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worker: john

“Nobody gives you freedom, you have to take it. ” -Meret Oppenheim

The desire for continuity and completeness of both physical and interpretive landscapes is a conscious choice made by a person. It is not the voracious yet blind devouring of the consumer, a grossly quantitative sequencing of objects and ideas, but the desire to pass through, or project lines through objects and ideas as a qualitative experience in which all elements come together progressively to form a world view and a relational network that trails the completist invisibly. These transgressions or penetrations involve a clean movement, a passing through, as through a shaft or tunnel for the maintenance of clearance around the path, for the perpetuation of distance, however minute, through which all trajectories are possible in a finely branching spine of tangential inquiries, each hollowed out and panoramically observant. This is penetration through the city, the continuity of the walking surface and the sometimes elusive yet wholly personal totality of the public way. This is movement through a text, an infinitely reducible series of interpretational chambers. This is life amongst a landscape of objects, the continuity of the urban surface and the subjective interpretational minutiae of naming, language, and memory. This is not the envelopment of consumption, in which the consumer is in fact consumed, but the construction of all things into the continuously deferring desire of asymptotic distance, where they can remain distinct, in place, yet locked into the trailing web of the completist’s penetrations. Inherent within these two opposing pursuits of consumption and inclusion is a desire for completion, an obsessive drive for a perceived totality. This perception is derived from the reading of a system that is assumed to be complete or continuous, such as ‘the city’ or a novel, and the desire to consume or include it in totality.

Although incompleteness, as the status of an object, is in essence a transferal of duty, there are many ways that this movement is announced and facilitated. Two divergent modes of transferal are into or through continuing mental processes and peripheral action or through continued physical action. The incomplete state that invites physical action upon it is a situation of temporal change in which the configuration and structure of the construct is in continuous flux, whether toward a predetermined terminal state, such as the majestic, mountain-sized sculpture in the round of Crazy Horse in the Black Hills of South Dakota, whose completion necessitates a transfer of labor through the generations due to its scope, or the potentially infinite composition of an ‘exquisite corpse’ text, in which the status of completion depends on how long the participants remain interested or at what point in that duration the piece is read. Alternately, as the focus of this study, there are conditions for whom incompleteness is the terminal state. Although perceived to be a complete body, these examples remain inert until a relationship with them is consummated, and this can only occur externally, leaving no physical trace, either through mental processes, such as a riddle or a rhetorical device, or through attempted and repulsed physical interactions which continue to leave the object mute, distant, and untouched, such as the art object. Also, analogous to the status of Crazy Horse above, is Raymond Queneau’s Hundred Thousand Billion poems, a permutative sonnet that, although its terminal physical state reveals just 10 poems, if following the instructions for reading, would take 200,000,000 years of continuous attention to complete. More explicitly, this study will focus on the frustration and inspiration found in intra-systemic incompleteness, those points in complete and mature systems which, as physically terminal objects or moments, remain impenetrable and exclusionary.

A particularly revealing investigation of this issue is the plight of ‘K.,’ the ‘land surveyor’ of Franz Kafka’s unfinished novel The Castle. Although the incompleteness of the novel itself provides useful analogues for the status of closure and resolution with exclusionary systems and constructs, it is the very system and construct in question that will reveal the most in this inquiry, the bureaucracy and physicality of the castle respectively. The castle stands as an intra-systemic solid within the text which is impenetrable to the reader and to K., both of whom consequently fail at their tasks of assimilating the castle into their reading and ’surveying’ the relationship of the castle to the village. The narrative of this quest and failure and the positive changes that they affect in K. will serve to structure the argument of this investigation.

The castle appears as a rhetorical solid in the text not only because it is engaged only tangentially through the narrative vehicle of K., for as he is repelled, we are too, but also because it is a disruption in the interpretive and associational framework that is our movement through and thorough comprehension of the text. It is prominent in the text as a rhetorical device yet it remains impenetrable due to the meager physical descriptions which loosely characterize it as something other than the formal castle archetype. This discontinuity in our movement through the landscape of the text is made all the more frustrating by its foiling against extremely pedestrian and accessible archetypal settings such as inns, hovels, schoolhouses, and taverns. All of these, not coincidentally, K. is also granted surprisingly unfettered access to given his notorious status of otherness in the village. The castle, as a key increment in the body of the text, through its physical impenetrability, its social inaccessibility, and its interpretational and associational elusiveness, is incomplete within a landscape, a totality, that is, as a realm and an argument, complete.

A more concrete manifestation of this grouping of repulsive aspects is found in art objects and their existence and immersion in a culturally established space of contemplation. In the realm of art, objects and artifacts, more than paintings, drawings, and photographs, institute a space of externality in which the viewer remains. Apart from certain hybrid examples (Rauschenberg, Matta-Clark), two-dimensional works support a more spatially clear relationship between the viewer and the piece; by virtue of wall mounting it is a frontal 180 degree fan of angles that the piece may be viewed from with a frame or edge that denotes the termination of the work allowing the back side, which is against a wall, to remain out of the equation for clear understanding of the limits of the piece. This inherent frontality creates a consistently binary relationship between the viewer and the piece which facilitates a conversational spatial discourse. The architectural correlation to walls lying at the boundary of spaces allows the two-dimensional works’ communicative function to be disambiguated by transferring the lack of spatial continuity to the primary delimiting function of the architecture. Objects defy this quality spatially to externalize the viewer. The architectural isolation of the object on a flush-based pedestal or standing anthropomorphically on the floor in the space of the gallery distinguishes the moment from the volume of the space as a precious discontinuity and swells the space around it with the perceived presence of its absence. In most situations, where objects do not possess architectural correlations such as niches, there is a physical sense that in their untethered state they possess a variable amount of space around themselves. In addition, there is an inherent timidity of the viewer to approach the precious object, standing quietly of its own accord, for fear that its posture might be disturbed, a quality one does not sense with two-dimensional objects who receive the stability and security of the walls they are mounted upon. This effect of repulsion, coupled with its situation in the round, keeps the viewer roving about the object, stalking it in an attempt to establish a frame of reference for it by surveying it against the spaces and bounding elements in the distance by remaining tenuously distant from it, by mutually refusing to develop a concrete relationship. This distance is both culturally imbued into the object itself and necessitated by the physical conditions of its reception. This spatial reading of the object foregrounds its primary architectural correlation as an obstacle and its physical impenetrability which, over time, overpowers the communicative aspects of the object and frustrates the clarity of discourse with it.

I attempted to gain access to the Inforum today, I surveyed the exterior, unable to get a full impression, it was too large and the distance required to understand its scale was impossible due to the other looming superstructures, the glass ground level in the corner was slick and empty, it was 1:30 PM on a Tuesday, the large well-lit atrium was vacant, reflective surfaces and ‘open air’ meeting/lecture halls, I felt that I was assuming the posture of a legitimate Inforum visitor, a security booth on the ground level gave me no second looks as I photographed, with comfort I ascended, the real entrance was not until the 5th floor where I was accosted by security and told to stop shooting, I balked, I was a local architect looking at the building, you need to check with management, I don’t have an ID, I was led into another glass room where a receptionist called a man out, the guard told him I was taking pictures, he said I was not allowed to, they are on his camera, it is our policy since 9/11, I’m sure you understand, yes I am sure this is a big target for terrorists, the guard watched me, albeit disinterestedly, delete my photos, a few of which I surreptitiously kept, she told me I had to delete any photos I had of the outside of the building as well, I forced her to check on that point, the boss said they could not control what I did outside the building.

This sort of discontinuity is also recognizable at the level of the city by first understanding what constitutes continuity within its dominant formal systems. An appropriate correlation can be drawn from Kafka’s castle, through the art object, to a series of structures in Atlanta, Georgia called the ‘Marts.’ Atlanta is not known to possess a particularly livable downtown area. Its density mainly owes to finance and commerce centers housed in relatively nondescript high-rise towers and a number of large hotels catering to conventioneers. The typical downtown block measures 115 meters and houses an aggregation of structures of varying use, all with fairly minimal street-level activity. Philip Johnson’s 191 Peachtree Street shares its block with The Four Seasons hotel, a number of parking structures, and a Hooter’s. The Georgia Pacific Center by Skidmore Owings and Merrill shares its block with a subway station and a surface parking lot. John Portman’s Marriott Marquis shares its block with two office towers also design by Mr. Portman. In fact, Mr. Portman is often credited with the uninviting character of downtown Atlanta’s streetscape. His Peachtree Center Mall, occupying a block with a number of office buildings, retracted much of the city center’s retail functions into the interior of the block with easily securable entrance points and a continuous flow of the (semi)public way through an interior space. Although he has been condemned for turning the architectural back of the city on the streetscape, Portman’s prototypes have played out and progenerated into a fabric that is porous both on the grid of the street and in the continuous threads of public space that wind through the aggregated solid blocks of downtown, at least during the day, and if one is dressed reasonably well. The keystone examples for each block listed above, in addition to Mr. Portman’s Hyatt Regency, which stands alone on a block, and his Westin hotel, which shares its block with the now abandoned Macy’s department store, possess this continuity of surface, albeit sometimes convoluted and elusive, across which one can penetrate the constructed volume of the block and emerge on the opposite side. The aggregation of many downtown blocks additionally allows for porosity between structures through alleys and drives.

Having helped to establish this somewhat specious, yet legible and experiential system of porosity, Mr. Portman is also responsible for the most dramatic intra-systemic disruptions, a series of private, full block megastructures: The Apparel Mart, The Merchandise Mart, and The Inforum. These structures house wholesale clothing showrooms, wholesale junk showrooms, and high-tech conference facilities respectively. Each structure is an extruded block pushing out to the property line and standing anywhere from 15 to 22 stories, with highly controlled access points on the ground level, at the most, one per street frontage, at the least, one total, and the highly introverted aesthetic Mr. Portman’s more public ventures have drawn criticism for, with either continuous expanses of mirrored glass or virtually windowless concrete megaliths. These structures are often lauded for their concentration of commercial functions and their magnetic ability to bring people into the city, yet they stand as irritating discontinuities in the accessible surface of downtown. Like the art object, these structures exert a repulsive force on the viewer, not through physical and cultural isolation, but through the intra-systemic aberration of their scale. In the density of the downtown environment, it is impossible to take in their totality; one is pushed first to the opposite sidewalk to glimpse the parapet, and even further still to see two corners of the structure in the field of vision.

Much more than the art object though, the literal impenetrability of the Marts is enforced through the long undetailed facades, long doorless streetscapes, and more subtly and lastingly, the ambiguity of their use. This ambiguity also promotes the repulsive force of the structure to a social frame in an already alienating downtown environment. Although the ‘closed’ role of the Marts in the function of the commerce-based downtown as viewed by the ground-level visitor is no less ambiguous than any other structure, the architectural solidity and impenetrability reinforces and makes actual the social and topographic impenetrability rather than making concessions to the general public, and formalizes its own irritating absence in the city’s formal system.

The effect of the intra-systemic incompleteness of the Marts on the occupant of the city can be tracked through an examination of K.’s exclusion from the castle as a rhetorical locus of physical and social power. K.’s externality to the castle is initiated by his inability to objectively delimit its physical extents, thereby giving him no means to plot or even comprehend his physical penetration into the castle, and his otherness from the society of the villagers, who have helped to construct the subjective image and social power of the castle. This image of the castle can only be developed and perpetuated by those who are components of the ingrained system, such as the villagers and the officials from the castle who dwell in the village. As lifelong participants in the conception of the castle, their subjectivity has been one of reception through such integrated vehicles as rumors and deferral of responsibility. This secondhand subjectivity muddies the initial impulses of the ’surveyor’ to form an objective understanding of the castle and its functions before he begins to enter into his own subjective relationship with it. This plight can only be associated with the marginalized newcomer, as the constructed social exclusivity of the Marts begins to corrupt the initial perceptions of their architecture.

The physical ambiguity of these structures is compounded by the subjective information coming from various secondary sources. In the case of the Marts, a haze of civic propaganda beclouds the presence and success of the structures. Real estate and urban growth advocates trumpet the beneficial presence of the Marts, their role in downtown commerce, and the concentration of powerful capital into downtown instead of allowing it to migrate into the barren suburbs, yet all at the price of their secure introversion in the field of the city’s formal system. A parental ‘for your own good’ brand of secrecy that the villagers of The Castle have bought into if only out of habit. Although in downtown Atlanta this is presented as a populist justification for the wholesale excision of this space from the public forum, the benefit is as hermetic as the structures themselves. The commerce that they support is there only as a support for them; hotels and foodcourts exist only as a convenience, not as a draw to those on the ground who are presumably local and do not require a hotel, and could find more suitable sustenance outside of the city center.

In the face of this one-sided praise, one seeks to invest in the formal properties of the structures these qualities of beneficence, and at the very least, depth. In their place one finds only patronizing illusions: the reflected sky in the expanses of mirror glass, open precast concrete grillage at street level before what appears to be a shadowy hollow, concealed from the blistering sidewalk heat, but is in reality a black painted concrete-block wall. In these details one sees mounting correspondence to the questionable physicality of the castle and the ambiguous relationship of that physicality to the subjective image constructed by the villagers. The glass in the castle’s windows, what should stand for openness or be an allowance of depth, only reflects the sky, the void against which solids are gauged, in the openings, replaces what might have been the glimmer of content with a mute adoption of absence. In another instance, K.’s perception of the castle amount to no more than its profile against the sky traced by mist, an irreducible delineation that alludes to, at the most, the bare essence of presence. On either side of this line are analogous voids, the sky, and presumably the facade of the castle. As with the vast concrete facades of the Apparel Mart, there is not detail to communicate scale or dimension. This endistancing through intangibility provides the viewer with no location in space relatable to the structure, only a repellent perceptual movement.

Although K.’s objective perceptions of the castle are fragmented and illusory, and the reading of the marts can not be coherently organized due to their scale and ambiguity, it is not this perceptual fragmentation or physical ambiguity that perpetuates its incomplete status, bit its misregistration with the physical system and the inability, as an other seeking objective support for the ingrained subjective image, to reconcile these two readings. The conflict between the propagandized image of quiet beneficence, and the desire of the other to find his place in the system, to himself derive some benefit from it, or at the very least to gain access to it, stales the relationship with the object in frustration. The resultant alienation from the social or cultural system which constructs the meaning of the object causes it to then be both socially and physically repellent, but also heightens suspicion about the veracity of the image of power projected upon something so eager to erase its own presence. What the externalized viewer is then left with is a comprehension of a tenuous collection of surfaces, and the notion that the object is itself a shell that occludes a disparate physical or social reality at its heart.

Looking sideways at the object, there grows an incredulity of its wavering physicality, almost waiting, as with a wooden decoy, after a sequence of misperceptions and rejections, for it to move. This frustration leads to a divestment of its capacity to sustain a physical or interpretational discourse, an evacuation of its power. For K., this was not such an active process. What began as a basic exercise for understanding the castle’s form through analogy became a vocal belittling of the castle’s physical and operational capacity, and finally to a subtle rhetorical manipulation of his growing doubts, tempered also with the shame of his exclusion, into feigned disinterestedness that brought him his initial social benefits in the village independent of the castle’s misdirected investment in him. These questions of discourse and benefit have a lesser burden on the mute objects which serve as correlations for the endistancing of two parties, one who sees in them sustained power through the full integration of a social and physical properties, and the other who sees a lapse, a moment of incompleteness that threatens the totality of that cultural system which bears it, and a mute foreignness with no aspiration to translate or assimilate. In this objective correlative, is both the necessity, on the part of the villagers, and the folly, for K., of impenetrability.

The social bifurcation of the object can be tracked within studies of museum anthropology. The reception of objects created in distinctly alien cultural systems necessarily follow the trajectories established above, whether they are presented as ethnographic artifacts or aestheticized art objects. The site of reception of these objects is drawn all the way to its most outer visual surface (at the least, due to the tactile restraints of museum presentation) where any ability to receive the object from its cultural interior or heart, to penetrate it, is repelled by lack of integration of the viewer’s frame of reference into the object’s native culture, or is illusory, constructed from flawed personal analogies or popular allusions. As has been criticized routinely, the location of alien cultural artifacts in a remote museum setting, by its very nature, initiates this bifurcation by institutionalizing the cultural differences of both parties (creator and viewer). Also institutionalized in the museum experience is the exteriority of reception. To receive an object outside of its cultural milieu is to lack the supporting continuum of knowledge that is actually integrated with it. It has been discussed that the accompanying materials of texts and life groups (diorama-like groupings of mannequins and settings) do little to bridge the cultural chasm between object and viewer, and in fact, by virtue of their construction from an exterior frame of reference, serve to reinforce that critical exteriority. In any event, whatever meaning they project is not integral to the objects themselves in the manner that they would be received by the culturally initiated. One counter-argument has proposed the evacuation of both institutional and native power, to foreground the reading and experience of the surface, which is reduced to a recognizable impenetrability in one’s own interpretational landscape. It is allowed to ‘just be.’

I snuck into the Gift Mart downtown today on my lunchbreak, through a parking garage and a service entrance left open, I had seen, on the escalator down out of the lobby of the Westin hotel, another escalator going up above me, the landing where this mystery escalator would have started was hidden behind a serpentine glass block wall, when I found my way through the service entrance and back up through the fire stair to this level, I was on the opposite side of the glass block wall, it was completely silent and well-lit, and empty, knowing both sides of the wall now, I did not know which was the mystery, which side was privileged, yet I felt haunted, now with 25 stories of inactive, dim escalators rising above me into the darkness, an entire city block extruded vertically, empty at 1 PM on a Wednesday, I ascended the becalmed escalator, each landing bringing a darkened glass-line hallway branching off which I could not see the end of, I thought about being caught without a badge, asked how I got there, into these bowels, I am an architect I would submit, looking for urban experience in each block the city permits, I am looking at the building, but I was not, the building was nothing, it was a city block become rhetorical solid, the spaces, hallways lined with glass, behind which, through dim transient displays of goods, I could see other hallways branching off in different directions or running parallel to the one I was in, each slab of space stacked in the building was dissolved, through lack of orientation and use, into a relentless void, ultimately powerless.

Yet before the blank, or the rhetorical solid can become a vehicle of use to the viewer or other, it must be determined what it is not. Objects which place their impenetrability or solidity, their repellent surface, as the site of reception, must be voided, given space by the viewer. Whether a space of interpretation, occupation, or incursion, even if that space remains external to the object, it must be constructed by the viewer. As the object cedes nothing, the viewer must evacuate it of its received power.

Finally, the conflation of these tendencies into the realm of the recognizable, the archetypal, returning to a more analogous relationship to the figure of the castle in Kafka’s novel, is the movement of the object into a representational or communicative status. In the case of Meret Oppenheim’s ‘Object,’ an icon of surrealism that consists of a teacup, saucer, and spoon all clad in fur, this involves a transformation, a resituation of an archetypal object into a space of uncertainty that does not typically accompany it. This movement occurs not only through its inclusion as an object in a gallery setting, like Duchamp’s ‘Fountain,’ but by wrapping the objects in fur, Oppenheim has given to them a representational status by robbing them of their use; they are as useful as the word ‘teacup,’ or a photograph of a teacup. The viewer, because of the familiarity of the form and grouping of the objects, seeks, like K. relating the disintegrated visions of the castle to concrete memories of his hometown, to perceive what has been quantitatively removed: the actual teacup. More than words or other two-dimensional representations however, ‘Object’ calls into question the presence of the source material in an imperative way. To recognize the profiles traced by the fur is to imbue that surface, that profile against the mute gallery wall, with the same cultural power that its endoskeleton would possess. It is the progressive evacuation of the internal power of the object into a space external to it.

Through a somewhat different process, the castle’s power is drawn out of the physical object, but then given a form through personification, and like the final doll in the matryoshka, the body is all surface and no space. For K., this body is Klamm, a high ranking official from the castle who has been said to be handling K.’s ‘case.’ Klamm’s physicality is as suspect as that of his mother-ship, the castle. In fact, as a body or an object, his presence exists in more of a representational capacity; he is a representation of the abstract power of the castle. As a man, he is voided, an evacuated body, not present for himself but for his representational status. The only time K. sees Klamm is through a peephole in the tavern. Seen only with one eye, the image of Klamm is flattened and still (he is asleep), K.’s only evidence of Klamm’s existence is equivalent to seeing a photograph of him. In addition, K. receives a letter signed by Klamm which does little more to isolate the man in space. Although Klamm is still powerful as a representation, he is only as powerful as the strength perceived in the media through which he appears, whether it be this glimpse or letter, or through the rumor-mill of the village, all of which are abstract and intangible. The castle never physically exerts any power over the villagers. In one instance K. is waiting to talk to Klamm outside of the hotel. The coachman does not force K. to leave, in fact, K. even crawls into the coach and passes out. Klamm merely waits inside for K. to give up and leave. In another case, a townsman loses all of his business and standing in the town due to a misunderstanding between his daughter and a castle messenger, yet when an official response from the castle is sought, they claim no knowledge of the incident. It was the fear of the villagers of associating with a family who had slighted the castle that had isolated them, rather than any direct influence of the castle itself. Where physical objects or spaces have reciprocity between themselves and the viewer or participant in which the power over situations and use are shared, the representation relinquishes any authority to govern its perception. The authority is perceived as a latent quality of the representation, as the villagers perceive it in the castle or Klamm, yet it is only through laziness and habit that they do not reclaim the authority over its perception back from the representation.

This consciousness of the exterior locus of meaning, is an investment in the understanding that the power of the representation lies in turning away. It is also the understanding that in terms of the power of the mind, the interpretive space outside of the representation might contain a more immediate seizure of power than the porous object itself which we can assess experientially and then claim in retrospect through memory, whereas the fluidity of that object in the representation appears immediately as a memory. Following this narrative trajectory into architectural representation, and architectural photography in particular, introduces new issues and questionable relationships between objects and how they are interfaced. As with the perceptual flattening of Klamm the building is transformed by the infinite distance placed between itself and the representation contained in the photograph. It had become an appendage of itself, a perspectival tether which floats free yet could not exist or have bearing without its source material. As with the vision of Klamm, the architectural photograph is the investment of the building with an authority that is constructed outside of its physical body by means of a subjective eye or voice which is only rhetorically present in the photograph. This voice gives primacy to a particular view or message that is contained actively in the photograph but which is only latent in the source. Yet in architectural photography as opposed to the mythology and propaganda of the villagers, the voice is instrumentalized in the characteristics of the medium such as point-of-view, composition, cropping, and tone. Although not intentional, the architectural photograph then has the effect of evacuating the building of its innate powers, the experiential potential, by making it a singularity. By speaking for the building through the documentary representation, as the castle was reduced to Klamm, the building becomes the only the view, the penetration into the mystery of the impenetrable solid only to find absence, the bestilling of one’s own roving eye and the illusion of space made convex. Through the projection of the building inside of a building or the the landscape that contains it, space is developed onto the flat surface of the photographic film; the invitation to relate one’s body to space is made repellent and improbable. It is in this dimensionless stillness that the authorial voice seeks to reintroduce movement and depth, the characteristics of the body in the space of the building, through compositional syntax, didactic framing, omniscience or impossible perspectives, or artificial tone in the form of lighting and filtering. All of these are devices to compensate for the loss of the building’s power, yet in a new voice that is not of the building, from its core, but is speaking upon and through its surfaces.

An additional device that is not a product of the medium, which is the less rhetorical than the above mentioned techniques, is the embedded narrative. In the history of architectural photography there has been a tendency toward the mise en scène, a story or communication of a particular message or understanding of the building through a rebus of objects: a peeled apple and a paring knife, writing implements carefully scattered, partially drained wine glasses, an open book, a pair of slippers. A common practice in the hey day of architectural modernism was the carefully staged automobile, a symbol of the technological age whose impersonality and glossy tactility set off the abstract and machined aesthetics of the buildings they posed against. One of the most well known tableaux is a photo of Le Corbusier’s Villa Savoye in which the architect’s chapeau, sunglasses, and two small packages lay on a table in the foreground haphazardly, referring pointedly, to the absence of a particular man from the scene.

The architectural photograph, as has been questionably criticized of the mid-century French fiction, particularly that of Alain Robbe-Grillet, relies on inanimate objects to construct a subjective communiqué as objective correlatives for traditional qualities of character and depth. These intentions are arguably still present in the photograph, or in Robbe-Grillet, though in less overtly psychoanalytic devices such as omniscience or expressions of human emotion. The reliance on objects to establish the tone or use of a building in an architectural photograph begs the question: where are the people? Throughout the short history of architectural photography the human figure has been almost taboo in the frame beginning with the technical problems of living, moving models in the long exposures of early cameras. Although the penetration of untrained and casual photographers into the modern media of immediacy have admitted more snapshot-like representations of buildings replete with groups of figures engaged in typical and unstaged activities, figures rarely appear in the high-end photographs produced by professionals with the conspicuousness the accompanies posed and composed objects or furniture. It is more common to see attempts to reduce figures to the status of these objects themselves by orienting them with their backs to the camera of allowing them to move during long exposures. Perhaps the human presence conveys too much; it robs the subjective eye masked in the faux objectivity of the photograph’s properties of its latent presence and points to the viewpoint of the model rather than the rhetorical viewpoint of the photographer or even the architect, the progenitors of the photograph’s power.

In relation to the photographer’s inability to adequately direct the contribution of the model, photographer and historian Cervin Robinson remarked that “if one could not record experience undistorted, then a picture of a family’s living room, say, might be more revealing than an image of their guarded faces.” When K. finally gained access to the hotel in which the castle officials conducted their village business, he was party to their infantile behavior and general disinterestedness in the functions of the castle as well as the tone of chaos and futility contained in their actions. Perhaps this unmediated presence of the figure awakens distrust in the medium’s power, in this case the lore of the village. In the case of the architectural photograph, by solidifying the actuality of the situation or source material with an untapped experiential potential, the figure disintegrates the veil of spatial power the photograph wields, like the destruction of the Marts’ solidity by a single unlocked door.

This objective tendency to move out of the realm of the experienced into an externalized space of contemplation as a trait of the architectural photograph finds additional parallels in mid-century French fiction, in this case the collagic novels of Michel Butor, such as Mobile and Boomerang. The focus of these novels is more on the construction of a textual body rather than a narrative body composed of characters and experiences. By utilizing paratextual devices such as typeface and formatting, the text itself becomes an animate character that only occurs in the external space of the reader who searches for combinations of words, connections between threads of content and non-linguistic syntaxes to perceive the character of the work. The traditional role of character is to provide an invitation to enter the space of the text, like Virgil escorting Dante into hell. Any decision making by the reader occurs through the lens of the emotions and history of that character within the experiential or narrative space of the book rather than on its visual surface. In the fiction of Butor, the absence of this traditional notion of character is not missed due to the wholesale divorce from traditional prose techniques whose persistence would frustrate the project of transferal to the reader’s space.

The foregrounding of this absence as a photographic technique effectively closes the false invitation to discourse that the above mentioned rhetorical devices extend and initiates the creation by the viewer of their own space outside of the photograph. The photography of Daniel Mirer, identifies the tenet of emptiness that characterizes so much architectural photography and makes a presence out of it. No longer does one see a structure attempting to individuate itself out of the physical world in which it relies on the undefinable edges between bodies and surfaces, and structures and landscapes to make it real, struggling with its status as a representation, one sees a solid object, the delineation of whose space across a two-dimensional surface does not embody that struggle. The subject of Mirer’s photographs are both the object and the empty space around or within them. Both are made physical when drawn across the film. These are different from architectural photos because they seek to reveal, to make that emptiness tangible, perhaps as a vehicle for mood, or alienation, or as a comment on the waste of so many uninhabited and lifeless built environments. These are not architectural photographs, some carry the haphazardness of the snapshot; most employ static compositions or one-point perspectives that would never appear in professional architectural photographs. They are photos on paper, they can be held as objects without the lure of spatial promise. The “sameness and interchangeability” which was criticized in the work of Mirer and other similar photographers in a group show called “Vanishing Point,” could be used to describe Mirer’s oeuvre alone. However, it is this uniformity that allows the photographs to be emptied of their rhetorical power, their mock subjectivity. They seem to loosen their representational status because of the banality of the subject matter, in whose status quo lack of quality one can not see the necessity of a representation. The photograph’s status as an object becomes singular, not of its source but its own, and in the space outside of it, evacuated of that rhetoric, one is set free to relate to it on one’s own terms.

The completist, a name used at the outset of this paper, is a term typically associated with collectors who seek to amass a full set or representation of the subject they are interested in. For these people, collecting is a drive whose fervor eclipses the rational importance of some of their acquisitions. The rationality and import of the drive comes into question more in the age of mechanical reproduction. Collectors interested in Greek pottery or Rembrandt for instance clearly have a limited pool of items they are driven to acquire as no more are being produced. However, that lack of surplus also forces the collector to limit their aspirations for complete selections of their field. The completist is more of a modern incarnation. The multiplicity with which modern objects are produced, particularly in the field of recorded movies and music, allows the interested party a reasonably good opportunity to acquire all of the objects in question, whether it be all releases by a particular director or musician. Even in the case of more under-the -radar artists who produce limited edition releases to their dedicated followers and completists, with runs typically in the low hundreds, although they can reach as low as 10, there is still the potential for acquisition. A particular Japanese noise artist, known as Merzbow, notorious for his prolific output, unofficially tallied at over 350 releases, has a well established base of collectors. In fact it is somewhat of an obsessive following who compare notes on the discography of relatively unlistenable releases, whose content, over the past 25 years, has varied little (therein lies the irrationality perhaps). However, within this stream of releases, some limited, some released in the thousands, came an unprecedented singularity. A Swedish record distributor produced a Merzbow release with a run of one. It was a compact disc permanently playing in the stereo of a Mercedes. The presence of a unique item is more disconcerting in a collectible field of easily acquired, mechanically reproduced increments. This outlandish singularity has infiltrated the lore of Merzbow’s catalog of available releases although it is destined to remain out of all but one listener’s collection, all others are incomplete.

The unchecked reproduction of modern media and collectible objects parallels the growth of urban centers as they filter out into the landscape, reproduced ad infinitum with little variation. The urban completist seeks to roam and assimilate the continuous built surface into their spatial repertoire, their spatial memory, their sense of control over the internalized whole. The impenetrable solid, the false promise of continuity, stands as an inassimilable void in the flaneur’s collection. Unable to be claimed, the anonymous building must be turned away from, if it is to have value in the collection, in order for its impenetrability to be used as the stuff of personal legend. In the space where the solid shadow had fallen, now falls the translucent shadow of a void. Yet in it one cannot gawk, or set up shop on its surface; only through its absence in the collection can it be made a singularity of one’s own. Although someone claims its secrets, those people for which it was made, and someone has produced it, one on the outside must write their way around it, in order to write it into one’s self. Here the viewer realizes that they must reconstruct their own physical condition, eroded over time by investment in the scenarios of others, or they must simply look away from the photographic surface and observe their current physical surroundings for the space, experience, and empowerment that the image has lost. It is in this space that K. evacuated the social power from the image of Klamm by seducing his mistress and cuckolding him. For K. this was an action of individuation. This about-face in K.’s aggressive pursuit to engage Klamm was the forerunner to a series of actions that removed K. from the shadow of the castle. At least in his own mind, he was then a peer of Klamm, and with a new sense of confidence not found in his early scramblings to understand the mysteries of the castle, K. carved out a niche in the society of the village. Whether folly or futility, this confidence was the key to K.’s independent actions.

When the drive or need for an objective understanding of the impenetrable object expires or has become futile, the mute surface is transformed into a surface for projection. The material construct is rendered void and becomes the site of pure subjectivity; it becomes useful. The durational component of this shift could be found in cinematic productions such as Andy Warhol’s Empire or Derek Jarman’s Blue, both static framed motion pictures. The more extreme example would be Blue, in which the screen is filled with a luminous blue tone for the 70+ minute duration. At a certain point, both perceptually, when the eye fails to maintain the integrity of the hue, and contextually, when the film fails to yield to cinematic convention, the power of the visual component of the film is in the viewer’s ability to individualize its reception, through hallucinogenic transformations or through projection of ones own daydreams and fantasies into the void, a transferal that traditional cinema does not permit. Although also a performance or presentation condition, John Cage’s musical piece 4′33″ functions in a more inflammatory fashion. This piece of live music, which consists of a solo piano player emerging onto a stage, pulling back the keyboard cover of the piano, and sitting still on the bench for 4 minutes and 33 seconds, effects the transferal to the viewer or listener both through its departure from the context of traditional live performances and its reliance on the spatial conditions which typically enable the hierarchy between performer and audience. 4′33″ allows the reemergence of control over the action of one’s own behavior, thoughts, and senses through the incompleteness of the performance. By voiding the traditional locus of power, the cognizance of one’s own power to act is ignited. 4′33″ has been described as an invitation to act in contribution to the performance, but in the traditional spatial context of the theater, that invitation is to be again oneself, and not a servant to the space of performance. The repulsive invitation is a culturally rooted force to occupy a space external to the performance and to act personally and to register individuality of one’s actions vis a vis the impenetrable and empty space of the performance.

This movement from fluid continuity, to the stalking of the object, to the productive turning away, to an enriched return to continuity with one’s original trajectory traces the manner in which intra-systemic incompleteness is assimilated into the overall construct of one’s spatial or interpretive landscape. The physical or interpretational impenetrability of an object or situation affects a spasm, but it is not necessarily a productive one. It is the basis of inspiration, which is the drive to create for oneself derived from the existence of something external to us. It is the aspects of things that we cannot claim or understand that cause us to retreat, to look into ourselves and our abilities, and to produce what is then our own, outside the shadow of the impenetrable solid of the world’s work.