THE   S-P-I-N-E   PROJECT

John Blake / Peter Mason

At least since Vitruvius (most recently and eloquently in Joseph Rykwert's The Dancing Column ),* theorists have grounded the architectural orders in the human body: the column echoing the upright trunk, the head corresponding to the capital, and so on. And over the centuries, a number of artists have shown a keen interest in questions of spatiality and corporeality.

In their visual and written work, Blake and Mason explore the common ground on which the human body and the crafted environment meet. These explorations are of two kinds: (photographs of) three-dimensional artworks whose impact cannot be detached from the environment in which they are installed; and texts which comment on these and other artworks.

Reflexivity characterises both the texts and the artworks: just as a three-dimensional work in space already designates a position from which it is observed by the spectator, so the texts about bodies and space are themselves marked by the same qualities as the objects they describe.

Once set in motion, the texts and images generate new forms as they collude or collide. This project is definitely not just a description of finished works, but equally a 'work in progress'.

The project envisages at least two components: (1.) English-language and alternate versions of a publication (provisionally entitled S-P-I-N-E), containing   some 70-80 illustrations, most of them in full colour, and a running text of around 25,000-30,000 words (of linked essays), and (2.) an exhibition of several new works by John Blake that have already arisen in the course of the collaboration.

In order to clarify the specific nature of this visual/textual collaboration, the publication (site) will begin with a short, expository introduction by Art Historian (Professor) Anne-Marie Bonnet of the Kunsthistorische Institut der Universitat Bonn (author, most recently, of Rodin's Late Drawings: Towards a Culture of Desire , Schirmer/Mosel, 1998, among many others).

Photographs of works by John Blake and texts by Peter Mason have appeared side by side in: John Blake-Bunker-Munchen (Kunstbunker Tumulka, 1996), and in 'Heavy Duty', Aesthesis (University of Antwerp/Ripoli, 2002).

 

  *   MIT Press, 1996, 1998 (paper)

 

 

 

 

 

 

                                                            S-P-I-N-E (boxed)                                                  

John Blake's 'S-P-I-N-E'   is a work dating from 1993. It is composed of the twenty-five vertebra of one human spine - they are all real bones, presented in the correct sequence -   gripped by twenty-five steel calipers, hung overhead from a steel cable network. The work has been   discussed by Mason previously:

"...there is no longer any question of the representational status of the spine, for it does not stand for a human spine - it is a human spine. The installation is a presentation , not a representation."

 

Mason continues:

"One of the justifications of writing about these works is that they themselves have the quality of scripts....As for the calipers in S-P-I-N-E, they have become the crane-like inverted commas or quotation marks which punctuate human speech. This crane-like or plier-like operation of inverted commas has already been noted by Derrida in an interview: 'Somewhere, I think, I have compared quotation marks to cranes.' To jog the philosopher's memory, it was in his Eperons , where he referred to 'This spreading of truth which suspends itself,elevates itself between quotation marks (machination, cry, thieving movement of the grab of a crane)' Why are quotation marks like the thieving movement of the grab of the crane? Because in both cases something is removed from one context and grafted onto another. In the case of S-P-I-N-E, the elements of the human vertebra are removed from their human dimension to feature, as a quotation, within a skeletal structure of more than   human dimensions."

(from John Blake's Bone, a script to be revised and published for this project.)

S-P-I-N-E has been exhibited in Galeria BWA, Wroclaw, Poland, in 1994, in Galerie Arbeitsplatz, Heidelberg, 1995, and (in an adapted form) in Kunstbunker Tumulka, Munchen, 1996. Now it will   be reinstalled    --with the book considered a new site-- in the publication which is planned.

Peter Mason is an ethno-anthropologist and free-lance writer living and working in Amsterdam. He read classical studies at the University of Oxford, UK, and took his Ph.D. in anthropology at the University of Utrecht. He is the author of Deconstructing America / Representations of the Other,   (Routledge, London & NYC, 1990), Infelicities (John Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, USA, 1999), The Lives of Images (Reaktion Books, London, 2001) and   numerous articles published internationally. He has also, with Florike Egmond,   co-authored   The Mammoth and the Mouse : Microhistory and Morphology   ( John Hopkins University Press, 1997; Japanese Edition, 1999).

He is currently consultant to the Taller Experimental Cuerpos Pintados Dos, Fundacion America, Santiago de Chile, a preview of which will be opening in the Museum of Natural History, New York City, forthcoming.

His previous texts on the artist's work include: 'Not like a rifle or a hat' in John Blake-Bunker-Munchen (Kunstbunker Tumulka, 1996) and   'Heavy Duty' (Aesthesis, University of Antwerp/Rodopi, NY/A'dam)).