2001.03.29 09:43
Re: theological pomo
If it is all process as opposed to production then Keuss' article would be ultra important. As it stands, Keuss' article is not ultra important, therefore it is not all process sans production. Is, for example, metabolism all process with no production? Of course not.
2001.04.10 09:41
Re: militarism and freedom...
Utilizing (in this instance) a metabolic imagination, I am free to opin destructively as well. I, like all humans, have a series of operations going on within my body (which includes my mind).
If one equates or exchanges Imperialism for Capitalism, then US business/foreign policy does indeed act agressively well beyond its own borders. If one agrees with Schumpeter (sp?) that Capitalism is 'creative destruction', then it is likewise easy to see how (any) militarism is closely related to capitalism.
In my (chronosomatic) opinion, the United States of America is our planets consumate Assimilating-Metabolic State. It absorbs, it creates, and it destroys, and it does all this in tandum more than anyplace else. The era of unrestricted expansion is now over, however. And a (re)new(d) structural duality is now beginning (East-West in simple global terms). (Again in my opinion) two centuries hence, the operation of assimilation on a large scale will diminish, while metabolism will then be the predominate modus operandi, keeping in mind the structural duality is steadily growing and strengthing as well.
Is the People's Republic of China also an Assimilating-Metabolic State? I venture the answer is probably yes, and likely more so than the West realizes.
2001.04.27 08:17
Re: metabolic?
It's not everyday that someone asks my opinion on the 'metabolic'. You're kind of catching me off guard here, but I'll give you my gut reaction. I understand metabolism as a creative-destructive duality that releases energy. The key element of the concept (for me at least) is that both a creative act and a destructive act work equally in tandem. My first thought regarding two universes colliding is that it is more of an accident rather than a creative-destructive occurrance. You're thinking/question is not to be discounted, however, because this new 'beginning of the universe' theory may well represent an important point of distinction relative to the metabolic process, ie, an interesting place to figure out what can be deemed metabolic and what cannot be thus deemed.
I see my painting on the Gehry chair as a metabolic act because while I was being artistically creative I was at the same time being destructive. The chair is still a chair, and even still a Gehry chair, yet it now also a unique work of art by Steve Lauf, namely Museumpeace. The creative-destuctive process is now integral to the piece, as is the notion of duality, and creative-destructive and duality are the operative concepts that (I see) must be present. Now I could take this example further and ask whether Museumpeace has an energy that wasn't there before. Personally, I think there is an energy there that wasn't there before, and hopefully that energy is getting a little stronger every day.
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2001.11.27 13:27
Re: Substantial Theory Article
I wouldn't exactly call "Darwinian Processes and Memes in Architecture: A Memetic Theory of Modernism" a substantial theory article. There are several flaws, and didn't Tom Wolfe pretty much write the same thing twenty years ago in From Bauhaus To Our House?
I also had to ask myself, where is this world that has been taken over by International Style modernism? There happens to be one truly International Style house in my neighborhood, but I doubt if you can find a half dozen more in Philadelphia. So, from where I'm sitting, Modernism is only a small percentage of reality here. Maybe there is rampant International Style in Texas where the authors are from. Or maybe the authors really live in Europe or South America or Southeast Asia. Or maybe the Modernism virus has infected most of the world, and somehow where I live is not effected. Does that mean I live in a place that actually hasn't evolved? Oh dear.
Isn't it completely ironic that an article about evolutionary processes contains the following passage? "No-one wants to have to reach back and re-wire their brain into new habits of thinking, because such a process can be traumatic. It is far easier to hold onto one's ideas and values, and when challenged, the natural reaction is to defend them emotionally without thinking about their origin." Evolution aside, to me this is just proof of widespread intellectual laziness. And besides, isn't evolution a rather slow process? Hey! Isn't there usually a direct relationship between laziness and slowness?
I thought this "theory" was going to get interesting when metabolism (of all things) came up. But, mentioning metabolism without relating its inherent creative-destructive duality is nothing more than a sign of either laziness or slowness. Personally, I think slowness is the operative here. Maybe there's a virus that causes slowness, and another one for laziness. That would certainly explain why it is so prevalent.
Funny how there was no real analysis of the effects on 20th century world design engendered by World War I and World War II. Or, before that, Colonialism as ur-International Style.
I remember when I was a second year student and I had to explain to my studio adviser at the time (Hal Guida, he went on to be the Project Architect for the new Capitol at Canberra, Australia) why I didn't have more work done after the weekend. I told him I went to the King Tut exhibit in Washington DC. Hal immediately became excited because he had recently seen the exhibit as well. We talked a little about the great stuff in the exhibit, and then he said, "We really haven't come that far since then, have we?"
2001.12.22 11:48
Re: Void to Avoid
Muschamp wrote:
Aleppo, my destination, has been a cosmopolitan center for more than 4,000 years Over the millennia, Aleppo has been destroyed and rebuilt often. They have a saying there: every civilized person has two homes, his own and Syria. New York could benefit now from the knowledge that civilization includes the destruction as well as the creation and re-creation of great things. Aleppo was in the news again recently. Mohamed Atta, the Egyptian who studied engineering and city planning and is believed to have led the Sept. 11 attack, wrote his thesis on the destruction of Aleppo's historic fabric by modern design.
Lauf wrote (17 December 1998):
It has not escaped my attention that Operation Desert Fox has spurred some discussion here within the design-list that very much resembles the notion of humanity presently working metabolically, i.e., equal doses of creation and destruction. With regard to what I last said here concerning the possible notion of an assimilating architecture, my further elaboration of their presently also being an imaginative operation of a metabolic nature now seems very timely. I thus wish to interject one example of metabolic architecture/urbanism.
about a year ago I learned Koolhaas wrote:
"Therefore, the performance can never end or even progress in the conventional sense of dramatic plotting; it can only be the cyclic restatement of a single theme: creation and destruction irrevocably interlocked, endlessly re-enacted." from Delirious New York (p. 10)
Observation:
Just yesterday I was thinking of presenting the 911 Mural on 5th Street in Philadelphia (www.quondam.com/01/0092.htm and follows) as surely one of the first complete works of art anywhere created in direct metabolic reaction to the terrorist attacks. The mural was created by two youths, seemingly of their own volition, both started and completed within 24 hours of Tuesday (911) morning. Without doubt this mural is one of 2001's consummate metabolic masterpieces.
Anyone want to make wagers as to how long it will take for "metabolic" as defined above to enter the general lexicon? It sure as hell ain't leaving my lexicon.
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2001.12.23 12:00
Re: Void to Avoid
…the reality of our metabolic imagination as it manifests in human endevours.
What am I to think of educated people that have such a hard time believing the obvious (in this case the metabolic) only because the information does not come from a qualified source, and therefore treat the information with deep suspicions, if not outright neglect? Actually, I think less of them, but I truly wish it were not so.
2002.01.26 14:26
Re: WTC Recycled Steel
Again, where is that study on 'architecture that moves' when you need?
Did anyone complain when pieces of the Berlin Wall were up for sale as souvenirs? Concrete is real cheap though, isn't it?
Schumpeter called capitalism "creative destruction," however "destructive creation" seems more apt (today at least).
The (chronosomatically forthcoming) liver is the most metabolic organ of our bodies.
2002.01.28 13:51
Re: map
And maybe "niche-obsessed, crippling education" is reflective of humanity's present hyper-assimilating and increasingly metabolic imagination. (With 'maybe' being the operative word.)
Then again, where would humanity be without its "niche-obsessed" organs.
Its truly a wonder that some long ago Hindu niche figured out the long range importance of the spinal column.
Do you think Benjamin Franklin knew why salt melts ice? (Assuming, of course, that he knew salt melts ice.)
2002.04.11 10:28
Re: being/critical
The ownership of the chair that became MUSEUMPEACE was always as ambiguous as it still kinda sorta is. [Isn't there a saying that "possession is 95% of the law," or is that the title of some forthcoming 95% finished work of art?]
I'm not sure how familiar Ron is with my mid-1980s "fashions", as he was living in LA at the time, but the same appositional spirit is in both the fashions and the chair. [Hey, if you're going to appose stuff, it might as well be good stuff.]
Just over a year ago, there was also a comparison made involving Rauschenberg, Johns and Museumpeace. Early in his career, Rauschenberg asked DeKooning for one of his drawing so that he (Rauschenberg) could erase it. De Kooning complied, and it took Rauschenberg quite some time to erase the drawing completely. (I saw the erased drawing in Washington DC in 1990 or 1991.) Then sometime in early 2000 I noticed a resemblance between Museumpeace (the chair) and the Jasper Johns 1962(?) painting Painting With Two Balls (as in "a painting with real balls"), and then a wrote a webpage entitled "reenacting Rauschenberg via doing Johns". This is now a response to R's notion that the "chair would be even more effective with some representational or decorative aspect -- little fish, flowers, something on the surface to even further negate the materiality of the chair. [a Warhol@Best idea if there ever was one])
Somewhat related to all this is the story (which I think I read in the Andy Warhol Diaries) of Julian Schnabel once staying as a guest in someone's apartment while the apartment owners were away. The apartment owners owned a Schnabel painting as well. Schnabel decided to paint some more on the apartment owners Schnabel. The owner of the apartment and the painting was at first very upset to see what Schnabel had done (in apposition) to the painting. I'm actually making this next part up, but I once dreamed that Schnabel also retitled the painting, something like I Think There's a Part of My Anniversary Clock in the Atlantic Ocean Right Now or did he retitle it Honor Among Friends?
[you don't want to learn too much from] lauf-(vague)-s
ps
It's not exactly common knowledge, but Tony Shafrazi, the NYC art gallery owner that more or less put graffitti artists on the art map in the 1980s, was in the 1970s arrested for spray painting "Kill Lies All" on (ie, apposing) Picasso's Guernica then at MoMA.
pss
Isn't there an underlying metabolic (ie, (self)destructive/(self)constructive) theme running throughout all of the above?
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2002.04.23 13:35
Re: losing losing it (whatever it is)
Assimilation and metabolizing of received data is how I mostly operate now.
2002.07.08 09:24
Re: more architectural photography: that which was staples
It is more true that the more shopping center sites (of Olney at least) change, the more they reenact themselves, in that they so far continue to reenact the metabolic nature of capitalism at the same spot. And, just like capitalism, the Olney sites morphed from primarily manufacturing to primarily consumption, while maintaining the same level of activity under both circumstances. These sites are still manifesting their same (original) metabolic, i.e., creative/destructive, process.
2002.08.13 16:54
Re: universality / particularity [was: church plans (was: synagogues)]
My favorite commonality within ancient myths are the metabolic (i.e., creative and destructive) twin brothers within many, many creation myths. Campbell often mentions these, but doesn't really focus on or highlight them as the distinct seminal(!) phenomenon it is. Cain and Abel, Romulus and Remus, etc.--even schizophrenia + architectures by the brothers metabolic for those that remember.
2002.10.24 13:09
Re: urinal and mistletoe
The point could be made that excremental and reproductive functions do not exactly overlap within the human body. Excrement, while generally defined (in Webster's Third New International Dictionary, 1966)as 'waste matter discharged from the body' usually refers to 'waste discharged from the alimentary canal,' hence fecal matter. More correctly then, reproductive fuctions overlap with the urinary tract. Note that urine is a product of metabolism, while excrement is a product of assimilation (in the extreme, i.e., purge).
2002.11.25 10:08
Re: Barnett Newman
There is also the notion [within the theory of chronosomatics] that the operations of the mind, i.e., imagination, reenact the (physiological) operations of the body. For example, there is a fertile imagination, an assimilating imagination, a metabolic (creative/destructive) imagination, an electro-magnetic imagination, etc. According to the chronosomatic guage, humanity in our time operates mostly via a combination of an assimilating and metabolic imagination.
2002.12.07 10:00
Re: game talk
Anabolism to the left of me. Catabolism to the right. Here I am, stuck in the middle of life.
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2002.12.09 17:41
Re: Sentimental Journey
Our planet's celestial cycle, literally, does reenact itself with each revolution around that star we call the sun. And yes, human procreation is often akin to reenactment. Yet, more than anything, it is human memory that manifests the primordial reenactment that we humans deal with consciously and unconsciously all the time. Our memories are nothing but reenactments.
How all this relates to the sensibility toward artistic creation, be it a new sensibility or an old one, is easily considered an open question. What would it mean if human imagination is actually a mental process that reenacts corporeal physiology, for example, an imagination that behaves like osmosis where an equilibrium is sought, or a metabolic imagination where creative and destructive forces act in tandem toward a manifestation. Would such thinking yield a truly new sensibility?
If the imagination indeed already does operate in a way that reenacts corporeal physiology, then it has been operating as such for as long as there have been humans. Could it be that the new sensibility that you say is coming turns out to be a better understanding of our own visceral sensibilities?
2003.01.18 10:09
Re: Critical Theory Clinically Dead?
According to the theory of chronosomatics (an idea/theory of mine), the modus operandi of humanity today comprises the end stages of massive assimilation (absorption of data), the beginning stages of metabolism (the dualistic creation/destruction of data), and the embryonic development of a forthcoming birth (i.e., about five months into pregnancy).
Imagine the male/female human body upstanding with outstretched arms as the continuum of time, and the present as a plane slowly rising up through the body. To read the present (or any moment in human history) is to read the cross (transverse) section of the body that the plane of the present cuts through. 2003 corresponds with the corporal cross-section where the lowest tips of the rib-cage appear.
Essentially, the era of unrestricted expansion, corresponding to the hiatus of peripheral skeleton between the hip bones and the rib-cage is now ending, and a new web-like structure is beginning.
For the most part, about 1/2 inch of corporal cross-section equals 100 years. Ever notice that (on average) the crest of the hip bones lies on the same plane as the center of the navel? That's when/where the heliocentric theory of Copernicus was published.
2003.02.19 10:21
Re: Critical Theory Clinically Dead?
"While the body continuously encounters the real world, the mind, through its ability to imagine, creates an illusory world."
Chronosomatics has led me to investigate where the mind's "ability to image" comes from. I'm working with the proposition that the (mind's) imagination operates like corporal physiology, e.g., a/the fertile imagination operates like corporal fertility, a/the metabolic imagination operates in a dual creative/destructive manner, etc. Furthermore, there is also the chronosomatic proposition that the prevalence of specific operations of imagination (on a global scale, if you will) directly corresponds with the prevalence of specific physiologies within any specific slice of the body, where each corporal slice corresponds with a specific slice of time.
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