), or be embedded within the story, as dialogue, descripition of gestures, intensifiers, repetitions, comparisons. Comparators may depart from the past tense, and draw upon a background beyond the immediate complicating action.

5) Resolution & Coda
These elements mark the conclusion of the complicating action. Their effect is to create a sense of completion. They may consist of just one sentence, as a tag line, or return the account to the beginning of the narrative.

The Birthday Surprise

[Abstract] Let me tell you about the day George, the hired man at the Gravel plant, surprised Walt with a birthday present.

[Orientation] There was this huge pile, a mountain, of oversize rock that came off the side of the washer. Too big for anything, unless we had a crusher, which we could not afford. They just sat there, smooth oval mottled gray stone, and piled up over the years, always with a few rock-hounds climbing over it, lookng for agates. You could get a full cubic yard, over a ton of this rock, for two dollars in those days.

[Complicating Action] One day George came back from lunch with a present for Dad, a birthday present, something he found at the drugstore. Walt opened it and there was this box and inside the box was a pet rock.

[Evaluation] The pet-rock fad was just starting. Now there was no difference between this pet rock and the rocks in the ovesize pile, except that the pet one had a face painted on it, a frown, with knitted eyebrows, like it was angry, and it was packaged in this box like a pet carrier.

[Action continued] George says, “guess what this thing cost?” and Dad said he couldn’t guess. “Two bits?” he says. “Two dollars!” says George.

[Evaluation: intensifier] Two dollars each he says.

[Action…] Dad stared at that rock, hefted it in his hand, and this look came over his face.

[Evaluation] I thought he was going to throw it.

[Resolution] And that look was a good imitation of the frown on his new pet.

[Coda] He turned to me and says, “Go put this on the oversize pile.”

(275 words)

Greg Ulmer 2018-07-20T14:48:49+00:00 July 20th, 2018|Categories: Memory, Mystory, Narrative, Tutorials|Tags: Labov, Noon, Thymos, Ulmer|

MYSTORY 3

The Popcycle of James Joyce

History (School, Community): Young Joyce’s imagination was captured by the cause of Irish freedom, whose most prominent spokesman at the time was Charles Stewart Parnell, a national hero who suffered a tragic fall. “He was accused of adultery in the divorce suit of Captain O’Shea. At first it appeared that Parnell might weather this scandal, but a coalition of political enemies and devout Catholics ousted him from leadership of the Irish Parliamentary Party, and the rural population of Ireland turned against their hero with savage hatred” (Litz, 1972: 20). At Parnell’s funeral crowds tore to shreds the case in which the man’s coffin had been shipped in order to have a relic. Soon he became in the Irish imagination the type of the betrayed hero (21).

Church (Religion): Joyce’s formal education took place in schools run by the Jesuit order. His mot important religious experience occurred at Belvedere College, “when he was elected Prefect of the Sodality, “that is, “head of a group of students who banded together for the purposes of devotion and mutual help.” It was his duty according to the Jesuit manual “to excel the other members of the Sodality in virtue and to observe with the greatest diligence not only the rules of his own office but also the common rules, those especially that relate to the frequentation of the sacraments, confessing his sins and receiving the Blessed Eucharist more frequently than the others, and he should take care to advance the Sodality in the way of virtue and Christian perfection, more by example even than by words (28). Although Joyce broke with the Church, as Litz observed, this stance carried over to his “view of the artist as secular priest.”

Family (Paleo): The defining problem of Home for Joyce was his ambivalence toward his father, whose chief interst in life was “jolification.” “The declining family fortune had the greatest impact on James. The inefficiency of Joyce’s father and his wasteful habits gradually undermined family finances and family solidarity. When James entered the fashionable Clongowes Wood College in 1888, his family was quite well-to-do; by the time he had reached Belvedere College, five years later, his father had been dismissed from the Rates office on a small pension. The family had now begun a long series of removals to heaper dwellings” (919).

Career: At age eighteen Joyce published a refiew of Ibsen’s play, “When We Dead Awaken” in The Fortnightly Review. In a letter he sent to Ibsen, the student Joyce explained that while he promoted the dramatist’s work at every opportunity, he kept to himself the most important reasons for his admiration. “I did not say how what I could discern dimly of your life was my pride to see, how your battles inspired me–not the obvious material battle but those that were fought and won behind your forehead–how your willful resolution to wrest the secret from life gave me heart and how in your absolute indifference to public canons of art friends and shibboleths you walked in the light of your inward heroism” (Joyce, in Litz, 24).

Mystory: These entries constitute a preliminary survey of Joyce’s popcyle, points of identification, both positive and negative, attraction and repulsion, by which Joyce oriented himself his existence: Parnell, Christ, Joyce’s father, Ibsen: together they constitute Joyce’s inner Board of Directors (superego).Even in these brief descriptions themata are evident, perhaps summarized in the completed sentence of Ibsen’s title: “When we dead awaken, we will see that we have never lived.” The Jesuit organization for boys, the Sodality, set the highest standards piety an virtue for lay people, perhaps too high: Parnell, Joyce’s father, the characters in the play, could not live up to them.

_____________

A. Walton Litz (1972), James Joyce, revised ed. New York: Hippocrene Books.

The image is a map drawn by Nabokov of the intertwining paths of Leopold Bloom and Stephen Daedalus around Dublin recounted in the novel, Ulysses.

Greg Ulmer 2018-07-20T14:15:48+00:00 July 20th, 2018|Categories: Memory, Mystory, Popcycle|Tags: Identification, Interpellation, James Joyce, Thymos|

MYSTORY 2

2) MYSTORY: COMPOSITION/DESIGN

Purpose: Details
The fundamental goal of each part of the mystory is to record and accumulate details, sensory material signifiers, from each discourse of the popcycle. The mystory serves as a kind of “dream catcher,” an aesthetic filter, to register the events of interaction between the individual and the society. Within this general purpose there is a specific fit between each part of the mystory and the commonly available basic forms of composition and design. The commitments noted below were arrived at through a process of trial and error, and are open to revision (as are all aspects of this pedagogy).

Family Discourse: Narrative
Memories of family experience are entered into the mystory by means of narrative form. The literary anecdote (adapted from oral storytelling) works well. The various versions of supershort, micro or flash fiction fit with the brevity desirable in online venues. The exercise of putting the memory into narrative form enhances and intensifies the memory experience. There is also the fact that any formal requirements tend to stimulate inventiveness. Some key points about narrative are:

Incident: something must happen. A narrative records a change from an earlier to a later situation, with the two moments having a relationship of similarity in difference. The very short forms that I favor are distinguishable from prose poems mostly by this inclusion of incident. These short forms are desirable not only because of the nature of hypermedia but because they may be performed successfully without special training in creative writing.
Structure: the narrative has two levels — a situation, and some implicit manifestation in the arrangement and treatment of the details revealing the narrator’s attitude to the situation. This dual structure allows the author to combine past and present times, to show the situation as it was then, and to evaluate it from the vantage point of the present. This evaluation of course is not made explicit or explained, but is shown implicitly in the story.

Entertainment Discourse: Exposition
Unlike the Family memory, the Entertainment work is already a narrative. The diegesis of this narrative (its imaginary world) is entered into the mystory not by retelling the story but by using the documentary form of expository analysis. The features of a scene deemed most relevant by the maker are recorded using technical, objective, encyclopedic style to enhance and augment those props and gestures that most contribute to the atmosphere of the world.

One version of the assignment proposed that this documentation be entirely visual, to foreground the pictorial image in the way that the Family entry foregrounded the verbal image. However, this distinction is arbitrary since in both cases there is supposed to be a balance of words and graphics (adapting the forms to the medium of the Web). Roland Barthes’ Empire of Signs is a relay for the desired documentary description. Each entry of his short book on Japan constitutes a “sign,” consisting of some 400-500 words, often with a pictorial illustration. The instruction is do for the diegesis of your Entertainment work what Barthes did for Japan. Other relays are possible, including encyclopedic dictionaries. The principle is to adapt an existing model as a guide for your composition. Another possibility is to use the formal features of screenplays or scriptwriting to record the necessary details: shot lists, treatments, dialogue, camera work, and the like. All these versions may be used together. The scenario form in general is a useful model for konsult experiments, with sketchbooks, storyboards, scrapbooks, journals, as contemporary retrievals of manuscript commonplace books and memory palaces.

History: Combination and Repetition
In the version in which Entertainment features visual graphics, History is recorded using exposition. In an alternative version this third installment is an opportunity to repeat all the forms and devices introduced in the first two installments. The diegesis of a relevant historical event from the egent’s community is recorded using a combination of short narrative, documentary sign, and visualization. The narrative established the event (the situation) and the documentation (sign) focused on some detail, promoted through this intensification into a metonym evoking the attitude of the narrator to the situation.

Greg Ulmer 2018-07-20T00:54:50+00:00 July 20th, 2018|Categories: Design, Mystory, Popcycle|Tags: Diegesis, Micro Fiction, Narrative|

Identity (Know Thyself)

There are reasons why creativity is not the basis of conventional pedagogy. Creativity does not happen in general, but must take place in relation to specific fields of productivity and their paradigmatic problems. The assumption is that egents first must learn “normal science,” and then innovate. In the absence of the unknowns of a discipline, mystory poses the maker’s own identity as the mystery.
Another obstacle to education as creativity is the peculiarity of inventive reason, whose inferential movement from the known to the unknown involves risky departures from proven procedures, counterintuitive choices and operations, a persistence of application in the face of unpromising results, and similarly unusual experiences. The one object of study likely to motivate a maker to undertake these trials is a self-portrait. The problem of one’s own identity is a simulacrum of the unknowns of any field of knowledge. Within the framework of the wide image, every invention in the specialized disciplines is a self-portrait. It is difficult to remain indifferent or disengaged when the heart of the inquiry is a vision of one’s own being.

Identification

To make a mystory is to notice and record the identifications organizing our experience. We accept the theory of ideological interpellation as an explanation of identity construction, but with the understanding that individuals experience these internalizations of default collective norms of thought and behavior more through emotion, affect, intuition than through explicit concepts and ideas. The mystory maps the makers’ passages between living and artificial memory, between embodied experience and the social archives of lore, libraries, databases, festivals, rituals, and other external collective information storages. Thus for example long before one starts thinking about a career and how to make a living in a capitalist economy, one has already internalized the norms and expectations of competition within the lifeworlds of Family, Entertainment, and School. The wild card (the joker) in the deck of socialization, however, is the unpredictable way these default moods are internalized within the biologies and peculiar circumstances of individuals.
Poetic Encounter
The overall effect of mystory is that of an extended parable. It is what Roland Barthes called a structural self-portrait. The makers compose an analogy between their own personal situation and the situations observed in the relevant stories located in the popcycle institutions within which our identity is constructed. The method is that of modernist poetics, variously named “objective correlative,” “correspondences,” “world-inner-space.” Some situation in the external world is recognized/adopted as an analogy or allegory of how the makers feel about their personal situation. The outside scene is the “vehicle” in a metaphor whose “tenor” is the maker’s spirit, temperament, state of mind. Thus when Ulmer identifies with Will Kane (Gary Cooper) in High Noon or with Custer at the Little Bighorn, it is not because he is the same as that person or resembles that person directly, nor that his circumstances are literally those of showdowns and last stands, but that his circumstances have a mood of showdowns and last stands (this is what a situation of masculine gendering in a capitalist society felt like to him).

Testimony, not Confession. For an image to become wide, for the simulation to work, egents engage emotionally with the design process. This engagement is easiest with personal memories of Family life. There is little difficulty in recalling Entertainment works, but then the work must be reviewed/reread in order to notice the relevant resonant details. This act of research is essential when it comes to Community History and Career field. The relevance of a specific history is established through the sheer fact of life circumstances associating the makers with a given context of place, ethnicity, religion, or whichever identity community one decides is most significant. After that the work of identification is intellectual, based on the assumption of interpellation, that I must have assimilated in some way the beliefs and attitudes circulating in my environment. The key in every case is the bodily emotional experience of recognition, the sting or punctum as Barthes called it, in which the Entertainment, History, or Career scene shows me figuratively, metaphorically, the nature of my own state of mind.
To make this event of revelation happen the makers must put themselves in the picture. But this entering of one’s own circumstances need not involve any secrets. Rather, one simply documents the external details of any situation that has persisted in memory. An assumption is that a reason for this memorability is that the situation involved some lack of fit between the individual and the identity expectations of the default norms. The mystory testifies to these moments of self-consciousness awakened by the problems of being and becoming. Indeed, mystory is considered relevant to creativity just because of the assumption that one’s approach to problem-solving in a Career field is shaped by the experience of “problem” in the institutions of the popcycle.

Greg Ulmer 2018-07-19T19:58:18+00:00 July 19th, 2018|Categories: Mystory, Popcycle|Tags: Creativity, Felt, Identification, Punctum|

POPCYCLE

Mystory. The Wide Image posts reviewed examples of completed careers in which it is possible to recognize the signature of a childhood primal scene of memory. The function of mystory is to discover and design one’s wide image at the beginning of a career, and we will review some careers in which the mystory levels are legible, as relays for composing our own version. The premise of mystory is that disposition is shaped into identity (selfhood, subject) uniquely for each individual during upbringing (ideological interpellation) within a specific habitus of four institutions before entering into career: Family, Church, School, Entertainment. These institutions form a popcycle –the name referring to the circulation of culture across levels, a matrix or system we will explore in detail in KE. Mystory is composed by documenting the scene of interpellation in each of the institutions, using memory and research to register how one became positioned or placed (how one was “called”) relative to the ideological configuration of that institution. The assumption is that identity is not given in nature, but is formed within specific ideology. Ideology names those categories of dominant/subordinant behaviors and attitudes whose shorthand tag is WASP (in Western society). The conventional preferred identity status until recently was White race, Anglo-Saxon ethnicity, Protestant religion, continuing through the inventory to Heterosexual (sexuality) Bourgeois (class) Male (gender). These preferences and categories are breaking down now, manifested in intensely contested policy debates. Identity formation is one of the three fundamental areas of apparatus invention, so one of the concerns of konsult is to engage with new identity behaviors emerging in electracy.

–Popcycle. The popcycle is structured as an isotopy of microcosm and macrocosm, manifesting an homology of correspondences relating individual faculties (faculty psychology remains relevant in pedagogy) with institutions and even apparati. Understanding of this civilizational recapitulation (ontogeny repeating phylogeny) is one key to egent capability put to work in konsult. By the time egents reach college they have become natives of all four apparati: born into a family and hence a native language (Paleolithic institution, the Paleo apparatus); introduced to Orality through religion, learning ethics (right and wrong behavior) whether directly in the institution of church, synagogue, mosque, or indirectly through popular culture; Literacy is acquired in school, including enculturation into the history and values of a community (a nation); simultaneously with these three interpellations, children encounter Electracy in their consumption of media. Two points must be noted: these institutions are prostheses and collective projections of the intellectual virtues or powers of individuals: Language plus Theoria (Knowing institutionalized in Literacy), Praxis (Willing institutionalized in Orality), Poiesis (Imagining institutionalized in Electracy): theopraxesis. The second point is that at the collective level these institutions are at odds, in opposition and conflict with one another. A challenge for konsult is to invent theopraxesis not only as a skill-set of individuals but also of civilizations.

Greg Ulmer 2018-07-19T16:21:42+00:00 July 19th, 2018|Categories: Mystory, Popcycle, Theopraxesis|Tags: Habitus, Ideology, Interpellation, Recapitulation|

WIDE IMAGE 7

7) Howard Gardner: Definition of Wide Image. Gardner references Howard E. Gruber, who also studied creativity in science from the point of view of the wide image. Gruber’s examples cited below are cases of memories translated into wide images, applied as guiding figures (analogies, metaphors, allegories) used to structure otherwise unshaped archive of data.

The creative individual pursues (or is pursued by) a number of dominant metaphors. These figures are images of wide scope, rich, and susceptible to considerable exploration, exposing the investigator to aspects of phenomena that might otherwise remain invisible to him. Often the key to the individual’s most important innovations inhere in these images. In Darwin’s case, the most fecund metaphor was the branching tree of evolution, on which he could trace the rise and fate of various species. Gruber’s students have uncovered other such metaphors of wide scope. William James had a penchant for viewing mental processes as a stream or river, rather than in terms of the associationist images of a train or a chain. Any consideration of John Locke should focus on his falconer, whose release of a bird symbolized the quest for human knowledge. Finally, in conveying his own emerging view of the creative process, Gruber finds himiself attracted to the Mosaic image of the bush that is always burning but never consumed. (Howard Gardner, Art, Mind, and Brain: A Cognitive Approach to Creativity).

–Memory Glimpse. There are many more examples of memories from early childhood that resonate retrospectively with a career. It is important to note for our Exercise that these early memories do not always present themselves so clearly to the maker as was the case for Einstein or Darwin. The memory may first appear as a glimpse, an intuition, an endocept rather than a concept. The first lesson is just that the way to a pedagogy of creativity passes through childhood experience, involving eventually both memory work, and historical research, as well as some ethnographic field work. All of that comes later. For now it is enough to retrieve a memory and save it in an illustrated anecdote. Here is one more example for now.

–Steven Spielberg. Sarah Boxer asked Steven Spielberg to recall his earliest visual experience. He found one from the age of 3.

“My parents put me into a fluoroscope, a big, horizontal X-ray machine. My parents were very friendly with the doctor, and he tested his fluoroscope on me.” They laid their toddler down “in the machine, a kind of coffin, and closed the lid on me. It was all green in there, a white-green light. That was one of my earliest and most scary memories. I guess they were looking at my bones. But my point of view was that they put me in a box, and it was all green. And I couldn’t get out. I think that might have been the beginning of ‘Poltergeist’ and ‘Jaws.'” The connection between the light and “Poltergeist” was clear. But how do you get “Jaws” from green light? Spielberg didn’t miss a beat. “Just being abandoned, you know, set adrift, in the middle of the ocean, my ocean of green light.”

Before the green light came another light. “The first thing I remember was the eternal light.” He was only 6 months old at the time and was in a synagogue in Cincinnati, the city where he was born in 1946. “I didn’t know at the time that that’s what it was. I remember seeing people with long beards, handing me crackers. And a red light.” The crackers were called Tamtams, and “the red light was the eternal light, the Ner Tamid,” the light that never goes out. Given all these extraordinary encounters with light — green, red and eternal — it’s no wonder that Spielberg became obsessed with alien abductions. “I’ve been dealing with abduction ever since ‘Close Encounters,'” he said.

(Gainesville Sun, December 7, 2002).

Greg Ulmer 2018-07-18T14:16:04+00:00 July 18th, 2018|Categories: Memory, Mystory, Wide Image|Tags: Exercise, Gruber, Metaphor, Sketch, Spielberg|

WIDE IMAGE 6

6) Memory Exercise: Kandinsky. As illustrated by the careers of productive people, at some point an interviewer will ask about an early memory from childhood. Mystory may adopt such interviews–the kind of things people want to know about the sources and motivations of creativity–as a guide to identify similar resources in one’s own biography to bring into the wide image matrix. Exercise: read an interview with a creative person of interest, inventory the questions asked, and answer them in your own case.

In Pictorial Nominalism, Thierry de Duve describes the autobiography of Wassily Kandinsky, one of the inventors of abstract painting, in a way that resonates with the theory of the image of wide scope.

- In Ruckblicke (Reminiscences) Kandinsky relates his memories of several aesthetic experiences that he judges retrospectively to have been crucial and that he endows with all the inner necessity required to have justified his passage to abstraction. […] One is a memory dated from adolescence, which deals with the being and name of color and which Kandinsky describes with a fervent lyricism that gives it the value of a true revelation: “As a thirteen- or fourteen-year-old boy, I gradually saved up enough money to buy myself a paintbox containing oil paints. I can still feel today the sensation I experienced then–or, to put it better, the experience I underwent then–of the paints emerging from the tube. One squeeze of the fingers, and out came these strange beings, one after the other, which one calls colors–exultant, solemn, brooding, dreamy, self-absorbed, deeply serious, with roguish exuberance, with a sigh of release, with a deep sound of mourning, with defiant power and resistance, with submissive suppleness… Living an independent life of their own, with all the necessary qualities for further, autonomous existence, prepared to make way readily, in an instant, for new combinations, to mingle with one another and create an infinite succession of new worlds.” This sentence is pivotal in more than one way. By its position in the book, it acts as a hinge in time allowing two other memories to fold onto one another. The first, an archaic one, is the childhood memory with which the text of Reminiscences opens and that gives to the title all the phantasmatic weight of a “primal scene”: “The first colors to make a powerful impression on me were light juicy green, white, carmine red, black, and yellow ochre. These memories go as far back as the age of three.”

Greg Ulmer 2018-07-17T14:55:10+00:00 July 17th, 2018|Categories: Art, Memory, Mystory, Wide Image|Tags: Exercise, Interview, Kandinsky|

WIDE IMAGE 5

5) Design Relay: Coco Chanel. Design is electrate écriture (konsult is designed). Design in general and in its various specialized applications is a resource for composing wide image since there is a legible continuity relating the memory event with the gesture defining the designer’s style. Coco Chanel is a case in point. In her account of the life and career of the designer Coco Chanel, (Coco Chanel: The Legend and the Life), Justine Picardie explains the origins of Chanel’s Logo as alluding to the arabesque patterns of the stained glass windows in the convent that took care of destitute children, the Cistercian abbey at Aubazine, where Chanel lived from the time she was 12 years old, until age 18. This match between a detail from a childhood memory and the adult career is a signal that an image of wide scope is at work. It is worth noting in this context the archetype that is latent within and no doubt deliberately invoked by Chanel’s design: the sacred geometric figure known as the Vesica Piscis

Chanel created the Little Black Dress (so accepted in popular culture that it is known by its acronym LBD). Perhaps the most famous LBD was worn by Audrey Hepburn in Breakfast at Tiffany’s, but it has been present in numerous other films. The correspondence between the nun habits of memory and the secular fashion of the liberated woman creates a hybrid in popular erotic fantasy.

Greg Ulmer 2018-07-17T14:15:35+00:00 July 17th, 2018|Categories: Design, Memory, Mystory, Wide Image|Tags: Relay|

WIDE IMAGE 4

4) Childhood Memory: Renzo Piano.Hal Foster was in Gainesville to give a lecture for the Architecture School. The theme was Neomodernism, focusing on Norman Foster and Renzo Piano. I had not heard the story before about the role that childhood memories played in Piano’s aesthetic. It is another example of an image of wide scope, the formatting of an imagination in specific childhood experiences. There are two memories that reinforce one another in Piano’s case: one of watching sailing ships in the port city of Genoa, his hometown; the other of laundry blowing in the wind on the roofs of the city.

The notion of a ‘light modernity’ is suggestive. ‘There is one theme that is very important for me,’ Piano remarks: ‘Lightness (and obviously not in reference only to the physical mass of objects).’ He traces this preoccupation from his early experiments with ‘weightless structures’ to his continued investigations of ‘immaterial elements’ like wind and light. Lightness is also the message of his primal scene as a designer, a childhood memory of sheets billowing in the breeze on a Genoese rooftop, a vision that conjures up the shapely beauty of classical drapery as well as contemporary sailing boats as architectural ideals. For Piano lightness is thus a value that bears on the human as well as on the architectural – it concerns graceful comportment in both realms.

The talk of not struggling is all very well, but in order to be where he is today, Piano has had to work very hard, with great purpose and commercial nous. (His point is that it is a question of balance.) Piano’s outlook is heavily influenced by two things: having been a child in postwar Italy, and growing up near a port. “A harbour,” he says, “is like an imaginary city where everything keeps moving.”

Every Sunday his father would take him to Genoa’s harbour and Piano would watch the ships, which he thought of as “immense buildings that move”. When they sailed, he watched them cross the water and imagined that they were flying. These notions converged in his mind to form an idea of buildings as structures that “fought against gravity”, as “miracles”.

The 95-story skyscraper Piano designed for the Shard Quarter in London expresses the sail as its Idea or parti. Architects are good relays for this translation of wide image into hypothesis since their Idea (parti pris) is precisely a materialized gesture unifying a complex program. Every wide image is a “compass,” we could say, generalizing from Einstein’s case, in that the idenification of true north allows one to go in any direction. Similarly we may generalize from architecture to say that any wide image provides the parti pris of Konsult.

” This thing came very quickly,” architect Renzo Piano has recalled of his first thoughts about the building that would become the Shard, in central London. Piano apparently sketched his idea on a restaurant napkin while meeting property developer Irvine Sellar in March 2000. According to Piano’s architectural firm, RPBW, Sellar keeps the famous napkin in his offices. “He saw the beauty of the river and the railways and the way their energy blended and began to sketch in green felt pen on a napkin what he saw as a giant sail or an iceberg,” Sellar recalled in a recent interview. Piano, for his part, has sometimes sounded squeamish about the legend that has built up around his off-the-cuff sketch. “I don’t want to create a mythology,” he has said.

Greg Ulmer 2018-07-18T14:19:03+00:00 July 16th, 2018|Categories: Memory, Mystory, Wide Image|Tags: Architecture, Idea, Sketch, Themata|

WIDE IMAGE 3

3) Memory: Frank Gehry.In their book about the architect, Frank Gehry (best known for his design of the Guggenheim museum in Bilbao, Spain), Jan Greenberg and Sandra Jordan (Frank O. Gehry: Outside In) describe the connection between Gehry’s childhood memories and his career in a way that resonates with the principle of the wide image.

Young Frank often spent the night at his grandparent’s house. They had emigrated to Canada from Poland, and although they slowly adopted the ways of their new country, they observed their Jewish traditions. On Thursdays, Frank went to the market with his grandmother. Each week she bought a live carp to be made into gefilte fish for Sabbath supper. They carried it home in a heavy white paper bag filled with water.

“We’d put it in the bathtub, and I would watch this fish for a day, this beautiful object swimming around. Then the next day it would be gone,” he says. Those beautiful disappearing fish, still vivid in his memories, appear over and over in Gehry’s architecture. . . .

In Timmins, Frank ran into his first experience with anti-Semitism. A group of bullies tormented him at school, beating him up and calling him Fish, an insult suggesting that he smelled. it was humiliating to be punched and taunted because he was Jewish. During this painful time he pulled back from his family’s religious beliefs. . . .

Many artists use autobiographical images to work through their conflicts. For Gehry, the shape of a fish repeated over and over in his designs represents his mixed feelings. On one hand, the fish echoes the anti-Semitic slurs of his childhood. On the other, it symbolizes the comforting religious rituals observed by his grandmother. The giant fish sculptures elevate memory into art.

Greg Ulmer 2018-07-16T21:59:16+00:00 July 16th, 2018|Categories: Memory, Mystory, Wide Image|Tags: Gehry, Themata|

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