- Details
-
Created: Sunday, 02 January 2005 00:43
A review of Christopher Alexander’s The Nature of Order: An Essay on the Art of Building and the Nature of the Universe (4 volumes, Berkeley, California: Center for Environmental Structure, 2002-2004)
Reviewed by Shierry Weber Nicholsen, including photographs of two of her sculptures.
Sculpture NorthWest is delighted to bring you another of Shierry’s jam-packed book reviews. We found some of Alexander’s concepts challenging to our comprehension, and yet well worth the effort. We hope that this review will open for you the intriguing and lustrous world of Christopher Alexander. (The Editors)
Christopher Alexander is not a sculptor. He is an architect, since the 1960s a very well known and controversial one. The Nature of Order is his masterwork, some twenty years in the preparation. As the subtitle indicates, its subject goes very far beyond architecture. This work is so articulate about the process of art-making and the characteristics of meaningful form or structure in any human-made or naturally created thing, that it is well worth the time and money of us stone-carvers – even given its length (4 volumes, each over 300 pages) and its cost ($75 per volume). It also has things to say about the nature of the universe and its connection with art-making that will interest any of us with any kind of mystical bent. I should add that The Nature of Order is illustrated with photographs of heart-piercingly wonderful artifacts, art works, and buildings from many cultures and eras, and equally satisfying photographs of natural phenomena. In this brief review I will simply introduce some of Alexander’s key formulations and comment a bit on how they resonate with my own experience as a carver.
The notion of aliveness – that something has life, feels alive – is the keystone of Alexander’s work. A work that has aliveness, he says, is like a living being; it has something akin to selfhood. A work, a being in this sense, may be understood as a “field of centers.” The concept of “center” is pivotal for Alexander, and is, for him, a concentrated locus of aliveness or selfhood. A “field of centers” is a system in which the different interrelated centers intensify one another’s aliveness. In the first volume of The Nature of Order, which is titled The Phenomenon of Life, Alexander lists fifteen qualities that add to the aliveness of structures of any kind. These fifteen qualities, or properties as he calls them, are not “rules” to be followed so much as empirical formulations of the characteristics of works that seem particularly alive. These concepts give names to things that artists do intuitively.
Alexander’s discussion of these fifteen properties is one of the most immediately engaging and rewarding parts of The Nature of Order. The concepts are easily grasped, and the illustrations are apt and beautiful. Some examples of these fifteen properties are:
- roughness: the wabi sabi quality of imperfection, illustrated by the way the stripes on a zebra are not perfectly parallel or complete
- boundaries, illustrated by the numerous hairline and other boundaries that form such an important part of the pattern of an Oriental carpet
- deep interlock, illustrated by the pattern of the tile of a mosque
- non-separateness, illustrated by a photo of a water’s edge
- gradients: different levels of scale in the same piece, also illustrated by an Oriental carpet
It is easy to see how such properties as levels of scale, echoes, roughness, and so on contribute to a piece of sculpture. The notion of the field of centers and the specific properties that Alexander discriminates are helpful to me in seeing what makes a particular piece of carving work. I can look at my own finished works and see them – and also see that I was trying to achieve them as I worked on the pieces. In the “Torso” of black and white alabaster reproduced here, for instance, there are both spots of black in the basic white of the alabaster and also something like black stripes. One of the challenges in this piece was to let the black stripes continue to feel like stripes without being so straight up and down that they looked stiff. I intuitively felt that they needed to have Alexander’s quality of roughness. I tried to accomplish that through the curves in the areas where the black stripes were so thick, as for instance in the waist area of the torso’s right side.
As a work on the nature of art and beauty, The Nature of Order is unusual in that it is written by a practicing artist (architect, painter) and it devotes attention to the process of art-making as well as to finished works of art. Alexander has always attacked dead, mechanical buildings and artifacts and the worldview that justifies and produces them. This is understandable given his emphasis on aliveness. Aliveness cannot be created or enhanced by sticking individual pieces together. To be made more alive, the various aspects of a work must be worked on in their relationship to one another so that the interdependent aspects intensify one another’s aliveness. “Extension, enhancement, and deepening of the whole are the crux and heart of all living process,” Alexander writes in Book 2, p. 251.
Although Alexander rarely speaks of stone carving or sculpture per se, he certainly talks about the act of making something in a way that speaks directly to my own experience of carving. Particularly apt is his comment that in making something he looks for the places that seem dead and then tries to find the “latent centers” and bring them out. He also speaks of narrowing his eyes and looking for the “gray spots of disunity” in order to see what needs to happen to bring them into coherent relationship with the whole. When I am carving, and the piece has taken shape, I too find myself looking for the dead areas. I tend to talk to myself and say things like, “that’s too flat,” or “that’s too lumpy,” trying to put into words what feels bothersome about a particular area in the work. Then I try to imagine how it might be different, i.e. less flat or less lumpy. That means noticing something that is already present implicitly but needs to be enhanced to bring the area into relationship with the rest -- a movement, a curve, a bending toward, a connecting with. . . .
“Torso” was interesting in this regard. It is carved from a chunk of an old work by Alexandra Morosco which had been broken up. I wanted to carry forward the delicate concavity left from Alexandra’s work (above the torso’s left breast) and continue it with a related curve on the other side of the chest. I also wanted to shape the very different broken up area on the top of the piece so that its curves linked up with those in the chest area. I emphasized the echoes among the points at the top of the arms and the point where the neck arises in order to intensify the interrelationships among these areas.
Book 2 of The Nature of Order is called The Process of Creating Life. It refers to both the process of biological development and the process of creating aliveness in works of art or buildings. The key concept here is what Alexander refers to as “unfolding wholeness.” That is to say, one works with an eye to the wholeness of the thing (i.e. intensity of the interdependent field of centers), and one does that by working with the wholeness as it unfolds. Alexander talks here about “structure-preserving transformation,” i.e., the elaboration from the initial idea (embryonic germ) retains the initial “center” as it intensifies and elaborates it. The initial idea is only the first step; you look at what you have after the first step and see how you can move toward wholeness. Then you look again after the second step and see what you have and how you can make it more alive, and so on. “Possibly the most basic and necessary feature of any living process is that it goes gradually,” Alexander writes. “We cannot create unfolded living structure by drawing it as if it had unfolded and then building it by different means. It really must unfold in real time,” Alexander writes in Book 2, p. 230-1. In the marble piece “Furl”, pictured here, for instance, the major oval shaped concavity is echoed by the smaller one at the side – this is the property Alexander calls gradients or levels of scale. Part of the unfolding of that piece came when I followed my intuitive desire to make a second smaller concavity.
I think that the common notion of “seeing what is in the stone” means something like this process. It is not, certainly at least for me, seeing instantaneously something that one might make, but a process of being guided by the stone, in that the deadness feels bad to me (and presumably bad for the stone as well). I find that I almost sense the stone as a body, and can feel its constricted places or its flabby places, which can then be released, or pared, in a way that is not so easy with a live human body! In “Furl,” for instance, I was constantly paring away the edge of the larger concavity because it felt too thick too me --- it literally made me feel uncomfortable in my body.
Working with stone does seem a matter of “unfolding wholeness” – in the sense that you are committed to what you have done, and can only shape the stone from there. Revision of the piece doesn’t ever mean starting from scratch but rather “making it more alive,” i.e. enriching the interrelationships in the whole. Of course sometimes we have to get rid of parts of a piece that please us in order to achieve a better integration in the whole. Part of the “skirt” area of “Torso” I eventually left rough, but I smoothed off—with regret -- the edge of the rough area in order to have a small black stripe at the edge of the white skirt. This both achieved an echo of the other black stripes and also created a boundary between the rough area and the white area (boundary is another of Alexander’s fifteen properties).
And what does all this say about the Nature of the Universe? The possibility of making a work more alive implies that space/matter, the substance of the universe, has the potentiality for aliveness. Like the Buddhist notion of the plenum, which can give rise to all things, the Luminous Ground (Alexander’s title for Book 4), is space/matter which is alive, or potentially alive. The creation of form is what makes it more alive. Thus the work itself -- not only the living biological creature but also the work of art or the building – is not only a being in itself, but also a place where matter/space has become more alive. As a being with aliveness, the work has the quality of selfhood and in this sense is the mirror of the human self who is in relation to it.
I’ve presented these ideas in very condensed form, but Alexander’s depiction of the sense of selfhood in the works he shows is very compelling. His ideas speak to a question that is relevant for all artists, namely: what is the relationship between the mind of the maker (or viewer) and the made, non-human thing? How shall we characterize the kinship with the work of art that both maker and viewer experience? Alexander would define that kinship as a commonality of aliveness/selfhood.
Book 4, The Luminous Ground*, elaborates these ideas of the aliveness and self-hood that appears in space/matter and link the human self with the universe, including the works of art. Two parts of this final volume were especially interesting to me: first, a long section on color, illustrated primarily by paintings from my own favorite colorists, Matisse and Bonnard as well as others. Alexander’s point here is that the universe as we know it is colored! (And though we don’t talk much about it, all carvings are also colored.) It is not so much individual colors in isolation that feel alive, Alexander says, as the unity of color produced by the mutual intensification of colors in, for instance, a painting, yielding what he calls “subdued brilliance.”
Another important aspect of Book 4 is contained in Alexander’s phrase “making a gift to God.” While we may not all want to use the term God, I think we can recognize what he is talking about. What Alexander means has to do with lack of egotism in the work: one strives to make the work more and more itself, a being with aliveness, thus contributing to the work of creation, rather than to make an object that will reflect well on the maker, i.e. an object which bears the traces of its maker’s egotism. Alexander describes experiences where there was a clear choice between making something perfect or beautiful on the one hand or making it become a gift to God, i.e. more fully alive, on the other. This is a choice which I know from my own experience. It is so easy in the early stage of a piece to see how it could look elegant, like something else I have seen – and then I have to try to deliberately let it become what I call more “weird.” That seems to be my own private word for “more alive.”
And what about the question of at what point we call a particular carving finished? When does it become a thing in itself? (That’s the phrase I use in talking to myself.) When does it stand apart from me as a separate being? And it won’t feel like a separate being until it’s become at least relatively alive in Alexander’s sense. This isn’t to say that the next time I look at it I won’t notice dead spots I wasn’t aware of before, or whole perspectives where I can see that a slight revision would create more life. In this way the process of looking anew with each step, but looking anew in such a way that one elaborates what is already begun, continues.
*Book 3 will be Alexander’s effort to talk about a viable architecture for the modern period (much of twentieth century architecture he considers dead and deadening rather than alive and enlivening). As of this writing (November 2004) Book 3 has not yet appeared.
To see pictures of Alexander’s work and more about his perspective on many kinds of art, go to his website at: www.patternlanguage.com.
- Details
-
Created: Sunday, 02 January 2005 00:52
Setting the stage, as the stage must be set – it was a winter evening. Blissfully quiet in the studio, the Fluff was elsewhere doing whatever a person like her does with her non-working time. (Despite the myth, the Fluff and I do not spend all our time together. Only the occasional case and a few “P.I. BYO Sidekick” conventions bring us together. She’s all about red after all, and I’m more into your cool colors.) I was gazing at the winter stars, noticing the way they wink at you like sparks off an angle grinder, when the dog started yelling “intruder alert.” With my dog, that could mean anything from imminent home invasion to the dreaded squirrel disaster he seemed created to prevent. His 19 hollering pounds of terrierage were all steamed up, so I took a peek out the door. In the darkness I could barely make out the silhouette of some guy faintly reminiscent of a Muppet. It was the beret he was wearing that convinced me it was safe to call him out of the shadows. (No self-respecting thug wears a beret. After all, prison time begun in French millinery can’t be pleasant.)
He was dressed head to pied in black, the dress uniform of a self-proclaimed “damn good” artist. In this business I see two types: those who need constant affirmation and those I call “Ego-Run-Amucks.” The ensemble, cocky smirk and fear of my dog, all gave his status away. Good dogs and big egos just don’t mix.
I coaxed him in, got his inevitable card and found out who’d sent him. A few cold stares at my carving in progress and after what seemed like hours of showing me his portfolio, he finally got down to why he needed to visit the Trix in the middle of the night. Seems that he had a case that needed solving but didn’t want anyone to know he needed help. As “gifted” as he was, even after dropping his prices, he still wasn’t selling. He knew it had to be “stupid Seattle buyers,” but before he moved the family to Wichita where “they really appreciated good art” his wife begged him to give the Trix a go. With a promise from me to visit his studio the next day, he left to lint roll the dog hair off his being.
At 0800 sharp the Fluff and her hot red car were at my door ready to roll on our new case. We pulled up to his studio an hour later. The “creative center” was far better than the house, so I could see why he was desperate to make a few sales and justify its opulence. Today he was a vision in beige, sporting a straw fedora. With Pollack-like flourish he flung open the door. Hundreds of sculptures stood waiting. This gig was suddenly as overwhelming as tackling an 800-pound piece of marble with only a bush hammer. I really needed to look at some of his work unobserved, so I told the Fluff that the guy had a problem and could she handle it? It always worked. You see, she’d hark back to her proctology days and suggest the guy drop his pants so she could take a look. It never failed to buy me five good minutes no matter what the guy’s reaction was. React they would.
With them engaged, I began my quest. He really wasn’t bad and was very versatile. The pieces all had one thing in common though, their bases. Most had flat bottoms and he chose to mount many of them on flat surfaces. It worked for his style, so what was the problem? Why was it bothering me?
At that moment the Fluff smacked the guy, sending his hat flying onto the light switch. With the overheads doused, the only light was sun streaming in from a back window. That’s when I saw it. Spots of light beaming out between the sculpture and their bases. Another case of lousy bottoms. He was tall, see, and looking down, never noticed that he’d been sloppy with the way his work rested. He never noticed that the eye went directly to the problem not the design. A few were so bad they were unstable. He was so smitten with his art he completely forgot his craft.
