The ‘devilry’ of our undercroft imagery, realised through the accidents of mirror-play, is not diabolically inspired, but perhaps critically associated with rogue spatial impulses akin to the underworlds of the Caceri d’ invenzione series of Piranesi, which indeed may well have been a distant reference in the minds of Gailhoustet and Renaudie themselves. They share a drive to break existing rules of spatial order, to overturn hierarchies of attention through disorientation, to actively assert the image as a site of spatial mutation which challenges that of architectural production. If there is a latent critique within the disorientations of our stereo prints, it is not so much directed at the architecture of Gailhoustet or Renaudie, as at the culture of imaging that currently disseminates such architectures on social media, and which defines a fetishised, global media spectacle of brutalist icons. For Re-wiring Brutalism we positioned Brutalism within the radical technologies promoted within the Barbican’s wider 2019 season of curatorial projects, called Life Rewired . We proposed Brutalism as a spatial technology that reached an apotheosis with the work of the likes of Renaudie, the implications of which are yet to be fully appraised. Rather than presenting examples of Parisian Brutalism as a conventional architectural, curatorial portrait, we wished to introduce the work of Renaudie and Gailhoustet as part of a fragmented sampling of brutalist spaces, which included imagery of Chamberlin, Powell and Bon’s Barbican itself, presented in-situ. The Stereo Adapter was the primary tool of fragmentation and the production of a comparative and defamiliarised aggregate of Brutalist space. In the article ‘Photography and Fetish’ the film theorist Christian Metz developed some thoughts on the differences between photography and film regarding the issue of fetishisation. 3 What emerges from his differentiation is a powerful sense of the force of the photographic frame as the imposition of an ‘immobility’ and a ‘silence’ through which still photography asserts its authority over the referent. He wrote, ‘Photography is a cut inside the referent, it cuts off a piece of it, a fragment, a part object, for a long immobile travel of no return’. In Metz’s understanding, the notion of the ‘fragment’ alludes to the referent of the photographic image itself, that which is presented as the centre of viewing and attention, but which, by definition, is formed through the exclusion of other things (the wider contingencies of a relational reality beyond the frame). This, we suggest, corresponds to the design object-centred structure of much architectural photography prevalent in professional architectural and social media. The raw prints issuing from the Stereo Adapter cannot be said to restore the relational complexities of a wider context beyond the architectural, object-centre, but they do actively fragment and disturb Metz’s ‘immobile’ ‘fragment’.
Nigel Green/Photolanguage
Robin Wilson installing work at the Barbican Centre, 2019
Detail of Photolanguage’s exhibition at the Barbican Centre, 2019
2 For information on the Diableries see, https://www.londonstereo.com/ diableries/index.html 3 Christian Metz, ‘Photography and Fetish’, October 34 (1985), pp. 81-90
Nigel Green/Photolanguage
on site review 39: tools
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