Anatomy of Melancholy

Selections from the Anatomy of Melancholy by Robert Burton

in-between photos from Drummer magazine

as put together by William E Jones.

Robert Burton was an Oxford scholar (1577-1640), who wrote the Anatomy of Melancholy as a manual for getting over chronic depression.

(published under the pseudonym Democritus Junior in 1621)

Drummer Magazine was "America's mag for the Macho male" published from 1975 until the late 1990s

William E. Jones is an artist and filmmaker who put the two together

Poverty and Want, causes of melancholy

 I write of melancholy, by being busy to avoid melancholy. There is no greater cause of melancholy than idleness, no better cure than business.
Melancholy in Disposition,
improperly so called,
Equivocations

[a heavy heart, hatchling in my head]

 Like all men, he was given bad times in which to live

 "Gay magazines originated in the early nineteen fifties from the physique magazines that already ... Well known Drummer Magazine first appeared in 1975."

 [152]———Arcades ambo

Et Cantare pares, et respondere parati.

Both young Arcadians, both alike inspir'd

To sing and answer as the song requir'd.

if I remember correctly, I got this at OMMU

Thoughts on an exhibition (Domesticated Mountain)

Recently I've been thinking about what it means for an architect to show in a gallery. Or what it means for a artist to present work that is perceived as architecture.

It became clear that the project and the exhibition should overlap. Of course the project was what was being exhibited, but the exhibition should be a project too, perhaps a project that informs the project itself. Almost inevitably, exhibitions are projects.

The main narrative of domesticated mountain takes place inside the video, the vehicle that carries the project, and it is also the object that occupies a spot between art and architecture, if only because it borrows it's form from film.

(but when an art installation is inhabitable, 

and actually a functional room in the space of the gallery, is it still art?)

All the other objects are more or less straightforward art or architecture: a large scale installation and short video fragments seem to be part of the art, and plans, section and model seem to be part of the architecture presented.

if, according to the video, we don't need buildings anymore, are the architectural plans and sections drawings of an un-proposed home? And could we say that they have crossed over to art, since they are not proposals?

Personally I was never interested in the what is what question, because the edges of the field have always been blurry, and writing a blogpost can be as architecture or as art as anything.

Plus, I do sometimes think about whether we indeed need buildings, and whether the only role for architects is to produce more objects, and if that is still a valid role. 

Couldn't it just be wrong to make any more buildings? Aren't we just serving the empire with products that in the end we despise? Doesn't every newly "developed" area just remind us of how scary is our postneoliberal reality? And could buildings play a role other than suspicious development tools for a post-capitalist landscape of perpetual crisis?

Domesticated Mountain

curated by Maria Cristina Didero

Gloria Maria Gallery, Milan

Domesticated Mountain

Domesticated Mountain proposes the suburban home as the traditional vehicle for an architectural manifesto.

Positioning the home in an expanded notion of suburbia, i.e. The internet, the suburban home is the accumulation of all the things we do online, and so it needs to be redefined from scratch.

(apparently online you can buy a photo of what your useless things being moved to your new house look like)

In order to redefine what makes our suburban home in the time of facebook and twitter and tumblr and pintrest, we go back to the most primitive state of a home.

The primitive state of such a suburban home is a transport van depositing boxes on the sidewalk.

These boxes contain the house.

(the house itself is a readymade, rented from an online agency of houses, picked from a list according to specifications. In this internet suburbia no more houses are designed, because enough readymades exist already)

(could this be a Villa Savoya made from transport packaging?)

the future of architecture

was often expressed

as a house

This initial primitive state of a house arriving at it's location as a set of transport boxes is a condition that continues throughout the life of this house, and perhaps becomes it's death.

The inhabitants constantly need more products to satisfy their ever expanding needs ("Do we need a raw almond puree maker darling? Yes we do").

But to be exact, they do not need the almond puree maker to make almond puree, they need it to satisfy their need of needing it. They just want to buy it, but not necessarily own it or use it.

So the inhabitants of the house go through evolutionary stages.

 First they bring all the stuff from their previous house, then they continuously purchase more stuff on the internet, but gradually become so saturated with browsing and buying that they forget what they bought. Boxes of bargains arrive at the house but nobody remembers buying them, because they have already discovered another site with better bargains, faster browsing, cheaper shipping.

(still from Domesticated Mountain)

This compulsive internet shopping is part of the inhabitants growing list of compulsive browsing behaviors. Every night they get lost in psychogeographic drifts down the jpeg avenues of tumblr, scrolling down cartesian city grids of thumbnails, making their situationist derives by caressing their ipad screens. 

silently they watched from across the street as their home morphed into a webpage of thumbnails. 

(they just couldn't' wait to start scrolling)

In these derives, they find everything: products to want, and buildings they like and archive material to reblog and bearded guys to make friends with. They find objects to order and have sent home and information to fill up their blogs and clothes to wear while browsing for more.

Soon they are saturated. They have seen all the images that exist on the internet, they have browsed all the bargain bins many times over, but they need more things to scroll through, sometimes not even looking at what they are looking at, just caressing and scrolling. 

(sometimes they shopped in their sleep, forgetting what they bought even before they completed their purchase)

They dont need to buy products anymore, they just add them to their dreamboxes, mark them as favorites, leave them rotting in the shopping cart in case they need something to want later on.

Slowly they realize that their home has become a mountain of things, stacked boxes of almond puree makers and organic ironing kits. And while this accumulating was going on, they got saturated with accumulating, with buying, with owning.

Suburbia is the timeless drift

of the Sleepy Situationist

looking for something to want

Now it was enough to just click on something and it had already partially been consumed. Consumed enough so that you could just scroll down to the next consumable image of product or information or person.

(at some point the citizens of internet suburbia decided to hold a protest against the sorry state of suburbia. But by the time they began, they had already forgotten what it was they were protesting)

Some accused Suburbia

of forgetting about public space

she did not forget

she just needed you to keep

buying

Has this evolutionary process of boxed products reached it's post-capitalist conclusion? 

Suburbia changed how they lived

changed how they shopped

drifting among products

browsing through people

Is it enough to just “consume” online without ever buying anything? Will the manifesto house, and its mountain of objects just evaporate into an ephemeral scroll up to the suburban sky?

Years later the geography of nowhere

became the internet of everywhere

the traditional shopping malls

replaced by the discount power centers

category killer hypermarkets

hooked on large infrastructural networks

feeding on the bloodstreams

of transportation and logistics 

No more products? no more buildings? no more images? no more real people? just a endless scroll of gaussian blurriness, a slow vertical drift into our internet suburbia.

 (photos and documentation fragments coming soon)

Domesticated Mountain
a project by Andreas Angelidakis
curated by Maria Cristina Didero
at GloriaMaria Gallery
opened 18th April 2012 
during the ultimate torrent of objects 
that is the Salone del Mobile in Milano


the exhibition consists of a short firm, video fragments, architectural drawings of an unproposed home, a 3D print that carried it's own shadow, and various furniture made from transport scraps. Oh and a site-specific domesticated mountain of stuff.


texts Andreas Angelidakis, Maria Cristina Didero
3D animation and drawings Sotiris Vasiliou
video editing and additional animation AA
3D printing Sculpteo using a zPrinter 650
special thanks: Angelo Plessas, Adelina von Furstenberg, Priscilla Tea, Fabrizio Meris, Alexandra Syriou, FedEx and the eternal genius of M. Ward


CLICK FOR PRESS MATERIAL




SELECTED PUBLICATIONS


review on ARTFORUM by Marco Tagliafierro


DOMUS video interview with Simona Bordona


review on Arttribune by Riccardo Conti

The Suburban Home as Vehicle for an Architectural Manifesto by Ethel Baraona Pohl / dpr-barcelona

Short interview by Elena Bordignion / ATPdiary.com 


WIRED / Brude Sterling 

"A BOX WILL BURY US" by Daniele Perra, GQ Italia

review by ivanmaria vele

Marriucia Casadio _Vogue Italia

Rhizome New York

Fashion for a Revolution

25th of March is the date that Greece celebrates 

its independence from the Ottoman Empire

 listening to the Nationalistic paranoia on the streets today was a strange wake-up call

 because in fact Greece has nothing much to celebrate.

Certainly not the fact that we are faced with a dreary election, in which the two main parties participate with their worst leaders in years. An election which is really the last thing a country in such deep trouble needs.

maybe the only thing worth celebrating is the splendid t-shirt weather

 which made me take out these 25th January Arab Spring t-shirts bought in Tahrir square, 

celebrating the hoped independence of Egypt. 

I cant help but thinking that a revolution might be our only hope.

Civic City Cahiers

 recently I've been going through the  great Civic City Cahier series, 

from the lovely folks at Bedford Press (and fellow ASAPers)

 which deals with how we deal with the world

as architects, designers, artists.

 mostly, with how we can keep producing for a world economy 

 that seems to only want to screw us up

1st from the series was Margit Mayers Cahier #1, Social Movements in the (Post-) Neoliberal City suggests a strategic negation of design as a tool for creating cities based on values other than just profit. Picking up a strand of thinking started with Henri Lefebvres' Right to the City, Mayer seems to suggest cities where conflict is a positive tool. Even though she positions the problems of the city quite well, I think the line of thinking does not take us much farther than the Occupy and Indignados movements.

next on my list was Cahier #5, Eric Swyngedouws' Designing the Post-Political City and the Insurgent Polis focus on the anger that has been recently surfacing in public space.  He talks about returning to public space as an inherently political platform, away from the comme-il-faut capitalism of the endless megabrand franchise globalisation and the hopeless and almost banal explosions of anger: "Resistance as the ultimate horizon of urban movements has become a hysterical act; a subterfuge that masks what is truly at stake - how to make sure that nothing changes." Swyngedouw suggests we reclaim the Polis by moving closer to public space as an arena of dispute and even conflict, concluding with three points: to start by thinking of of a free public urbanity, to allow space for Speech, even if that is utopian speech, and third to go beyond the fantasy of neoliberal marketplace which keeps us in fear of a crisis, to accept that the catastrophe has already happened, that we are already within the collapse of a civilization and we just need to choose sides.

 

Cahier #3 though seems to be taking everything a step further, and I guess the numbering is not sequential, since Cahier #4 has yet to come out. (and sadly Cahier #2 is out of print, I guess I missed it)

Tom Holerts' Distributed Agency, Design's Potentiality goes beyond the refusal and resistance of the previous volumes,  towards a place where design has joined the system of post-capitalism and attempts to make changes from within, not against. Holert suggests design is a practice of distributed agency, a social, political, anthropological, aesthetic and even engineering practice, and says that what we need to be designing is not participants into the system, but the system itself. As I was reading this, I kept imagining that it would lead to a designing of how space is distributed, how buildings are sold, how construction companies get control of land, how developers actually profit from public space. If we could re-design this system, we would be redesigning our cities, we would be retaking control of public space. In fact, instead of buildings and spaces we should be busy designing political systems. I was taking these thoughts further and further as I've been for the last 6 months working on such a project, to be posted quite soon in this blog.

Yet Holert goes in another direction, perhaps equally interesting. He suggests the space of collaboration, and of the artisan as practices that can withstand the neoliberal tsunami, he imagines economies of community, new ways of "being together", of re-designing the city, improving inherited designs via micro-alterations that engage with the local, of design facing it's own responsibilities in the current landscape. 

Maybe we can do even more? as Holert quotes somewhere :

"If you're going to be a corporate tool, at least be a good one."