Horner's Corner

This excellent film which, like it’s subject, is genre defying, doesn’t pretend to be the ‘film of the book’. It stands as a kind of sign, or memory, or meditation on the great book The Rings of Saturn and its author, WG ‘Max’ Sebald,. Excellent music by The Caretaker, a ghostly ambience, a variety of ‘hauntology’, mingling electronic sounds  with the hiss and crackle of 78 RPM records of Schubert. This  is utterly right for the project as  book and  film present a series of linked  encounters with revenants. 

There’s been some discussion about whether the book, the walk, could have been based just anywhere. Of course, in a way it could: why not walk and write about Wiltshire, or Greater Manchester, or Saxony? But of then, it was only by being utterly local, with a  walk through a landscape that meant something to a single person at a certain  time that anything  universal and lasting could be achieved.  Reading the book, we don’t need to ‘retrace the writer’s footsteps’ etc.,  because of  this singular encounter  of imagination, place and memory that has become a written artifact, a work of art.  The Rings of Saturn  transcends the particularities of locality and personality through  a total immersion in the local and the contingent, by a great artist. For only the  concrete can  ‘express’ the universal.  Getting stuck with the particularities would result in mere travel writing, a ‘guide to walks in Suffolk’; whereas failure to engage with that part of Suffolk as a real place and time for this writer, Sebald, would generate substanceless, over generalised, ‘fine writing’.  The Rings of Saturn is neither, and so it is a permanently valuable thing. So while it couldn’t have been  ‘set’ in any place but that part of Suffolk, Suffolk is only the foundation for these strange meditations.

Thus the last thing one needs is a pilgrimage to ‘Sebald Country’ in order to find the ‘real places’. If you want those, read the book.

The writer, the book and the film are of lasting interest, and I’ll be returning to them in later posts. Try to see the film, which is on limited release. And do read, or re-read, the book.

Read the book and discover what a quincunx is..

Fast Tube by Casper

WG ‘Max’ Sebald

Jean Nouvel’s new pavilion is now open. It’s certainly pleasurable to wander through, and the red -and it is very red – supposedly echoes the London colour of telephone boxes and buses,  coming into a  pleasing contrast with the surrounding greenery. It’s as if the very ‘constructed’ look of the pavilion comes into a kind of opposition to surrounding parkland: a nature/nurture dialectic is evoked, with the polite shrubbery of the Serpentine environs standing in for Mother Nature. Again, this works, without being very surprising: like a chord in ‘modern’ music that no longer offends the bourgeois ear.

As usual, the pavilion has a kind of very open plan,  full of gaps and angles you can enter and leave by; and it  evokes vaguely (to me, anyway) the shape of a sailing ship (simple mimesis in architecture has  also become familiar since postmodernism, but this is a bit more subtle).  As with a lot of architecture since postmodernism it seems to mean a lot (a surfeit of allusions) and be pseudo functional: all those angles and cantilevered modern planes etc, which don’t actually do much except act as a shelter for the tourist to exchange money for expensive drinks and snacks. It’s a good successor to previous efforts, although I’m not as taken by it as as I was by last year’s pavilion, or the one from 2008 by Frank Gehry (click here for more on previous years). As usual, it gets used mainly as a glorified cafe: that seems about right.

This photograph was taken in the 1960s-70s by John Gay (Gay was the English name taken by Hans Gohler,  a German who left his native land when Hitler rose to power  in 1933;  he was not a Jew, but was disgusted at the way the Jews were being treated. He became a naturalised British subject and took wonderful photographs of this country, usually in b&w. He died in 1999.)

Juno Temple, Agrigento – Caspar David Friedrich

Twelfth Century cloisters at Monreale, near Palermo.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Ruskin really took against this thing when he saw it; for him it seemed an emblem of everything he disliked about a city he loved. I like it!

I took this photograph of the elegant Hancock Building  a couple of years ago. I was attracted by the way the building seemed to merge with the sky, earth and buildings around it.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

One of Palladio’s most celebrated creations.

Photo: C. Horner

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

This is the Senate House of  University College, London. Architect was Charles Holden (1937 ).This Art Deco building is supposed to be the inspiriation for Orwell’s “Ministry of Love” in 1984.

Slavoj Zizek

My knowledge of architecture is constrained to a coupler of idiosyncratic data: my love for Ayn Rand and her architecture-novel The Fountainhead; my admiration of the Stalinist “wedding-cake” baroque kitsch; my dream of a house composed only of secondary spaces and places of passage – stairs, corridors, toilets, store-rooms, kitchen – with no living room or bedroom. The danger that I am courting is thus that what I will say will oscillate between the two extremes of unfounded speculations and what most is already known for a long time.

More here