The Shelter or A Fear of the Touch of
the Unknown, 2006
Instructions for assembly – Gwyn
Porter
1. According to the phrase book I was given, “The
verb ‘to be’ can take two forms in
Portuguese: ser or estar. Ser is used when speaking
about permanent characteristics… The verb
estar is used for characteristics or states that
are temporary.” It lead me to wonder what
effect such a choice operating in the language
had on the Brazilian people – are they forced
into venturing opinions about whether or not they
think something is cast in stone or in a state
of flux? Did this mean that people went for the ‘to
be’ that pertains to the temporary more than
that pertaining to the permanent? Did the more
practice they had about making the calls mean they
had more or less certainty? Was this something
that was discussed? Were particular named or unnamed
virtues, or disparagements (etiquette, even) attached
to such verb usage?
2. A tent was erected on a 10m wall that is the
exterior surface of a two-storeyed building housing
the A Gentil Carioca gallery in Rio de Janeiro’s
Centro district – an area of fairly low-rent
specialty shops in 19th century edifices of the
same height on narrow lumpy streets that are more
like footpaths than roads. (Set up by four prominent
artists, the gallery’s name roughly translates
to “a kind person from Rio de Janeiro”,
Carioca being the word used to denote someone who
is from Rio and embraces it as an operating system.
The gallery project seems to be quite irreverent
to its architectural space, relishing, with some
sort of “will to break”, the opportunity
to bash walls, cut into floors, introduce objects
that seem too big or impossible to introduce.)
More correctly, the tent is a Portaledge, a device
developed for climbers to sleep in when they are
part-way through a climb, or just don’t want
to come down yet. An essential for the (comically)
well-equipped nomad, its colours are synthetic,
poisonous even.
3. In nature, such a colour-way might warn birds “don’t
eat me, I will make you sick or even kill you.” Or
they might, conversely, attract insects to pollinate
its flower and allow multiplication and thus species
adaptation and continuation, to take place. The
way that this tent clings to the sheer face of
the wall, quite remarkably, in my mind makes it
slightly more akin to a plant than an insect (unless
it was still a cocoon). It has the air of an epiphyte – a
plant that grows on another plant, but is not a
parasite – or one of those plants that grows
seemingly unfeasibly out of a brick wall or motorway
structure, only time telling how long it will be
able to sustain itself as it taxes its available
nutrient resources. The tent is to remain on the
wall for six months and given how attractive it
looks, who knows if it will last the distance?
Maybe it will be ‘plucked’…
4. It is orchid-like in colouration and in its
opportunism, this portaledge, and its cords attach
it to the surface like aerial roots; only in this
case they are tied to karabiners, the clip rock-climbers
use to secure themselves to the pins they have
wedged, drilled and sometimes glued into the face.
So much architecture and so many plants seem overblown
in their foundations compared to these entities.
Somehow the way they have a lighter existence lends
them the impression of being untroubled by such
assertions as Marx’s “Everything that
is solid turns into air”, whereby the effect
of capital is perhaps suggested to take the ground
from our feet, our feet, and everything else too.
5. Marx was remarked on a lot during our stay,
but not Karl, a different fellow – Burle
Marx was a Brazilian landscape architect who worked
closely with Oscar Niemeyer, the man most popularly
known for designing Brasilia’s major buildings.
Marx designed, not only Brasilia’s urban
landscape, but what might very well be the longest
drawing-as-public-sculpture in the world, namely
the beachfront promenade footpaths at Ipanema and
Copacabana. Based
on the original design introduced from
Portugal at the beginning of the century, the paths
are made up of almost cubic stones of dark granite
and another equally hard and fine whitish stone
of about paper-weight size. These materials and
this same process are used a lot in other older
parts of the city, and the pattern variation is
impressive, and tends to be more organic than rectilinear.
Marx’s path figures a long, regular, sinuous
wave, as if describing a sweet sustained note that
one cannot see the end of, or the beginning either.
Which reminds me, didn’t Goethe call architecture
frozen music?
6. As the sun goes down at Ipanema, the crowd
on the beach applauds.
7. When a stone is dislodged from the footpath,
others work their way out and holes develop. Sometimes
people pile the loose bits up near a tree or something
else providing a place to pile them close by. These
loose stones seem to know their power as potential
missiles in street confrontations, and as reminders
of the rubble that is history. As broken architecture,
they also seem to speak of destroyed walls, walls
of thought especially, that, when broken down to
their semantic units (bricks?), can be re-employed
or drafted into other generative utterances.
8. Mitchell had considered casting these cobblestones
as part of an on-going interest in the materials
employed by civilians during unrest, revolution
and riot; particularly the matter that is drawn
in to the erection of barricades. He has been collecting
documentary images of such “spontaneous architecture” as
he has come to call it, into a sort of archive.
He has been engaged in a process of redrawing these,
some of which are photographs of obstructions set
up during the military dictatorship in Brazil in
the 1960s. Of this process he has said that “it
is also interesting, on a more formal note, that
when I am laboriously drawing these constructions
/ objects / assemblages that I am distilling them
(I have it in mind that they will float in space,
on the page in the ‘no-context’ of
white paper) when they were constructed in a moment
of urgency and exigency where formal concerns were
arbitrary.”
9. Mitchell also relates the barricades to a kind
of theatre, quoting Virilio to illustrate: “Barricades
are a kind of theatre prepared in advance of confrontation/war: ‘if
the ancients seem first and foremost to be builders
of ramparts and fortifications, it is because the
ambition of conducting a war begins with the planning
of its theatre, or the creation of artificial environmental
conditions which will form the infrastructure,
the stage on which the scenario should be played
out.’ Barricades represent political activity
making its way into reality (becoming concrete).
Popular defense, and transgression of ordinary ‘productive’ use
of objects – containers, tyres, road cobblestones,
gates.”
10. The tent is illuminated at night, giving it
the air of an incubator, or grow room. This atmosphere
of assisted growing suggests that either a plant
is being forced to go to places it has never been
before by an inspired breeder, or that the organism
is fragile and needs all the help it can get. All
orchids are endangered species now it is rumoured.
They are apparently unable to survive any longer
without help from the species that has changed
the world so much: a veritable plague, humans are,
in ecological terms.
11. There is a vast botanical gardens in Rio,
established by the son of the King of Portugal
in 1808 who was a lover of exotic plants. He had
specimens collected from all corners of the world
and establishes in a huge private arboretum. There
are also greenhouses for things like cacti, carnivorous
plants and, of course, orchids. When plants become
a part of a collecting garden, they seem to enter
the realm of human meaning in the sense of being
subject to taxonomies whereby order imposed on
their natural freedom from content and specificity.
They are dragged from formlessness into language
and into our attempts to map out something of their
scope and range. But despite these efforts to make
plants participate, they seem to draw back into
their own mysterious realm.
12. Fernando Pessoa (1888-1935), the Portuguese
writer of many pseudonyms, or heteronyms as he
called them, wrote in his posthumously published
The Book of Disquiet that “If I contemplate,
I don’t think. On these days, I am particularly
fond of gardens”.
13. Rio is in the tropics, and, if the heat would
ever let you forget, the plants that spring out
of every available crevice would remind you that
the dirt has memory of being jungle.
14. But this tent is not in nature, it is in a
public square of sorts; or rather the wall it is
on is. Centro is full of small shops, specialist
shops to be exact where one can go to see a full
range of prosthetics, tubes, craft materials, musical
instruments, stationery, tiles etc. It seems that
whatever you need is there, like a sort of trading
bazaar when really it is just a shitty part of
town where there are shops for everything and it
just seems exotic because I am visiting. They still
have the same $2 shop crapola that you can get
here in Auckland, naturally. The crossroads that
the gallery is on is actually quite a wide space,
an almost but not quite square, or largo. (Isn’t
that Latin for slowly, a musical instruction?)
On one corner an unassuming bar spills out, its
plastic beer company-sponsored furniture providing
a place in the evenings to hang out for people
who must live or work thereabouts. Every now and
again a vendor passes through with big potted ferns
hanging from a pole resting on his shoulder.
15. It is one thing to plan to put a tent up a
wall, but it is quite another to actually achieve
this – who would have thought there would
step forward a perfectly personable artist who
is also an accomplished rock climber? It is also
another thing to find out what such an audience,
as provided by the bar, makes of the work. According
to one of the gallerists, the tent has been quite
the primer for jokes, mainly about it being a place
to sleep away from home – a dog-box for those
in trouble with “her indoors”, or something
that can be hired by the hour. Another unexpected
element was that this site gag is suspended on
a wall that is perpendicular to the window of the
local dealer-pimp. Its height was adjusted accordingly
so to not be alarmingly on a level with the two
orange-lit openings in his dwelling.
16. At night this work takes on a special quality,
a sweetness, night being a time of greater vulnerability
to mysterious forces, of greater fears, and more
un-knowns. It also falls after the end of the worker’s
day and is a time to stop, repair, and let sleep
knit the ravelled sleeve of care. In this light
the portaledge hangs like an object’s public
dream about the emancipatory power of absenting
oneself from such earthly demands as gravity, participation,
meaning or touch.
17. It was suggested by a critic speaking on a
video resource in a Lygia Clark retrospective,
on in Sao Paulo at the time as Mitchell’s
project in Rio, that in Brazilian art there seems
to be a unity between the cerebral and the sensual.
Similarly, looking at Mitchell’s project,
there is no way of escaping vertiginous sensations
of a considerable nature. (Perhaps here it is our
disconnection with our bodies that is being scaled
or assailed?) Further parallels could be seen to
lie in the way Clark’s work was lauded for
asking why can’t the body free itself from
pain, and also for representing a return to an
era in which art was anonymous. Mitchell’s
tent, in its up-ness looks like it desires or is
aping transcendence, and it too has all the non-specific
anonymity of the found object.
18. The artist is not interested in any biographical
interpretations of the tent – as in he is
not in it, nor going to get in it and that is not
the point – and he is not even really interested
in it as the tent of a climber. The potential slapstick
quality of presenting something to be beheld that
usually denotes a desire for privacy is emptied
out by the way the object is re-inscribed, if by
nothing else than the fact that no-one is going
to believe that this was a legitimate climb. At
only a few metres in height – even though
it is high enough to injure, to look determined
about getting away from people – it is hardly “where
eagles dare”.
19. Lessons from my errant grandmother on the
redeployment of objects: lean a long dining table
down a flight of stairs and it becomes a slide
for you and your siblings. Shove a croquet hoop
through the bottom of a canoe and it becomes a
cruel joke against an unwelcome tea-guest.
20. The tent seems more of a figure, for the artist,
of a reclamation of space which is, he says, “schizophrenic
in some ways – a reclamation of space; latching
onto public space; taking space that is unused;
but a retreat, a hiding space.” To me it
sits as a strange anomaly – it seems to offer
sleep, but how could anyone sleep hanging out over
who knows what height and potential fall (the very
stuff of nightmares)? It also seems to figure an
explorer character (as “tent” connotes
to me “away from home”, or “wilderness”)
one who determinedly goes where one isn’t
normally able to go – perhaps even somewhere
inadvisable. An invocation to a bored god?
21. Ursula le Guin, the great SF/fantasy writer,
once wanted to provoke a response from a colleague’s
university class that she had been invited to speak
to. The paper was called “Wilderness” and
she raised the idea that wilderness is that place
outside of what is accessible to or structured
by language; and that wilderness is a female space,
a silent hinterland – no call of the wild
draws men into this imperceptible landscape. This,
to me, places extreme sports in an interesting
light – are they perhaps enacted by men who
are subconsciously trying to “reach” their
other in their “Nature” (men’s
discoverable wilderness)? It is, after all, a two-person
tent?
22. The supposed collapse of distance afforded
by jet travel is particularly satisfying when traveling
to South America given that NZ was originally joined
with this continent. (Our kowhai is the national
plant of Chile, Mitchell has pointed out; but it
is, of course, called something else there.) There
was a model of Gondwanaland in the Canterbury Museum
that, when you pushed a button, showed an ancient
continent floating apart into the modern land-masses
we are familiar with. Then the light would go out
and it would float back together.
23. Last night an old man asked me, as I was complaining
of jet-lag, “have you seen the way that an
Aborigine on walk-about stops and leans on his
long stick with one leg bent up?” I said
that I had, I thought, and he asked if I knew why.
I said I didn’t. He said “an aboriginal
man told me once that after they walk for a while,
they stop and wait for their soul to catch up.”
24. The distinction between cartography and archeology
made by Deleuze (the former pertaining to psychoanalysis
and the latter to schizoanalysis) seems to have
been run rough-shod over by Mitchell who gleefully
tilts to both with no particular preference for
either in the making of his maps, cross-section
diagrams, schedules of evidence, and plaster-cast “tells”.
He appears to prefer to exist in the exquisite
both-ness enjoyed by poets and deplored by rationalists.
In his practice, both map-making and archeology
come across as absurdist and marvellous – one
pertaining to shifting constellations of thought-paths
across surfaces, and the other to “deep” strata-plumbing
reductions.
25. Even the frame of the tent itself seems a
diagram of sorts, one that maps out its own absence.
26. Both map-making and archeology seem to be
plagued by the problems Fredric Jameson talked
about in his recent Auckland lecture that are involved
with any kind of “cognitive mapping” and “the
dynamic difficulties of the representational process” in
general. For example, he cited Godard’s question: “can
labour or work ever be represented?”. What
about “a nervous flock of birds”, “the
global flight of trade, foreign exchange”, “the
simultaneity of space/time?” he asked. Of
representation, he said, “fiction is its
function, not its mal-function”. “Maps,
like documentaries, often have their paranoid dimensions” (paranoia
being the breakdown of representational systems).
27. It is worth noting that the title of this
work of spontaneous architecture is taken from
the first line of Elias Canetti’s book Crowds
and Power: “There is nothing that man fears
more than the touch of the un-known. He wants to
see what is reaching towards him, and to be able
to recognize or at least classify it. Men always
tend to avoid contact with anything strange. In
the dark the fear of an unexpected touch can mount
to panic. Even clothes give insufficient security:
it is easy to tear them and pierce through to the
naked, smooth, defenceless skin of the victim.”
28. In this light, the tent might figure the human
body, which, as Thomas Carl Wall pointed out in
his book Radical Passivity, has a skin, where the
self does not. It could figure, more numerously, “the
flight crowd” – that, according to
Canetti, which is “created by a threat”.
This is the crowd that relates to strikes; it explodes
in all directions, including up, each individual
losing themselves into the mass in an exquisite
act of surrender. All reserve, all hierarchies
and boundaries are destroyed by such a crowd, including
the perceived limits of one’s own person.
Furthermore, the original fear and need for protection
from touch is paradoxically reversed where the
crowd is at its most dense.
29. They seem to take to crowds remarkably well
in Brazil. Quite apart from the obvious, I was
very taken with a crowd that came past the building
we were staying in every weekday morning at half-past
eight. Between them and I was the canopy of trees
that filled the head-space of the avenue below,
so I could not see who was pouring past. But I
could clearly hear a pack of a hundred or so primary-school
children coming down from the hill one street back,
heading towards the beach, one block away. They
were not just chattering, but chanting, egged on
by their teachers, I have no idea what, and for
the life of me it sounded like a child protest
march, but too happy a riot to be against anything
except maybe reserve.
30. Surely there is nothing more inviting than
a sheer face, metaphorically or otherwise, to those
who dislike ruling things out, at least before
a solid attempt. Mitchell’s tent seems to
quietly, methodically, comically, as if it were
alone, move on from its success in getting purchase
on the “impossible” by setting up to
sleep on it; as protected from the crowd as a child
in its hut made of sheets and a clotheshorse or
any other dwelling sub-component material can be
drawn over to suspend relations.
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