Allegories - aberrations - fictions

photos from the series Aberrations, courtesy of the author Jim Kazanjian

(all images courtesy Jim Kazanjian)

"Sirens change shape over time. Their first historian, a rhapsodist in the twelfth book of the Odyssey, does not say what they were like; but to Ovid they were birds with reddish feathers and maidenly faces; to Apollonius of Rhodes, from the waist up they were women, and from the waist down - sea birds; to the great Tirso de Molina (and to heraldry), half birds, half fish."³

Abstract ideas and concrete means.... unitary image... allegory. Re-reading the definitions of allegory, I wondered to what extent the reality of architecture is lived or imagined. The same question I asked myself in front of Filip Dujardin's compositions: which came first, the architect's idea behind the realistic photomontages or the industrial approach of MVRDV's Silodam containers in Amsterdam?

Contemporary architecture has expanded its fields of interest, especially in recent decades, into the visual sphere of parables, stories. Architectural allegories are no longer the grotesque representations of the dark middle ages or the fantastical faces of art nouveau, although in the former category I might include the new zoomorphic buildings of the urban orient. More than a zoomorphic mimetic approach, the allegories of contemporary architecture tell imaginary stories in unitary compositions. Art in turn approaches architecture in a baroque-sculptural manner; baroque through agglomeration and sculptural through abstraction.

Fascinating as the subject of allegories is in contemporary architecture, the balancing act between the real and the fantastic, the allegorical/unitary and the chaotic, delights in the play between the two visual hypostases: imagined fiction and personified reality. In this context, Le Corbusier, Zaha Hadid, Jean Nouvel, albeit with a strong dose of fiction in their works, seem to be at least visually artistic outdone by a series of photographers/artists/reworked architects, precisely for that sculptural baroque perspective we were discussing.

Particular perspectives on imagined/imagined architecture can be found in the works of visual artists Filip Dujardin, Thomas Barbey, Jim Kazanjian, artists with distinct approaches, who treat the architectural object/frame in a realistic, surrealist and fictional mania respectively. Taking the surrealist direction founded by Jerry N. ^Uelsmann4 characterized by frame ^minimalism5 and Erik Johansson in more complex approaches respectively, the works of the aforementioned artists use the same technique of superimposing negatives6, photomontages and collages, attacking synchronism as a latent state of things. The creative process is one of completion through completion, of producing/reproducing events at the optimum ^moment7.

Throughout the 20th century, commercial visual perception shifted from symbolically composed frames (^Uelsmann8) to exponentially architectural works. The latter present prose-like conceptual details - urban fragments that retain their scale, recomposing themselves in a futuristic world, unencumbered by the human scale given by vegetation, but unpopulated, abandoned, dominated by imaginary constructions.

Read the full text in issue 1/2012 of Arhitectura magazine.

NOTES

¹ Aberrations - Series of photographic works, impossible worlds, by Jim Kazanjian, 2010

² Fictions - Series of photographic works, with reference to an alternative reality, by Filip Dujardin, 2010

³ Jorge Luis Borges, Sirens, The Book of Imaginary Beings, Polirom Publishing House, 2006

⁴ Jerry N. Uelsmann (b. 1934), renowned American photographer of the 20th century; he reinvented photomontage photography, the composite print, and is recognized for his poetic images

⁵ The Open Room, from the Synchronic Moments collection, presents an open scenographic setting in which contrasts of light are speculated, creating a uniform filigree between the texture of the sky in contre-jour and the classical ornaments of the interior. in the background we notice the amplified difference in scale, between the scale of the human and that of space - recalling the fantastical fairy-tales and the doll's house models of the turn of the century. - "All the informations are there, yet the mystery remains." - Jerry N. Uelsmann, on the Synchronic Moments series, URL: http://www.pacicontemporary.com/www/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=153%3Ajerry-uelsmann-qsynchronistic-momentsq&catid=43%3A2011&Itemid=61&lang=en, 01.12.2011.

⁶ Beginning in 1850, photography evolved from initial experiments reconstructing pictorial frames - Oscar G. Rejlander, Henry Peach Robinson - to minimal frames - Jerry N. Uelsmann, and complex approaches - Erik Johansson.

⁷ "As the title suggests, it is linked to the synchronicity theory, according to which the events happen just at the right time: in the same way the work unveils itself only during the creative process." - critical text by Gigliola Foschi, Jerry Uelsmann "Synchronistic Moments", PaciArte, 2011, URL: http://www.pacicontemporary.com/www/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=153%3Ajerry-uelsmann-qsynchronistic-momentsq&catid=43%3A2011&Itemid=61&lang=en, 01.12.2011

⁸ Uelsmann, approaches the frames by speculating the symbolic plane and playing with the human scale - different elements combine enigmatically.