Pedro Levi Bismarck
NO ART IS MAD. NO ART IS ARCHITECTURE. PUNCTUM.
In the
beginning it wasn’t the verb, but the images, still without man
Bragança de Miranda, Corpo e
Imagem
Declassifying
For Barthes, Photography
is unclassifiable, is invisible and is mathesis
singulares: no «corpus», just a few bodies [1]. But it will always and mostly be an adventure – the
pressure of the unspoken that asks to be said [2]. La Photographie
commence dans la plaie, commence dans le punctum.
Studium-Punctum
The punctum is
with the studium, according to Barthes, one of the essential
elements that take part in the photographical image reading. If the studium is
the cultural and distracted reading of the object (the field
of the education, where one recognizes the main photography functions), the punctum is
the element that disturbs the studium. It's the wound (la
plaie), the sting, and the deep cut that opens the image interior
space. It’s the casualty that escapes from the composition. It’s what I
don’t seek but comes into sight, it’s the chance that disturbs me and opens me
up to the image secret abyss. What I don't see, what I don't want to see, but
what I can touch, that I know I will touch.
If the studium is
what allow us to observe and understand the photography, the punctum is
the wound without which the image cannot survive, the expansion force that
opens the photography. It’s the point-sauvage that
distinguishes the image, that opens up space in direction of the observed
thing. But is, mostly, the point where I stop seeing through the others eye and
I move myself; where I free myself from the image to build my own way of
looking. As Barthes writes, doesn’t matter anymore the studium or
its vulgar rhetoric (technique, report, art) just the absolute
subjectivity – the silence where I can close my eyes and make speak the image [3]. And in this critical moment, as Barthes says: “I am
just a savage, a child – or a maniac; I put aside all the knowledge, all the
culture, I abstain myself of being someone’s eye heir” [4].
Punctum-singularis
Moreover, the Barthes punctum is
also the image irruption of time, or rather, it's the instant awareness of time
in the image undifferentiated surface. That is, the absolutely precious and
inalienable place where the image becomes mine (where I
recognize it and inscribed in it a meaning). Where it finishes its universality
and starts its own subjectivity. In short: where my image is
at last free – free to be abolished, free to be annihilated.
And free because it’s now mine. Let’s say that its end is its deconstruction as
an image and its reconstruction as a power/potency (absolutely
subjective). This is its mythical conditional, its reachable purpose, because
it’s there that its power breeds – in its absence, in the irrevocable silence
that stays after its passage. “Is the passage of the image that creates time
and the human passes through in this sliding of the image over the «real»” [5]. The image universal nature is no more than an
illusion, it only exists as mathesis singularis [6]. And I will only be free as I conquer its subjectivity destructing
(deconstructing) its supposedly universal nature. The end of
the image cannot be other than its (own) end.
Punctum-invisibilis
This is also the meaning
of the punctum in the architectural image: the casualty that
escapes from the composition, the savage-point that
annihilates the homogenous and universal image, and provokes the awareness of
the real. The poetical device that turns the image into potency, that
turns the image into space – open, traveled,
experiencible. A space utterly subjective and utterly of the self (the free
place of the self) [7], without mediation or
a priori representations, but represented in the course of its
spatial action. A space, as Ignasi de Solà-Morales writes, constantly
produced by the instant and devoured by the action [8].
Let’s say that the
architectonical punctum, it's the wound that
opens up in the fix and immutable image, the detail that opens it and destroys
it, and that give us the time in the experimentation of space. If
architecture starts in the image, its end is the image destruction. And so the punctum is
the key moment where architecture is no longer image (supposedly universal and
alleged representation) and transforms itself in a poetical device of
habits, movements, desires, of the (un)expected and of the (im)possible. A system
of events, as writes Ignasi, that will work over changing and
not strict categories, able to leverage the multiple experience and world
awareness. And so, architecture is the spatial action invariable game
annihilating the pure and flat representations, the continuous action over the
space, the body and matter unpredictable instant. It will always be, as would
say Jorge Luis Borges, the fruit and the mouth simultaneously.
If the punctum give
us precisely the invisibility of the image, the singular beauty of architecture
is in its most enigmatic nature, that is, its utterly non-representable quality.
What distinguishes it from art, or any other art, and that makes its own
intimate poiesis, that is, the poetical motion of the bodies and matter in the
always ephemeral conquer for interiority, the lowermost place of the self in
the arise of death, beyond death, in love. The moment where architecture
becomes invisible, silently invisible – the silence where I can close
my eyes and make my image speak, my own images.
Punctum-locus
For Barthes the punctum is,
still, this mad point that allow us to touch the reality, that
moves me savage and without culture inside it. Mad because gives the
reality without mediation, because confirms shockingly
that what I see really existed [9]. But mad,
also, as Barthes writes, because the photography is beyond de representations
codes, doesn't want to be restitution, nor catharsis, nor wants to
transform the mourning in work. The photography is the terrible presence of
the real before us, savage, uncodified, simple (and I say:
beauty). And so, according to Barthes, the last effort of society has been
precisely the attempt of making the photography serious, fighting
its own (un)reality and smooth the mad savage that threat each and
single image. And it did, in one hand, making of the photography
an art (because no art is mad) and in other hand, generalizing it,
“because generalized, it completely unrealizes the human world of conflicts, of
desires, on the pretext of illustrating them” [10].
Punctum-fugit
And so, the question posed
in the final paragraph of La chambre claire: Mad or Serious? Photography
can be both says Barthes: “serious, if its realism remains on, smooth by
esthetical and empirical habits, or mad, if this realism is absolute and if, so
to speak, original, making return to the loving and terrified conscience the
imprint of Time” [11]. But isn’t that as well the question that we can
dispose over architecture? That is, serious if doesn’t
question the esthetical and empirical habits, if it is the
imitation without thickness of the image; or mad, if it wants
to go beyond the studium, if is utterly realistic (that is,
seeks first of all to understand the reality), if it works in the matter of
space and the in the body of time. Because the wound (and the drama) of the punctum
architecturae is precisely this: the awareness that the studium rules
and codes are not enough (they don't transform the white sheet in project, nor
transform by itself desire into reality, image into potency and space).
It will be always necessary the unclassifiable, invisible, singular and
immediate (without mediation) openness of the punctum, where
it’s us savages and without culture face to face to the mad
map of reality. But the only one that still give us the (im)possible
possibility, the unspoken adventure, of accessing and
understanding the reality (and the studium itself), where
we abstain to be others eye and where we conquer our irreparable
interiority (and individuality) – our own vanishing point (our punctum
fugitis). Because, if the madness of photography is to be the terrible
presence of the real, the one of architecture is to be, itself, the
production of the unnamed real. Beyond its own art and beyond the images
trivialization, this is its own madness. And so, as Barthes concludes, in this
world of increasingly seductive images, but smoothed and homogeneous, it is to
us to choose: “submit its spectacle to the civilized code of the perfect
illusions or [then] confront in it the inaccessible awake of the reality [12].
(Dziga
vertov, 1929)
I see the
endless images of Vertov, but I don't see them. I am now in the other side. I
am the machine, I am the camera itself. I am placed inside it. I am myself
inside it. And I forget. I forget of its time. I forget its limit. I forget
that they are images. I am the camera itself. I am the lens itself.
I am now
Vertov.
[1] Unclassifiable because that classification
would be necessarily reductive. Invisible, because it’s a presentation of
the reality and not a representation. Singularis,
because any discourse on this will never be able to start from «Photography»
itself, but from a photography. Barthes, Roland. Camera
Lucida.
[6] This is precisely the problem of the image
contemporary spectacle: there are more images that the ones we can destroy.
Consuming just some of them we left the others accumulating, diming the margins
of the real. Cf: Susan Sontag, Sobre la fotografia e
Bragança de Miranda, Corpo e Imagem.
______________________
Pedro
Levi Bismarck
Architect. Porto
Other Articles in the
same issue:
ANDRÉ SIER
PEDRO OLIVEIRA
ANDRÉ TAVARES
