'As we construct our self made world, we construct projections...and metaphors of our own mindscape. We dwell in the landscape and the landscape dwells in us'.
Artistic revolutions always imply a reconnection with the invisible undercurrents of the universe of the human mind.
The duty of education is to cultivate and support the human abilities of imagination and empathy, but the prevailing values of culture today tend to discourage fantasy, suppress the senses and petrify the boundary between the self and the world. The main objective of artistic education may not directly reside in the principles of artistic making but is the emancipation and opening up of personality of the student and his/her self-awareness and self-image in relation to the immensely rich tradition of art, and to the lived world at large.
'if a result is to come, it must come from the five sense' - Michael Serres.
'We respond to gestures with an extreme alertness and, might almost say, in accordance with an elaborate and secret code that is written nowhere known by no one and understood by all'- Edward Sapir.
'The hand is no longer a hand when it has taken hold of a hammer, it flies transparent and dissolves, my own hand has long since taken flight in writing. The hand thought like one's tongues disappear in that determination.'- Michael Serres,
Tools possess a special and inarguable beauty...Even the earliest stone tools express their use in the grip of a human hand and they convey the inarguable presence of perfect function and performance. The beauty of tools reflect the same pleasure on living creatures, indeed they possess the beauty of the human hand itself, the most perfect of all tools.
Whenever I see the total correspondence and unexplainable affinity of a craftsman's persona, his/her hands and his/her workshop environment, I am deeply moved...
'Every good craftsman conducts a dialogue between concrete practises and thinking; his dialogue evolves into sustaining habits and these habits establish a rhythm between problem solving and problem finding.'-Sennett
In addition to the tool, the skilled practise of the craft involves imagination with the hands, every material exercise of craft projects determined intentionality and an imagined vision of the completed task or object at hand.
Richard Sennett makes two basic arguments about the interaction of the bodily actions of the hand and imagination. First, that all skills, even the most abstract, begin as bodily practises; second that technical understanding develops through the power of imagination. The first argument focuses on knowledge gained in the hand through touch and movement. The argument about imagination by exploring language that attempts to direct and guide bodily skills.' Sennett.
A true craftsman is not bound to a single idea, as the formal idea often gives rise to a family of variations.
Mastering one craft personally helps the designer and architect to grasp the nuances of other crafts and, before all, to respect the special skill and experience of the craftsman executing his design. Besides, learning any skills intimately teaches him humility. Arrogance does not go with true skill.
Any skill calls for tireless practising. The established estimate based on research concludes that any demanding specialised manual or physical skill requires about 10,000 hours of practise.
'No honest craftsman or maker knows in the process of working whether he is making or creating...The first, the second and the last reality for jim is the work itself, the very process of working. The process takes precedence over its result, if only because the latter is impossible without the former.'- Brodsky
'Simplicity is not an end in Art, but one arrives at simplicity in spite of oneself in approaching the real essence of things, simplicity is at the bottom complexity and one must be nourished on its essence to understands it's significance...I never seek to make what they call a pure or abstract form. Process, simplicity is never in my mind; to arrive at the real sense of things is the one aim'.- Brancusi.
The initial mental image may emerge as a visual entity, but it can as well be a tactile, muscular or bodily impression, or a shapeless feeling that the hand concretises in a set of lines projeting a shape or structure.
One cannot know whether the image first arose in one's mind , and then recorded by hand, or whether the image was produced by the hand independently or whether it emerged as a result of the seamless collaboration of the hand and the drawer's mental space.
It is often the act of drawing itself, the deep engagement in the act of unconscious thinking through making that gives rise to an image or an idea. The second meaning of the word drawing as a means of pulling out, revealing and concretising internal mental images and feelings as much as recording an external world.
'Creativity is always linked with the happy moment when all conscious control can be forgotten. What is not sufficiently realised in the genuine conflict between two kinds of sensibility, conscious intellect and unconscious intuition... It is not an advantage if the creative thinker has to handle elements that are precise in themselves such as geometric or architectural diagrams.' - Ehrenzweig
Every tru piece of architecture relocates man in the world and casts some new light on man's existential enigma. Architecture needs to build a better world, and this projection of an idealised human dimension calls for existential wisdom rather than professional expertise, skill and experience. In fact a design task is an existencial exploration in which the architect's professional knowledge, life experiences, ethical and aesthetic sensibilities, mind and body, eye and hand, as well as his/her entire persona and existential wisdom eventually merge.
A genuine artistic and architectural experince is primarily a strengthened awareness of self...art is tautological, it keeps repeating the same basic expression over and over again; how it feels to be human in this world.
'Each confirmation or denial brings you closer to the object until finally you are, as it were, inside it. The contours you have drawn no longer marking the edge of what you have seen, but he edges of what you have become' - Berger
'Making things with my hands means a lot to me. I could even say that when I sculpt or model nature's materials it has almost a therapeutic effect. They inspire me and lead me on to new experiments. They transport me into another world. A world in which, if eyesight fails, my fingertips see the movement and the continuous emergence of forms.' -Tapio Wirkkala
The work of the craftsman implies collaboration with his material. Instead of imposing a preconceived idea or shape, he needs to listen to his material.
'You cannot make what you want to make, but what the material permits you to make. You cannot make out of marble what you would make out of wood, or out of wood what you would make out of stone...each material has its own life, and one cannot without punishment destroy a living material to make a dumb senseless thing. That is, we must nor try to make materials speak our language, we must go on with them to the point where others will understand their language.' -Brancusi.
'All materials have their own unwritten laws. You should never violate the material you;re working with. The designer's purpose is to be in harmony with the material. The craftsman has the advantage that at every stage of his work his material is in his hands to feel and command. In industry, the material is constantly subordinate to some preplanned law and machinery and once a job has begun its difficlut to make changes'.- Wirkkala
Architectural ugliness or existential falseness can make us experience alienation and weakening of the sense of self, and finally make us fall mentally and somatically ill. Knowledge becomes uselful for the creative endeavour when it is forgotten after it has been turned into an ingredient of one's body and personality. The moment of looking at the world or at a specific task as if neither had been encountered before, that is the creative instant and frame of mind.
The execution of an action by no means proves that we know, even superficially what we re doing or how we are doing it. If we attempt to carry out an action with awareness- that is- to follow it in detail- we soon discover that even the simplest and most common of actions such as getting up from a chair, is a mystery, and that we have no idea at all how its done.- Feldenkrais
An artistic work is not an intellectual riddle seeking an interpretation or explanation . It is a complex of images, experiences and emotions which enters directly our consciousness. It has an impact on our mind before it becomes understood, or without ever being intellectually understood.
The artist finds a way behind words, concepts, and rational explanations in his/her repeated search for a re-encounter with the world. Rational construction provide little help for artistic search as the artist has to rediscover the boundary of his own existence repeatedly, time after time.
Architecture tames and domesticates space and time in the flesh of the world for human habitation. It frames human existence in specific ways and defines a basic horizon of understanding.
As today's consumer, media and information culture increasingly manipulate the human mind through the thematised environemnts, commercial conditioning and benumbing entertainment, art has the mission to defend the autonomy of individual experience and provide an existential ground for the human condition. One of the primary tasks of art is to safeguard the authenticity and independence of human experience.
In my view, the task of architecture is to maintain the differentiation and hierarchical and qualitive articulation of existential space. Instead of participating in the process of furhter speeding up the experince of the world, architecture has to slow down experience, halt time, and defend the natural slowness and diversity of experience. Architecture must defend us against excessive exposure, noise and communication. Finally, the task of architecture is to maintain and defend silence.
-Extracts from The Thinking Hand by Juhani Pallasmaa