Week 8 assignment: essay – interrelationships reflection apa format | Applied Sciences homework help
- If we label Chicago’s The Dinner Party a feminist work, is it then to be treated as political sculpture? Do you think Lin’s Vietnam Veterans Memorial is a less political or more political sculpture than Chicago’s work? Could Serra’s Sequence be consid- ered a political work? Would labeling these works as political render them any less important as works of art?
FIGURE 5-29 Richard Serra, Sequence. 2006. Cor-Ten steel, 12 feet 9 inches × 40 feet 83⁄8 inches × 65 feet 23⁄16 inches. People walk around and in this gigantic work, in which the walls are torqued in such a way as to lean toward the viewer. Critic Ronald Paulson calls Serra the greatest modern sculptor, perhaps the greatest sculptor. ©2017 Richard Serra/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photo ©Frederick Charles jac16871_ch05_091-120.indd 119 12/11/17 11:41 AM 120
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Summary Sculpture is perceived differently from painting, engaging more acutely our sense of touch and the feeling of our bodies. Whereas painting is more about the visual appearance of things, sculpture is more about things as three-dimensional masses. Whereas painting only represents voluminosity and density, sculpture presents these qualities. Sculpture in the round, especially, brings out the three-dimensional- ity of objects. No object is more important to us than our bodies, and their “strange thickness” is always with us. When the human body is the subject matter, sculp- ture more than any other art reveals a material counterpoint for our mental images of our bodies. Traditional sculpture is made by either modeling or carving. Many contemporary sculptures, however, are made by assembling preformed pieces of material. New sculptural techniques and materials have opened developments in avant-garde sculpture that defy classification. Nonetheless, contemporary sculp- tors, generally, have emphasized truth to materials, respect for the medium that is organized by their forms. Space, protest against technology, accommodation with technology, machine, and earth sculpture are five of the most important new spe- cies. Public sculpture is flourishing. jac16871_ch05_091-120.indd 120 12/11/17 11:41 AM 121 ©kossarev56/Shutterstock RF Chapter 6
ARCHITECTURE
We can close the novel, shut off the music, refuse to go to a play or dance, sleep through a movie, shut our eyes to a painting or a sculpture. But we cannot escape from buildings for very long. Fortunately, however, sometimes buildings are works of art—that is, architecture. They draw us to them rather than push us away or make us ignore them. They make our living space more livable. Architecture is the shaping of buildings and space. Centered SpaCe Painters do not command real three-dimensional space: They feign it. Sculptors can mold out into space, but generally they do not enfold an enclosed or inner space for our movement. Our passage through the inner spaces of architecture is one of the conditions under which its solids and voids have their effect. In a sense, architecture is a great hollowed-out sculpture that we perceive by moving about both outside and inside. Space is the material of the architect, the primeval cutter,* who carves apart an inner space from an outer space in such a way that both spaces become more fully perceptible and interesting. Inner and outer space come together on the earth to form a centered and illumi- nated context or clearing. Centered space is the arrangement of things around some paramount thing—the place at which the other things seem to converge. Sometimes *This meaning is suggested by the Greek architectón. jac16871_ch06_121-162.indd 121 12/11/17 11:44 AM 122
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this center is a natural site, such as a great mountain, river, canyon, or forest. Some- times the center is a natural site enhanced by a human-made structure. Centered space is centripetal, insisting upon drawing us in. There is an in-rush that is difficult to escape, that overwhelms and makes us acquiescent. We perceive space not as a receptacle containing things but rather as a context energized by the positioned interrelationships of things. Centered space has a pulling power that, even in our most harassed moments, we cannot escape feeling. In the Valley of the Kings in Egypt (Figure 6-1), we approach the mortuary temple of the female pharaoh Hatshepsut with a sense of awe. It is, rightly, called the most beautiful of all the temples in the valley, perhaps in all of early Egypt. We find ourselves in the presence of a power beyond our control. We feel the sublimity of space, but, at the same time, the centeredness beckons and welcomes us. SpaCe and arChiteCture Architects are the shepherds of space. In turn, the paths around their shelters lead us away from our ordinary preoccupations demanding the use of space. We come to rest. Instead of our using up space, space takes possession of us with a ten-fingered grasp. We have a place to dwell. Architecture—as opposed to mere engineering—is the creative conservation of space. Architects perceive the centers of space in nature and build to preserve these centers and make them more vital. Architects are confronted by centered spaces that desire to be made, through them, into works. These spaces of nature are not offspring of architects alone but appearances that step up to them, so to speak, and demand protection. If an architect succeeds in carrying through these appeals, the power of the natural space streams forth and the work rises. The architect typically shelters inner space from outer space in such a way that we can use the inner space for practical purposes at the same time we perceive both spaces and their relationships as more interesting, thus evoking participation. The partitioning of space renders invisible air visible. Inside the building, space is filled with stresses and pressures. Outside the building, space becomes organized and fo- cused. Inner space is anchored to the earth. Outer space converges upon inner space. Architecture generally creates a strengthened hierarchy in the positioned interrela- tionships of earth and sky and what is in between. Architecture enhances the centered clearings of nature, accentuating a context in which all our senses can be in harmony with their surroundings. And even when architecture is not present, our memories FIGURE 6-1 Mortuary Temple of Hatshepsut, Valley of the Kings, Egypt, 15th century BCE. The temple was designed by Senmut, an architect and Hatshepsut’s visier and, according to legend, her lover. Hatshepsut (1508–1458 BCE) was the most successful of Egypt’s female pharaohs. This is one of the greatest examples of symmetry in early architecture. ©Lee A. Jacobus jac16871_ch06_121-162.indd 122 12/11/17 11:44 AM 123
ARCHITECTURE
of architecture, especially of great buildings, teach us how to order the sensations of our natural environment. Aristotle said, “Art completes nature.” Every natural environ- ment, unless it has been ruined by humans, lends itself to centering and ordering, even if no architecture is there. The architectural model teaches us how to be more sensitive to the potential centering and ordering of nature. As a result of such intensified sensitiv- ity, we have a context—a special place—within which the sounds, smells, temperatures, breezes, volumes, masses, colors, lines, textures, and constant changes of nature can be ordered into something more than a blooming, buzzing confusion. That special place might be sublimely open, as with the spectacle of an ocean, or cozily closed, as with a bordered brook. In either case, nature is consecrated, and we belong and dwell. ChartreS On a hot summer day many years ago, following the path of Henry Adams, who wrote Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres, one of the authors was attempting to drive from Mont-Saint-Michel to Chartres in time to catch the setting sun through the western rose window of Chartres Cathedral (Figures 6-2 and 6-3). The following is an account of this experience: In my rushing anxiety—I had to be in Paris the following day and I had never been to Char- tres before—I became oblivious of space except as providing landmarks for my time-clocked progress. Thus I have no significant memories of the towns and countrysides I hurried through. Late that afternoon the two spires of Chartres, like two strangely woven strands of rope let down from the heavens, gradually came into focus. The blue dome of the sky also became visible for the first time, centering as I approached more and more firmly around FIGURE 6-2 Chartres Cathedral, Chartres. The cathedral, built starting in 1140 and continuing into the fifteenth century, dominates the cityscape. Chartres is considered the greatest of the Gothic cathedrals. ©Alinari Archives/Corbis/Getty Images jac16871_ch06_121-162.indd 123 12/11/17 11:45 AM FIGURE 6-3 Chartres Cathedral. The great western rose window. The window casts a powerful light within the cathedral in the later afternoon. Rose windows were designed to cast a “dim, religious light,” as the poet John Milton said. ©Lee A. Jacobus *Chartres, like most Gothic churches, is shaped roughly like a recumbent Latin cross: The front—with its large circular window shaped like a rose and the three vertical windows, or lancets, beneath—faces west. The apse, or eastern end, of the building contains the high altar. The nave is the central and largest aisle leading from the central portal to the high altar. But before the altar is reached, the transept crosses the nave. Both the northern and southern facades of the transept of Chartres contain, like the western facade, glorious rose windows. (Drawing after R. Sturgis) the axis of those spires. “In lovely blueness blooms the steeple with metal roof ” (Hölderlin). The surrounding fields and then the town, coming out now in all their specificity, grew into tighter unity with the church and sky. I recalled a passage from Aeschylus: “The pure sky desires to penetrate the earth, and the earth is filled with love so that she longs for blissful unity with the sky. The rain falling from the sky impregnates the earth, so that she gives birth to plants and grain for beasts and men.” No one rushed in or out or around the church. The space around seemed alive and dense with slow currents all ultimately being pulled to and through the central portal.* Inside, the space, although spacious far beyond the scale of practical human needs, seemed strangely compressed, full of forces thrusting and counterthrusting in dynamic interrelations. Slowly, in the cool silence inlaid with stone, 124 jac16871_ch06_121-162.indd 124 12/11/17 11:45 AM 125
ARCHITECTURE
I was drawn down the long nave, following the stately rhythms of the bays and piers. But my eyes also followed the vast vertical stretches far up into the shifting shadows of the vaultings. It was as if I were being borne aloft. Yet I continued down the narrowing tunnel of the nave, but more and more slowly as the pull of the space above held back the pull of the space below. At the crossing of the transept, the flaming colors, especially the reds, of the northern and southern roses transfixed my slowing pace, and then I turned back at last to the western rose and the three lancets beneath—a delirium of color, dominantly blue, was pouring through. Earthbound on the crossing, the blaze of the Without was merging with the Within. Radiant space took complete possession of my senses. In the protective grace of this sheltering space, even the outer space which I had dismissed in the traffic of my driving seemed to converge around the center of this crossing. Instead of being alongside things— the church, the town, the fields, the sky, the sun—I was with them, at one with them. This housing of holiness made me feel at home in this strange land. PERCEPTION KEY Chartres Cathedral 1. Form and function usually work together in classic architecture. What visible ex- terior architectural details indicate that Chartres Cathedral functions as a church? Are there any visible details that conflict with its function as a church?