Vessel by Jennifer Moffat

Vessel [to preserve the intimacy of the individual]

Jennifer Moffat

Rooms + Cities Masters of Architecture Unit 2012/2013 Dundee University

Singular Vessel

Figure 1 â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;Roomâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;

Spiritual quality of singular vessel.

Contents

Preface

A Room of Oneâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Own

The Body As Vessel

The Body in Space

Constructing Vessel

List of Figures

Bibliography

Figure 2 A Room of One’s Own

Preface 1

Arendt, The Human Condition, p.39

Ibid., p.59

Fried, Art and Objecthood, p.20

Woolf, Women and Fiction

It can be said that in life there is no time; time to pause, to obscure, to observe. Always a part of a collective, an outside, public and exposed, how can we find a space for ourselves? A place where we can, just. Be. What if sometimes we were granted the opportunity to escape this outside world, to enter into a space so private, so interior, a room entered not through a door but in an instance of quiet? Space and time, obscured from the immediate exterior context, internalised, and focussed towards our most intimate interior: the inner self. Hannah Arendt argues the loss of the intimacy of the individual occurred by the introduction of privatisation to the public realm. 1 The inherent qualities of both destroyed, Arendt argues that the importance of the juxtaposition of the conditions of the intimate interior of the individual and the exposed exterior of the social is innate in promoting greater experiential depth to both. “Mass society not only destroys the public realm but the private as well, [and] deprives men not only of their place in the world but of their private home, where they once felt sheltered against the world” 2 Focussing on reclaiming the identity of the private realm the thesis aims to study the primitive atmosphere of critical privacy for the internal contemplation of the individual: vessels to “enclose, protect, preserve” 3 the intimacy of the inner self. The thesis is an exploration of this quality of vessel towards a definition which may allow one to construct an architecture of space by absence. A place whereby it may encourage a greater knowledge of self by isolation; a journey inwards to the depths of our own imagination through the perception of light and shadow; an encounter with an other by the definitive presence of an infinite. Beginning with a series of drawings and models attempting to capture this essence of Vessel, the thesis explores the characteristics of spaces of this sensation and continues to test this studied definition against project and brief. First for a Map Room in a Cartographic Institute in Edinburgh, and then towards a Dark Skyspace Observatory located in Galloway Forest Park, Scotland. The ultimate aim to create spaces in the collective to preserve the intimacy of the individual: A Room of One’s Own. 4

A Room of One’s Own

Figure 3 “Outer Space”

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“I read a book in college that said that everyone should have a room of their own’, she says. ‘Why?’ ‘To do their thinking in.’ ‘I can do my thinking in a room with you.’ I wait. ‘Why you can’t think in a room with me?’ Ma makes a face. ‘I can, most of the time, but it would be nice to have somewhere to go that’s just mine, sometimes.” 5

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Figure 4 Vessel

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A Room of One’s Own 5

Donoghue, Room, p.380

Barragan, Pritzker Architecture Prize Ceremony, cited in Burri, Luis Barragan, p.11

Jaspers, Von der Wahrheit, cited in Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, p.

Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, p.233

Ibid., p.234

Donoghue, Room, p.44

Woolf, Women and Fiction

“Only in intimate communion with solitude may man find himself.” 6 Only by isolation may we ‘know’ ourselves. Philosopher, Gaston Bachelard describes by the poetic works of metaphysicist Karl Jasper, “Every being seems in itself round.”7 Bachelard argues that the power of literary imagery has the capacity to, “Blot out the world” 8, to isolate the individual from their immediate context of reality and consume instead the intimate self within a truth of the instilled imagination. “Images of full roundness help us to collect ourselves, and to confirm our being intimately, inside.” 9 Arguably the suggestive nature of text may allow a moment, of time and place, whether in the physical or imaginary sense, whereby it is possible to escape the reality of immediate context and create a “roundness” of being, an intimate knowledge and understanding of self. ‘Room’ (2010), novel by Irish author Emma Donoghue depicts with clarity a room of such autonomous isolation. Evoking the earlier writing of feminist Virginia Woolf (1882 - 1941), ‘Room’ emphasises the need that, “Everyone should have a room of their own”. 5 Secluded from a sense of exterior Emma Donoghue invites the reader to occupy the imagination of a five year old boy, Jack. Jack occupies ‘Room’, a place of eleven foot square; completely isolated from its surrounding context, his only relationship with an outside is through a barred skylight in the roof he believes leads to “Outer Space” 10. Through the mediating presence of Ma*, Jack’s mother, Donoghue asserts a threshold between interior and exterior, feeding Jack rare information from the outside world he has been taught to believe does not exist. “Fiction is likely to contain more truth than fact.” 11 The reality of Jack’s world navigated by his mother he is never aware of his own individual identity. Hidden in plain sight ‘Room’ is a prison shared by mother and son. Born into the captivity of ‘Room’, a converted garden shed in suburban North America, and protected by his mother’s love, Jack is sheltered from his isolation, his perception of space limited to only that which he can see or imagine. Jack inhabits ‘Room’ as an autonomous world. His relationship to a sense of ‘other’ removed; he projects an image of himself on to the objects within his the room. * Ma - of Japanese etymology meaning ‘void’, ‘interval’, or space ‘between’; describing an ‘experiential place’. Donoghue uses the word Ma to define the character of Jack’s mother, a mediating figure of in-between. Ching-Yu, C. (1982) Japanese Spatial Conception, MI: University Microfilms, Ann Arbor

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Figure 5 Jack’s ‘Room’

Figure 6 Ma’s ‘Room’

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Donoghue, Room, p.358

Simmel, On Individuality and Social Forms, p.223

Bed, Rug, Bath, Fridge, Skylight, Table, Lamp, Chair, Door, Wardrobe; Jack relates to the objects personified, giving each an identity to reflect his search for his own. For Jack, ‘Room’ is portrayed by Donoghue as expanding and limitless, he explores his world in all of its capacities for the imagination. For Ma, however, the space is monotonous and confined, the surfaces of the prison and daily routine forgotten only in the dreams brought with sleep. With Jack’s fifth birthday we follow him as his world begins to grow smaller. Donoghue’s juxtaposition of age and altered spatial perception mirrors theories of child psychology suggesting that around the age of five children begin to instigate questions of self and identity. As the text progresses mother and child break free from their enclosure and Jack’s sense of time, privacy, place, and personal identity is abruptly altered as he learns he is one of many other self’s. “In the world I notice persons are nearly always stressed and have no time... In Room me and Ma had time for everything. I guess the time gets spread very thin like butter over all the world, the roads and houses and playgrounds and stores, so there’s only a little smear of time on each place, then everyone has to hurry on to the next bit.” 12 Donoghue protrays Jack’s exploration of his limitless new world as a continuous striving to return to the containment and privacy offered within ‘Room’, a place of quiet, calm, of solitude; a room of his own. This search for personal space, a sense of privacy among and within contemporary society, is in direct conversation with the work of Virginia Woolf during the 1900s. Both authors’ work is arguably directly relevant to preserving space for the individual within the public realm today. “Throughout the modern era, the quest of the individual is for his self, of a fixed and unambiguous point of reference. He needs such a fixed point more and more urgently in view of the unprecedented expansion of theoretical and practical perspectives and their complication of life, and the related fact that he can no longer find it anywhere outside himself.” 13 Virginia Woolf’s work of the early twentieth century pertains directly to women’s suffrage. Her work puts forward a strong

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PRODUCED BY AN AUTODESK EDUCATIONAL PRODUCT

Figure 7 ‘Room’ Plan and Internal Elevations

PRODUCED BY AN AUTODESK EDUCATIONAL PRODUCT

Figure 8 Through the Skylight

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argument for a physical space of privacy for women in the home and a recognised political identity within society, emphasising the absolute importance of privacy and time towards creating female independence. Woolf’s work intones that ‘A Room of One’s Own’, both a physical and symbolic place, could help establish individual thought, truth and opinion, away from the constraints and pressures of time and society, and would therefore answer the inequality and aid the strife for women’s suffrage in the early 1900s. Donoghue’s ‘Room’, a figurative place of utopian reality, offers the reader escape within the literate imagery to a room of isolation, shelter and enclosure from an outside world of fast pace and little privacy. While clearly arguing the intimate space of the individual, encouraged by the seductive possibility for personal contemplation found within Virginia Woolf’s earlier social idealism, Donoghue’s novel recognises the detrimental effect of this complete enclosure. A prison of one’s own identity, it is clear that endless seclusion is not the answer for the establishment, impossible to ever relate to the similar identity of an ‘other’. But perhaps, with the opportunity, the freedom to cross between, it may be possible to find a personal space within the collective, “somewhere that’s just mine...sometimes.” 5

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The Body As Vessel

Figure 9 Room, 1987

Figure 10 Press, 1995

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Vessel [noun]: “To enclose, protect, preserve.” 3

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Figure 11 Sense, 1991 “The idea of self knowledge through an internal relationship with the body” 19

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The Body As Vessel 14

Harries, The Ethical Function of Architecture, p.180

Bauhuis, Abecedarium: Jewel. Vessel. Implement., p.140

Klein, Notes on Schizoid mechanisms cited in Wilson, Architectural Reflections, p.6

Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, cited in Wilson, Architectural Reflections, p.6

Cellaya, Spaces of Chillida, p.29

Nesbitt, Antony Gormley, p.19

Cellaya, Spaces of Chillida, p.9

Stokes, Three Essays, The Luxury and Necessity of Painting, p.11

“We exist in the world, not as disembodied spirits, nor as beings that just happen to have bodies, but essentially selves, who by their bodies are inevitably assigned their place in the world.” 14 Sculpture recognises the integral nature of the body in understanding our place in the world. Enclosed, protected and preserved 3 our body acts as the ultimate vessel. Containing the inner self, by the physical thresholds of our anatomy, the human body holds the original language of our identity. The physicality of the skin protects this interior, distinguishing a temperance of inside and outside space, a mediating presence, both containing and radiating. “Press the inside edges of your palms tightly together; then cup your hands to form a bowl. Your body is now a vessel; your hands a provisional utensil to drink from, to contain, to treasure. This first such vessel was surely born of intuition.” 15 Our instinctive sense of self captured within this protective threshold can be considered at the centre of our being and the mediation between an act of acknowledging the place of the self within the greater extents of the world. This sensation of the space within and without the body is defined by child psychologist Melanie Klein as two extreme “positions” 16; the two primitive sensations by which we converse with all space in relation to the body. The first position Klien describes in terms of Freud’s “Oceanic Feeling” 17, a sensation grounded within the idea of shelter, intimacy and protection, the experience of mother-figure and child, a short sighted envelopment of space, an overwhelming claustrophobia; the condition of the womb. “A secret nook, a maternal tomb or cradle, a minimal hiding place protected.” 18 The second position is depicted by its exposure, the moment of realisation of one’s own identity a part from the mother, agoraphobia of the unlimited space of other. “Leaving the comforting nest of the coiled serpent in which we have huddled for nine months and going out into the unpeopled light, the neutral cold, into what we call space... A pure void. A light filled absence.” 20 Art writer Adrian Stokes argues “the unique role of art” 21 is to expose us to these two instinctual extremes which when

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Figure 12 Vessel

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Stokes, Michelangelo, p.75

Heidegger, The Thing

Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, p.183

Ibid., p.190

Wilson, Architectural Reflections, p.6

Heidegger, Being and Time, p.13

Ibid.

simultaneously juxtaposed can create a masterpiece. The potential for architecture to expose the purity of these opposite positions can be seen as often limited by the pragmatics of inhabited space. “Architecture, the more abstract of the visual arts, can afford to dignify those experiences with less disguise.” 22 Wilson explains the sensation of a simultaneous encounter with these two opposites in terms of Gestalt theory, a phenomenological experiment in our psychological awareness. The theory is based on an idea of the present absence epitomised within the Rubin Vase. The Rubin Vase presents an image of both a vase and two faces however it is only ever possibly to view one at a time, each viewed in the others absence. “The vessel’s thingness does not at all lie in the material of which it consists, but in the void that holds.” 23 A definition of vessel can be found within this presence of absence. Initiated by an object’s capacity to hold: empty space; a vessel can be considered as an object of “Intimate Immensity” 24 by which we may find a sense of these conditions of self in simultaneous confinement and exposure. “The spirit finds the nest of immensity in an object.” 25 The object in this context must be carefully measured. Not the tools we use in everyday life, the soup spoon, the armchair, the pillow, the bed. But rather an object capable of centring the psychological sensations we harness within ourselves. The “oneness” and “otherness” 26 by which we judge and measure space in its most primal subjective understanding. German philosopher Martin Heidegger defines this quality of object spatiality in terms of “Dasein” 27 : “Being there”. By this definition it is possible to describe a thing which can be seen to belong, while not within the physical, tangible world of the senses, unequivocally to the essential world of our experiential space. Heidegger uses the word “Dasein” to describe an objects quality of “nearness” 28 , neither a physical nor a dimensionable distance this condition of nearness refers instead to the objects strength of inhabiting a space purely by its existence. Writer Andrew Mitchell describes an understanding of this quality of “nearness” in his book, ‘Heidegger Among the

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Figure 13 Room II, 1987

Figure 14 Room II, 1987

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Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, p.202

Nesbitt, Antony Gormley, p.19

Sculptors’, by the following example. You are using glasses to view a painting. By observing the painting, by contemplating the art, you automatically become closer to the art viewed than the glasses touching your face. While physically closer to your body at no point in the scene have the glasses entered into the dialogue of encounter between you and the painting. “Equipment” 29 influential in our perception and programmatic use of the spaces we occupy, the glasses cannot be considered spatial as they are not understood to create an encounter, a dialogue, with the space occupied. “To give an object poetic space is to give it more space than it has objectivity.” 30 The work of sculptural artist Antony Gormley occupies space in this dynamic. Using his own body as subject and focus Gormley explores our primitive and subjective being in space. The human body’s capacity to contain and be contained is the essence of Gormley’s work. Gormley studies both conditions of our being within and out with the protection of the body, emphasising the intimate privacy of our interior by its exposure out into the world. Gormley’s work explores an encounter with the ‘presence of absence’ through the process of creating a mould of himself. “You are aware that there is a transition, that something is happening within you is gradually registering externally... a moment of stillness, of concentration... I am trying to make sculpture from the inside, by using my body as the instrument and the material.” 31 Creating this moment of tranquillity in his method is integral to Gormley’s art. The stilling of the human body into a permanent structure, a composing of the inherent kinetic energy of the body creates a bizarre timelessness, provoking a reaction in the viewer, to stop, to consider. This encounter between movement and stillness, presence and absence, is emphasised by the inherent emptiness of Gormley’s sculpture. His art creates a second skin, an object out with the human body within which we may return to the latent enclosure and protection of womb-like space while simultaneously by its very being announcing an otherness. We are exposed out with the body and as part of a condition of a collective society. “I define myself in terms of what I am not, in terms of how I

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Figure 15 Room I, 1980

Figure 16 Exercise Between Blood and Earth,1979

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Renton, Everything Matters: Antony Gormley’s Ethics of Materiality, cited in Gormley, Making Space, p.100

Gormley, Sketchbook, 1984

Nesbitt, Antony Gormley, p.22

Ibid., p.22

Mitchell, Heidegger Among the Sculptors, p.77

perceive that other, and therein perceive myself.” 32 Antony Gormley’s Expansion and Compressive artworks are arguably his most intimate studies of the human condition. Utilising his process of inside-out he projects the privacy of the body’s interior space out into the public realm, inverting the form of the human body to create spaces which emphasis the private nature of our inner selves. “My body contains all possibilities. What I am working towards is a total identification of all existence with my point of contact with the material world: my body.” 33 Gormley’s expansion work, ‘Room I’ (1980), radiates beyond the confines of the normal extents of the body. Using shredded clothing as his material Gormley implies a stretching of the periphery of the skin, a shedding of his own covering, of personal threshold and barrier, tied between four posts to demarcate an interior space, a room: private space out-with the body. Absent of identifiable human form we find a haunting in the space by the definitive lack of the body; Gormley has liberated the self from its natural primitive prison, resonating outwards a sense of interior privacy by the distortion of the threshold of ordinary bodily characteristics. Gormley, in expanding a space of himself outwards, explores our interior occupation of outside; our sensation of space. “Although the senses are located on the skin, on the periphery of the ‘person’, we know that they are an active distance from the body as much as internally to it. The free passage of the skin is an indication of the fact that our being is similarly unfettered by our invisible boundary.” 34 Placing emphasis on the skin as our bodies’ negotiating intermediary, Gormley describes the expansion works as a, “renegotiating of the skin” 35. The artist’s earlier work, ‘Exercise Between Blood and Earth’ (1979), exemplifies this articulation of the transitional space of the skin. Gormley begins from the form of his own body, tracing the outline in radials forming a pattern like the age makings of a tree, layering the skin until the final outline is completely ambiguous of its bodily starting point and obscuring the interior space. “The limit becomes the site of encounter and transformation”36 The Compressive works invert this notion of expanding space. Continuing to use the shell of his own body, Gormley instead describes a concentration of interior. ‘Flesh’ (1990),

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Figure 17 Immersion ,1991

Figure 18 Flesh ,1990

Figure 19 Home of the Heart III ,1992

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Nesbitt, Antony Gormley, p.26

Heidegger, Being and Time, cited in Mitchell, Heidegger Among the Sculptors, p.68

Renton, Everything Matters: Antony Gormley’s Ethics of Materiality, cited in Gormley, Making Space, p.110

Nesbit, Antony Gormley, p.22

‘Immersion’ (1991), ‘Sense’ (1991) and ‘Home of the Heart III’(1992) are among Gormley’s most evocative compressive works. Acting as catalysts for sensing space these works distil the emotive quality of the human body to an obscurity of identity and by so can be seen to create a time-less, universally relatable art. The mass of the concrete invokes the spatial relationship between the artist’s body and the compact interior, creating a powerful dynamic between the space of the exhibiting room and the space inside the block. Despite the absence of recognisable human form the sculptures can be seen to create an undeniable presence for encounter. The sculptures encourage the viewer to place a sense of themselves within the constraints of the object, the emotional engagement of the imprint of absent human flesh on the exterior form of the concrete mass suggesting an existence that cannot be ignored. A “cell for the human body” 37, ‘Room II’ (1987) creates a vessel to house the inner self; a surrogate space, a womb-like art. The minimal number of small apertures on the exterior of the work alludes to the hollow space inside, each pertaining to their bodily counterparts: mouth, ears, sexual organ and anus, and describe a thickness of material. The horizontal markings record the process of construction and announce the presence of a central void, encouraging a projection of the imagination upon the potential of the space within. “Empty space functions as a provocation to the everincreasing will, as a precondition for its growth. Empty space challenges the will to an, ‘occupying seizure, conquest’.” 38 Unusual of sculptural work Gormley describes both an interior and exterior in his art. Art critic Andrew Renton describes the experience as: “To perceive the constructed other, the viewer must stand at once within this surrogate and without.” 39 In this manner Gormley invites the viewer to position themselves both in front of and within the pieces. The moment of representation in his method of making only revealing a small portion of the work; the crucial material of the art is the void within. Created by the process of exposing the form of the human body, the void, “resists the medium of its presentation whilst being forced into being by it” 40 ; similarly to the previously discussed Gestalt theory, and it is within the emptiness of this vessel that we may find ourselves.

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Figure 20 Allotment II, Plan

Allotment, Antony Gormley. 2010 Plan.

Figure 21 Allotment II, 1996

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Renton, Everything Matters: Antony Gormley’s Ethics of Materiality, cited in Gormley, Making Space, p.105

Mitchell, Heidegger among the Sculptors, p.1

Gormley, Allotment, Herning Museum description, 1997- 1998, cited in Nesbitt, Antony Gormley, p.22

Walt Whitman, Song of Myself, cited in Nesbitt, Antony Gormley, p.36

Using the form of this earlier work, Gormley created ‘Allotment II’ (1997-1998), a “wilfully inarticulate” 41 collection of ‘Room II’s, three hundred lost or absent bodies. Created by the process of moulding these living, breathing, thinking, individuals (members of the public) Gormley compels an interaction by the embodied presence of the sculptures. ‘Allotment II’ emphasises Gormley’s predisposition to explore an interior manifestation of self. Focussing around an internalised space, captured, enclosed, protected and preserved, ‘Allotment II’ articulates the moment of encounter with the outside. “Things begin at their limits for it is here that they enter into relationships with the rest of the world.” 42 ‘Allotment II’ designs an opportunity for this encounter through invoking our natural inclination to react to an object of similar form and bodily identification. “The body is our first habitation, the building our second. I wanted to use the form of this second body, architecture, to make concentrated volumes out of a personal space that coins the memory of an absent self, articulated through measurement.” 43 A series of architecturally based sculptures, the figures within ‘Allotment II’ stand as a silent collective in a larger exhibiting room: a crowd of people, a city of buildings, a confrontation of self as a part of an image of other. Antony Gormley creates these sculptures of material form and physical incarnation of the human body as an obligation to view our self in direct relation to our ethical obligation and responsibility to an other. By creating these empty vessels with the capacity to be filled by our own projection, we learn our individuality lies in our perception of others. “I celebrate myself, and sing myself, And what I assume you shall assume, For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.” 44 Through the emptiness of sculpture we can project an understanding of our intimate interior self into the expanse of the world. Through the power of an object, defined by Heidegger’s quality of existential being, “Dasien”, and within the present absence offered by the void, we understand

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Figure 22 Room II

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and project the fragility of our own internally housed self, its private enclosure, protected interior and preserved identity. Using the skin as the essential component by which we experience space, inverted and explored in its own exposure, the creation of a mould of the human form automatically evokes the presence of an other. Through a moment of encounter with an object of similar form which by its very existence employs us to register our place as part of a collective society, our moral responsibility to an outside other, we identify and understand ourselves outside the shell of the human body. Through sculpture we can find an essence of our own primitive being in its purest form. Antony Gormley’s work acts as an expressive reminder of the integral relation of our bodies primal existence in space. A vessel with the capacity to contain and project we experience the two primitive positions by which we measure our existence in space. We are confronted by an encounter of the quintessence of “Dasien”. Our existential place founded in the vessel of our own being.

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The Body In Space

Figure 23 Wombspace

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â&#x20AC;&#x153;We test and evaluate space not only through our senses but through our imagination.â&#x20AC;? 45

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Figure 24 Inhabiting vessel

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The Body In Space 45

Pallasmaa, How do we grasp space and place?

Perez-Gomez, Introduction to Architecture and the Crisis of the Modern Science, cited in Pallasmaa, Questions of Perception: Phenomenology of Architecture

Pallasmaa, The Eyes of the Skin, p.50

Ibid., p.50

Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, p.183

Ibid., p.183

“Natural light, with its ethereal variety of change, fundamentally orchestrates the intensities of architecture and cities. What the eye sees and the senses feel in questions of architecture are framed according to conditions of light and shadow.” 46 The significance of light and shadow to our perception of space can be understood as of primal and infinite importance. Experience of space can be seen as fundamentally rooted within our subjective response to the natural transient qualities of light and shadow. and their deep instinctual effect on the human psyche. A quality of both physical material and spiritual transience, light fundamentally controls our sensation of the places we inhabit. Arguably what is perceived as our over exposure to over lit conditions of space in the modern world has been the instigation of our alienation, our lack of engagement, within our current built environment. “Homogenous bright light paralyses the imagination in the same way that homogenisation of space weakens the experience of being, and wipes away the sense of place.” 47 In the depth of shadow may be found an entrance to the imagination with the capacity to expand our spatial boundaries. “Mist and twilight awaken the imagination by making the visual images unclear and ambiguous... evoking a trancelike, meditative state. The absent minded gaze penetrates the surface of the physical image and focuses in infinity.” 48 According to Gaston Bachelard “Daydream” 49 is essential to the importance of contemplation. He describes: “Daydream is original contemplation... transports the dreamer outside the immediate world to a world that bears the mark on infinity... from the very first second [it] is an entirely constituted state. We do not see it start, and yet it always starts the same way, that is it flees the object nearby and right away it is far off elsewhere, in the space of elsewhere.” 50 American light artist James Turrell’s work captures this capacity, the power of light and shadow to increase sensitivity of spatial perception. Using installation art, an art of removing the frame, Turrell’s work invites the viewer to inhabit his work, to become immersed in an immediate experiential context.

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Figure 25 Close Call, 1992

Figure 26 Technical Drawing, Close Call, 1992

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Turrell, Sensing Space, p. 43

Ibid., p.43

Ibid., p.49

Ibid., p.57

Rilke, The Sonnets to Orpheus, cited in Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, p.183

Turrell, Sensing Space, p.56

Ibid., p. 56

Turrell began his art in the 1960s as part of a radical new movement of artists using light as a material substance. Stripping back his work to the minimal elements of light and perception, the “material perception of immaterial” 51, he aimed to explore the true “thingness” 52 of light and our experience of it. Turrell’s work captures light in isolation as a tactile material, considering the nature of light itself rather than the object, or thing, lit. Focussed on the complex and ever changing nature of light Turrell explores its effect on our psychological and bodily state, not what is physically seen but rather how it is perceived. “Perceiving is seeing oneself see.” 53 James Turrell’s early works include what he calls, ‘Perceptual Cells’; Individual booths designed for the viewer to inhabit extended boundaries through the radiance of the light installations within. The ‘Perceptual Cells’ were created with the aim to invite the occupant to see inside and behind their own eyes, to reveal an inner truth. Turrell’s cells force the user into complete enclosure, a physically confining space extended by the nuance of lighting conditions inside which invite a larger condition of spatial perception. “One enters into a larger visual space that, while not endless, does have a bigness that is certainly beyond the size of the booth.” 54 Unlike later works, the ‘Perceptual Cells’ are autonomous of site, the interior of the cells bearing no relation to the space around and out with, creating an interior for the self, symbolic of the soul as housed within the vessel of the human body. “Le monde est grand, mais en nous il est profound comme la mer.” 55 (The world is large, but in us it is deep as the sea.) Turrell describes this process of entering inside to meditate on a larger possibility of the space of the interior mind as being inseparable from his roots in the Quaker religion, his work regarded as a, “Personal inward search for mankind’s place in the universe.” 56 Reduced in search of deeper effect, the Quaker religion is a minimalist form of Christianity. Practice of the religion requires this idea of an interior space whereby we may contemplate our being as part of a greater other; we “go inside to greet the light”. 57 “Immensity is within ourselves. It is attached to a sort of

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Figure 27 Vessel

Figure 28 Solitary

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Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, p.184

Turrell, Sensing Space, p.57

Kilmer, The Origins of Solitary Confinement

expansion of being that life curbs and caution arrests, but which starts again when we are alone. As soon as we become motionless, we are elsewhere; we are dreaming in a world that is immense... the movement of motionless man.” 58 The ‘Perceptual Cells’, as with all of Turrell’s art, have derived directly from his own experience of space, in particular that of his time spent incarcerated in solitary confinement as a conscientious objector to the Vietnam War. “In order to get away from the sense of claustrophobia or the extremeness of the punishment, the mind manufactures a bigger space.” 59 Solitary confinement originated in the 1780s at a time when the prisons of America were overwrought, overcrowded and unsanitary, creating smaller cellular spaces which removed the individual from the collective mass. The original penitentiary designed to hold prisoners in solitary confinement was Walnut Street Jail in Philadelphia. Built in 1790 to include sixteen individual cell units, the concept was created by a group of Quakers led by Benjamin Rush. They aimed to create spaces of spiritual retribution, dark, isolated rooms in which prisoners were encouraged to consider the repercussions of their actions and reach reform by internal contemplation. “A place and a time for prisoners to think about what they have done, and then grow to the point where they are able to resolve that they will never, ever, ever do that again.” 60 Utopian in concept the prisons failed in reality, the ideals of Quakerism crushed by the negative implications of extreme isolation. Alone in the darkness prisoners sank further inside until, damaged so thoroughly psychologically, the prisons became asylums for the insane. In 1942, writer and social critic, Charles Dickens visited the Eastern State Penitentiary and wrote of the conditions he found there: “The system here, is rigid, strict, and hopeless solitary confinement. I believe it, in its effects to be cruel and wrong... I hold this slow and daily tampering with the mysteries of the brain, to be immeasurably worse than any torture of the body: and because its ghastly signs and tokens are not so palpable to the eye and sense of touch as scars upon the flesh; because its wounds are not upon the surface, and it extends few cries that human ears can hear; therefore I more denounce it as a

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Multiple Vessels