Transposition Reiterated as a Canon (Camarillo Project)

Poetry is translated to architecture in this Whitmanian celebration of agricultural richness soon to be turned into suburban housing.

Although Camarillo is known for growing flowers, the impact of acres of sunflowers can only be fully appreciated walking down row after row with a camera. (I took hundreds of agricultural row photos and assorted other local topics for this project that was to include a thirty foot long photocollage.)

Somehow, being engulfed in this fantastic world of sunflowers altered my state of consciousness and my mind lapsed into the late sixties. I recalled the Ah! Sunflower poem by William Blake that had been set to music by the Fugs in what sounded like a somewhat drunken session by an amateur band playing in a friend’s garage. (Kurt Cobain also did some early work with this character that I especially like.) This recording had fondly stuck in my mind for years and suddenly it seemed perfect for the job at hand.

I wanted to celebrate the common beauty of the land and people in the same spirit as Walt Whitman. This I planned to do not only in a photocollage, but in an all-encompassing architectural environment that was to be an immersion experience. Since it was a space where the office staff and visitors would only spend a short time, I thought it would be ok to go full throttle. No matter how unusual the architectural scheme, I felt certain that people would still relate to the whole experience because they would see their community and even themselves celebrated in aesthetically presented photos.

The old Fug’s recording was located and I promptly set to work translating the music into rhythmical patterns of aniline dyed white rift oak veneers that were to become part of the cabinetry. The same concept was also going to be applied to the art on the walls, but in a modified form.

This office space was an attempt to encode architecture with the type of content one normally might expect in art (or in much architecture prior to the twentieth century). It also was an experiment to see if meaning in one form of communication could be translated into another.

In a literature class in college I had been struck by how certain poems by T.S. Eliot almost communicated their meaning by sound alone. And, in experiments setting text to music, I soon realized that speech patterns practically translated themselves into music. Years later, I started exploring the connection between rhythm, pitch and timbre in the visual arts. This project was simply a continuation of former explorations.

I was attempting to find out if visual rhythms might convey their source: speech translated into music. Obviously, when looking at a visual pattern, an observer will usually not start hearing music or chanting, but the thought was that maybe a trace of the original content might come through.

In this office, a visitor with unusual curiosity and a musical mind would be able to unearth rhythmical motifs in the patterned wood panels that were repeated and developed very much as in a musical composition. The visitor would observe that one panel was composed in the form of a canon and another as if it were a synopsis of a Bach invention.

The inquisitive visitor who had just deciphered the rhythmical patterns would soon notice that one veneered panel was larger than all the others and significantly different in design. This discovery would be the equivalent of finding the Rosetta Stone. This panel presents the unmodified rhythmical motifs which were directly taken from the recording (and the recording was a direct translation of Blake’s poem). Thus, if a person could somehow realize that this panel was the key to translating rhythmical motifs to language, he or she could go anywhere and read the coded texts of the panels all over the office. As an aid for anyone who might attempt to play archaeologist, I provided the full text of the poem in a collage entitled Blake’s Space.

Finally, the truly diligent, musical archaeologist would be rewarded by coming upon a pale virgin shrouded in snow in one room and a youth pining away with desire in the adjoining cubicle.

Granted, this would be a weird and highly improbable adventure. But, for me it was an interesting experiment, nevertheless.

I was surprised myself at times by how the text translated itself into resonating visual images, especially considering I was following strict self-imposed rules that allowed virtually no freedom. The part about the dead virgin in the snow ended up with pink accents that could be imagined as rose buds or at least flower petals in the icy cold snow of the blue veneer.

In addition to the architecture, I had made plans for art on the walls. Because the office had to be closed within months of completion, this part of the project didn’t reach fruition. In addition to smaller works such as Blake’s Space, which was the only piece of art for the walls to be completed, there was to be a thirty foot long assemblage of dyed wooden boxes also beating out a rhythm and incorporating the previously mentioned photos of the region.

At least the entire space was built out. This project allowed me to explore ideas I had considered for some time, and it served as a disciplined, essential warm-up exercise for the Ojai project, where I abandoned all self-imposed rules and allowed ideas to flow freely.