Sea Ranch

TRIP to Sea Ranch

This weekend, I was privileged enough to take a trip to Sea Ranch, a place very far away from here:

My first time here. Windows open straight to the sea, a sliding door that takes you to exactly where you are, fresh caught fish and slow hunted mushrooms. Time set sitting in the comfortable window nook and sipping on tea. It's me and the sea, and studio matters, but it also doesn't. 

Friends at the beach

Introduction

INTRODUCTION The Death and Life of Great American Cities by Jane Jacobs, 1961

I've just started to read this book.

Excerpt: "Handsome is as handsome does. All that glitters is not gold... There is a quality even meaner than outright ugliness or disorder, and this meaner quality is the dishonest mask of pretended order, achieved by ignoring or suppressing the real order that is struggling to exist and to be served."

Plus, Cedric Price's, City As An Egg:

Points of Reference

DOWNTOWN Petaluma

1) June 2006, Eva Joan being launched from the Landing Way Depot
2) March 2013, a guy producing a local feature on downtown

manifesto

MANIFESTO by Agnes Denes in 1969 via Radical Nature (2009) from Barbican Art Gallery

For some reason,  I'm becoming obsessed with material from the 1960s. Here is Agnes Dene's Manifesto from 1969 to loosen it up:

working with a paradox
defining the elusive
visualizing the invisible
communicating the incommunicable
not accepting the limitations society has accepted
seeing in new ways
living for a fraction of a second and penetrating light years
using intellect and instinct to achieve intuition
achieving total self-consciousness and self-awareness
being creatively obsessive
questioning, reasoning, analysing, dissection and re-examining
understanding the finitude of human existence and still striving to create
beauty and provocative reasoning
finding new concepts, recognising new patterns
desiring to know the importance or significance of existence
seeing reality and still being able to dream
persisting in the eternal search


And to pair it with Thích Nhất Hạnh's words, "love is understanding." 

Floating Quotes

QUOTES floating around this week

All that is solid melts into air.

Be here now.

Currently, I am looking for a direction, trying to steer my subconscious into creating a master plan for a town. My subconscious wants to make this master plan out of white porcelain, to look at it, and to drop it on the floor to see where it breaks. I want to open the thing up to itself, watch it flooded by light and air, exposed.

These two quotes have been useful in mediating the impulse.

An Ark Kit Puncture

MORE from Gordon Matta-Clark: The Space Between by James Attlee & Lisa Le Feuvre (2003):

(p. 48) 
    completion through removal
    completion through collapse
    completion through emptiness

"The word Anarchitecture itself merged two apparently conflicting sets of principles - the planned and the spontaneous, the structured and the fluid, the built and the disassembled - and by joining them together held them in balance, setting up a kind of creative tension. The continual puns the members of the Anarchitecture group made about their name - AN ARK KIT PUNCTURE, ANARCHY TORTURE, AN ARTIC LECTURE, AN ORCHID TEXTURE, AN ART COLLECTOR etc - were a demonstration of that the principle of entropy applied as much to language as to the physical world. One can no more rely on a word to retain its meaning over the years than one can a politician his integrity, a building its function or an ideology its validity. The rules that govern language - on the levels of phonetics, semantics or syntax; the divisions between words that render them legible as signs - this architecture of sound and meaning is written on water not on stone. As Duchamp had pointed out, nothing in the universe is at rest."

photos from downtown Petaluma:

The Space Between

PSYCHOGEOGRAPHY of people, water, in drift

From Gordon Matta-Clark: The Space Between by James Attlee & Lisa Le Feuvre (2003):

"Psychogeographers would drift through the urban environment, attuned to subtle changes in the atmosphere of the streets, prompted to change direction by stimuli not immediately apparent to less sensitive observers. The important thing was to get beyond the overarching control of town-planners, politicians and architects, into regions where there existed a unitary ambience: an indefinable combination of lively and colourful inhabitants, light, sounds, activity and architectural backdrop.

Situationist cartography, making use of cutups and collages of existing maps, was highly selective, concentrating on revealing the surviving fragments of the city that had escaped the attention of urban planners and retained their original ambiance and excising the rest."