studio gale design
choreographic sculpture
In her classic book on the medium, “Passages in Modern Sculpture”, Rosalind Krauss traces the journey of sculpture from its place atop the pedestal in the late 19th/early 20th century work of Rodin, through the work of the Russian Constructivists, Duchamp and Brancusi, Alexander Calder, David Smith, Richard Serra and Anthony Caro, and finally to the first generation of “Earth Artists” such as Smithson, Matta-Clark and Heizer. Her title is a triple entendre, in that the work documents changes (or passages) in the medium, that the direction of sculpture in that time frame has been away from fixed, static objects and towards movement, and that the book itself is comprised of writings or “passages”. Essentially she is describing sculpture’s evolution from being seen and understood as a static object, to a dynamic one that it was necessary to circumnavigate in order to perceive.
What the sculptures were also (in some cases inadvertently) doing was creating their own choreography, which overlapped with the realm of architecture, which is always in the business of creating a physical choreography around it’s functional program. Most often, however, that choreography is unconscious; strictly treated as a by-product of programmatic necessity. It is there nonetheless, and I became fascinated with the possible articulation of that choreography.
Taking my cue from artists like Richard Serra, Gordon Matta-Clark, Roland Poulin, and architects like Carlo Scarpa, I began to develop a sculptural language directed at that choreography itself. These were sculptures whose purpose was less as visual objects (although they are, undeniably, visual) and more as physical “rhythms” that spoke directly to muscular memory by presenting an alternative pattern of movement than our bodies unconscious ones. The “sculpture” takes place inside our bodies themselves, and offers an “image” directly to their unconscious rhythms.
In many ways, these works form the very core of the philosophy of studio archit(tȳp).
whispering to the body's dream
Fall 1997
It is something like the composition of music, itself a pattern of number. Even when it departs from that pattern—that too is part of the composition, part of a greater pattern, at first invisible to us as we concentrate on the small kernel we believed the whole. Perhaps it is akin to the enduring search for repetition in Pi, the belief that somewhere down in the depths of calculation, the figure will return to its key signature like the fugue finally retuning to it’s prelude. It is the music we are listening for in the mathematics, and the mathematics we are listening to in the music: the ultimate balance in the equation. Life clings to pattern, every heartbeat in perfect tune with orchestral maneuvers beyond comprehension, finding the rhythm and harmony, however obscured.
Our daily lives, our movements, our routines, have their own music. They have a rhythm, a dance which we unconsciously play out day after day. They accumulate over time in the deep structures of the body’s memory. They have the power of a dream to mystify and guide while slipping just free of the grasp of consciousness. Does it make sense then, to discover a compositional language of the music of our movement? Not a visual language of bodily movement (which exists in dance) but a physical language, an actual choreography of the participants body, structured along the lines of a musical conversation, of pattern, departure and return. Is there a communication which can only be made to the history of gesture buried inside our muscles? Is there a conversation to be had there with the parts of us that remember our history better than we ourselves do? Is there a way to create a new belief, beneath knowledge, of who we are?
I am looking for the sculptural language that takes place within the participants body, that is assembled in the fingertips and muscles the way a cubist painting is assembled by the eye: a composition of invoked physical memory that builds an emotional myth of action. I want to tempt the participant’s unconscious body towards a meeting with their conscious mind, and through there describe a new myth, a new possibility of being.
It begins with something simple. A subtle manipulation of iconographic movements: stairs, a railing, a door; the invisible motions that have been repeated endlessly and unconsciously from childhood; now subverted, their archetypal rhythms played a beat faster or slower than expected. Or perhaps played as we heard them as children: the stairs too big for the way our small bodies climbed, the rail awkwardly out of comfortable reach. And when this pattern has played itself to definite recognition in the muscles, through a door (itself a pregnant pause in the ‘movement’) a new pattern, one like a breath held too long and then released: a series that catches the instinctual joy of that same period in our lives. Stairs that encourage an abandoned run, which ring out as they are struck, amounting to a kind of musical sculpture which takes place in the body; sensations, embedded but forgotten, awakened and encouraged to communicate with our present selves. It is, perhaps, our younger selves, unencumbered by the baggage we now carry, who can make the most effective plea for change.
constructing the body's dream
Spring 1998
Constructing the body’s dream was an attempt to integrate the sculptural language that had been developed in “Whispering to the Body’s Dream”, and integrate it into the purely functional program of a bus interchange station, in an effort to explore the possibilities of altering the choreography in even the most ignored of spaces.
This project was presented as a film, using a combination of scale models, full scale detail models, video of the actual bus station, and found footage.
return to the playgound
ongoing
In the next step for this sculptural language, Return to the Playground takes the concepts and forms developed in earlier projects, and removes the dependence on an existing architectural context, and builds the spatial/physical experiences in their entirety in the neutral setting of a gallery as stand alone experience.
This series is comprised of three pieces, each based on a common playground activity or apparatus: Hopscotch, Double Dutch, and Jungle Gym. This strategy was chosen for multiple reasons. First, these experiences are part of our shared language of muscular memory, so they are capable of speaking to a broad audience. Second, they are experiences that, as adults, belong to our younger selves, and so to the time when our bodies were a very different scale than they are now. And finally, these are experiences whose primary goal is to elicit physical joy, and so are in marked contrast to those that belong to our workaday lives.
The goal, as in earlier projects, is to introduce a counter rhythm to the body’s unconscious dance, and create the possibility of dancing it in a new way.