POUSSIERE LINGUISTIQUE
POSTSCRIPT
"If we reflect how long the belief in disguises survived -- how farce throughout the ages, Shakespeare's high comedy, and even the detective story of the late nineteenth century found it quite unproblematic to work with the confusions that result from disguises -- it must be a matter of considerable astonishment to see how reluctant people are to accept such devices in more recent times. When it comes to disguises, they refuse to see the joke, and in the modern novel such mistaken identities are frowned on. Yet this dogged insistence on the unmistakable, unique singularity of the body comes at precisely the moment when philanthropists, the disciples of Proust, and psychoanalysts assure us that all possibilities dwell within each of us, and that nothing could be more out-of-date and philistine than the belief in the unity of the personality. What can be behind this?" --Walter Benjamin, "Milieu Theoreticians" (1929)
“House_House” is also a turning point, signifying the turning point implicit (always already present / found) within surrational sursurration … that is, whispers regarding some-thing else … or other coordinates … Hence the tell-tale presence of Adolf Loos, but hence -- too -- Proust and the specter of Bachelard (unnamed, yet present) …The twin villas resemble many things all at once … They seem somehow related, in spirit, as well, to the two houses used in Andrei Tarkovsky’s last film Sacrifice (1986), insofar as those two houses were actually one house (Tarkovsky had to build two identical houses, and burn both to the ground, when the camera jammed during the filming of the first conflagration) … Which brings forward the extraordinary mise en scène of Tarkovsky’s extraordinary films … which is, in fact, the linguistic mise en scène for “House_House” …
The ‘house’ as penultimate architectural conundrum … mired / sited in linguistic dust* (poussière linguistique) … Thus, apparently, magically, yet another figure appears in the margins (off-stage) -- John Hejduk, architect ‘from the future’ (if ever there was one) … but also Raimund Abraham … progenitors of the house of being-in-the-world … of being-in-the-world-on-fire … And, therefore Artaud … patron saint of being-on-fire-in-the-world (signaling through the flames) …
The ethereal music that emanates from “House_House” (on the same moon-lit nights that the tree appears) is Johann Sebastian Bach’s Matthäus-Passion (1720s), music (especially “Erbarme dich, mein Gott […]”) that permeates both Tarkovsky’s Sacrifice and Pasolini’s The Gospel According to St Matthew (1965) … Music inspired by the “most human” of the Gospels … time-less music … the total work of art …
The image of the tree (a ‘dancing tree’) is Blakean … a tree that appears only when the moon is full or nearly-full (meaning, of course, in the imagination) … It may or may not be the same tree that Blake saw ‘limbed’ with angels … This tree may also be the tree Shirin Neshat implicates in her two-screen, 12-minute video “Tooba”, the tree in Paradise that offers shelter and sustenance … except that the conceptual sign of ‘Paradise’ (the walled garden), here, is the very spirit of immanence, versus some-where, some-place else …
Lastly, “House_House” (A Turning Point) looks to the future, through the prescience of the present-present … All things being equal, some-times, the present-present invokes all times, invoking -- ultimately and tragically -- the Angel of History (Walter Benjamin’s ‘Angel’, by way of Karl Kraus by way of Paul Klee) … In one of the two villas, or both (if both are one), therefore, lives ‘the Angel’ …
GK (12/10/03)
*Linguistic dust is the term given, in linguistics, to the odd (rare) occurrence of two words having the exact same meaning ... otherwise known as doublets ...
THE 'ANGELIC' - "And so, imagination uses and invents other fragments as visible components of the unity which it is trying to achieve." --Aldo Rossi, in Massimo Scheurer, "Angels and Architecture", Paolo Portoghesi (ed.), Aldo Rossi: Sketchbooks, 1990-1997 (London: Thames & Hudson, 2000), p. 180
THE REDUCTION - “There remains after this imaginary destruction of things, not something, but the fact that there is [il y a]. The absence of all things returns like a presence: like a site wherein everything has sunken, like an atmospheric density, like a plenitude of emptiness or like the murmur of silence. There is, after this destruction of things and beings, the ‘field of forces’ of existing, impersonal. Something that is neither a subject, nor a substantive. The fact of existing, which imposes itself when there is nothing more. And it is anonymous: there is no one and nothing that might take this existence upon itself. It is impersonal like ‘it is raining’ or ‘it is hot.’ An existing that returns, whatever be the negation by which one sets it aside. This is something like a pure existing that cannot be remitted.” --Emmanuel Lévinas, Le temps et l’autre, in Le choix, le monde, l’existence (Paris: Arthaud, 1948), pp. 25-26; cited in Jacques Rolland, “Getting Out of Being by a New Path”, Emmanuel Lévinas, On Escape: De l’évasion [1935], trans. Bettina Bergo (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003), p. 25
RAIMUND ABRAHAM - Elementare Architektur / Architectonics (Salzburg: Verlag Anton Pustet, 2001) - 74 pages, English/German text, ISBN 3-702-50439-7 / Manhattan Austria: die Architektur des österreichischen Kulturinstitutes von Raimund Abraham [The Architecture of the Austrian Cultural Institute by Raimund Abraham] (Vienna: Architektur Zentrum Wien; Salzburg: Verlag Anton Pustet, 1999), Catalogue of the AZW exhibition, Vienna, March 24-May 10, 1999, 96 pages / (Un)built (New York: Springer Verlag, 1996) - Cloth, ISBN 3-211-82671-8 / Abraham Bibliography (Loeb Library, Harvard GSD) / Abraham Dossier (Yellow Pages) ...
“To think of one thing, one must first think of something else.” –Jean-Luc Godard, Eloge de l'Amour (2001)
