sorry for the tardy response but I just wanted to thank you for the lovely--and important--thoughts...
chris
>
> I guess I didn't really address this question, since I went off in
> another direction.
>
> What do I really think? The best work (that is the work I like best)
> is in the dialectic between the hand and the mind, which is why I was
> interested in art, particularly sculpture and architecture. Of course
> that isn't how either of these are done any more.
>
> I didn't follow who put this up, Yoshie or someone else, but it's a
> good example:
>
> ``Well, if they insist on `hard, difficult labor,' I suppose a socialist
> society can oblige them: create a special `temple of labor' --
> modeled upon Zen temples in Japan, perhaps, but without any modern
> conveniences -- where they can spend their free time spiritualizing
> themselves through such tasks as cleaning, sweeping, carrying water,
> rearranging stone gardens, etc.''
>
> Well, yes. But why not? It does sound better than scraping shit off
> the wheelchairs of the poor and desperate of Oakland. But consider
> what is required to build such a temple and surrounding gardens, and
> assume all work is to be done by hand with hand tools, then sign me
> up. I have no interest in ceremony or worship. My interest is in
> building it.
>
> It has to start with finding a suitable location with a knowledge of
> the surrounding landscape (not downtown Oakland), the soil conditions,
> climate, the rhythms of seasonal change, native plants and animals and
> their habits. The location of possible building materials. Can you use
> existing features in the landscape, water, trees, rock formations? So
> the entire project is already a dialogue with the ecosystems and
> landscape, in short a dialectic with the earth. The dialogue begins
> before any building takes form. The form arises out of this
> dialectic. This isn't from Frank Lloyd Wright, Hegel or Marx, but from
> almost all traditional building from almost all pre-industrial
> societies.
>
> Nobody probably understood the idea that the stone facades of ancient
> societies were obsessions with time, as labor in stone. Building this
> imaginary temple to Labor, isn't about the deification of labor, but
> about the dialectic between all the elements of its creation, the land
> formation, the eco-systems, the materials of construction, the found
> design from the interlacing of imaginary labor with material labor, a
> dialectic conducted in real time.
>
> A traditional Zen rock garden is a expression of it, say Ryoan-ji in
> the Kyoto Imperial Palaces, from the Muromachi period. That is, these
> gardens arise from these conceptions and their interplay with the
> materials that form them. Whether this is the traditional Japanese
> conception of what these gardens are, I don't know. What I can give,
> is how I interpreted them and learned from them.
>
> For Doug. Is this organistic clap trap? Yes. Although such claptrap
> with some nuance, it can be made to take in a considerable quantity of
> the world's cultural traditions. But take a look at Isamu Noguchi's
> work and imagine making it, try to resuscitate the forms through their
> historical antecedents and associations, like the gardens of Kyoto. A
> NOT very good example is the Sunken Garden for the Chase Manhattan
> Bank Plaza. Its only real virtue (if its still there, cleaned and
> functioning) is you can go see it. This in a certain critical sense is
> a good example of how monuments to Capital presume over the deep or
> long historical traditions that arise from Labor. Of course only
> bankers can afford to buy these things. But see, I am not interested
> in buying them or possessing them in that sense at all. I am
> interested in making them.
>
> Chuck Grimes
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>