Architectural Design - 2022 - Tschapeller - Moments On The Dissecting Table PDF

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Wolfgang Tschapeller
110
15542769, 2022, 4, Downloaded from https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/ad.2842 by Cardiff University, Wiley Online Library on [06/03/2023]. See the Terms and Conditions (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/terms-and-conditions) on Wiley Online Library for rules of use; OA articles are governed by the applicable Creative Commons License
Mark West,
The Lace Maker,
2018
The Lace Maker comes with

built-in confusion. The one who
makes lace seems to be made of
lace. And lace fabric is among the
earliest products to be made by
a programmed device, namely
the loom. One of the loom’s
constituent components is the
‘flying shuttle’ (perhaps in this
case, that faint evocation of a pig’s
trotter towards the bottom of the
drawing), which carries the yarn
through the rhythmically shifting
spaces between different layers of
select longitudinal threads.
111
Canadian architect Mark West breeds
extraordinary architectural images using a mixture
of techniques. He is equally at home drawing, using
the computer, casting concrete or tying fabric
together. Wolfgang Tschapeller, Head of the
Institute of Art and Architecture at the Academy
of Fine Arts Vienna, looks at West’s methods
and aspirations, revealing how these most radical
representations are concocted and why.
Mark West,
The Beauties 3,
1990
An enigmatic portrait of inhabitants of abandoned intercontinental ballistic missile

silos, the work has the air of a hallucinatory speculation on their nature, gender and
constitution. Their vertical form reflects what we do not see: the invisible silos, their
invisible shells. At second glance, the elongated Beauties, with all their spikes and
extensions, appear like complex keys, perhaps master keys to West’s work.
112
It is not so clear where Mark West’s works begin and where Venus F Boucher, Topkapi Floor, St Bruno Praying, Tram Track
they end. Their boundaries remain vague. Their thingness is Light, Seaweed. Digital photographs, some of them massive,
diaphanous. Analogue and digital. Their thingness is trouble, heavy files, images with frayed, jagged edges, evidence of a
like a falling stone troubling water. The falling stone does not special process of making. These images are not single-shot
keep the trouble to itself; now trouble is everywhere, in the photographs; they do not consist of merely one view. Every
water, the ripples, the waves, the banks, maybe in fish, shrimp file is the product of multiple views, of multiple photographs,
or pig’s feet. All troubled. In many drawings, borders are dozens, maybe hundreds of independent pictures perfectly
blurred and pushed from the edge of the drawing paper deep stitched together by software to form one coherent image, a
into the underbrush, into the realm of preparatory works, the superorganism of images so to say, which at any desired point
realm of studies, basic research and, as West calls them, ‘base in time could devolve back into its individual components.
files’ or ‘base images’, ‘large-format photographs’ and ‘choices What makes it explosive in the context of West’s work is its
from the world’.1 genetic code, the fact that the image is not one, but many: every
Of the eight reproductions from his graphic oeuvre featured image holds and is simultaneously prone to losing a multitude
here, The Beauties 3 (1990) and Hopper Façade (2005) are of independent, individual views. This is a garden of the world,
earlier works, pure graphite drawings on white paper. The the archive, the stockpile.
rest, however, are beings of a different kind. Although there
is drawing activity involved, with graphite, colour pencil, What We Do Not See
gouache paint or rubbing sticks in turpentine on paper-printed When West is in the mood there is collage activity. Images
photomontages, they transgress the idea of drawing. Size-wise selected from the stockpile are set up as experiments of
they are regular; no surprises there. What makes them unusual tentative liaisons, often superimposed on what can amount
is that they are more moments than drawings, very special to over 20 different layers, as in the New Robot Wall (2017)
moments extracted from a vast, deep and surprisingly extensive or just a few layers, as in The Lace Maker (2018) where they
process across various media, realities and worlds. At which have various grades of transparency; they are porous and
moment they appear often depends, as West says, on ‘when I
am in the mood’. They have features of mushrooms, of fruiting
bodies shooting out of the ground as highly compressed
summaries of a much larger, hidden, underground network.
A rhizome model would accommodate many aspects of the
works, especially the sweeping underground of West’s invisible
activity. But the rhizome model is more about space than
about time and moments. It therefore seems more productive
to look at them as if they were snapshots; that is, incredibly
sharp, short and not fully controlled moments in a much larger
artistic process that is itself the oeuvre, a massive flow which
does not stop, not even for snap or shot. So what is on the
dissecting table are eight works, six of them snapshots and two
of them drawings. What else? The network, the stockpile, the
garden of the world from which they shoot or sprout.
Clicks: The Snapshot

And ‘snapshot’ is the term West himself uses to talk about his
more recent works.2 Snapshot may appear as a surprising,
even irritating categorisation. However, let us try. Let us
snapshot the Westian galaxy itself. Let us take some of these
fast, extemporaneous, flat-footed clicks and bite into them,
listen to the click, often shorter than a fraction of a second,
which in Westian terms might turn into an eternity because it is
feeding from an enormous underbrush (the stockpile), a large
collection of high-resolution photographs of the world (base
files), which themselves are constructions of dozens, if not
hundreds of clicks.
Base files are the substructure for further works; they are Mark West,
New Robot Wall,
the stockpile. High-resolution photographs with carefully 2017
selected subjects, all personal choices. A massive, erratic
New Robot Wall contains the genetic information of up to 20
collection of recordings of the world with a jumble of titles: base files, all of them grafted on the virtual operation desk
Yeni Cami Scaffold, Truck Tarp, Yellow Green Leaves, Wracked to a compound tissue, a bio-robotic skin. Colours seem to
act contrapuntally. They smell like meat, but then there are
Submarine, Venus and Cupid, Wrapped Swan Ducks, Venus flashes of Baroque church paintings, angels and skies and
Water Detail, Turkish Toy Store, Tripe, Spitfire Wing, Toilet of water lilies from a French garden.
113
permeable, meshing into a functional abdominal organism
of lace, machinic parts and bio-extensions. This activity
recalls practices throughout art history, such as the Surrealist
encounters on an operating table, or composer Karlheinz
Stockhausen’s ‘metacollage’ (1970),3 but is also a strategy
West applied in his The Beauties 3 drawing. In contrast to
The Lace Maker, which as a possibly functional organic
texture evokes the ocean or the non-anthropomorphic
intelligence in sci-fi writer Stanisław Lem’s novel Solaris
(1961),4 The Beauties 3 is West’s answer to an architectural Mark West,
The Big Top (Fruits of the
competition for the repurposing of three abandoned Quarantine),
intercontinental ballistic missile silos. Three missile substitutes 2020
are presented, some kind of a future weaponry, composed out below: The 15 x 11.5 inch (38 x 29
of plant and insect parts and possibly of flesh, with steam on centimetres) image dimensions are not
to be trusted! Although meticulously
top. Something is simmering in the interior. Even with the aid measured, they are false. Truth is, The Big
of botanical encyclopaedias, the sprouts at the root are only Top measures several kilometres from
left to right and from bottom to top. With
vaguely identifiable, but they can be recognised in all their a depth, then, of several hundred metres.
glory in the seminal photographs of Karl Blossfeldt.5 There Another truth is, it has no size. Truth also
is that whenever one looks at it, one gets
they are! Not intergrown as if they were one being as in lost. Truth is, The Big Top contains an
West’s work, but each in silent isolation. endless number of interior worlds.
114
Critical theory and
philosophy from the
1970s on has welcomed its
potential to overcome the
cuts, the visible joints and
the sutures of early 20th-
century collage concepts
West’s three Beauties read as follows: At the base of the

middle Beauty, a leaf bud of Viburnum, or snowball, is
splinted onto maple twigs with a three-legged metal brace. Is
it really a brace? Maybe a tripod? Maybe a walking compass?
Or is it a grafting scissor? Then, at the base of the Beauty to
the left, a young shoot – again three-legged – of Aconitum,
or monkshood, grows effortlessly in reverse into a shoot of
Aristolochia clematitis, or birthwort, and birthwort in turn
grows the legs of a mantis.
What we see here is not only a drawing; it is a drawing
and a treatise laying out strategies that figure later on in
works such as New Robot Wall, The Lace Maker, Happy
Town Toys for Boys and Girls (2018) or The Big Top (Fruits
of the Quarantine) (2020). The strategy announced in The
Beauties 3 is not that of collage, but rather of grafting,
whereby tissues of different species of plants are joined
seamlessly, so as to continue their growth together. On the
one hand such a seamless joining of different origins is an
old horticultural technique; on the other, critical theory and
philosophy from the 1970s on has welcomed its potential to
overcome the cuts, the visible joints and the sutures of early
20th-century collage concepts.6
But then The Beauties 3 goes far beyond grafting.
Aristolochia clematitis, or birthwort, has a double life. It is
plant and insect, drawn strictly in accordance with Blossfeldt’s
photographic template. The inverse setup along with mantis
legs suggests an oscillating double presence: the bud of a
plant and the body of a great green bush cricket. Again, The
Mark West,
Happy Town Toys for Boys and Girls,
Beauties 3 lays out traits of later works such as Happy Town
2018 Toys for Boys and Girls, where the permanent on-and-off of
Flesh everywhere in Happy Town Toys for Boys and Girls. Candy and
multiple presences threatens to collapse a fragile equilibrium.
toys? In West’s ‘stockpile’ there is a ‘base file’ titled Turkish Toy Store. All of it deep space. Statics is the exception, breakdown the
Is this one of the base files? If yes, what are the others? Could they
be parts of archaeological sites? Reliefs? Broken marble sculptures?
norm. Space is deep. Moments long. Clicks and eternity. ‘My
Something agravic? The skin on the underside of a spacecraft? drawings are not happy,’7 says West.
115
The Operating Table
Collage activity as defined by West includes a process of
selection of one or more documents from the stockpile,
from the choices of the world. Enormous digital files lie on
the desktop of an image-processing software, not unlike
the umbrella and the sewing machine on the Comte de
Lautréamont’s operating table.8 In fact, the surface of the
image-processing software, framed by commands, tools, icons,
magnetic lassos, clone stamps, eyedroppers, slice select and
magic wands, bears resemblance to an operating table in a
surgical intensive care unit. Instead of transplanting life tissue,
pixel formations are processed, treated, inversed, copied,
displaced, locked, brought to the fore- or background without
leaving sutures, scars, traces. Such image-processing activities
appear to be organised in space in a certain order. In contrast
to film, where images are organised in a linear way frame by
frame on one long band, the Westian use of image-processing
software seems to stack image information so that multiple
images lie on top of one other, like pages in a book with
various and permanently changing degrees of transparency
allowing the free-floating patches of content to reconfigure
themselves in ever new liaisons.
In the process of making, the stacks of images behave in
a similar way. Their components are in a constant flux of
flickering on and off. Partial transparencies let information
spring into the depth of the stacks. Opacities, hiding or being
hidden, popping up or being covered up. A book with pages
of glass. As if the accumulation of images had turned into Mark West,
The Incubator,
vertical film, a life form, as if there were a growing and dying, 2019
as if there were an operation on an open heart, as if there
Among West’s more recent works, a
were a decelerated life review, a flashback, running at a very rare instance of an interior space. As an
low speed. And in fact, it seems to be the speed, the tempo interior it would appear to be an offspring
of his earlier ‘Hotel Edward Hopper’
that constitutes one difference between West’s oeuvre and series (2005) where different points of
experimental filmmaker Stan Brakhage’s operations on film. view applied in the same spatial setting
decode a certain spatial order. Is The
There are other differences too; however, their works exist in Incubator part of a similar setting? What
an extremely productive togetherness. in West’s world is outside it?
More Clicks, More Snapshots

Time to flank, to expose the Westian snapshot to others. In
the video 89 Seconds at Alcázar (2003), media artist Eve
Sussman unrolls the Diego Velázquez painting Las Meninas
(1656). Within a reconstructed historical setting, performers
re-enact the seconds before and after the moment Velázquez
had frozen on canvas. The painting, a complex snapshot, a
click, highly enriched with spatial and temporal vectors, is thus The Westian use of image-
processing software seems
unfurled in a slow-motion, 10-minute video. And another try.
In Greeting (1995), video artist Bill Viola unfolds a conceptual
superimposition of the historic painting La Visitazione
(1528–30) by Jacopo da Pontormo, and a contemporary street to stack image information
scene observed by Viola himself. An oscillating double presence
of video and snapshot, of click and durance materialises. so that multiple images lie
The Blackout
on top of one other, like
‘The trick was really to forget what I know,’9 says West.
Forgetting is not about shaking off knowledge, but rather
pages in a book with various
shaking off schemata, automatised activity, conventions and permanently changing
degrees of transparency
and norms, rationality and will. It is said that in the 1950s,
painter Arnulf Rainer made his first black overpaintings
116
Mark West, because there was no money for canvas. And in a lecture at
Enough For Everyone,
2021 Cornell University in the 1980s, the linguist and activist Noam
Chomsky described a group of inventive journalists who
Enough For Everyone seems to be good
news. But we know that West’s pictures ridiculed a dictatorship by positioning material likely to be
‘are not happy’. Toys and candy spill out, censored so that the crude black bars formed a secret pattern
doubt is sparked; is there decay? Are
there insects crawling around? Are they language. Compared to all his other activities, the moments
dangerous? Are they just feeding on the where West resorts to ‘the real adventure’, the drawing, seem to
decaying candy? Are the candies decoys?
And is the truck tarp part of a trap, the be rare. These days, drawing for him could mean ‘blackening
sail of a hostile craft? Think of Constant’s out’ or ‘colouring out’ or ‘blurring and obliterating’, activities
New Babylon.
that he often performs on paper-printed photomontages from
the stockpile, moving from the operating table to the drawing
table. Blackening out, colouring out. Here is the trick, here
is the forgetting. Drawing inverts, like one of Charles
Bukowski’s cats. Colour and graphite delete. Out of the eye.
Making disappear makes appear. Into the eye. Fur in, intestines
out. A strategy which isolates bits of information in such a way
that the unexpected happens. 1
Notes
1. In conversation with the author.
2. Ibid.
3. Karlheinz Stockhausen, Kompositorische Grundlagen Neuer Musik:
Sechs Seminare für die Darmstädter Ferienkurse 1970, edited by Imke
Misch, Stockhausen-Stiftung für Musik (Kürten), 2009, pp 118–9.
4. Stanisław Lem, Solaris [1961], Walker and Company (New York),
1st English edn, 1970.
5. Karl Blossfeldt, Urformen der Kunst, Wasmuth Verlag (Berlin),
1st edn, 1928.
6. See Gregory L Ulmer, ‘The Object of Post-Criticism’ in Hal Foster,
Postmodern Culture, Pluto Press (London), 1985, p 89.
8. Comte de Lautréamont, Maldoror (Les Chants de Maldoror),
English trans Alexis Lykiard, Thomas Y Crowell Company (New York),
1970, Canto IV, Chapter 3.
Mark West,
Hopper Façade,
2005
Part of the cryptic ‘Hotel Edward Hopper’

series of drawings, which also includes
Hopper Court Yard, Hopper Interior and
Hopper Lobby. Together they are the Hotel.
But then their different points of view,
meant to clarify, do in fact complicate the
situation. Their enigmatic dance exposes
certain figures from unexpected sides, thus
turning the Hotel into a scrambled and
codified secret figure. For example, the
same delicate piece of fabric shows as a
curtain-type façade in various views under
different light conditions between certain
Y-shaped columns. Hopper Façade includes
it as well, although not as a curtain, but
rather more like a skin or flexible mould that
seems to hold the columns in shape.
Text © 2022 John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

Images © Mark West
117

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15542769, 2022, 4, Downloaded from https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/ad.2842 by Cardiff University, Wiley Online Library on [06/03/2023].

The Lace Maker comes with

An enigmatic portrait of inhabitants of abandoned intercontinental ballistic missile

Clicks: The Snapshot

West’s three Beauties read as follows: At the base of the

More Clicks, More Snapshots

Part of the cryptic ‘Hotel Edward Hopper’

Text © 2022 John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

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