Descending into the Pool of Reflection by Federico Ortiz

Descending into the Pool of Reflection

“There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide.” The Myth of Sisyphus Albert Camus

No truth will be found in here. Having said that and warned from this, you are now invited to this pilgrimage. This text is then a map to navigate, to explore ideas on the sublime, death and the human existence.

0 Taking Kant’s Critique of Judgment as a point of departure, we should say that for him “sublime is what even to be able to think proves that the mind has a power surpassing any standard of sense.”1 Sublime is something so large that our mind has nothing to compare it with. But instead of showing a weakness of our mind, it shows the power of reason. Then, where is the sublime to be found? Kant explains that the sublime “(…) cannot be contained in any sensible form but concerns only ideas of reason, which, though they cannot be exhibited adequately, are aroused and called to mind by this very inadequacy, which can be exhibited in sensibility.”2 The “vast ocean heaved up by storms” in a Turner painting, is then nowhere to find the sublime. At least, it is not itself the sublime. Therefore, if the sublime is only in our minds – in the realm of ideas – how is it possible to work with it in the concrete real world? How to materialize the sublime? In order to answer this question, we must first consider another important side to Kant’s sublime, the idea of fear. If the sublime is not in an object itself but is provoked to our minds, what can arise the aesthetic judgment of the sublime? One possible answer is nature. In Kant’s words “nature can count as a might, and so as dynamically sublime, for aesthetic judgment only insofar as we consider it as an object of fear.”3 Fear, Kant writes, is not to consider something fearful, something you would be afraid of; but something you can think of it as fearful because you want to put resistance against it. When confronted to dynamically sublime nature, we discover in ourselves the ability to resist. This arises in our minds the power of reason. We find in our minds a conscious superiority over nature. In a similar way, in A Philosophical Enquiry Burke suggested, before Kant, that whatever stimulates the idea of pain and danger is a source of the sublime. Fear is to capture pain or death; it acts on the body, it tenses our nerves. Pain is more powerful than pleasure and the biggest pain is death.4 Nonetheless, what is the pleasure in death? Solitude. The pain of being with oneself, completely excluded from society, is the greatest pleasure. Pain and pleasure overlap. Can solitude produce the sublime? Is this a possible way to deal with it in the concrete world?

In order to try to answer these questions, we will analyse three cases. Different subjects in different moments, probably, trying to deal with the representation or the experience of the fear of being alone or the absurdity of our existence. J. M. W. Turner, Bas Jan Ader and Le Corbusier will be put to work together so that a closer approach to this problem can be drawn.

-1 Before and during Turner’s lifetime (1775-1851) the sublime was developed as a philosophical problem by many theorists, thus, one could expect him to be fully aware of this concept. In fact, some authors speak of a ‘Turnerian Sublime’ and link his work with the idea of the representation of the sublime. This is, however, exactly the point in which we are going to put an emphasis, the experience of representations. Turner knew that to excite ideas is not the same as to represent them. Trained as a topographical draughtsman and a landscape painter, Turner achieved to transmit the sublime in his paintings by distorting reality. Modifying topographical details or creating ‘unnatural’ settings adding storms, strong lights and shadows or even wind, allowed him to overcome the mere representation of the physical reality and to express in his paintings his own bodily experience. In fact, what he manages to express is the human experience; “the horror of a sea storm is the more appalling when we watch men vomiting up salt water as they drown, or slipping on wet sand as they try to salvage wreckage from the surf.”5 Turner is not making a mere representation of a storm but he is awakening in the viewers the thoughts and feelings of the experience of the storm. Wilton explains that “what distinguishes Turner’s sunsets from any others is his constant reference to the human experience, which is our only means of approaching them.”6 As Turner himself said, he did not “paint to be understood”; he aimed to the experience itself. The operation of the sublime can be seen in any of his late pictures; now every “sunrise and sunset take on a fresh and personal meaning, a significance which relates neither to a hero nor to the common man, but to the artist himself, who is both.”7 In that sense, to exemplify these ideas, the most powerful example in Turner’s work would be his late 1842 painting, Snow Storm Steam-Boat off a Harbour's Mouth; except for us, no so much for the picture in itself but for the events behind it.

In order to paint this picture, as the complete title Snow Storm – Steam-Boat off a Harbour’s Mouth making Signals in Shallow Water, and going by the Lead. The Author was in this Storm on the Night the Ariel left Harwich suggests, Turner had himself tied to the mast of a boat during a snowstorm. Whether a romantic myth or not, it is enough evidence to prove that what Turner was trying to express in this painting was actually the thoughts that this sublime experience arouses in him. Alone in a dark snowstorm in the middle of the sea, the painter finds in this dangerous limit between life and death, the true experience of the sublime. Turner died in 1851 and two objects were made after his dead body. One was the painting known as Turner’s Body Lying in State by George Jones, which recorded the painter’s funeral in the picture gallery he had himself designed in his house in London. The other was a mask of Turner’s dead face attributed to the Pre-Raphaelite sculptor Thomas Woolner. We shall return to this point about the link between death, body and representation.

-2 Thereafter, is it possible not to just represent the sublime but also to experience it? Or to put it in another way, can the experience of the sublime be represented? Although, how could one represent something if it cannot be put into words or images? The work of the Dutch artist Bas Jan Ader can bring some light into this question. Normally associated with the romantic eighteenth-century artists and ideas of the tragic hero on a quest for the sublime, Ader’s work is not only romantic but also, and mostly, conceptual. Based and driven by an idea, a precise set of rules is defined in order to carry on the work. Go on to the top of a roof, sit on a chair and let yourself roll down. Ride a bike along a canal, drive towards the canal and let yourself go. Climb up to a tree, hold yourself from a branch and let yourself fall. As LeWitt wrote, “the idea becomes a machine that makes the art.” 8 If conceptual art moves away from a representational into a system-based practice, then how can the work be represented? In Ader’s case, films and photographs are produced after the execution of the work. Although these are only traces of each piece, as the main part of the work is in the performance itself.

In the falling series, we see the artist falling down the roof of his house in California (Fall I, Los Angeles. 16mm, duration: 24 sec, 1970) and then we see him riding a bike and falling into a canal in Amsterdam (Fall II, Amsterdam. 16mm, duration: 19 sec, 1970). As Spence puts it, falling under one of the most powerful forces of nature, gravity, the human subject becomes an object under the power of natural forces, an object product of the falling and the loosing of selfconsciousness; falling is also a rehearsal of the inevitable act of dying.9 What he is trying to represent, gravity, cannot be represented at all. Just as in his work I’m too sad to tell you, a film in which the artist is crying in a close-up shot for 3 minutes and 34 seconds, we see him fighting against what cannot be said because there are no words to do it. Here the sublime is in the infinite sadness and the melancholia of the solitary self-reflection. Ader shows how conceptualism can transcend reason by rational means. Stripped from any kind of romantic association, emotions are now pure concepts. However, by placing himself as the subject of his performances, it could be said that his work is not only conceptual but also strongly existential. One of the most powerful and dramatic exposures to the existential experience is his last work In search of the miraculous. Intended as a three-piece performance, Ader was sent off by a choir in Los Angeles, sailed across the Atlantic in a small boat and finally another choir in Amsterdam would receive him. The trip could not be captured in words or images, the intensity of the self-experience was paradoxically only for himself. Death is, Dumbadze explains, “the only event one faces absolutely alone. (…) One watches life expire, one observes the pain, anguish or resolve that marks someone else’s last moments. The liminal point demarcating being and nonbeing is a knowledge that is singular.”10 As the sailor Henk de Velde says, “There is a moment that everyone experiences between life and death. It’s a moment no one can explain, only 1/10th of a second. And it’s this state of grace that I experience while at sea. I want to hold on to that moment as long as possible. It’s about holding on to what you’re letting go of. I think that’s what he [Ader] was always searching for.”11 In 1975, Bas Jan Ader started his boat trip in search of the miraculous and he never came back. His search was that of death, not in the way a suicidal person would do, but with an aesthetic intention. The experiment was to test the romantic ideas of the tragic hero on the quest for the sublime in an existential conceptual performance.

Ironically the moment the sublime is experienced at its most, it’s the moment oneself couldn’t be more alone; it’s the moment one completely gives up to the overwhelming power of the mighty and then physical death is left. “The self is made to experience itself most fully, paradoxically, in the very moment when, overpowered by the force of the sublime, it sense the possibility of its own dissolution.”12 The body of Bas Jan Ader was never found.

-3 Exactly ten years before Bas Jan Ader’s disappearance – 50 years ago today – another artist died in the sea. After a typical morning swim in Roquebrune-CapMartin, his body was found on the shore. Le Corbusier was not necessarily searching for the sublime in the exact same moment of his death, but wasn’t he after it before? Is it possible to enquire his architectural work, neither in relation to his personal symbolism – so strongly expressed in Le Poeme de l'Angle Droit – nor to the spiritual sacred espaces indicibles of Ronchamp or La Tourette? Here we intend to understand in Le Corbusier the problem of death as an aesthetic matter related to the aesthetics of the sublime. In different occasions, Le Corbuiser had supposedly said, “How nice it would be to die swimming toward the sun.” As if he had designed his own death, it was exactly how he died at the age of 78. Previously in life, death was not for Le Corbusier something horrible; in fact, it clearly had some aesthetics values. When his wife Yvonne died in 1957, he made a sketch of her lying on her deathbed and wrote: “She is lying on her bed in the guest room, straight as a recumbent statue, her death mask the magisterial Provençal bone structure. And today, calmly, I have the feeling that death is no horror.”13 The fact that he made a sketch of his dead lover is not surprising at all if we consider that he had done the same, some years before, with his dead father and he would do it again with his mother. Surprisingly, however, after his dog Pinceau died, he used his hide to bound one of his favourite books, Don Quichotte.14 Another object he kept from a dead body was a backbone from his wife. The day of her funeral, he went to the crematorium and rescued a small vertebra from the ashes; he showed it to his friends René and Perriand saying, “This is all I have left from my dear Yvonne.”

He kept this bone for the rest of his life in his apartment; he would even take it with him in his pocket and sometimes while working, he would put it on the drafting table. 15 Apart from their symbolic load, these objects (bodily representations of the experience of death) reminded Le Corbusier, not so much of the others but more of himself; his own solitude – as all his loved ones were dying – and his own destiny, his mortality. Death was no doubt aesthetically relevant in Le Corbusier’s life, and work as well. Just as any other architecture project, after Yvonne passed away not only did he draw her and keep her bone, but he also designed her grave, which in the future would too accommodate his own dead body. In previous years, Le Corbusier had experienced a moment in-between life and death. In a letter to his mother in March 1932, he tells her about the dreamlike experience of swimming under a thunderstorm. “The water fell madly. Lightning, thunder. I was completely alone. I never took a bath so calm. The rain crushed the waves. I’ve never gotten such soft water in the mouth. I got out of the bath like a dream.”16 The fact that he felt so alone and yet so calm reveals the idea of the pleasure in solitude. The storm, here again, is not important, but the thoughts it incited in him are the ones that count for the experience of the sublime. How could this subsequently be applied into architecture? Did Le Corbusier ever try to materialise this experience? Tafuri could provide us a hint into this question when in “Machine et mémoire” he writes, “In many ways, the Pool of Reflection seems to be a further development of the metaphors contained in the ‘chamber à ciel ouvert’ of the Beistegui penthouse: descending into it, rather than ascending to the height of a penthouse, one is supposed to remain in the company of one’s own solitude, while the symbols of the great values disappear”17 To remain in the company of one’s own solitude. The chamber à ciel ouvert (open-air room) Tafuri is mentioning is a room without a roof, a room with open sky, designed by Le Corbusier on the top of a penthouse in the centre of Paris; and the “Pool of Reflection” is an important part, as we will see, in his design for the Capitol of the new city of Chandigarh in India.

Apparently empty in its centre, the final project for the Capitol of Chandigarh consists of four big sculptural buildings trying to establish a dialogue with each other and with the surrounding landscape. The “empty” centre, the impossibility of the centre or the loss of centre, becomes the main issue undermining the wholeness of the composition and at the same time keeping it all together. As Gargiani and Rosellini wrote, “The entire design of the capitol expresses sculptural force and existential fragility, at the same time.”18 Then, this existential fragility will be for us the most intriguing part of the design. Despite its apparent emptiness, the centre is full. Artificial hills, tree curtains, deep trenches and reflecting pools; they create a machine for hollowing the fullness of one’s own existence. The artificial hills are not elements to climb on top to see the vastness of the city, but instead, they are elements with the only mission of blocking the view and forcing the individual to remain isolated from the city, they are elements to not-see. Le Corbusier is even trying to make sure that no one could climb up to one of these hills as he says “be careful to not lead paths to the top of the hills (…) one should never see the city.”19 Arranged in long lines, forming “curtains”, the trees are also intended to block the view of the city. Furthermore, from the lowest part of this massive public space, down in “The Trench of Consideration”, the only visible thing would be the open sky.20 Just as in the Besitegui apartment in Paris, a set of artifice is put to work to create an isolating chamber à ciel ouvert, a “closed basin”; except this time in India, there are no technological devices, no mechanical periscopes, no sliding chandeliers, no moving hedges, just pure artificial landscapes. Hills, trees, trenches and pools, are just like white walls that intensify the experience of the solitary self-reflection, under the infinite sky. In creating this space, Le Corbusier not only refers to well known historical references. Athens, Rome, Venice or Pisa are faraway western allusions, instead he goes on to explore the Indian landscape trying to understand how the locals dealt with this unknown climate. A revealing experience in this sense will be his visits to the Pinjore Garden at Patiala, close to Chandigarh, and to an old mill in which he finds the strategy of the pools in different levels. “In the erosion of the terrain on which an old mill stands, in a sequence of four levels starting with the natural ground level, Le Corbusier counts ‘eight levels’, including the four illusory levels created by reflection in the pool of the lowest level.”21

Blinded by the glare of the water pathways and marble paving, Le Corbusier’s experience is that of detachment; what he sees is actually in the reflections. He then uses this “mathematical and objective” tactic of the reflections and its resulting optical illusions, to confine them the impossible task to bring together immense objects that are almost 500 meters apart. Finally, the Pools of Reflection are, in Le Corbusier’s words, “the key to the composition.”22 The experience of solitude, silence and detachment are the only means to assure reaching the universal sublime, away from the metropolitan contingences. On a closer inspection of the plans and images of the project, we can observe the complicated earthwork: an artificial landscape with the only intention to trick the eye of the observer pretending to bring closer massive objects, though resulting in a solitary garden of forking paths, a promenade to get lost, to disappear. These images are to be listened. In listening to the plastic acoustics of this great “void”, we hear nothing. “Descending into the Pool of Reflection, the absence and multiplication of enigmatic echoes turn into silence.”23

Lastly, having walked all the way down here, we could conclude that architecture – understood as pure spatial experience – might be one of the arts that, compared to painting, photography or film, could incite in a subject the experience of the sublime, without necessarily having to represent it. When the body is turned into an object with the aim of representing the experience of the inexistence, death becomes aesthetically sublime. Fear arises in our minds; solitude makes us self-conscious of our own existence and a kind of pleasure tensions our nerves.

Notes

I. (1790). Critique of Judgment. Pluhar, W. trans. 1987 Edition. Indianapolis and Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Company. p. 106. 2 Ibid., p. 99. 1 Kant,

Ibid., p. 119.

Burke, E. (1757). A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful. 1998 Edition. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Wilton, A. (1981). Turner and the Sublime. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. pp. 78-79.

Ibid., p. 99.

Ibid., p. 101.

LeWitt, S. (1967). ‘Paragraphs on Conceptual Art’. Artforum. V.10, pp. 79-83.

Spence, B. (2000). ‘The Case of Bas Jan Ader’, in Spence, J. (ed.) Bas Jan Ader. Irvine: University of California. p. 2. 10 Dumbadze, A. (2015). Death is Elsewhere. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. p. 141. 11 Here is always somewhere else. (2008) Directed by Rene Daalder. [Film]. USA & Canada: Agitpop and Cult Epics. 1:01:47. 12 Verwoert, J. (2006). Bas Jan Ader. In Search of the Miraculous. London: Afterall Books. p. 13. 13 Petit, J. (1970). Le Corbusier lui-même. Geneva: Éditions Rousseau. 14 De Smet, C. (2007). Le Corbusier, Architect of Books. Baden: Lars Müller Publishers. pp. 86-87 15 Weber, N. F. (2008). Le Corbusier: a life. New York: Alfred A. Knopf Publishing. pp. 18-19. 9

Le Corbusier. (1932). Letter to his mother. Tuesday 6 September 1932. Foundation Le Corbusier, R2-1 177T. I should thank professor Tim Benton for introducing me to this letter and Ushma Thakrar for helping me with the translation. 17 Tafuri, M. (1987).“Machine et mémoire”: The City in the Work of Le Corbusier. Translation by Stephen Sartarelli, in Brooks, H. A. (ed.) Le Corbusier. Princeton: Princeton University Press. p. 214, note 37. 18 Gargiani, R. and Rosellini, A. (2011). Le Corbusier. Béton Brut and Ineffable Space, 1940 – 1965. Surface Materials and Psychophysiology of Vision. Lausanne: EPFL Press. p. 209. 16

Le Corbusier, sketchbook M52, in Le Corbusier. Carnets. Volume 4, 1957-1964. cit., No.80, n. d. [March 1958], in Gargiani, R. and Rosellini, A. (2011). Le Corbusier. Béton Brut and Ineffable Space, 1940 – 1965. Surface Materials and Psychophysiology of Vision. Lausanne: EPFL Press. p. 210. note 35.

Le Corbusier, “Légends”, n.d. [1952], FLC, U3.7.323, in Gargiani, R. and Rosellini, A. (2011). Le Corbusier. Béton Brut and Ineffable Space, 1940 – 1965. Surface Materials and Psychophysiology of Vision. Lausanne: EPFL Press. p. 213. note 47.

Gargiani, R. and Rosellini, A. (2011). Le Corbusier. Béton Brut and Ineffable Space, 1940 – 1965. Surface Materials and Psychophysiology of Vision. Lausanne: EPFL Press. p. 214.

Le Corbusier, letter to Ernesto Nathan Rogers, 30 March 1955, FLC, R3.1.133, in Gargiani, R. and Rosellini, A. (2011). Le Corbusier. Béton Brut and Ineffable Space, 1940 – 1965. Surface Materials and Psychophysiology of Vision. Lausanne: EPFL Press. p. 214. note 49. 23 Tafuri, M. (1987).“Machine et mémoire”: The City in the Work of Le Corbusier. Translation by Stephen Sartarelli, in Brooks, H. A. (ed.) Le Corbusier. Princeton: Princeton University Press. p. 213. 22

Turnerâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Body lying in State. 1851. Oil on millboard.14 x 23 cm. George Jones. Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford, UK. 13

Snow Storm – Steam-Boat off a Harbour’s Mouth. 1842. Oil on canvas. 91 cm × 122 cm. Joseph Mallord William Turner. Tate Britain, London, UK. 14

Joseph Mallord William Turner. 1851. Plaster cast of death-mask. 25 cm high. Attributed to Thomas Woolner. Tate Britain, London, UK. 15

Untitled (In Search of the Miraculous). 1975. Vintage gelatin silver print. 12.5 cm x 20.3 cm. Bas Jan Ader. University Of California, BAM/PFA, Berkeley, USA. 16

Please Donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t Leave Me. 1969. Black and white photograph. Bas Jan Ader. Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam, Holland. 18

Georges Edouard Jeanneret, Le Corbusierâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s father, on his deathbed. 1926. Le Corbusier. Le Corbusierâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Sketchbooks. FLC, Paris, France. 19

L’Admirable Don Quichotte de la Mancha, vol. 2. Miguel de Cervantes. Paris: Charpentier, 1847. Book binded in leather from the hide of Le Corbusier’s dog “Pinceau”. 1945. FLC, Paris, France. 20

Yvonne Gallis, Le Corbusierâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s wife, on her deathbed. 1957. Le Corbusier. Le Corbusierâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Sketchbooks. FLC, Paris, France. 21

Yvonne Gallis and Le Corbusierâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s grave. 1955. Plans and sections. Roquebrune-Cap-Martin. Le Corbusier. FLC, Paris, France. 22

Design of the parvis of the Capitol of Chandigarh, India. 1956. Le Corbusier. FLC, 5165, Paris, France. 23

Definitive plan of Chandigarhâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Capitol, India. 1956. Le Corbusier. FLC, 5162, Paris, France. 24

Study for the Capitol of Chandigarh, India. 1956. Le Corbusier. FLC, 5129, Paris, France. 25

References Borges, J. L. (1941). El jardín de los senderos que se bifurcan, en Borges, J. L. (1944). Ficciones. Buenos Aires: Sur. Burke, E. (1757). A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful. 1998 Edition. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Camus, A. (1942). The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays. New York: Vintage Books. Dumbadze, A. (2015). Death is Elsewhere. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. De Smet, C. (2007). Le Corbusier, Architect of Books. Baden: Lars Müller Publishers. Gargiani, R. and Rosellini, A. (2011). Le Corbusier. Béton Brut and Ineffable Space, 1940 – 1965. Surface Materials and Psychophysiology of Vision. Lausanne: EPFL Press. Here is always somewhere else. (2008) Directed by Rene Daalder. [Film]. USA & Canada: Agitpop and Cult Epics. Kant, I. (1790). Critique of Judgment. Pluhar, W. trans. 1987 Edition. Indianapolis and Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Company. p. 106. LeWitt, S. (1967). ‘Paragraphs on Conceptual Art’. Artforum. V.10. Petit, J. (1970). Le Corbusier lui-même. Geneva: Éditions Rousseau. Spence, B. (2000). ‘The Case of Bas Jan Ader’, in Spence, J. (ed.) Bas Jan Ader. Irvine: University of California. Tafuri, M. (1987).“Machine et mémoire”: The City in the Work of Le Corbusier. Translation by Stephen Sartarelli, in Brooks, H. A. (ed.) Le Corbusier. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Verwoert, J. (2006). Bas Jan Ader. In Search of the Miraculous. London: Afterall Books.

Wilton, A. (1981). Turner and the Sublime. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Weber, N. F. (2008). Le Corbusier: a life. New York: Alfred A. Knopf Publishing.

Federico Ortiz Aesthetics and Architectural History MA History and Critical Thinking Architectural Association January 2016