I know very little about architecture. I am aware of certain Starchitects, of which Mexican architect Luis Barragán could be considered part of the milieu. A starchitect is one of the high-profile architects who became a household name. A list of starchitects could include, but is not limited to, Zaha Hadid, Tadao Ando, Frank Gehry, Norman Foster, Jean Nouvel, I.M, Pei, Richard Meier, and Renzo Piano. Knowing little about architecture, these are people whose work, along with Barragán, I am aware. I have been in a few of their buildings and understand the genuine fascination that architecture holds for many people. From my perspective, the relationship between spatial geometry and sculpture, on top of the immersive experience of architecture, makes it a pursuit that I have begun to gravitate toward more as I get older. Having studied sculpture at a young age, I feel indebted to three-dimensional form, an itch rarely scratched with photography and its displays.
Upon seeing The Images of Luis Barragán published recently by ROMA, several things attracted me to the title. It is first, knowing of Barragán and his private one-story homes that combine an abundance of color and are, for lack of knowledge or better terms, reminders of a type of constructivist painting that exhibit, for me, a mix between Giorgio de Chirico and Piet Mondrian-Casa Gilardi being an example of what I am trying to unfurl. It is hard to explain for a non-scholar of architecture, but this is the sense I get when thinking of Barragán and his homes. However, I think of his work more precisely exhibiting tendencies also found in Mexican social-realist art, like the Murals of Siqueiros, Rivera, and Orozco. Architects, please forgive me; I do with what I have in reach.
The second thing that attracted me to the book was the involvement/editing between ROMA designer Roger Willems and Mark Manders, a sculptor whose work I love. It is bodily yet deconstructed and often reminds me of a large-scale Hans Bellmer work that comes to life but cuts itself away from its erotic impulse. Manders’ large clay bodies and faces are severed and often pinioned between wood and clamps. Newspaper is used as an homage to the works of Jasper Johns for the objects I might refer to as paintings or collages. His large-scale busts make me think of the film Planet of the Apes, where the Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi sculpture of the Statue of Liberty lies face down on the beach: this monument, a derivative of the Colossus of Rhodes.
But, back to Barragán, whose archive in a particular form has been examined by the team of Willems and Manders. I have been paying attention to the art production process in recent years, mainly through the Nearest Truth Podcast. I have also sought out artist’s books, ephemera, interviews, dialogs, catalogs, etc., showing their process, sketchbooks, or scrapbooks to understand their creative prompt. A recent purchase by Matthieu Orléan has been an essential confirmation of my interests as it showcases works by Christophe Berhault, William S. Burroughs, Pedro Costa, Robert Duncan & Jess Collins, Derek Jarman, Stanley Kubrick, Bertrand Mandico, Christian Patterson, Mary Pickford, John Truwe, Agnès Varda, Jane Wodening, & Stan Brackhage. This book and a book of collages by Victor Hugo, along with similar volumes by Dennis Cooper, Walther Pfeiffer, and others, have put automatism at the front of the process, which, for me, speaks to the honesty of production, the psycho-analytical decisiveness and intuition that is produced from our root condition.
The Images of Luis Barragán is not precisely a scrapbook we see, but it is also not far from it. In his home in Mexico, Barragán kept a lectern, a lecture platform often used in litany or the delivery of speeches. On this lectern, he placed varying amounts of images culled from magazines, books, etc. He left these images atop the lectern as a way to keep the presence of an open notebook, which undoubtedly wormed its way into his practice the same way that other visual cues work into artists thinking by process of consecutive viewings, some ambient, without direct investigation, and others more studied. Living with images will work its way out in a process for many artists. It is a methodology, an influence machine, that can be programmed, like music, to dictate a way of thinking through something.
By finding references or reaction points and living with the images, the artist can increase or decrease the volume of influence in their creativity. In this, Barragán loved pictures and used this lectern to think about specific imagery. In some ways, there feels like a crossroads between Aby Warburg and his Mnemosyne work here. Specific motifs regarding death, Judeo-Christian territory, and pre-Colombian sculpture permeate the pages. Sacred icons come through in both art historical and contemporary forms, from art history books to fashion magazines, perhaps making a slight nod to Vince Aletti’s recent book by Self Publish Be Happy, The Drawer, in which the artist also used his archive of magazines to play with similar results, although in a more raucous way.
In some ways, Manders and Willems’s approach reminds me of a scrapbook, though the outcome is contained, not a book within a book, but rather a scrapbook printed to reflect the ephemera found on the architect’s lectern. In this, it is documentation, but it is handled in a way that suggests an imperfect document. The images are laid on the lectern unevenly, shot from varying angles, and instead of a ruler or color grid, we are given an iPhone 6 for scale, asking the contemporary viewer to understand the scale of the images but essentially making its interpretation from the future less precise, thus negating the documentary objectivity in its entirely, which is of course, a game worth playing. I love the efficiency of the directive and the comparatively simple framework for reading the images, the archive, and the editor’s approach to the work. The cover is also awe-inspiring, reminding one of the early Starn Twins work. Highest Recommendation. MORE PLEASE!
