I decided to write a blog about staircases because one of my videos has some stairs in it and I thought I might as well tell whyish because I haven't written it in my sketchbook and I need to prove that I have been reading and looking at stuff rather than just sitting around drinking tea.
These two videos show the dual purpose of staircases you can go both up and down them, making them twice as usful as escalators and slides. they are trasitory spaces.
in both reaching the top means death.
The first clip is from psycho which is a good film the second clip is from a matter of life and death which is also a good film. I have never watched psycho. Its one of those film that I hardly think I need to watch because of the weight of what has been written about it. I can play it pretty much in my head becase of all the clip shows its featured in, documentaries, books on film theory, references in pop culture even art works. Its become a sort of cultural myth, its in the collective subconsious, its a foundation for modern horror, really good film...yadda yadda yadda
actally stuff this! I'm going to watch it now. It'll probably be on the internet somewhere.
Well that was a really good film. I really liked the ordinariness of it from the start where it had the establishing shot and the seemingly pointless date and time. Seemingly because it showed it as just anyother day. the date meant nothing to us except that it grounded the audianice in everyday meanial fact. Everything was ordiary the male hero and romantic interest wasn't a firefighter or anything he owned a small shop that sold insecticide to old ladies who wouldn't want to hurt a fly. Even after the ladies murdered in the shower the whole cleaning scene is presented almost like regular house work. the Bates motel would seem normal if it weren't for the haunted house that lurks like a big tumur of crazy.
The second clip is from a film called "A Matter of Life and Death" which is such a charming film it melts the icy shard lodged in my heart by the straight up warmness of its tone and the chemistry of the characters. and it looks so lovely aswell. All nice bold colour, except in the black and white afterlife. oooo its cimnema as it should be. I don't know whats better this or Psycho if only their was someway to combine them. If there ever was such a film made I would not dare to watch for after seeing something so fantabulous what in life could top it? But in saying this I would miss one of the most important lessons within "A Matter of Life and Death". The bold colours of life and love overpower anything that can be found in death. Life and love are the most precisious things in the world more important than any rules of the cosmos and so need to be fought for with all our given strengh. This is what happens in the film. A british airman cheats death and falls in love with an american radio operator and then has to argue why he should live in a court in heaven. It was made and set in WW2 to be used to ease animosity between the british and americans. I don't know if it worked in that respect although their are the odd scene where this is brought up but it dosn't upset anything. Anyway the clip shows the airman disscussing who should be his lawyer in the upcoming court case with the angel who failed to collect his soul in the first place, who is trying to trick him into accending to the afterlife.
The staircase they are going up is perhaps the most famous staircase, jacobs ladder. I couldn't think of anyother really famous staircases. I though about looking at stepped pyramids of the icas, aztecs and Egyptions but after reading for too long about them I decided Jacobs ladder is the only religious stairway I can be bothered writting about in this blog because there is a nice painting by William Blake of it and William Blake is just great.
Jacob left Beersheba, and went toward Haran. He came to the place and stayed there that night, because the sun had set. Taking one of the stones of the place, he put it under his head and lay down in that place to sleep. And he dreamed that there was a ladder set up on the earth, and the top of it reached to heaven; and behold, the angels of God were ascending and descending on it! And behold, the Lord stood above it [or "beside him"] and said, "I am the Lord, the God of Abraham your father and the God of Isaac; the land on which you lie I will give to you and to your descendants; and your descendants shall be like the dust of the earth, and you shall spread abroad to the west and to the east and to the north and to the south; and by you and your descendants shall all the families of the earth bless themselves. Behold, I am with you and will keep you wherever you go, and will bring you back to this land; for I will not leave you until I have done that of which I have spoken to you." Then Jacob awoke from his sleep and said, "Surely the Lord is in this place; and I did not know it." And he was afraid, and said, "This is none other than the house of God, and this is the gate of heaven."
The ladder is a powerful symbol of the link between man and the divine.
Martin Creed and Bruce Naumen did a few simple (in form, if not content) art works comprising of staircases. I couldn't find a video of Creeds stairs works on youtube. I was looking for the one where a note sounds when you step on a step from low at bottom to high at top. I eventually found one in this video advert for the show it featured in last year which is ok I suppose.
i hate his fake mondesty it feels like he's trying to figure out how much modesty can i get away with. however he can be endearing when talking about his ego: "I probably have a big-ish ego, like a lot of people. It just looks small when you're standing far away." Anyway I don't know why I am talking about whether I like martin creed as a person. It is kind of irrelevent, and I have had no contact with the man so really anything I can say about him is of no real value. However he does choose to present himself in a very delibretly low key manner and this relates to his work. If you fink this persona irrating then you will probably also find his work irratating.
"I think that the best things get under people's skin, make them remember them. People aren't stupid. They know what's fake and what's not. They respond to things. Art is just things in the world, usually an arrangement of colour and shapes. It's people who have the feelings and the reactions."marin creed
His work posseses a purity that stretches almost to the point of boredom but to say this is to miss the point. Whereas other minamilists such as Judd get rid of everything except the matierial to let the universe in and so walk toward the light of the sublime. Creed pull focus into banitly and simple boring truth. There is no end to judds work whearase thre is a first step and a last step in Creeds work in my view.
His work are all about restrictions: impersonal rules which require a quick, definitive responce made formal by the parameters Part random, part ordered.
it makes minamalism managable and also injects much needed humour into it. Humour can never work in tandem with the sublime in my books because humour acts as a screen. Man can seperate himself from the the butt of the joke by his ability to change the thing he looks at in the way its perseived while the thing persieved can do nothing to him. If it did do something to him the joke would be over. its all fun and games before someone loses an eye.
Anyway I was talking about staircases.
Creed has rigged things so that every step triggers a musical note from speakers on the stairs. It's like that big keyboard in that Tom Hanks film "Big". Is it one of those artworks that serve to make us aware of our body and movement in space, yeah probably. It also looks like fun. Its the sort of artwork that when you go to an art gallery with non art friends and you ask them what artwork they liked best. They will say eh that staircase one because its the only one they can remeber becauseit relates to them and so they relate to it. It is fun to play with and isn't play the way we learn how to function in the world. It does its job I think.
"there is no regular rythm whe your going down so you have to take each step and watch it"Nauman
I can't find any signithicant writing on Bruce Naumen's stair cases apart the odd droll remark. The usal its art because I say so tedium. I wish people would all stop saying that if only to see if their work is still art. It probably will be.
"Stairway" above and "The Stadium Piece" do diferent tthings on is a staircase where all the steps are different sizes supposedly causing an increased awarness of body but you could if you wanted to spin it into a statment on life you know because although its sometimes hard to see each step is different so you have to watch out. I don't think this view is a worth while view of the art work because its really quite cheesy it sounds like a moral you might find at the end of the wonder years. To be honest I never watched the programe, I've only ever scene scraps of it while channel hopping on weekend afternoons so who am I to judge it? from the short while i spent making sure the show was called "The Wonder Years" and not Days of Our Lives or Golden Years I read many heartfelt reviews of the program from old fans who thanks partly to the strong messages and inspiration hey gained from the seris managed to get through some pretty hard times, other who had lived through that period themselves and made their insides warmed by bittersweet nostalgia. I think we are two soon to write off these forms low art. I am sure wonder years have touched more people brought more tears to the eye and smile to the face than all of naumans ouvre. and isn't that the purpose of art to touch people, to share in our humanity? I don't know i haven't learned the answer to that yet but what I have learned is its not big or clever to write anything off before taking the time to appriciate. The rules that state what is good and what is bad, what is important and unimportant are not written by one man alone and even less by one mans ignorance. yes I have learned something to day. perhaps i'll look back on this day. Narrating over my own TV seris about how naive i was then but how I was learning to open up my heart to new things and open up myself to life.
"The Stadium Piece" on the other hand is a staircase that in the end dosen't reach anywhere, it goes up and down and up and down and ends up on the same floor. I can can make up a crummby metephore for this work aswell. Life has its ups and downs but in the end we all end up the same place the ground. These works are so much fun because they are nice and contained but open to any rubbish theory you care to think up. This sort of art is usefull for keeping the ego at bay because you come up with your half assed interpretation of with the understanding that it can never be correct but it kinda is. its a nice balance. I need to make sure that my works are nice and contained because its not good when unsureness leaks out, it just makes a mess.
"I like the idea that you could make something that appears to be functional but when you use it dosen't you can't quite figure out what that function might be and that in the end is what its function is." Nauman
rachel whitread makes scultures out of negative space. I like this persons work. She makes familier space become unfamiler by filling it with plaster.
and the human inability to find any. The absurd dosen't mean logically impossible but humanly impossible to understand. The universe and the human mind do not each separately cause the Absurd, but rather, the Absurd arises by the contradictory nature of the two existing simultaneously.
One of her works “Untitled (Upstairs),” 2001, is a cast of a staircase from the artists house located in London’s Bethnal Green. Whiteread’s staircases play with our perceptions on two levels. Firstly, the empty space beneath the staircase is negated by transforming it into an impenetrable closed form and secondly, it is flipped on its side skewing the expected laws of gravity and the viewer’s own sense of orientation. The work is foreign and at the same time familiar. Whiteread’s staircases thus call into question the credibility of our perception and embody both absurdity and impossibility.
The Absud refers to the conflict between the human tendency to seek the meaning of life
In whitereads work this exists in a marginal way in that the object is regonisable as a staircase well a shadow of a staircese, well something like that however it is unrelatable in a human sence because where we would have fitted into it has become solid.
Absurdism is something that has infected my thinking for a while now. The confrontation between man's desire for significance, meaning and clarity and the vast inconsivable universe is an easy thing to get stuck in.
Whenever I start to wax philosophical I always remember this part of a video game i had as a child. I have been reading that essay "The Myth of Sisyphus" by camus which has been nice. The myth of the titial is basically that there was this ancient greek guy who was all sorts of badass, he dified the Gods, he captured death so that no one died and he managed to slime his way out of the underworld. When he was eventually apprehended by the Gods he forced by them to everyday roll a boulder to the top of a mountain only to have roll back down again. An endless pointless task like washing "You have already grasped that Sisyphus is the absurd hero. He is, as much through his passions as through his torture. His scorn of the gods, his hatred of death, and his passion for life won him that unspeakable penalty in which the whole being is exerted toward accomplishing nothing." camus
I have also been looking at the sublime through the essay "On the Sublime" by Friedrich Schiller and Romantic artists such as Blake. Here is that picture people always show when anyone mentions romanticism:
"The sublime object is of a double description. We refer it either to our power of comprehension, and succumb in the attempt to form for ourselves an image or a concept of it; or we refer it to our vital power, and consider it as a power before which those of ours vanish into nothing. But although in the one as in the other case we preserve the painful feeling of our limits through its instigation, so we do not, however, flee it, but rather are attracted by it with irresistible force. " schiller
In this quote we can see similarities between the notion of the absurd and the sublime in fact the sublime could be seen as the begining of the absurd in that the sublime is the moment we realise the human impossibiltiy of belittling the universe down to a human size. You can see your life as insignificant against the sublime, see your life as meaningless but that would be narsassitic. Just enjoy the view.
Anyway good bye i have writting this blog for too long i was going to write a bit more but that will have to do. the gist of the essay was I was going to talk a wee bit about the spiral jetty and what that says about the sublime and also speak a wee bit about entropy.
a spiral goes on forever because it never leads anywhere
I was then going to talk again about jacobs ladder whilst comparing and contrasting it with Sisyphuses task and talk about the matieral and the immatieral. sisyphus was damned because of his love for life and his wish to remain in the realm of bodily sensations-earth. I was also going to mention "a matter of life and death" again. because this fit with the sisyphin philosophym, with the desplay of love for life. While jacobs ladder is celebrating the fact that we can escape and leave this body behind. The body is the boulder but instead of having to roll it up a hill we have to feed and water it everyday, more than once supplying its demades is what keeps us chained to the earth. Climbing up jacobs ladder is to leave it behind.
I am an absurdist in the respect that I don't belive in a god and I know I can't understand the universe but it is foolish to then see life as a drugery. that the gist of what I was going to say but I need to write about other stuff before the deadline smacks me in the face. its taken my days to write this far I am just too easily distracted why did them have to combine the typewritter with the biggest cornicopia of distraction that mankind has ever consieved. Everytime I start to type the temptation just to read or watch something new and interesting pops up. yes I am going know goodbye.
"We gladly submit to the physical necessity of our well-being and our existence, for that reminds us precisely, that it has no command over our principles. Man is in its hand, but the will of man is in his own." schiller
climbing to the sublime.
"I leave Sisyphus at the foot of the mountain! One always finds one's burden again. But Sisyphus teaches the higher fidelity that negates the gods and raises rocks. He too concludes that all is well. This universe henceforth without a master seems to him neither sterile nor futile. Each atom of that stone, each mineral flake of that night filled mountain, in itself forms a world. The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man's heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy" camus
"despite everything i believe people are really good at heart" anne frank
crafty people don't do these sort of tasks
you never see femme fatales doing housework except maybe as penance. sisyphus was the crafiest of men
Fullest Feeling of Sublime – Immensity of Universe's extent or duration. (Pleasure from knowledge of observer's nothingness and oneness with Nature).
The word, of Latin origin, means something that is 'set or raised aloft, high up'. The sublime is further defined as having the quality of such greatness, magnitude or intensity, whether physical, metaphysical, moral, aesthetic or spiritual, that our ability to perceive or comprehend it is temporarily overwhelmed.
can the sublime defeat absurdism, it dosen't matter whether life has meaning or not It just matter whether or not it seems to.
sublime is most sublime when it can kill you thundrous ocean or explosize vollcano. Why not tripping over your shoe laces while going downstairs? when the sublime and the mundane meet. The romantics worship death as much as nature and life. death is the ultimate in sublime. the great darkness.
The zohar also connects Jacob's Ladder to the mystery of the human body. "Soncino Zohar, Bereshith, Section 1, Page 150b - Jacob then said: THIS IS NONE OTHER THAN THE HOUSE OF GOD , implying: This is not to remain idle; its covenant is not meant to exist in isolation. It is in sooth a godly abode, to be used for the promotion of fecundity and for receiving blessing from all the bodily organs. For indeed this is THE GATE OF HEAVEN , or, in other words, the gate of the Body, the gate assuredly through which pass the blessings downwards, so that it is attached both on high and below: on high, as being the gate of heaven, and below, as being none other than the house of God."
"In the sublime, on the contrary, reason and sensuousness do not harmonize, and precisely in this contradiction between both lies the charm wherewith it seizes our soul. The physical and the moral man are separated here from one another most sharply; for exactly in such objects, where the first only feels its limits, does the other have the experience of its force and is elevated infinitely precisely through that which presses the other to the ground."schiller
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