Topographies Magazine

Topographies

Magazine

Topographies

Magazine

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For the purpose of this publication, Topographies Magazine is pleased to have been given the right of publication of all contributions in print and electronic formates. Writers and photographers retain copyrights of their own material, for future publication if they so wish.

Front cover layout: Quinta da Regaleira Š Rowynn Dumont 2016 Front page layout: Time Explication Š Wilson Hurst 2016

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Table of Contents pg 5 || In Collaboration: Topos & Tropos || rowynn dumont

pg 9 || Point Source || wilson hurst

pg 13 || The Naked Eye: “David” & “Venus of Urbino” || taliesin thomas

pg 18 || Rowynn Dumont: Topographies / Bath Abbey || lorena morales

pg 21 || Groys || milos zahradka maiorana

pg 22 || Always Already There: Lost Horizon || mike adams photographs Point Source series || wilson hurst Topographies series || rowynn dumont

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Determinate Considerations Š Wilson Hurst 2016.

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In Collaboration: Topos & Tropos By rowynn dumont The landscape’s singularity is thus not something which a bit of topography does not possess; it is rather a function of the images it figures forth at any moment in time and the way these pictures register in the imagination. - Rosalind E. Krauss, The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths Topographies the magazine is a reflection of the aesthetic, philosophical and conceptual values of the study of topography. The question must be asked: Why Topographies? Topos - a Greek root word meaning, of a particular place, space or notion (Lidov, 2). -graphy, being a descriptive science indicating geography - that of which is the study of the physical attributes of the earth, its atmosphere, and how it relates and effects human activity. (Oxford). “Topography is conventionally understood as referring to either a system for mapping a landscape, or the method for studying the history of the contours and properties of a place.” (Papastergiadis, 117).

I came up with the concept of this magazine in the summer of 2015. I spent a year traveling through the various topographical landscapes of the United Kingdom, Europe and the USA. I stumbled across Krauss’s quote (listed above), and it really hit home with me. The landscape is a bit of topography, but it is much more than that. It is the interaction of the human spirit within the physical manifestation of our atmosphere, which helps to create our sense of place and space. Within my re-imagined state of what these topographies represented, I began photographing my surroundings with an antique twin lens camera from 1939, which I picked up in the Czech Republic. This produced the photographic series titled: Topographies.

Nikos Papastergiadis in his text Spatial Aesthetics states: In Greek, there is a slight typographical difference between the word for (topos) place in which events occur, and the (tropos) method in which they occur, but I would also claim that they are linked to the collaborative process of topography. To collaborate with other people, to receive them and work with them, is to be attentive to this engagement between topos and tropos. Collaboration is a way of receiving others, involving both the recognition of where they are coming from, and the projection of a new horizon line towards which the combined practice will head.

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I see the practice of writing on art as a form of imaginary collaboration. The practical exchange of information between the artist and the writer is not as vital as the intellectual pursuit of a common trajectory. (Papastergiadis, 117).

It is this methodology of tropos in collaboration with topos that I became interested in. I wished to receive others in this engagement between the two. An alliance between the writer and the artist in creating a new conceptualization of Topographies gave birth to what I present to you now in this magazine.

Works Cited Lidov, Alexei. Creating the Sacred Space. Hierotopy as a new field of cultural history.

Institute for World Culture, Lomonosov Moscow State University; 2015.

Oxford Dictionaries. Oxford University Press. Web. April 9, 2016.

Papastergiadis, Nikos. Spatial Aesthetics: Art, Place and the Everyday.

London: Rivers Oram, 2006. Print.

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Somerset, England, United Kingdom. Š Rowynn Dumont.

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Energy Streams Š Wilson Hurst 2016.

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Point Source By wilson hurst Being present in the dark of the night, equipment employed becomes part of an opening in intelligibility. From form comes transformation as process. In boundless speculative enthusiasm, aesthetics allows for the free play of imagination to formulate new concepts unmitigated by old concepts. In this light, creativity is a hypothetical and tentative experiment inspired by a profound sense of the reality of existence. As explained by Immanuel Kant, “we do not need to look beyond the critical explanation of the possibility of knowledge to find ample reason for assuming a subjective appropriateness on the part of nature in its particular laws” (187). In this way, experience is interesting in the way particular episodes relate to universal forms. By tracing a succession of cause and effect, the life performer arranges the truths thus established into a harmonious structure. In this rhythmic dance, the distinction between form and substance is of supreme consequence. Our inner life differs from the existence of inert matter by consisting in the continuous permeation of the present by all the past.

It is nice to have imaging projects nested into other imaging projects, maximizing creative experience.

Starting from the natural setting, refining experience in the light of night, the real object is the thing out there. Thought and behavior are conditioned both consciously and unconsciously. Aesthetic sensibility is the advancing boundary between the past and the future drifting forward. Hitting the window of opportunity by framing the event in a durational interlude, being in the world can often become recursive: “We pass, by imperceptible stages, from recollections strung out along the course of time to the movements which indicate their nascent or possible action in space” (Bergson MM 88). Many successive executions involve action of which a part requires the application of the whole. The artist describes and makes statements concerning existence, fortifying and presenting the self-evident. Dancing with point source illumination at dusk expresses a songlike outpouring of thoughts and feelings. Such a fabricated abstract theory must go beyond the appearances of physical reality and roam in the unknown. Patterns repeat in infinitely various permutations, providing a structure for creative progression. The promise of life is to add something new to the accumulating discourse. This is the artistic approach to meaning as “there are things that intelligence alone is able to seek, but which, by itself, it will never find. These things instinct alone could find; but it will never seek them” (Bergson CE 159). Working on the gap between the past and the future, some things are determined by causes external to the will. Conditions exist that could cause alternative events far beyond the cosmological horizon. Abstractions denote actual qualities of things presented as event appearances. The networks of interconnecting relationships are more important than the nodes of intersection in a durational experience. Aesthetics is a system of juxtaposition within a range of associations.

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Creative invention elaborates an infinite variety of permutations out of a limited set of elements, for “if an idea should ever lead us not only towards, or up to, or against, a reality, but so close that we and the reality should melt together, it would be made absolutely true, according to me, by that performance� (James 157). There is nothing in the entire domain of existence that cannot become a subject of investigation.

Thought promotes meaning through form.

Works Cited Bergson, Henri. The Creative Mind: An Introduction to Metaphysics. New York: Wisdom Library, 1946.

Print.

Bergson, Henri, Nancy M. Paul, and William S. Palmer. Matter and Memory. London: G. Allen & Co, 1912. Print.

James, William. The Meaning of Truth: A Sequel to 'pragmatism'. New York: Longmans, Green, 1914.

Print.

Kant, Immanuel, and Nicholas Walker. Critique of Judgment. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007.

Print.

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Bath, England, United Kingdom. Š Rowynn Dumont 2016.

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Form Substance Distinction Š Wilson Hurst 2016.

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The Naked Eye: “David” and “Venus of Urbino” By taliesin thomas I painted, and my painting was equal to truth; I gave my figures poses, animation, motion, and emotion.

-Annibale Caro, The Lives of the Artists (109) ** Aesthetic objects possess cultural agency. Artists as creators of objects have a significant role in the reification and revelation of power—they act as a conduit for a creative force that takes shape by way of material expressions. Artists not only give life to this mysterious function through art, they also have the capability to change human perspective through artistic imagination and representation. This perspective is, quiet literally, directed by way of the eyes and view as demonstrated in figurative art.

In Plato’s Republic, Book X, the artist was not to be trusted for his ability to stir passion in the heart of the observer. According to Plato, this “emotional” comprehension of the world was equivalent to a feminine perspective, thus artists were a liability to hierarchy for their capacity to undermine the patriarchal agenda.

Plato argued that unruly passions and need for pleasure is increased by art and poetry, and these volatile potentials should be seen as threatening. The combination of art and poetry as a disservice to man “nurtures and waters [desire] and establishes them as rulers in us when they ought to wither and be ruled” (Plato 277). Where Plato’s masculine sensibilities imply logic and control, Plato’s description of the feminine implies danger and contention toward patriarchal hierarchy. In either case, the eyes must land upon the work of art—be it painting or poetry—to be guided toward pathos.

How do works of art exemplify misogynistic Platonic attitudes? Does the “naked eye” in art suggest something other? Arguably artworks can indeed reflect an ulterior ideology not evident at prima facie. The potential of art is always open to divergent explanations, yet the influence of a work of art as experienced via the eye of the human form—and notably the direction of sight—suggests (male) authority and (female) servility. Considering two seminal art objects—Michelangelo’s “David” and Titian’s “Venus of Urbino”— this brief write-up argues the eye as a form of “consciousness” conveys masculine dominance and feminine subservience.

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Michelangelo’s singular contribution to the history of art is so profound that we might as well “call him something divine rather than mortal” (Vasari 414) for his unparalleled gift of aesthetic understanding to mankind. His masterpiece “David” is a veritable treasure of Renaissance sculpture and remains the crowning jewel of the Accademia Gallery in Florence. “David” is a symbolic representation of man’s defense of civil liberties against the ruling Medici family. This magnificent artwork not only inspires civic pride and adoration of the human physique, it also reinforces male dominance above all. The original David is a Biblical figure, yet Michelangelo’s “David” must be understood as a product of its time. Created between 1501 and 1504, the sculpture was born at the height of the Renaissance, when ideas about humanity and art where evolving to reflect new values and understandings of man as a celebrated being.

The work itself—a towering 17-foot sculpture depicting an athletic male figure in the nude—is clearly not only a glorification of man, but also a exaltation of the “divine” strength of spirit, a veritable masculine God in human form. The sculpture commands respect and awe. Contemplating the mighty “David” on our recent visit to the Florence, one cannot ignore one’s subordinate position below this colossal body. Where most works of art elicit an aligned viewing experience, the “David” demands your gaze toward the heavens. Looking upward, the eyes are naturally drawn to his groin, his tremendous hands, chiseled chest and ultimately toward his focused glare. He does not look down at you, rather his eyes are fixed elsewhere, indicating his superiority and disinterest. Eschewing your vision and focused abroad, his eyes convey that he has more important things to deliberate. As a work of public art for all to see, he is the embodiment of Plato’s masculine “rational part of the soul” (Plato 273).

By contrast, the eyes of Titian’s “Venus of Urbino” (1538) look directly at the viewer, inviting connection, communication, and questioning. What has she just experienced? In her post-coital dignity, what newfound lustful knowledge does she now posses? Relaxing in a languid state of naked repose, clearly this female figure has just enjoyed a sensual interlude—yet her eyes reflect a state of deep contemplation. Her role will soon evolve from woman of carnal enjoyment to mother and provider. Titian’s choice is intentional: “the idea itself cannot perfectly envision or picture its inventions unless it opens up and displays its conceptions to the eyes” (Vasari 490). In this case, “Venus of Urbino’s” eyes channel the message of her soon to come transformation from lover to child-bearer unequivocally.

Her view reaches the audience in a sideways glance, exhibiting her demure poise in the light of her supple bare flesh. Created for a wealthy family, the “Venus of Urbino” was painted to be witnessed only by a privileged few. Where “David” stands like a quasi-political pillar above the plebian, “Venus” is sequestered in a somber chamber in a private home. Looking directly into her gaze, the viewer is drawn into her intimate world. As her eyes meet mine, she is at once unapologetic and resolute in her sexuality.

One is reminded of Plato’s directive concerning the pitfall that is the implied by the emotional energy of this moment: “[i]f you admit the pleasure-giving Muse … pleasure and pain will always be kings in your city instead of law or the thing that everyone has always

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The Cotswolds, England, United Kingdom. Š Rowynn Dumont 2016.

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Intellect Alive Š Wilson Hurst

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believed to be best, namely, reason” (Plato 278). As such, “Venus” is distained while “David” is honored.

Where Plato argued: “that our soul is immortal and never destroyed” (Plato 279), works of art suggest the human form is both a powerful authority and servile sack of flesh whose purpose is to merely uphold primogeniture. In either case, it is the eyes that reckon and escort: in the case of “David,” who looks away from his viewer, they instill reverence for patriarchal power, where in the case of “Venus of Urbino” they inspire sensuality and seduction into sentimentality. In either case, the naked eye is the guide.

Works Cited Plato. Republic. Ed. G. M. A. Grube. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc., 1992. Print.

Vasari, Giorgio. The Lives of the Artists. Trans. Julia Conaway Bondanella and Peter Bondanella. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991. Print.

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Rowynn Dumont: Topographies

Bath Abbey By lorena morales Bath, an English city renown for it’s curing waters, also figures in the imagination through other sitings. Bath’s waters, a phenomenon of nature, are equally layered-over with man-made buildings that are permanent sitings of our ever fascination with nature versus the progression of culture, of “civilization.”

Rosalind Krauss writes in her Picasso Papers of the draughtsman’s line and how it structures culture along a Platonic vector of sameness. It’s a metaphor of the cohesiveness of a community through time based on shared values. Picasso’s Cubist project ruptures Classical line by restructuring line away from sameness to a visual abstraction of perspectival space. Similarly, Rowynn’s interpretative photograph of an abbey in Bath, England, abstracts the traditional lines of Gothic architectural form through an atmospheric blur of natural light cascading into the space. While lux nova is a key idea in Catholic liturgy—the light of God pouring into a house of God—Rowynn captures the light through time with an artistic gesture that moves her camera as she photographs. Rowynn’s metaphysical interpretation of this artificial structure in Bath’s topography shows the irony of nature and her phenomena. While light seems to just be, to just illuminate as in a still photograph, it moves across spaces as the sun and moon are repositioned according to the Earth’s axis. Thus, while line is a component of organization—building forms to frame values, the organic movement of the axis and gravitational pull—it is not and should not be the guiding principle for understanding a space or place. In other words, as Picasso appropriates the draughtsmanship—the line—of the Old Master painters, he does so to reveal the limitations of line while recognizing line as a foundational component of cultural values. Topographies, like aesthetics, respond to what came before. Like Rowynn, we should consider any topography as a palimpsest—histories of the layerings of the natural and cultural phenomena that ever people a place like Bath.

The beauty of Rowynn’s print bring is this eidetic blur of vision that only a metaphysical consideration of space and place brings to any artwork, and likewise to any topography. Transcending the immediate moment, the immediate structure —whether it is natural or artificial—creates an intellectual and spiritual community that recognizes specific values in the context of a larger community of distinguishing values.

For example, the Christian history refuses to acknowledge the spirituality of the Roman settlement of England. Specifically, a temple dedicated to the Sun and a temple dedicated to Minerva. These Roman values are indeed foundational to the later elaborations of Christianity. It just goes to show that we need philosophical artistry such as Rowynn’s to remind us that, beyond the immediate, however seductive in its visuality, there are varied layers of values and their forms that are as inspired by the natural, as they are made into culture by differing communities expressed as a topography.

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Bath Abbey, England, United Kingdom. Š Rowynn Dumont 2016.

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Teleogical Judgment Š Wilson Hurst 2016.

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Groys By milos zahradka maiorana I do not believe in the soul, I believe in the corpse. - Boris Groys I finally got to see where e-flux lives. In a small, tight building, on the 5th floor, I believe, the elevator was packed shut. I had reserved a spot and could cut the line of funereal theorists. The room was crowded with hunger and smuggled sandwiches. I felt a ten second wave of disgust seeing that so many young and healthy people were attending a lecture on the status of art and truth, how decadent. Many exceptional haircuts, art-cuts that is, like bleached hair with an inch of black roots and medieval helmethair cuts like Joan of Arc. The lecture was underwhelming, predictable but enjoyable. Points of notice: Groys was a student of logic before entering the world of art theory, which makes sense looking at his dry, soviet, style of hermeneutics. So, art and crime are related because it is form of responsibility towards oneself and a risk-taking. Badiou calls Nietzsche a criminal of philosophy. Art is no longer a risk, today it is acceptable, there an international infrastructure that support the arts, post-doc institutions, magazines, collectives, residencies, etc. When Toulouse-Lautrec wanted to be an artist it was a risk, it was unacceptable for a man of his upbringing. Nowadays the artist curates himself thought the internet. It is in no way a lamentation, as Groys says. Internet is sort of like God, we confess to it, expose ourselves, it knows us but we cannot know it. The expert internaut is similar to a conceptual artist producing text, image, identity, mood. We produce content for the algorithmic system to echo without being paid for it.

The internet has no time or place, there is a distance collapse, a relaxation. True communication happens when this system of binary, constant information flow is interrupted. When the information code is interrupted something like communication might happen, otherwise it is an exchange where we get what we need and become part of the assessment of information. We yelp and are yelped. The most important point Groys brought up, in my view, is that artists no longer possess the truth, the conviction of Kandinsky, truth is on my side - the world is an abyss of meaning. We have too much faith in the world. Truth has a bad reputation, exclusionary, totalitarian. His position seems antiquated but is ecstatic.Truth is thought to be a vestige of modernist aesthetics, nobody wants to dirty their hands with it. Those who have truth on their side must be deluded, or even worse backwards terrorists. Groys seems to believe the artist needs the truth to survive, and to cultivate distance in order to create it.

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Always Already There: Lost Horizon By mike adams George Kennedy, one of the stars of the box-office bomb, the 1973 film-musical version of the James Hilton novel Lost Horizon, died in February in Idaho. He was an iconic character actor who typically played a certain kind of Hollywood hero: unenigmatic, dependable. I remember seeing the movie on television as a kid, and thinking it was amazing: a latter-day Wizard of Oz. In my naivety I saw it as Hollywood meant it to be seen, as a dazzling spectacle not to be carefully scrutinized, in spite of the fact that the film lays on—rather thick—a “philosophical” message about the putative “utopia” of Shangri-La (where white people live in a palace waited upon—or have they been captured?—by Asians). In retrospect, this film is unintentionally postmodernist, although without any sense of irony; our own historical distance from its time make it more “readable.” What it sought to gloss over becomes obvious. The film is greatly entertaining, however, especially if you are an unabashed Burt Bacharach fan like me. Visually, the film is relatively unimaginative, with a too brightly lit Technicolor look, and staid, solid camera angles from the 1940s; but the songs are for the most part irrepressibly upbeat and dynamic, breezy 1970s pop tunes.

If George Kennedy is even by the early 1970’s a throwback to an earlier, seemingly less ambiguous time of manly, gung-ho Hollywood men, his love-interest interest, Sally Kellerman, is suitably beautiful and elegant—but at the beginning of the film in the midst of a Vietnam-era spiritual malaise: pill-popping and suicidal. She recovers, and he, thanks to her love—and Hollywood hokum—becomes more altruistic. I suppose it was—like the visuals and the music—intended as a marriage of Hollywood’s Golden Age and 1970s “counter-culture.” In a marvelous review detailing the film’s numerous failings—but also its definite charms as a “guilty pleasure”—Glenn Erickson tells us: Initial reviewers of Lost Horizon tripped all over one another to fashion the cruelest put-downs in print.

Unfortunately, most of what they complained about is true. The production is tacky in almost every respect, with the High Lama's palace a poor revamp of a leftover set for 1967's Camelot. The palace grounds look tossed together by Southern California pool & garden landscapers and the interior sets do indeed resemble generic Holiday Inn décor, with a bland 'oriental' theme.

Seeing the film recently I was struck by a sense of nostalgia—as my introduction probably reveals—but also by a sense of the uncanny. In the film a group of what are apparently Brits and Americans find themselves in Shangri-La. Is it real or not? Uncanny in German is Unheimlich—a much more revealing word that translates literally as “un-home-like.” Ironically, I was watching the film at home with my family, but had an odd sort of neither here-nor-there feeling, a sense of the Unheimlich. I was not sure why. I had in mind (before looking it up) that the “palace” of Shangri-La was on a Hollywood backlot; indeed it was: Burbank. In June I flew in and out of Burbank—my first time in Southern California in many years—so there was a certain familiarity: one can see the smog in the air in the film—worse then probably than it is now.

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Somerset, England, United Kingdom. Š Rowynn Dumont.

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Harmonic Dissonance Š Wilson Hurst 2016.

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Shangri-La is Burbank—an under two-hour flight for me. I am almost there already. Yet, there was another more powerful sense of the uncanny: the film opens with an aerial view of the “Himalayas” as the title sequence. A little research revealed that this was the North Cascades of Washington State, my home.

Indeed, I think the shot at the beginning of the film is Mt. Baker, easily seen on a clear day from near here.

So, this Unheimlichkeit stems from the knowledge that this un-home-like place of Shangri-La— unattainable, a fairy tale—is assembled in my own back-yard.

Michel Foucault makes a distinction between utopia and heterotopia. A utopia is literally “without place,” but a heterotopia is a set-aside place, an actual space where things are different from the outside world. For the latter, Foucault uses the example of the religious colonies founded in the Americas. Perhaps ShangriLa means a utopian society in a heterotopia—the Valley of the Blue Moon is the place name in the film— separate from the world but contiguous with it. The film’s setting in the early 1970s makes Shangri-La’s invisibility to the outside world implausible, of course; aerial reconnaissance and spy satellites make the undiscovered place nearly impossible. Yet, what is more interesting is that it exists in the film: various locations on the West Coast are amalgamated—spliced—into something exotic, revealing that I already live there.

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The Clifton Suspension Bridge, Bristol, England Š Rowynn Dumont 2016

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Intuitive Operation Š Wilson Hurst 2016

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