Body and Space
For this weeks Softness Assignment we were assigned to discuss around the body and space. We saw the painting by the dutch painter who was commissioned a painting for a church, in which he painted Christ inside the coffin. It was not very well received. The painting was very interestingly painted, it had a claustrophobic feeling to it.
I was still thinking about how we used space, how it relates to our body. what it means to walk around a space and take it in, or run through it. Could you absorb a space, do you actually need to walk a space to take it in? Could you just see it, to know how it feels? Why do babies taste and bite everything when they are discovering the world around them?
I still had the salt and charcoal in my mind. I looked at the use of charcoal and salt. The connotations. the use of salt as currency. The chimney cleaners, the salt mines. the salt statues.
So I remembered a story that Vik Muniz tells in his book about Juárez. and talks about how sculptures are copies and not really faithful to the original. I looked at Harvard’s Statue of Three lies, the statue of John Harvard. (http://www.bu.edu/mfeldman/Harvard/statue.html
During Spring break I went to the MIT Museum, I walked through the exhibitions at the moment.
robots
http://web.mit.edu/museum/exhibitions/robots.html
holograms
http://web.mit.edu/museum/exhibitions/holography.html
kinetic sculptures (Arthur Ganson)
http://web.mit.edu/museum/exhibitions/ganson.html
It was interesting to match these exhibitions to the readings about the humans and their senses.
so in thinking this is was brought back to the myth Narcissus. It was amazing to see how we were really good at creating versions of what we think we look like, and sometimes we forget that humans are ourselves wonderful sensory and moving beings. And everyday I feel we have not come to know everything about ourselves.
I really fixated on how monuments and paintings plant a body in any given space for people living around it to react to that monument, change and mold their lives around the qualities or story of static stone person.
So for class I thought of three projects.
please forgive me if they might offend, it is a brainstorm and still a work in progress.
In the spirit of how man is the measure of all things, and monuments being something to look up to.
a) why not make monuments for the animals in the city, famous animals in history. A rat in the subway to the Unknown Rat who died in combat against the Subway Cars.
b) Would a mirror in the trash cans or by the trees be a monument with which the squirrels and rats could identify with?
c) Why not go the opposite way and blow up a monument of a rat or cat. Sometimes there is monuments to people who we know less about. At least rats and cats are animals we see around the city more often than dead people.
d) I looked up the story in the Bible about the woman who turned back and was turned into a salt statue. Why do we keep turning back and bringing up monuments if we are not learning anything from them. Is history just meant to be repeated just like parrots do?
I looked at lot at paintings, sculptures and works of art. While thinking about how great humans’ bodies are, I though why not make the human body a work of art. It has been immortalized in marble by the Greeks, by the Romans, Michelangelo, painters, in new media. but it is always there in still life. Why not celebrate the living people.
With a mirror pointed at a bench in the park to reflect the sun and a museum index card. Have any body who comes to sit at the bench be a work of art. Have a bunch of tourists come and be amazed by it, or disgusted.
So with these thoughts into account, I remember walking into the Natural history Museum and under the Giant whale feeling so little. and also remembering very clearly the smell of the ocean. however it was not there. Two days later, while in Boston, I smelled the ocean and then remembered the whale.
It was very fun.
So I thought why not make something with smell, it is after all a very neglected sense.
Why not provide with a humidifier a smell different to the ones found on the street?
My latest idea was to make people look down, people look down when they find a coin, they see as good luck. So why not put scented coins when even if the coin might not be necessarily lucky, it will provide with relaxing scents and one second of change to the lucky picker.
