http://www.thingsandpeople.com/page/7/
Although so much of the life we care about takes place at home, this
private space often remains behind closed doors and is notoriously
difficult for researchers to infiltrate. We may think it is just up to
us to decorate, transform and construct our homes, but in this book we
discover a new form of 'estate agency', the active participation of the
home and its material culture in the construction of our lives. What do
the possessions people choose to take with them when moving say about
who they are, and should we emphasize the mobility of a move or the
stability of what movers take with them? How is the home an active
partner in developing relationships? Why are our homes sometimes haunted
by 'ghosts'?.
This intriguing book is a rare behind-the-scenes exposé of the domestic sphere across a range of cultures. Examples come from working class housewives in Norway, a tribal society in Taiwan, a museum in London, tenants in Canada and students from Greece, to produce a genuinely comparative perspective based in every case on sustained fieldwork. So Japan, long thought to be a nation that idealizes uncluttered simplicity, is shown behind closed doors to harbour illicit pockets of disorganization, while the warmth inside Romanian apartments is used to expel the presence of the state.
Representing a vital development in the study of material culture, this book clearly shows that we may think we possess our homes, but our homes are more likely to possess us.
This intriguing book is a rare behind-the-scenes exposé of the domestic sphere across a range of cultures. Examples come from working class housewives in Norway, a tribal society in Taiwan, a museum in London, tenants in Canada and students from Greece, to produce a genuinely comparative perspective based in every case on sustained fieldwork. So Japan, long thought to be a nation that idealizes uncluttered simplicity, is shown behind closed doors to harbour illicit pockets of disorganization, while the warmth inside Romanian apartments is used to expel the presence of the state.
Representing a vital development in the study of material culture, this book clearly shows that we may think we possess our homes, but our homes are more likely to possess us.
The first 300 words from
Wabi-Sabi: for Artists, Designers, Poets & Philosophers
Wabi-Sabi: for Artists, Designers, Poets & Philosophers
“Wabi-sabi is a beauty of things
imperfect, impermanent, and incomplete. It is a beauty of things modest
and humble. It is a beauty of things unconventional.”
---
“The immediate catalyst for this
book was a widely publicized tea event in Japan. The Japanese aesthetic
of wabi-sabi has long been associated with the tea ceremony, and this
event promised to be a profound wabi-sabi experience. Hiroshi
Teshigahara, the hereditary iemoto (grand master) of the Sogetsu
school of flower arranging, had commissioned three of Japan’s most
famous and fashionable architects to design and build their conceptions
of ceremonial tea-drinking environments. Teshigahara in addition would
provide a fourth design. After a three-plus-hour train and bus ride from
my office in Tokyo, I arrived at the event site, the grounds of an old
imperial summer residence. To my dismay I found a celebration of
gorgeousness, grandeur, and elegant play, but hardly a trace of
wabi-sabi. One slick tea hut, ostensibly made of paper, looked and
smelled like a big white plastic umbrella. Adjacent was a structure made
of glass, steel, and wood that had all the intimacy of a highrise
office building. The one tea house that approached the wabi-sabi
qualities I had anticipated, upon closer inspection, was fussed up with
gratuitous post-modern appendages. It suddenly dawned on me that
wabi-sabi, once the preeminent high-culture Japanese aesthetic and the
acknowledged centerpiece of tea, was becoming—had become?—an endangered
species.
“Admittedly, the beauty of
wabi-sabi is not to everyone’s liking. But I believe it is in everyone’s
interest to prevent wabi-sabi from disappearing altogether. Diversity
of the cultural ecology is a desirable state of affairs, especially in
opposition to the accelerating trend toward the uniform digitalization
of all sensory experience, wherein an electronic “reader” stands between
experience and observation, and all manifestation is encoded
identically...”
Dr. Johnson’s Doorknob, inspired by Liz Workman’s National
Heritage Revisited series published in England in 2002, is a
situationist’s catalog of overlooked and highly amusing personal objects
from the most famous households in history.
A laser-cut artist's book. A tour through the artist's own house 85:1 scale,
454 laser cut pages.
No comments:
Post a Comment