There are two versions of the story of Orpheus. I imagine this means there are two Orpheuses. One Orpheus unfolds in the poetry of Ovid’s Metamorphoses and follows the pattern of Virgil’s Georgics.1 Ovid tells a story of an Orpheus that breathes life into stone with song. It’s a story of an Orpheus in love but who lost his new bride Eurydice. Twice. The first loss occurred when Eurydice was playing with other nymphs in a field and was bitten on the ankle by a serpent. Orpheus found the body. His grief was so immense that he sang for Eurydice ‘in the upper realms of air’, on the Earth, and then in ‘the shades below’, the land of the dead, Hades. He wanted her back. He sang such a ritournelle that he was able to assert an order of life in the underworld itself. Orpheus sang to Persephone, queen of Hades: ‘[b]y these places filled with horrors, by this vast Chaos, and by the silence of these boundless realms, I entreat you, weave over again the quick-spun thread of the life of Eurydice’.2 The song was so affecting that even the ‘bloodless spirits wept’. Orpheus was granted his wish to return Eurydice to the Earth, but on the condition that he led the way and did not look back upon his bride until they had both reached the surface. Before the journey was complete Orpheus, perhaps out of fear, turns. He gazed back at Eurydice only to see her falling for a second and final time back to Hades: ‘stretching out her arms, and struggling to be grasped, and to grasp him, [she] caught nothing but the fleeting air’.3
This Orpheus is the Orpheus of much artistic, theatrical, literary and architectural endeavour. It is the Orpheus of architects who hope to breathe life into stone – into architecture – in order to breach the gap between the corporeal and incorporeal; to occupy a zone of indiscernibility between the two. It’s perhaps a noble endeavour but it may be a fruitless one. The tale of this Orpheus suggests as much. For if we are to imagine that we can breathe life into architecture without also giving over, losing, something of the self (or at least the self as we know it) then the task may be in vain.
A second Orpheus also engages with this gap between the corporeal and incorporeal but the moral of this tale suggests that this gap should be breached in a radically different manner. This Orpheus predates that of Ovid and Virgil and is thus a ‘second’ Orpheus in systems other than chronology. This Orpheus is invoked by Phaedrus, a character which in turn is invoked by Plato. In Plato’s Symposium Phaedrus, an aristocratic insider, joins a party of figures to lecture on love.4 The party consists of Pausanias a legal expert, Eryximachus a physician, Aristophanes a playwright, Agathon a poet, Socrates a philosopher and Alcibiades a statesman. In his opening lecture, Phaedrus makes mention of an Orpheus. It’s a fleeting reference. It’s a story within a story as such. A story within a story that we hear as a third, fourth and fifth-hand account. For there is in Plato’s Symposium a rhetoric of layering: of stories, of accounts and of what may come to pass as rumours. This work reeks like the press conferences of the Bush and Blair era. An era of media theatre, of spin-doctors and the doctoring of events in order to keep blood from the hands of authors. Terminally mediated stories with devastating consequences. Plato begins to tell his story via Phaedrus. Phaedrus in turn quotes Hesiod:
First Chaos came, and then broad-bosomed Earth,
The everlasting seat of all that is,
And Love.5
The story Phaedrus tells is a story of love; love and death. Eros, we are told, is the oldest of the gods and ‘Love is a mighty God’ and for Phaedrus death is framed as love’s most fitting corollary. In his lecture, love and death are a system of equilibrium whereby every sacrifice equals a commensurate reward. Phaedrus tells a story of the love of country expressed on battlefields and of the eros of the soldier. The eros of those that die for love. Orpheus was no such figure and Phaedrus casts his Orpheus as a ‘miserable harper’ and a coward.6 For Phaedrus, Orpheus dabbled at the edges of Hades and failed to appropriately respond to the death of Eurydice. We are told that this Orpheus went to the underworld in order to bring his beloved back and instead was given only an apparition. This Orpheus was mocked by the gods. His crime was in choosing not to die in order to be with Eurydice. Phaedrus reminds us that the decision to die for love was a decision that was rewarded by the gods in the case of Alcestis who had died in order to preserve the life of her partner Admetus. There is no more noble an act in Phaedrus’ cosmos than to die for love, for ‘[l]ove will make men dare to die for their beloved – love alone’.7
For Phaedrus love has an object: love for country, love for a partner. It has meaning: love is a sign of loyalty. It is in service of a stable state: a love in the service of fatherlands and extant relations, and; it operates in a well-balanced system of morality. All the daughters of the state love a soldier in Plato’s Symposium and in more contemporary times every death on a battlefield is rewarded with a military funeral: a coffin draped in a crisp national flag, a lone bugler and a budget dedicated to flowers. It is love that leads us to places from which we may not return: Afghanistan, Iraq and Hades. It is an easy story to tell for the men of the Symposium: an aristocrat, a legal expert, a physician, a playwright, a poet, a philosopher and a statesman. It’s a harder story to hear for those that have to fight and die. For those that are the subject of the story rather than the authors thereof: a soldier, a refugee, a grieving widower and an orphan. But Eros – like every Marvel comic character – is already an orphan, with nothing to lose but the sense of loss. The sacrifice was already made.
This second Orpheus is an Orpheus largely unrecognized in artistic, theatrical, literary and architectural endeavour. Its most fleeting appearance in architecture may have been in the provocations, the Advertisements for Architecture of the mid-1970s by the Swiss-born architect Bernard Tschumi. This Orpheus may also have been briefly invoked on the drowning and flying stairs of Carlo Scarpa’s Brion-Vega cemetery. It may have once sat, momentarily, in Elizabeth Diller and Ricardo Scofidio’s ceiling-anchored chairs. It may have also have been the Orpheus of Anne Lacaton and Jean-Philippe Vassal’s authorless Place Léon Aucoc. It is the Orpheus of architects who hope to maim or slay the subject in order to breach the gap between the corporeal and incorporeal; to open a zone of indistinction between the two. In Tschumi’s eighth advertisement, above a grainy black and white image of a man falling from a building and a woman at a window with arms outstretched as if to grasp or to push, Tschumi was to write: ‘To really appreciate architecture, you may even need to commit a murder’ (Figure 4.1).8 It’s a provocation, an incitement, which may nevertheless be fruitful. For we may need to take breath from the subject in order to reunite it with architecture. This second Orpheus would suggest as much.
It must be noted that these two Orpheuses, that of Ovid and that of Phaedrus, though opposed, are not diametrically opposed. It’s more complex than this. The song of one Orpheus breathes life in order that the incorporeal might join the corporeal (in life). The other Orpheus is remonstrated for not embracing death in order that the corporeal might join the incorporeal (in death). The corollary of each story is an apportioning of the self and that which it is not. That is, the taking on and the giving over of a quality in order to restore to the other that which distinguishes it from the self. In this sense apportioning is a move toward and from life and each move is an opening of a zone of indiscernibility.
Apportioning
Between the self and any other (person, object, room, architecture) there is always difference. It is a difference that is at once between and yet very much part of both. Apportioning is, at its simplest, the distribution of difference between a self and an other.9 Orpheus was already apportioned to Eurydice and Eurydice to Orpheus before the depth of the apportioning was articulated in song. It is apportioning that occurs when we lose ourselves in the arms, eyes and thoughts of our lovers. It is apportioning that occurs when I forget where you end and I begin. The two that became an indiscernible two. The twoness that became distinctly one. Apportioning is that completion of thoughts and contrapuntal phrases that only someone who holds part of you can seamlessly negotiate. The secret languages that are held between you. The breath that is not yours and that is not mine but that operates between us both. That song of joy in every petite mort. Apportioning is also felt when the death is not small. It is felt intensely at moments of separation. An indistinct portion of me that lay with you, stayed with you, when I travelled. It’s that hole I felt somewhere deep in my abdomen, or is it that space where I thought my heart to be, that drew me home. Apportioning is the sense I have that a portion of me is operated by you – not this or that organ necessarily, not this or that percentage – but an indiscernible zone that was neither me nor you but both. Apportioning is also that death that occurred in me when you died. The perpetual howl that surges within and on occasions breaks free in a cry or a scream. The term ‘apportioning’ comes, not coincidentally, from those who had chosen not to die – from Madeline Gins and the late Shusaku Arakawa.10 Apportioning is that song of grief in every death. A struggling to grasp and be grasped.
Our engagements with art, theatre and literature always tend toward an apportioning. It involves a part of the self becoming apportioned to a part of the art simultaneous to an apportioning of the art to the self. This movement is machinic. It involves both a shutting down or suspension in order to open something afresh. It is complex like the act of giving and receiving a gift. Though this is not like the gift given by the anthropologist Marcel Mauss: a simple economic exchange that implies a reciprocity.11 An Alcestis for an Admetus. It is rather the gift of the philosopher Jean-François Lyotard: a complex ‘pulsional machinery’; a mutual pleasure, and; the constitution of a simulacra.12 A metamorphosis. We can understand the libidinal economy of apportioning when we think of the manners by which we engage with the arts, the manners by which we are shut down and opened up and constituted by art. We can understand apportioning too by a consideration of the spaces, the architectures, that configure such intensities and affections: galleries, theatres and ‘a room of one’s own’.
In a gallery, we go quiet. There is always a small death in awe. Or at least a giving over of one mode of life for another. Jean-Luc Nancy tells us there is always community in communication and yet silence is also an entrance to an alternate community: that of the gallery.13 We shut our larynxes in order to hear the clamour of the art over our own voices. To converse with that which doesn’t speak as we do. It’s a death of a kind that opens us to the life of art. I always imagine that the art tourist in the loud shirt, wearing the provided headset and listening to the authoritative tone of an art interpreter cannot properly hear Francis Bacon’s screaming Pope. In shutting certain things down (organs, sounds, shirts, landscapes, exteriors) we open others (depths, intensities, colours, galleries, screams). Opening is necessary. Open eyes and minds. Open heads and an exposing of the self. There is a necessary rawness and a nakedness that we need to adopt in order to approach a Lying Figure. It was necessary for Henrietta Moraes to open her house on Apollo Place, Chelsea, and then to open herself for John Deakin to photograph; black and white and naked on that mattress. It was necessary that Bacon opened in his shut-off Kensington studio. That he was willing to lose himself. ‘The will to lose one’s will?’ David Sylvester asks Bacon. ‘Absolutely. The will to make oneself completely free. Will is the wrong word because in the end you could call it despair.’14 It was necessary for Bacon to enter that impossible lying figure. To despair in order to open the body, to expose the head behind the face, the meat behind the flesh. At this moment we no longer need to speak of the body, this body or that body, but rather in terms of a body. A singular plural. A work of art, a piece of art, is an apportioning of an artist and a community of artists and then silent audiences: a people for whom a mode of communication has not yet solidified. An ‘unborn people’ as Gilles Deleuze says,15 a ‘people yet to come’ as Deleuze and Félix Guattari say.16 Every reclining figure is an apportioning of models, mattresses, studios, libidos, rooms, canvases, paint and a liquid semiotics in the generation of a life that exceeds the parts. It’s not about this or that element. It’s not about a particular organ or fragment that finds itself in the image. It’s not about presence or absence as such. It is that the image, just like the gallery, is an opening of a zone of a kind where indistinct entities are framed, suspended and sometimes pinned down; and where indiscernible intensities migrate, waver and sometimes drift.
In a theatre we are suspended (Figure 4.2). Held in a space for a time and for that time complicit in certain truths. It’s a ‘wilful suspension’, as Samuel Taylor Coleridge had suggested, invoked in order that the life of the stage might be entered.17 It is at once a shutting down, a holding at bay; and an opening, an exposure or rawness. The theatre shuts us to the outside that we once had: a London street in Covent Garden with its rain, umbrellas, buses, cabs and ruckus, crowds and a girl selling flowers. This outside is shut down, the headlights of cabs are channelled into the pendant lights and chandeliers of the forecourt and entrance. The noisy ruckus of the street is hushed into the sounds of chatter, clinking glasses and the mwah of a hundred air kisses as the bourgeoisie meet and greet and hold themselves tall and appear popular (even alone they appear popular).
The audience has already been configured by this portion of the city, this square, these streets, the cab, the box-office and the glowing white dry-cleaned shirt. Crisp, with Piccadilly collars and Portofino cuffs. A bell tolls and the clink of champagne flutes is channelled through silver bracelets that tap along brass balustrades. The sound of stilettos on steps too is a channelling. A thousand sharp stabs that mould a foot and a calf muscle and a stair that rises toward the theatre proper. The channels get tighter. You make a genteel exchange with a ticket collector, the theatre’s Charon. It’s not money at this point. Money belonged to the vulgar economy of the street outside. The theatre has its own polite currency: tickets. They aren’t for trading everywhere, but operate only here and only at this time on this night. And relate only to these two bodies and these two seats. I find our allotted positions and shuffle to remove a jacket hoping that someone might catch a glimpse of the label. I gaze around the theatre to see, but more importantly to be seen. And then the lights go dim. I can’t discern my beautiful partner any more. You were on my left and reach for my forearm lest I have to turn to check you’re still there. We go quiet. Still. Lifeless. The audience is not of this world. Even the spectator we were is shut down, suspended, in order to focus. We have given ourselves over. A singular point of light on a stage. A spot of light, a pinpoint through which a quick-spun thread of life passes. A raised curtain, an opening and an entrance. We find ourselves on a London street, Covent Garden perhaps, with its rain, umbrellas, cabs and ruckus, crowds and a girl selling flowers. It’s not the chaos of the street we left behind but, in this case, a chaosmos named Pygmalion.
And in literature, in the production and devouring of every book, we are apportioned. Propped up in a lonely bed in our room I lose myself in a book. Reading may be a revolutionary act in the sense that we construct ourselves through it but every construction is an apportioning of materials from this place to that, from this structure to that. From writing to reading. From that room to this. Every piece of writing and every reading is an apportioning. There is a shutting down – a closing of the bedroom door that protects me from the outside whilst I read. Well away from the window I sit with a bedhead behind my back and a masonry wall behind that. This shutting down was necessary in order that something else might be opened, exposed. The ‘alienating armour of identity’ of which Jacques Lacan spoke is breached in every act of writing and reading18 – a courting of the words onto a page or into your head that allows them to do as they please with you. A disarming of the ego. There’s the possibility of a violence here. A small suicide as you forget yourself. Nancy was to name the shutting down and opening up of text exscripting and exscription. In one, text removes the logics of meaning that we had previously cloaked ourselves with and leaves us bare and exposed. In the other, we enter a new world in text and are transformed. The process is much like that of schizoanalysis and it is similarly exposing. Nancy was to suggest:
The nakedness of writing is the nakedness of existence. Writing is naked because it ‘exscripts’, existence is naked because it is ‘exscripted’.
From one to the other passes the light and violent tension of that suspension of meaning which compromises all ‘meaning’; that jouissance so absolute that it accedes to its own joy only by losing itself in it, by spilling itself into it, and it appears as the absent heart (absence which beats like a heart) of presence. It is the heart of things which is exscripted.19
This losing and spilling; this absence which beats like a heart in our bed, beat almost as loud in the keys of Virginia Woolf’s Portable Underwood typewriter and from these keys to the 14 taps of the final sentence of Mrs Dalloway (1925) where we find ourselves desperately apportioned.20 Woolf concludes the novel with the sentence ‘There she was’ and in this moment we find not the eponymous character Mrs Dalloway but we find ourselves: lost and adrift.21 In a lonely bed, in our room, which will always smell of lily.
The novel titled Mrs Dalloway, and ostensibly concerned with the character of Mrs Dalloway, ends with the sentence ‘There she was.’ It is a sentence that reminds us that Clarissa Dalloway, Mrs Dalloway, Mrs Richard Dalloway, was not entirely present earlier in the novel. That is, we never completely meet Mrs Dalloway; but that is not to say that we don’t know her. She had been constructed in portions: in the sliding and occasionally vague memories and imaginings of close friends, in recollections, in desires, in shell shock and indecipherable hallucinations, in dreams, misplaced flowers, deaths, ticking clocks, taxi cabs, doorsteps, dogs on rugs, footsteps on pavement and in the tolling of bells. The deep and lingering sense we have at the conclusion of this short novel is that we too are constituted or configured in connection with so much more than that which we call the self. Apportioned to so much more than that which we’ve come to habitually define and delineate ourselves as. And yet, by so much less than the image we saw reflected in our mother’s eyes. But this sense of less is not felt as loss. The novel leaves us feeling neither more nor less, neither definitively present nor absent, but rather indiscernibly both.
The realms of galleries, theatres and rooms complicate the body/world distinction in extending the understanding that individuals themselves cannot be differentiated from others, modes of communication, odd economies and the technologies they surround themselves with, embed within themselves, constitute and are constituted by, as matters of life. Orpheus was a harper. To be a harper is to be with harp. It becomes impracticable to differentiate individuals from what they are not, let alone specify conceptual, temporal or spatial boundaries to that entity.22 We recognize Ovid’s Orpheus in Jean Cocteau’s Orphic trilogy just as we recognize Cocteau’s Orpheus in Ovid.23 In Ovid a Freudian anxiety and in Sigmund Freud an Oedipus. In Anti-Oedipus a Marcel Proust and in Proust a painting, a Pierre-Auguste Renoir and a singular women: ‘Women pass in the street, different from those we used to see, because they are Renoirs, the same Renoirs we once refused to see as women.’24 Every time Woolf took to the streets of London for a pencil she was poststructural and piercingly contemporary. The pencil wasn’t for writing and all that she spelt or misspelt was, she declared, ‘the spelling of a Portable Underwood – not mine’.25 We are exscripted. Every Marvel comic hero is an orphaned Eros. Every orphan an Eliza Doolittle awaiting a Colonel Pickering and a Professor Henry Higgins. A Sharon Osbourne, a Wendy Vera and a Simon Cowell. The contemporary celebrity plucked from a street and sculpted by a panel, a symposium, of authors and authority figures. The same confusions of affection and authority that the military fosters. The same confusions Freud had formulated to account for the masochist and that Bacon had recited as a logic for his own masochisms. Every ‘no’ of a Lacanian father passes through lips that once grasped the nipple of a mother. We are inscripted. This constitutive apportioning, this impracticability of differentiating a body from that which it is not and where temporal boundaries operate in systems other than chronology, leads us to a sense of selves as indiscernible.
In the work of Deleuze this ‘zone of indiscernibility’ is presented as a unity of a kind. Like Ovid, Deleuze starts with an idea of a chaos from which all that is distinct has been extracted. For Deleuze this chaos is not only that which we have departed from, but that which is ever-present, lapping at our doors, beckoning us to our windows. The negotiation of chaos is what matters and every element that we know and all that we name has been extracted from the chaos and bares a trace of the mode of extraction. This trace is what Fredric Jameson refers to as a ‘structural limitation’ that any ‘strategy of containment’ inflicts upon its objects and subjects.26 Deleuze would refer to this trace as ‘sense’. It is for this reason that Deleuze suggests in his 1962 study of Friedrich Nietzsche; ‘[w]e will never find the sense of something (of a human, a biological or even a physical phenomenon) if we do not know the force which appropriates the thing’27 and for Deleuze and Guattari all elements extracted from the Earth maintain ‘a zone of neighbourhood, or a threshold of indiscernibility’.28 The text, A Thousand Plateaus (1980), may be understood as an exercising of the multiplicitous valences of this threshold. Every apportioning is a drift through the threshold of indiscernibility and a return, often a composed return, to the Earth. In this way every apportioning is the breaching of the barriers that were necessary in order to extract elements, subjects and objects from the Earth. A zone of indiscernibility is thus the zone between indistinct entities and every apportioning is a return to an undifferentiated unity of a kind. For Deleuze and Guattari:
Between things does not designate a localizable relation going from one thing to the other and back again, but a perpendicular direction, a transversal movement that sweeps one and the other away, a stream without beginning or end that undermines its banks and picks up speed in the middle.29
The distinctions between what we are and what we are not are swept away in galleries, in theatres and rooms, and; in the arms and thoughts of others, of lovers. It is a zone of indiscernibility that we enter when we struggle to grasp and to be grasped. It is a zone of indiscernibility that we enter when we are affected by the world. It is also the zone that allows us to affect. To impact. To sing like a bird. To drown like a stone. To smell like a flower. To serve like a flag. It isn’t a matter of metaphor. It has little to do with a mimesis or miming. It’s about the singular intensity that operates between. Between both.
Streets
There is much architecture that endeavours to occupy a zone of indiscernibility between the corporeal subject and the incorporeal building by breathing life into architecture. By operating like a first Orpheus in order that the incorporeal might join the corporeal (in life). Much architecture that operates as galleries, theatres and rooms which harbour life. This architecture dabbles in questions of subjectivity but it tends to do so whilst reinforcing that same subject. In genteel white-walled galleries, secure in theatre seats and in our beds with our backs against bedheads, that are themselves against walls, the subject is far too protected, reinforced. In a gallery, a theatre and in a room of one’s own we can only enact the little deaths.
There is, however rare, moments of another architecture. An architecture of a second Orpheus that occupies a zone of indiscernibility by embracing a death of a kind in order that the corporeal might join the incorporeal (in death). In the admonishing of Phaedrus, and in the provocations of Tschumi we are incited to an alternate manner by which the distinctions of the corporeal and incorporeal are breached. Not in connection and life but in connection and death. Below the grainy black and white image of the man falling and the woman at a window, who one suspects was there not to grasp but to push, Tschumi reminds us that ‘Murder in the Street differs from Murder in the Cathedral in the same way as love in the street differs from the Street of Love. Radically’.30 This is a provocation to a much rawer architecture. A provocation to a gap breached, a between occupied, a parallel line followed that is not the line of life (as we know it).
One of the most sublime deaths of contemporary architecture occurred in 1996. It was an act of the Paris-based architects Lacaton and Vassal. The firm were commissioned by the City of Bordeaux to master-plan what may have been considered a ‘non-descript’ gravel square on the outskirts of the city (Figure 4.3). The square was called Place Léon Aucoc. It was named after an administrator and jurist: a man of symposia. Place Léon Aucoc is a triangular square surrounded on three sides with streets in which white vans park alongside aging Peugeots, Citroëns and Renaults. The cars likely belong to the owners of the simple yet dignified two-storey rendered masonry and tile terrace houses that surround the streets which surround the Place. One assumes the people who occupy the homes are likewise dignified. Neither dignitaries nor bourgeoisie, but dignified for not being so. Comfortable but not contorted by comforts. The Place has a number of park benches of iron and timber slats nestled amongst the deciduous trees that run around the edge. The seats are like the seats you might imagine in any park. The trees too. There is a simple grey steel light pole which branches into three globes at the square’s centre. The ground is roughly level and largely gravel; making it ideal for pétanque. The people play when the weather is good. A garbage bin for recyclables now sits in one corner. There’s also now a children’s play area.31 Again, it’s familiar enough that one might not have ordinarily looked twice. The brief the City had established for the Place was embellissement, which roughly translates as beautification or embellishment, but Lacaton and Vassal felt the Place to be already beautiful. So, as architects, they did something profound. They were to suggest ‘[a]t the beginning there was this feeling that there was nothing to do’32 – and this is roughly what they did do.
‘[I]t is our duty to start from scratch with each new Project’, Vassal writes. ‘That can also mean fundamentally questioning our own profession – and with that the way in which architecture is practiced’.33 The architects did not present the City of Bordeaux with an architectural form, an installation or a landscape and instead chose to construct a contract, or what they called an ‘argumentation’.34 The argumentation was at once both an argument and a building of a kind: Vassal suggests that ‘[a]s an architect, you explore the concept of building. Building can be seen in very material and systematic terms because you build with bricks, concrete, steel, and windows. But in our view building means first and foremost thinking’.35
This argumentation, this argument, this thinking, was an advocacy for the maintaining of the park roughly as it was. A maintaining of what may have been considered ‘non-descript’. The architects were to propose a schedule of maintenance that stipulated a replacing of the gravel and a routine of other minor maintenance works. Raking, cleaning, garbage collecting. They were to develop a contract that was not about the imposition of their order on the space but rather that allowed the space to maintain its own dignified quietness. It is a contract that allows this place to continue as ‘a zone of neighbourhood’, to maintain the ‘threshold of indiscernibility’ which it possessed on the very first day the architects visited.36 The contract would protect the Place from a landscaping and an architecture that in all likelihood would shout ‘look at me’, and instead allows the Place to continue to whisper ‘love’.
This act of restraint is such an important and rare event in architecture. Below an image of Le Corbusier’s once decaying Villa Savoye, in another of Tschumi’s Advertisements, the provocateur was to suggest ‘[a]rchitecture only survives where it negates the form that society expects of it. Where it negates itself by transgressing the limits that history has set for it’.37 These transgressions are moments in which even the professional men of the symposium are made vulnerable. Where they give up entrenched positions, boundaries, borders and fail to deploy soldiers. The significant act of Lacaton and Vassal was to give themselves over in order that the Place might remain quiet. A quietness ruptured only in the joyous clinks and guttural thuds of pétanque balls. Lacaton and Vassal gave themselves over quite consciously. Like a masochist to his own contract. Lacaton suggests ‘[i]t isn’t a refusal – it’s a project involving a conscious decision to do nothing’.38 As such, Place Léon Aucoc is an architecture where even the architect is silenced. A giving over of the self rather than an assertion. To have done with this id. To shut down this ego. As an act of love. Love on a street.
Thresholds
Ovid’s Orpheus asks that we ‘enjoy the short spring of life, and its early flowers’ whilst noting that ‘sooner or later we all hasten to one abode’.39 The negotiation of life and death and of love and death, is never simple. Life isn’t always as organized, suspended, opened and closed, inscripted and exscripted as galleries, theatres and rooms may suggest. Our nakedness is not always so genteel. Our suspensions not always so momentary. Our deaths not as pleasant as ‘hasten[ing] to one abode’. The collapse of the boundaries between the corporeal and the incorporeal are often of a higher intensity than the deaths and the loves that galleries, theatres and rooms apportion. This is likely why Tschumi points to the difference between ‘Murder in the Street and Murder in the Cathedral, love in the street and the Street of Love’. It’s a difference of intensity. There is a difference of intensity between the little death in awe that a gallery inflicts and an awful death. Between a screaming Pope and the scream of a lover. Between architects writing themselves out of an architecture and a suicide note. Between a wilful suspension and that suspension that is thrust upon us via shrapnel or a knife. Between ‘a stream without beginning or end’ and to take to the river Ouse with pockets full of stones. The difference in intensity between the mild and profound loves and the small and great deaths does not however discount the fact that they are indeed between, and art and life too is ‘caught in a movement that sweeps one and the other away’.40
Orpheus’ song was one such transversal movement, a conduit. It was a scream from the portion of himself that was Eurydice. It is the same scream of Bacon’s Pope and the same scream that sometimes breaks free from my abdomen or is it from where I thought my heart to be? To be bare is to know the weight of the unbearable. We carry love and death, art, theatre and writing into streets and we carry streets, love and death back into galleries, theatres and rooms of one’s own. It is love and death that pass through forms of life and art. It is the subject that is constructed in apportionings. And not the other way round. The single story of the two Orpheuses suggests as much. Orpheus’ crime was not in the manner by which he breached the divide between life and death, but rather that he hesitated. Turned. Turned to grasp ‘nothing but the fleeting air’.
