Figure 7.1 Barns against the sky. Photograph courtesy of Marco Casagrande (1999).
Francis Bacon was after photographs of a nude Henrietta Moraes upon which to base a painting; but initially she was handed to him naked. John Deakin had photographed her in a series of stark images. They were black and white, wide-angle shots with the sharp genital focus of pornography.1 There are many routes to the heart of things but these photographs weren’t what Bacon had wanted.
Deakin had come to Moraes’ house at 9 Apollo Place to take the photographs.2 The house was a stone’s throw from the Thames; a short flight of a Marvel comic character from ‘this girl called Eleanor’s room’, and; a chilly winter’s ramble from Lucian Freud’s flat.3 Moraes had inherited the house in 1957 following the suicide of the incommensurable love of her life, the painter and illustrator Johnny Minton.4 The love was incommensurable only in the sense that it was not to be consummated. Though not consummated and not marked by marriage (they weren’t what Johnny had wanted) the relationship was no less intense and perhaps even more endearing. I imagine Minton bequeathed the house to Moraes in the hope it might anchor her more than it had he. She would, however, continue to drift in life as much as he drifted out of it.
After a drink or two Deakin had Moraes pose for the photographs in her bedroom on a dishevelled mattress.5 The poses were invasive; focused on what Luce Irigaray might call the ‘mucous of the carnal’.6 Moraes told Deakin that she was sure that the images he was taking were not what Bacon would want. Deakin was a thug of a photographer.7 His work is angry. Hard, harsh and urbane like asphalt. And he continued unconcerned; ‘[s]nap, snap, snap and on and on he went’, Moraes tells us.8 Deakin once wrote ‘sitters turn into my victims. But I would like to add that it is only those with a daemon, however small and of whatever kind, whose faces lend themselves to being victimised at all’.9 The qualification further imbrutes the statement. Bacon rejected these photographs of Moraes, and Deakin was asked to take a second set: ‘the other way up this time’.10
About a week later Moraes found Deakin selling the original, intrusive, photographs to sailors in a Soho drinking club for ten bob a pop. The muse had become an organ of porn, a target for semen at sea. Moraes was not entirely disaffected. She was no victim. Moraes didn’t hold too tight to this identity or that. To this organ or that. She seems not to have fought battles to retain some essential sense of self or place. In these photographs she was less exposed than in the Bacon paintings. And even the much-contested mucous membrane was a port of departure.11 She asked Deakin to buy her a large drink by way of compensation.12 He bought her several. I imagine this was less an act of generosity on the photographer’s part, than a method to narrow the angle of view and soften the focus. A method to advance what Paul Virilio would call the ‘fusion-confusion of eye and camera lens, the passage from vision to visualisation’.13 Moraes would move on. Photographs too have a mobility that sail well beyond origins and intentions. This first set of photographs of a naked Moraes travelled down the Thames, left the Port of London and floated away with the change of tide.
Moraes would eventually be lost to the Apollo Place house as she was lost to most things. She was far too Dionysian for Apollo Place. Too much of the street to be homely. Too much of the milieu to be anything other than uncanny. Anorganic, asignifying and asubjective in Bacon’s paintings. Indiscernible, impersonal and then imperceptible in the world. Despite Bacon’s pinning of the figure with a syringe and the sailors’ attempts to pin-down the tattered porn pictures to bunks and in lockers, images pass like bodies and architectures. They are objects of passage. They seem to flow in spite of content or subject matter. That the content of Deakin’s first set of photographs was not what Bacon had wanted make the images no less impactful. That the photographs and their subject matter no longer exist also make them no less impactful. There is, in the passing of such things, an intense ripple of matter in flux. The warmest of inframince.14 The glint of the afterimage.15 The reverberations of a snap, snap, snap of a camera. The loitering smile that the image spreads over a face. The warm glow left by the carnal. The lingering lap of labia. The sense of shudder that rolls over the body following the squirt of semen. The drifting debris of the tide of the river. Such passages aren’t about the production of meaning. They don’t prompt hard logics and fixed narratives, they just reverberate, glow, linger, shudder and drift; and continue to pass through us as we pass through them.
In this chapter I want to focus on the manner by which our photographs and our architectures operate as objects of passage. ‘Photography evades us’, writes Roland Barthes in his text of 1980, Camera Lucida, and I think architecture too evades.16 It evades us and in doing so leaves us bare in its wake. Bare and moving on. It is, in this manner, an object of passage. I will turn to one particular moment of architectural passage. The fires set by Sami Rintala and Marco Casagrande’s Land(e)scape project of 1999. This project responds to Bernard Tschumi’s forgotten call for an architecture to evade and leave us raw, for an architecture to be ‘conceived, erected and burned in vain’.17 Tschumi made this call in 1974 but our collective ear caught ‘nothing but the fleeting air’.
Strange attractors
The first set of photographs of Moraes, though lost long ago, maintain a potency. Though largely unseen and now unseeable the photographs are no less intense and perhaps even more endearing. That which is unseen, unheard and unheld, like that which is incommensurable and unconsummated, is strangely attractive. And particularly so, to art: photography, music, literature and architecture. The unseen and unheard maintain the potency that Maurice Blanchot associates with the figure of Eurydice in his essay of 1955, ‘The Gaze of Orpheus’. Blanchot describes Orpheus’ lost bride as ‘the limit of what art can attain; concealed by a name and covered by a veil’.18 It is also a potency like that which Barthes describes in Camera Lucida in terms of the ‘punctum’, as ‘a kind of subtle beyond – as if the image launched desire beyond what it permits us to see’.19
In Blanchot’s account of the story of Orpheus, the harpist was to lose his new bride in a moment when he was joyfully distracted by his art. Orpheus was concentrating on his music when Eurydice died. In grief however his focus moves. In grief Orpheus fixates not upon his music but upon Eurydice. His music now happens only for her sake and takes her as its intense focus. Blanchot would write of Eurydice as ‘the profoundly dark point towards which art, desire, death, and the night all seem to lead. She is the instant in which the essence of the night approaches the other night.’20 Orpheus heads toward Eurydice in death, he enters Hades, under the aegis of his art. It is the music, the song, that allows Orpheus to access Eurydice, that ‘causes the night to open’, and yet Orpheus is unconcerned for his art at this moment.21 The music becomes a means to an end. At this point Orpheus sacrifices everything for his fixation, for Eurydice. Blanchot suggests that it was Orpheus’ mistake to not merely approach this ‘point’ of fixation but to ‘try to bring it back into the daylight and in the daylight give it form, figure and reality’.22 Orpheus mistakes a line for a point. He mistakes a line of flight for a point of fixation. A place of passage for a more tangible and concrete object. Orpheus wants Eurydice in a way he cannot have her. He mistakes the dead Eurydice for that Eurydice which could be seen, heard and held.
Blanchot’s depiction of Orpheus is like the eye and I of Georges Bataille’s ‘L’Anus Solaire’ [1927] and the secret melancholia of Julia Kristeva’s ‘Soleil Noir’ (1987) in its concern for ‘the ultimate thresholds of inscribable dislocation and jouissance’, as Kristeva writes.23 Blanchot’s project is also not far removed from Sigmund Freud’s account of the lost object, the irretrievable that we nevertheless desire.24 Eurydice was the unattainable point of desire and the song of Orpheus was a passage between chaotic pained loss, Blanchot’s other night, and the relative stabilities of rhythm and territory. But ‘the song itself is already a skip’, as Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari suggest, ‘it jumps from chaos to the beginnings of order in chaos and is in danger of breaking apart at any moment. There is always sonority in Ariadne’s thread. Or the song of Orpheus’.25 The song has to waver, lest we actually get that which we desire and then desire no more.
In Camera Lucida Barthes was also focused on the complexity of the manners by which art, in this case the art of the photograph, might operate as passage. Camera Lucida was Barthes’ last book. It was written concurrently with his ‘mourning diary’ detailing his grief at the loss of his mother, Henriette. Barthes loved his mother deeply and had lived with her for most of his life.26 Following her death, Barthes began his own Orphic quest, hoping to find his mother – in a photograph. Not just her image, but what he would describe as her air. For Barthes, air ‘is a kind of intractable supplement of identity, what is given as an act of grace stripped of any “importance”: the air expresses the subject insofar as that subject assigns itself no importance’.27 Air thus, would seem to be a raw or bare self. A self stripped bare. A bio beyond an auto. Or indeed, a zoë beyond a bio. Barthes uses the word ‘animula’ or ‘little individual soul’ to describe the quality.28 Barthes hoped to find his mother’s air in a photograph because for him a photograph and its referent are indissociable, infrathin, ‘both affected by some amorous or funereal immobility, at the very heart of the moving world’.29 He defines air in both anatomical and ethereal ways: as that ‘tenuous umbilical cord that the photographer gives life’30 and, in a manner that resonates with the ‘Dernier poème’ of Robert Desnos, as ‘that luminous shadow which accompanies the body’.31
The air that a photograph may harbour is accessed via a wound, or what Barthes would describe as the punctum. The punctum is that which causes you to turn and look again at a photograph. The punctum is described by Barthes as a piercing or a prick. It is particular and specific. It plays directly with the neurones and has ‘no preference for morality or good taste’.32 The punctum operates much like a singularity – in and of itself. That is, it does not offer a narrative. It is punctuation. It does not speak or articulate – it is expressive in and of itself, sometimes subtle like a semi-colon and sometimes harder like an exclamation mark. It reverberates, glows, lingers, shudders and drifts. Barthes characterizes the punctum as ‘a mark made by a pointed instrument’,33 a compass or a syringe perhaps. And yet these points operate not to pin the subject or referent of the photograph down.
The punctum operates as a point of passage, an access point to air. This place of passage is impersonal in the sense it flows through intimate relations. It operates between you and the referent or subject of the photograph. And it is asubjective in the sense that it is transformative. We are different now. We are other. You are different. You are of the other night. For Barthes, the photograph invigorates the desired and beloved subject of the photograph and yet accentuates ‘that rather terrible thing which is there in every photograph: the return of the dead’.34 Like Blanchot’s Orpheus, Barthes would suggest he, himself, ‘must submit to this law: I cannot penetrate, I cannot reach into the Photograph’.35 For Barthes the punctum ‘cries out in silence’,36 and the air of a photograph is a promise made that cannot be actualized, it remains a shadow, albeit luminous.37
I recognize this wound in the two framed photographs of you which sit on my desk, one colour and one black and white. I stare at these photographs for hours but ‘I had no hope of “finding” her’, as Barthes wrote of his mother.38 I imagine it is pained grief and a sense of profound longing for that which is ‘beyond what the photograph permits us to see’, that leads Barthes to conclude that ‘[u]ltimately – or at the limit – in order to see a photograph well, it is best to look away or close your eyes’.39
Fetishists and wayfarers
The desire for that which we can’t see, hear and hold often leads us to place something more tangible in our grasp. To have something firm in our hand. A photograph or a postcard. A syringe or a drink. The right hand in the left. Stilettos or a piece of blue velvet. Rosary beads or icons. Madeleine for Proust. Cocaine for Cocteau. These items are not the point. They are the means. We place flowers on graves and at the edge of the diving platform we hold a handrail. We don’t want the flowers or the rail; we desire the air. That which we touch is often a vector pointing toward that which we can’t hold. These flowers and handrails, these things, are objects of passage. We pass through them to get elsewhere. Virginia Woolf would pass through a lead pencil to get to the streets of London:
No one perhaps has ever felt passionately towards a lead pencil. But there are circumstances in which it can become supremely desirable to possess one; moments when we are set upon having an object, an excuse for walking half across London between tea and dinner. As the foxhunter hunts in order to preserve the breed of foxes, and the golfer plays in order that open spaces may be preserved from the builders, so when the desire comes upon us to go street rambling the pencil does for a pretext, and getting up we say: ‘Really I must buy a pencil’, as if under cover of this excuse we could indulge safely in the greatest pleasure of town life in winter – rambling the streets of London.
In her essay of 1930, ‘Street Haunting: A London Adventure’, Woolf notes that objects often stand in place of less tangible desires.40 The pencil serves to focus a walk, to foster the desire to ramble. The pencil operates at once in and of itself as an object – an identifiable concrete object that one can grasp; and as an object of passage that connects one to an alternate series of elements that form a trajectory toward what one desires – in this case, the desire to lose oneself in a city. The desire to haunt.
As concrete objects these elements are often fetishized. The fetishist fixates upon the object of the fetish irrespective of its traditional function. What these pencils, photographs and postcards, rosary beads and icons, stilettos and pieces of blue velvet are is not the point. What matters is what they do. And what they do is move someone. Take someone somewhere else. Even Freud was to suggest that fixations with such objects involve a ‘displacement’ of a kind.41 But for Freud this displacement is born as a distraction. A distraction from what may be really at stake. In Freud’s take on the fetishized object, the libido breaches the bounds of the body to invest in objects and associations well beyond.42 That is, the traditional and habitual fixations with sexual organs and orifices have been transferred to other objects. The black and white wide angled photograph in place of a vagina. The sharp point of a stiletto in place of a castrated penis. A foot for a flaccid phallus. For Freud, the fetish stands in place of, and is invested with, the intensities of that which was lost. In particular, it is the transference of the anxiety associated with the loss of the phallus (noticing that mother hasn’t got one) onto the object or organ that held one’s attention prior to the startling discovery (the stiletto, the foot, the hem of mother’s blue velvet dress). For Freud, ‘[i]n all the cases the meaning and purpose of the fetish turned out under analysis to be the same [...] the fetish is a penis-substitute’ and ‘not a substitute for any chance penis, but for a particular quite special penis that has been extremely important in early childhood but was afterwards lost’.43 For Freud to fetishize is always to negate; to repress, to sublimate. Orpheus is an anxious Oedipus. Eurydice a complex Electra.
In economics too this idea of the concrete object that is performative beyond rational value is referred to in terms of fetishism. In economics representative money fulfils the promise of exchange in placing of a unit or value (a dollar) on all objects and subjects, bringing the most incongruous of elements into relation. Money also allows the most incongruous of trades. Woolf could trade her work as an author (writing, reading, rambling) for a pencil, a Singer automobile, a Portable Underwood typewriter and a dog named Hans, because of representative money. Representative money makes congruity from the incongruous. Commensurability from the incommensurable. In his text of 1974, Libidinal Economy, Jean-François Lyotard would identify the extreme assortment of consummations fostered by economies.44 There is, in the insinuation of a banal indicator of value, a dollar, also a devaluation. (Ten bob for a black and white vagina. Several drinks for the pleasure.) However, commodifications and investments of energy or labour outside of the monetary economy, are more often than not considered aberrant or excessive. As aberrant as a sexual fetish. As excessive as a religious fetish. Karl Marx begins his Capital: Critique of Political Economy (1867) on this very point:
There is a definite social relation between men, that assumes, in their eyes, the fantastic form of a relation between things. In order, therefore, to find an analogy, we must have recourse to the mist-enveloped regions of the religious world. In that world the productions of the human brain appear as independent beings endowed with life, and entering into relation both with one another and the human race. So it is in the world of commodities with the products of men’s hands. This I call the Fetishism.45
There is a clear correspondence between the fetishisms of the libido, of faith and of the commodity. Just as the sexual fetish is defined as diversion and deviance, the religious fetish is prone to the charge of false idolatry, and; the commodity fetish is aberrant to economic rationalisms and located in the blackest of markets. We perpetuate myths that relegate these investments as ‘false’, ‘diversional’, ‘deviant’ and ‘aberrant’ and deny the force of that which is performative beyond rational value. We continue to privilege the pretext of purchasing a pencil over the most forceful sensations of a winter ramble. And yet, as Marx would suggest, all the products of one’s hands are, in some manner, aberrant to the doxa that might otherwise situate them and the analytical narratives into which they are habitually forced. It is the thuggish dominance of the (so-called rational) narratives and logics, into which our most intense of passions and most nuanced of sensations are forced, that lead Deleuze and Guattari to suggest in the opening pages of Anti-Oedipus that ‘[a] schizophrenic out for a walk is a better model than a neurotic lying on the analyst’s couch. A breath of fresh air, a relationship with the outside world’.46
The fixation of much contemporary discourse concerning the concrete architectural object often seems to be a narrative of denial recounted from an analyst’s couch. Freud would note that fetishists ‘do not complain about their symptom but are “quite content”’47 and far too much architectural discourse is quite content. This discourse focuses on the autonomous object of architecture. It focuses on the formal and functional aspects of architecture as one might focus on a stiletto’s height, diameter, reinforcement, price and resultant walking speed, when we know the stiletto’s real value is to point – toward desires. Architecture is not a usual technology of sex, religion and economics. However, architecture is a tool for a production of a kind. Individual architectural objects, at their best, operate in a manner that resonates with Marx’s descriptor, as ‘independent beings endowed with life’ (or indeed as ‘nonorganic life’, to defer to the language of Deleuze and Guattari). Like other fetishized objects what the architectural object is may be beside-the-point. All the blogs and all the books and all the posturing on the topic of the architectural object often seem as odd as playing at foxhunting and golf when all one really wants is a breath of fresh air.
I should be careful to note that the concept of ‘object’ is not at stake. The key issue is an awareness of the richer life of the object. To ask as Barthes does, ‘[h]ow can an object have a story’?48 Such a fixation ties itself to the concrete of the object and yet not completely so. In Jacques Lacan’s account of the objet petit a, the object of fixation is always in a slippery chimeric relation as ‘something from which the subject, in order to constitute itself, has separated itself off as organ’.49 We can’t have it completely and we never completely lost it. And yet the objet continues to re-present the subject in the world of objects.50 A pencil can be used to write or be used as a pretext for a walk. A stiletto can be used to walk or as a pretext to orgasm. A bedroom might at once be used to orgasm or as a pretext to dream of other nights. The concrete object is important but these objects are ‘entering into relations’ and taking someone elsewhere. They are objects of passage. They operate like the songs of the Sirens. Blanchot would write:
Yes, they really sang, but not in a very satisfactory way. Their song merely suggested the direction from which the perfect song might come. Yet through their imperfect song – a song as yet unborn – they lured the navigator towards the space where singing really begins.51
For Blanchot the song of the Sirens is a vector. That is, the fixation with the song allows a sailor to make a movement in a certain direction and at a certain speed. To chart a course in what would otherwise be too difficult, too chaotic. I imagine the first set of photographs of Moraes were like this. Taking sailors elsewhere, if only for a shuddering moment. Architecture may be like this too. A relative holding or harbouring that nonetheless operates as a ‘tenuous umbilical’. A tentative holding in place that fosters an abstract passage. A wavering song that points toward a desire. In this way architecture is like these pencils, photographs and postcards, rosary beads and icons, stilettos and pieces of blue velvet. It is an object of passage. A wonderful aberration. A joyous false idolatry. A magnificent wound. When architecture is approached in this manner, architects by consequence are less fetishists in denial and more like wayfarers. Haunting cartographies, assembling tools and techniques, materials, objects and subjects, as a photographer might gently manipulate bodies, light and lenses, in order to approach the unholdable air.
Woolf too was more wayfarer than fetishist. Woolf would not mistake a point of fixation for a line of flight. She knew her pencil was not the point. It was a ‘pretext’, a wayfaring device that led one toward a certain desire. It was an arrow pointing in a certain direction. Woolf knew this because she didn’t use her pencil to write. She used ink pens and a typewriter – a Portable Underwood typewriter. And the typewriter too wasn’t the point. The pencil and the typewriter, the winter and the streets of London were all parts of, elements of, a wonderful literary chaosmos. And even the author wasn’t the point. She too was lost to the drifting tide of her art. Woolf wrote, ‘[t]his spelling is the spelling of a Portable Underwood – not mine!’52 Oddly, she wrote this note by hand, but that too is not the point.
Elsewhere
When Orpheus fixated on the Eurydice that could be seen, heard and held she became an object of passage toward the unseen, unheard and unholdable. At this same moment Orpheus’ song was transformed from the point into a wayfaring device and he, himself, became what Deleuze and Guattari refer to as a Body without Organs: ‘a component of passage’.53 A Body without Organs is not a body that is without organs per se, but rather a body that is organized in an alternate manner. It is to look with organs other than eyes or to see via a blind-spot. It is to gaze rather than observe. It is to liberate the organ from the organization. Woolf would write of that moment when she left her house to enter the streets of London as a moment of becoming ‘a central oyster of perceptiveness, an enormous eye’54 and Deleuze would suggest of Bacon’s work, ‘[p]ainting gives us eyes all over: in the ear, in the stomach, in the lungs (the painting breathes …)’.55 As artists, as architects, it is important that we dis-organ-ize ourselves somewhat, to become a little more object among objects. A little more animal among animals. A little more shadow among shadows. It is important that we sufficiently dismantle ourselves and liberate our faculties in order to allow our work to breathe. This disorganization of the self is not about loss but rather about ‘moving on’. It is as important as the departing from preconceptions, traditions and the habits of thought that otherwise contain us. We do this in order that we can explore and experiment and approach desires afresh. Intensely afresh.
To become a wayfarer is to enter into relations with all the components of passage by compromising the marks that distinguish us from that which we are not. The components of the journey are not brought together in order to achieve a preordained desire nor to point in a preconceived direction. Desire too is an assemblage and, as Freud tells us, it is a particularly mobile assemblage. It is hard to construct and point to that which is itself under construction and on the move. The relations between the components of passage are characterized by proximities and valences, configurings and dispersals. The relations between components of passage and desire are characterized by reverberations, glow, lingerings and shudders. In this sense all the components of passage are like the drifting debris of the river that desires the tide. They move and they are moved. They move as they are moved. They are the inframince of a moving on. This is why the word ‘wayfaring’ may be a more accurate descriptor than ‘navigating’ to describe procedures of art: photography, music, literature and architecture. Blanchot would refer to this anti-teleological aspect of literature – this experimental and exploratory character – in terms of the ‘inspired and unconcerned’ manner of Orpheus’ gaze.56 Blanchot suggests that ‘[t]he act of writing begins with Orpheus’ gaze, and that gaze is the impulse of desire which shatters the song’s destiny and concern, and in that inspired and unconcerned decision reaches the origin, consecrates the song’.57 I think the act of architecture too may begin with such a gaze and end in such a song.
Casagrande and Rintala’s Land(e)scape project is a case of inspired unconcern. This project was a gesture beyond itself. A wayfaring device that took us elsewhere. This journey commenced in the fields of Savonlinna in the south-east of Finland, north-east of Helsinki, in the last months of the twentieth century. The fields had largely been abandoned and suburbs and light-industry were encroaching. The population of farmers had taken to the adjacent highways and were involved in a migration toward the cities. Along with the farmers went the animals and the crops. The old timber barns of the Finnish countryside were also disappearing. Despite the solidity of their construction, the barns were decaying, rotting ever-so-slowly into the earth. Casagrande tells us that three barns ‘[d]esolate, longing after their farmers […] have abandoned their primeval union with the soil and have now risen on their legs and are swaying towards the cities of the South’ (Figure 7.1).58 The barns sit poised on their long legs. Four legs each, and each askew. The legs were approximately 400 millimetres in diameter and held the barns approximately 8 metres into the sky. Though no one measured them. There were metal cross-wires, bracing the legs; running from the top of one leg to the bottom of the next. It either helped the barns stand or restrained the creatures. The three elevated barns appeared as a herd of rogue animals, ancient vertebrates, in slow motion, on a slow march. The capacity to become animula is an important creative source for art and architecture – and these barns had their own small souls. Endowing them with such life was already a move toward the unknown. Just because they’d resided on farms did not mean these barns were at all domesticated. The enormous power of apportioning is invoked. These objects make us a little more object as we make them a little more animula. It is not metaphoric. It is literal. It is as literal in a critical sense as it is anatomical in a clinical sense.
There is a simple diagnostic here: the depopulating of the land and the death of a way of life. There is also a simple therapy: allowing the barns the mobility of the farmers. But the symptomatology, the clinical impulse, was violent and invasive. It was less for the benefit of a ‘people to come’ than a people who’d already departed. The project was bound to haunt.
Barthes would speak of a photograph as ‘a kind of primitive theater, a kind of Tableau Vivant, a figuration of the motionless and made-up face beneath which we see the dead’.59 The Land(e)scape project operated in a similar manner. The barns stood against the sky and it was not always possible to discern the movement of the clouds from the movement of the creatures. Casagrande and Rintala’s barns achieved an ‘intense immobility’.60 There was a composing of the silent and motionless that was louder and more animate for being mute and immobile. There was a figuration; an assembling and organizing of components, an orgonology, that was ‘all the more alive for having no organs’.61 Despite the motionless theatrical character of the event (tableau) there is a raw force here. A potency (vivant). It is the potency of that which is beyond the frame of a photograph or ‘beyond what we are permitted to see’. A punctum. It is a life beyond the control of the architects. And well beyond the metaphoric narratives the architects spun to the architecture journals. Sensation always precedes the sensible. These huge creatures with small souls were moving on.
For Blanchot, the impulses of art are complicated. Orpheus may have descended to Hades to retrieve Eurydice but ‘Orpheus does not want to make her live, but to have the fullness of death living in her’.62 Likewise, Casagrande and Rintala breathed life into these barns not to make them live, but, to have the fullness of their death. Their experiment was a painful one. More biology than chemistry. More vivisection than injection. More evisceration than surgery. The barns, poised on their stilt legs, were doused in petrol and set alight on Saturday 2 October 1999 (Figure 7.2).63
The death of the barns was both a ritual sacrifice and a clinical sadism. The choreographer and dancer, Reijo Kela, was engaged to light the fires. Kela stumbled through a drunken dance to strained music from a lonely accordion.64 It was an imperfect song. The architects gave over control. They watched from an edge and were absorbed into the audience like Woolf on a London street. The architects invoked what Barthes might call the ‘second sight’ of the photographer.65 For Barthes the piercing wound of a photograph cannot be manufactured or controlled and the photographer must be oddly unconcerned with the point of the photograph. What Barthes refers to as the ‘second sight’ of the photographer is a form of unconcern. Deakin was a thug of a photographer, cruel and unconcerned, but this was perhaps what made him ‘a photographer with extraordinary eyes’.66 Such photographers invoke a gaze rather than a focus. A seeing that is practised without habitual intent; or indeed a seeing through organs other than eyes. For Barthes, ‘[t]he Photographer’s “second sight” does not consist in “seeing” but in being there. And above all, imitating Orpheus, he must not Turn back to look at what he is leading.’67 As the audience watched on, Kela lit fire-sticks, torches of a kind, then hoisted them up into the undersides, the underbellies, of the barns. Tschumi would write that ‘[t]he greatest architecture of all is the fireworker’s: it perfectly shows the gratuitous consumption of pleasure’.68 It may also perfectly show the gratuitous consumption of pain. Immobility can be amorous or funereal.
Some six thousand people reportedly came to the fields to witness the aberration.69 Parents with a drink in their hands and children with balloons were there to celebrate the slaughter. There was much rowdy laughter and screams – of joy – before the fires were lit. When it came to it though – when the fires burnt – no one celebrated. The barns clearly roared when the flames tore a violent path through their timbers. They cried out. No one could hear the accordion over the pained roar. The barns slowly collapsed, were burnt to skeleton and then ash. The audience of this event were made naked in the wake of the flames. There was gasping for air. A crying. Unable to look away but also unable to look, many closed their eyes. A psychoanalytic reading would suggest that the audience saw their own deaths in the burning of the barns. That the repressed returned in this ritualistic frenzy. A psychoanalytic reading would find penetrative violence in the flames and exchange a lit torch for an engorged penis. An immobilized creature for a castrated stiletto. A field of Finnish Oedipuses clawing at their eyes. Such narratives are correctives to an aberration. But here, in the fields of Savonlinna, it is the aberration that is operative. The audience didn’t see death as such. They saw flames that glowed toward the absolute darkness of the night. They heard the cry of an object that shuddered toward the profundity of absence. We travel through anxiety and upset, as trauma and pain travel through us, and the most compelling of movement occurs between intensity and extensity. Forceful and terrifying. Intense and brilliant in the sky. So still as to scintillate. The burning barns were, as Cocteau described of cocaine withdrawal, a ‘wound in slow motion’70 but it wasn’t my wound or yours. It didn’t belong to any person or singular architecture though it lingered in both. In this moment so much burnt. So much rhetoric was burnt away. Habitual narratives and traditional logics were burnt away. Our sense of self was burnt away. Architecture and selves became rawer and barer and indissociable in that rawness and bareness. Shadows amongst shadows. Such events aren’t contained or controlled; they sweep us up and take us elsewhere. The architects drifted in the audience and like the audience they too were swept away by the event. Gliding like cinders in the night sky.
The conclusions are not so easily inscribed because they aren’t of text; they are ‘pretext’ as Woolf might say, ‘inscribable’ as Kristeva might say, ‘exscribed’ as Nancy might call it. The conclusions are the product of a gaze that does not settle so easily into a singular point of view or a fixed narrative. As such, I think of Casagrande and Rintala’s project not as a celebration of death, of ends, but as a powerful gesture toward where architecture itself begins. It burnt away so much of the artefactual marks of distinction that separate bodies from objects, organs from inorganics, life from shadow and me from you. There is, in the Land(e)scape project, a consecration of architecture. And this consecrated architecture, this bare architecture, starts not in shelter and not in territory, but in passage.
