Late here, late night. Late write. Honest.
Reading from Palle Nielsen's writings about his experience with the children who came to the The Model, I am reminded of my first days of sculpture class this semester. It was hard for me to begin working with the materials we were asked to use, hard to begin making something. I asked for some reading that could help me orient myself toward materials- "materiality" is what I think I called it, remembering Robert Smithson's writings about earth and dirt and stone. I wanted to read something about the material in hand, sort of a phenomenology of matter, I guess. I wanted to read before I could touch, feeling incapable of sculpting a thing without having prepared myself to do so. The intellectual preparedness that I thought I needed in order to "get going" was requisite for what I had been assigned to do, namely, to create something. I was going to make something out of matter, I was going to transform one thing into another thing, and this final thing would be my creation.
Palle Nielsen describes watching children at a table totally laden with new, clean clay. He went to fetch water so that they might smooth it, make smooth whatever it was they would sculpt. In dismay he watched them as they proceeded to make thin watery clay water and squeeze their fingers through it, making nothing at all. Later, he reflected;
"In the evening I tried to experience the same materials. But because I had decided to experience- or because I was only capable of creating- the situation of daring to experience was foreign to me. It hurts to have to confess that you have created without experiencing- or that there has been a difference between experience and creation. That you may have completely forgotten how to experience the new."
Reading Nielsen is helping me to think about the experience rather than focusing only on the end product.
I am trying to be less rigid, I am trying to let myself play.
A Model for a Qualitative Society (1968)
Images taken by Nielsen of the project:
Reading from Palle Nielsen's writings about his experience with the children who came to the The Model, I am reminded of my first days of sculpture class this semester. It was hard for me to begin working with the materials we were asked to use, hard to begin making something. I asked for some reading that could help me orient myself toward materials- "materiality" is what I think I called it, remembering Robert Smithson's writings about earth and dirt and stone. I wanted to read something about the material in hand, sort of a phenomenology of matter, I guess. I wanted to read before I could touch, feeling incapable of sculpting a thing without having prepared myself to do so. The intellectual preparedness that I thought I needed in order to "get going" was requisite for what I had been assigned to do, namely, to create something. I was going to make something out of matter, I was going to transform one thing into another thing, and this final thing would be my creation.
Palle Nielsen describes watching children at a table totally laden with new, clean clay. He went to fetch water so that they might smooth it, make smooth whatever it was they would sculpt. In dismay he watched them as they proceeded to make thin watery clay water and squeeze their fingers through it, making nothing at all. Later, he reflected;
"In the evening I tried to experience the same materials. But because I had decided to experience- or because I was only capable of creating- the situation of daring to experience was foreign to me. It hurts to have to confess that you have created without experiencing- or that there has been a difference between experience and creation. That you may have completely forgotten how to experience the new."
Reading Nielsen is helping me to think about the experience rather than focusing only on the end product.
I am trying to be less rigid, I am trying to let myself play.
A Model for a Qualitative Society (1968)
Images taken by Nielsen of the project:
No comments:
Post a Comment