Window Facade

American artist Joseph Cornell (1903–1972) has been celebrated internationally for his boxes, collages, and films since the 1930s. His mining of far-flung ideas and traditions and elegant integration of woodworking, painting, papering, and drawing define the innovation and visual poetry associated with his work. Above all, he forever altered the concept of the box—from a time-honored functional container into a new art form, the box construction.

His lyrical, often surprising combinations of materials and ideas are usually associated with surrealism, a European art movement that emphasized dreams and poetic dislocation in the 1920s and 1930s. Surrealism, however, was just one of many resources that Cornell called upon as an artist driven by innate curiosity and creativity rather than by theories and formal art training.

He often described himself as a maker because he valued his “natural” and “spontaneous” origins as an artist. Making something new from nothing or the pre-existing is critical to the processes of many self-taught artists. It is also central to the modern concept of creativity as the collision and recombination of ideas. Traditions can be reinterpreted; connections can be forged between the seemingly random or disparate. Cornell believed that artists renew and transform materials, experiences, and ideas, and this belief fueled his ability to communicate the beauty and magic in ordinary, often forgotten things.

Excerpt from Cathedral by Marco Brambilla, 2007

Kaleidoscope interior & cityscape -2

After finished the project’s report, the main issue of my project is getting clearer than before. Moreover, the exhibition of “surreal house” provides several references to support “kaleidoscopic space.” For example, the photographs of Lee Miller, the drawing of Nicholas de Larmessin, the interior of Dali, and the works of Joseph Cornell. Surrealism gives designers, arties, architects more imaginations not only to create many masterpieces and break boundaries of stationary definitions.

According to one main axis of this project, “continually moving and zooming in through the cityscape in London from interior of a car, ” three drawings represent the continual movement through the recombined mess internal space from the huge cityscape to tiny element. However, in tiny furniture or a window, another new cityscape is created base on these elements’ shape and structure via the continual movement. The interior space in the old architecture in London will be experienced and redefined by this project’s mythology: moving and go deep into the surface of a object and probe into its true meanings.

These drawings are just only the introduction. The next step of this project is follow this mythology, choosing one interior element like a furniture, space, and window to develop and substantiate the main aim of this project (kaleidoscopic space: continually changes and repeated space and cityscape).

Yves Marchand & Romain Meffre Photography

Sapporo - Legendary Biru

Sapporo - Legendary Biru from CRUSH on Vimeo.

Kaleidoscope interior & cityscape

(combinition with the Regent Palace Hotel & Regent Street)

KALEIDOSCOPE

KALEIDOSCOPE

Kaleidoscope opens on Friday, March 31, 2006 at the Changing Room. The exhibit runs from March 31st April 8 and is open on Monday’s for the convenience of Art Professionals.

The photographic image for many years was hailed as a medium that recorded fact. Early in its inception photography was quickly embraced as a way to record moments deemed important. In reality, photography is a very subjective medium. In Kaleidoscope, Gild presents two styles of photographs: those that are "staged" and those that are not.

Sometimes, it is difficult to be able to differentiate between the two. Like a kaleidoscope, photography has a variegated way of capturing a scene or object that may itself be in a constant state of flux. Depending on the information provided a photo can have shifting values or meanings thus effecting it’s "realness". Phillip Toledano is a beast of staging photos that seem like happenstance and making outrageous photos seem like the most normal of things. Come and see the difference between the "real" and "unreal".

Phil Toledano’s photographs are a contemporary representation of what he believes to be the hopes and fears that run through America today. The warp and weft of the American dream are changing, and these changes are worn by the people in this series. While one man is covered in babies of every colour, a woman is touched by a multitude of hands. One man wears his guns with pride, while someone is strangled by a choker of firearms. Someone else is all ears, and yet another is covered in breasts. One person’s hope is another’s fear.

WORLD GAZING, SUNSET KALEIDOSCOPE (2005)

Is there a difference between a kaleidoscope and a telescope? Or are the two inversions of the same thing – viewing devices that help you see… One sets out to represent the immediate world, as seen through mirrored-glass and transparent colour-objects, while the other brings the far-away closer, using a powerful optical device.

Olafur Eliasson’s ‘Sunset kaleidoscope’ (2005) falls on the former of these two sides. When properly installed, its protruding rectangular structure penetrates the skin of the museum, creating a connection between the inside and the outside.

Olafur Eliasson Sunset kaleidoscope 2005 wood, color-effect filter glass, mirrors, and motor installation view at Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, 2009 Collection of John and Phyllis Kleinberg © 2009 Olafur Eliasson
For its Sydney presentation a view of Jørn Utzon’s famous Opera House, the Circular Quay Esplanade and the infamous ‘Toaster’ are infinitely fractured and neatly put back together again. What you see is a perspective of the world remade anew. Traditionally, our curiosity about the universe looks to stargazing telescopes for inspiration and information. In ‘Sunset kaleidoscope’ (2005) this same curiosity is simply brought closer to home.
By Joel Mu
This entry was posted in Visuals and tagged colour, Light, mirrors, perception, Sunset kaleidoscope
Bookmark the permalink. Post a comment or leave a trackback: Trackback URL.

Dimensies

Steie van Vugt made a mirror installation that played with the dimensions of a space: the mirrors pull the space apart like a kaleidoscope and display conflicting images. The installation emphasizes and blurs angles and holes, creating both calmness and complexity. Dimensies gives an empty concrete space a unique finishing touch and lets people reflect on how they experience a space.

emmanuelle moureaux architecture & design: 'kaleidoscope' exhibition

emmanuelle moureaux architecture + design designed offices and showrooms of
nakagawa chemical CS design center, in tokyo which displays 1100 colors in the space.
the 'kaleidoscope' exhibition which was recently held at the center focused on
one color at a time such as yellow, red, green, blue or black. every month, the space
displayed a different color, changing hues like a kaleidoscope. the exhibition
aimed to rediscover ordinary colors.

360° kaleidoscope

360° kaleidoscope from Frank Freitag on Vimeo.

nicholas de larmessin

Surrealist architecture

(Claude Nicolas Ledoux Théatre de Besançon, vue de l'interieur)

Antoni Gaudi
Ferdinand Cheval
Simon Rodia
Bruno Taut
Hermann Finsterlin
Frank Lloyd Wright
Bruce Alonzo Goff
Frederick Kiesler

Surrealist architecture includes : designs for towns or for houses which the painters and poets of the movement set out in their works : the work of both classical and contemporary architects whom they admired; and finally various constructions from the designs of decorators and builders who were connected with the surrealist movement. It is an irrational architecture which does not fall in with any ideas of comfort; it is figurative, even metaphorical. Its aim is to make habitable monumental pieces of sculpture, preferably representing creatures or objects.

The surrealists were always interested in architecture; but, before making any practical proposals for this form of art, they used it mainly to achieve an effect of exile, of disorientation, in their painting and poetry. Many of their paintings are based on fantastic architectural landscapes, as detailed as the engravings of Piranesi. In La Peinfure аи defi (1930), Aragon remarked that 'a juxtaposition of the early paintings of Chirico would result in the creation of a town whose plan could be drawn'. Andre Masson and Max Ernst both made drawings of imaginary cities, and in the canvases of Dali, Delvaux and Kay Sage there are all manner of unexpected buildings. In his series of Dwellings (1966), Georges Malkine evokes imaginary houses conceived as particularly suitable for various famous people.

Kaleidoscopic internal Spaces

(above, Kaleidoscopic internal Spaces, drawing)
(below, the Regent Palace, Hotel under constuction 2009)

According to the chosen site, the Regent Palace Hotel, which is still under construction (2009-2012) (Figure 19), people are able to see the demolish situation inside but remain the old façade outside. This drawing (Figure 20) represents inner parts of the building reconstructed via a verity of interior constitutions such as doors, curtains, toilets, rooms, decorations, and lobby and so on in the hotel. The internal power of this building keeps combining interior elements together. Therefore, viewers are able to redefine or re-imagine the interior of this hotel from stereotypical historical images and perceptions.

After taking apart the interior elements of this historical hotel, the distorted mages blur the boundary of different spaces. The definitions of rooms, toilets, shops, kitchens, lobbies and so on are none existent anymore. Just like the under construction site, the preserved façades is the meaning of “The Regent Place Hotel.”

And when the chaos and mess factors are combined, the combination provides a chance to inspect the relationship of interior and exterior, architecture and cityscape. The internal architecture could be treated as a collector or generator, which contains cityscape, memory images beside physical objects.

Blasted Architecture

(Lee Miller,Bridge of Sighs, Kinghtsbridge, Lonson,1940)
Tristan Tzara suggested that the pantheon should be cut in half vertically, and the two halves set 50 centimeters apart, and the poet Paul Eluard predicted that “one day house will be turned inside out like gloves”. The house has a cosmic wholeness that we apprehend in childhood—four sides, four windows, a door, a pitched roof and a chimney. But it is also subject or attack, fragmentation, conflagration and collapse. The house that goes up must come down; this is especially true if we think of the house as a mirror of our won fragile being.
The first manifesto of surrealism in 1924 celebrated “psychic automatism” as central tenet of movement. Breton and fellow surrealists experimented with so-called “sleep séances” to induce automatic speech at the same time as in a trance. The ideal was to access the unconscious as far as possible unmediated by the rational mind. Although later rejected, it being impossible to deny the imposition of reason, the “sleep séances” certainly served as a playful and instructive way of loosening inhibitions and subverting convention.

Porcelain

Rachel Kneebone’s finely sculpted porcelain works erupt with a bacchanal of contorted bodies, limbs and slumped phallic tendrils that emerge from amorphous properties of the material. Sharing the characteristics of Hellenistic sculpture, Kneebone retains the purity of the glazed white surface while the tonal chiaroscuro enhances the intricately modeled ruptures and crevices that inject this conventional material with a sensual physicality and unique energy.

Inspired by Ovid’s great poem ‘Metamorphosis’ where humans migrate into a myriad of forms, Kneebone depicts an erotic state of flux, suspended mid-transition, divulging part figurative and fragmentary motifs. Kneebone’s eclectic vision relishes in the angst of both Greek tragedies and Bernini, the hybrid creatures of Bosch, and the ‘erotic gaze’ of Batialle and Bellmer. A more direct comparison is with the eighteenth century Meissen porcelain tableaux, some of which were copied from idyllic pastoral paintings and odalisques by Watteau and Boucher. Yet Kneebone manages to decant all these influences into her own highly distinct rhetoric, celebrating forms of transgression, beauty and seduction.

Dream of Venus

BusterKeaton, Marcel Duchamp, Joseph Cornell and Alberto Giacometti all made play a component of the surreal house. Dali took this playfulness one step further, creating an amusement hall that was the first and perhaps only—until now, that is –dwelling actually conceived as a surrealist house. His dream of Venus pavilion for the New York World’s Fair of 1939 has long been overlooked; indeed for many years it was written off as being in the worst possible taste. Only recently recuperate in the post-Warholian era of excess and transgression, Dali’s funhouse transforms systematic confusion into carnival.

Combines

The next step, after taking apart of all internal elements in architecture is to recombine these pieces. One reason to combine these fragment elements together is try to blur the boundary of definition in architecture. For instance, most works of the American pop artist Robert Rauschenberg are called “Combines.” Rauschenberg's Combines imitate the arbitrary accumulations of objects to be found in museum collections. Positioned between the culture of the mass media and the museum, the Combines point towards the massive information that makes our experience in everyday life. Rauschenberg's work repeatedly pulls the realms of art and the everyday into close proximity, yet we must recall that he attempts "to act in the gap between the two." In many ways the viewer is placed in that gap, a space in between the cast-off commodities of yesterday and the high art to be preserved for posterity . However, the meaning of a process combined with different architectural elements could also seem to blur the definition boundary; all opposite definition such as: interior and exterior, modern and classical, pass and present, breakdown through recombination. The observers, also as viewers, become breakers who watch or pass through them.

Micromages

There is a similarity here between the mechanical aspect of the car that can relate to Micromages a series of drawing describes Daniel Libeskind’s ideal that takes part the forms of architecture and filters these elements to the purely geometry precise. In his drawings, looking as though they might have been visual texts produced by the machines; they depict a new and ambiguous spatial world emerging from an older, familiar one of architectural form and representation. In his book, “this is presentation, but always according to the mode of imperfection; an internal play in which deferred completeness is united with mobilized openness.” Via the process of purifying, people can reconsider objects with no-conceptual experience that is the source of programs, forms, and responses that were here explored. Imagination, in outpacing this experience, provides alternative solutions to problems without defining architecture. Therefore, the definition of internal architecture would be explored and redefined it.

Breakdown

How to take apart the images or objects of internal architecture and obtain these elements are also important to this project. The processes of art exhibition “Breakdown” (Figure 18) in 2001 in London could provide a similar way to take apart components inside of architecture. Although Michael Landy, the artist of this exhibition, focused on the core ideal that the meaning of consuming, the way he catalogued, defined, and re-organised all his properties in his 33 years life (7,227 items) is another big issue in his work. Before breakdown all his properties, he have to classify different items, take apart of them, and reorganised the fragments. The whole process reverses the way of production, and purifies the daily objects in the real world. Therefore, every interior images, items, and decorations belong to historical buildings in London could be take apart through this same process, which is like the mechanical operation beneath these buildings.