Dream And Action Find Equal Support In It (038)

In this work there are 3 central images. Dream and action find equal support in it. In this work consisting of many elements, there are 3 curious images I would like to tell you about. A photograph of a bathroom and a window seen through a mirror in the bedroom of E1027, a house created by the designer and architect Eileen Gray (in the period 1926–1929). A drawing of “the mirror room” by the dancer and performer Loïe Fuller from 1893. This image depicts a room (of mirrors) placed in a room (of mirrors) on a stage. Third, a portrait by the artist Hannah Höch from 1917, which shows a circle of five women looking at each other or a mirroring and doubling of one woman. In connection with the publication of the plans for the house E1027, a conversation between Eileen Gray and the architect Jean Badovici was released with the title From eclecticism to doubt in the magazine L’Architecture Vivante in 1929. Gray states: “The influx of light and air can be regulated… like the shutter of a camera.” The house becomes a viewfinder, a constructed frame through which to see the world. She furthermore says, “For me, a model house is merely a house whose construction has been carried out in accordance with the best and least costly technical procedures, and whose architecture attains the maximum of perfection for a given situation; that is to say, it is like a model that is not to be infinitely reproduced, but which will inspire the construction of other houses in the same spirit.” In the text, Gray indirectly goes to war with part of the modernist movement’s practice, and in particular, with aspects of the architect Le Corbusier’s thinking. The text also functions as a case study of what architecture can be, with E1027 as an example. Gray was concerned with designs of mobility and practiced it through “obtaining several uses for the same object.” Gray was first educated as a visual artist but became engaged with working in the difficult craft of lacquer. After working with lacquer screens, she continued making other furniture and was commissioned to build interiors. It was in a meeting with the architect and editor of L’Architecture Vivante, Jean Badovici, that she started doing architecture. Badovici commissioned Gray to do a house for him. The previously mentioned house, E1027, has been the focal point for a larger controversy. Much against Gray’s will, Le Corbusier did a series of murals inside the house. Le Corbusier “overwrote” the wall inscriptions that Gray had made for the house. This is a strange action from a man who had complimented the house for its continuity. You could perceive this act as a primitive retaliation for Gray’s criticism in the article From eclecticism to doubt. In the exhibition are a series of screens that are constructed in the same system as Eileen Gray’s block screens. They function as room dividers and as surfaces for projection. Slide images are projected on a mirror, which is sent back onto a paper screen, transforming the image as well as negotiating spatial conceptions. The portrait by Hannah Höch from 1917 (seen in the poster series in the exhibition) speaks to me not only of a woman but a collective of women. Virginia Woolf writes in A Room of One’s Own: “Women have served all these centuries as looking-glasses possessing the magic and delicious power of reflecting the figure of man at twice its natural size” (Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own (A Harvard Book, 1989), p. 35). In Höch’s montage, the reflection becomes an act where women are looking at and being seen by other women. The series of posters in the exhibition takes its title from Hannah Höch’s work Album, where she collected a wide range of images and montaged them together in various associative categories. The collection of images in the posters shows the work done by women in the field of design, architecture, performance, and art — all of them contemporary with Eileen Gray. Much of the work comes from women trained at the Bauhaus school and whose existence is mostly known through the historical photo archive of Bauhaus. The female students at Bauhaus were discouraged from working with architecture and furniture making, and the general idea was that women could not work in three-dimensional practices. Nevertheless, a group of them managed to transgress these rules and trained with carpentry, metal, and used photography to capture and transform space with. I see the Album posters as an unfinished collection — one to be added to. The montage of images I think of as associative, systematic, and desirable. One of the things that interested me in them is the idea of mirroring space. I made a filmic experiment in my apartment. I filmed the space only through mirrors — one small round mirror and several bigger ones. I also filmed onto a mirror that was capturing the ceiling while walking through the space. This, in a sense, became the floor plan for a completely different house. I wanted to not see all the ugly things that constitute an everyday life, or at least some of them, formed by certain habits. There is a voice in the exhibition that leads us through the E1027 house. The audio is based on Eileen Gray’s own text From eclecticism to doubt in L’Architecture Vivante (1929) and excerpts from conversations she had with the biographer Peter Adams. The voiceover functions almost like a tour of the house. I think of it as a place without a present reality but which comes alive through the conception of it. The room is lit partially with paper lamps created from photocopies made in the period when I was collecting images and texts of Eileen Gray’s work. Gray had specific notions of how light should be installed as a way to create intimacy. In Gray’s work she is in dialogue with a number of different collaborators and practices. I wonder how these meetings have influenced her work. For example, was Gray fascinated by the dancer Loïe Fuller’s performances? Fuller worked innovatively with light, projections, and mirror rooms in her staging. Loïe Fuller choreographed the Serpentine Dance, which was one of the first performances to be caught on film. The dance form was expressed through a large white fabric, and formations were created through the movement of the staged and illuminated body. The filmmaker and writer Germaine Dulac formulates it in the following manner: “That also was cinema, the play of light and of colors in relief and in movement… Loïe Fuller created her first color harmonies at the moment that the Lumière Brothers gave us the cinema” (Tom Gunning, Camera Obscura Camera Lucida, ed. Richard Allen and Malcolm Turvey (Amsterdam University Press, 2003), p. 85–87). I think Gray’s designs challenge notions of the ideal. She includes context as a factor that can change the concept and function of an object and therefore also the ways in which it interacts in space. In Fuller’s Mirror Room, I imagine the body becomes fragmented and multiplied. This quote by Henri Bergson might best describe the condition: “In reality... the body is changing form at every moment; or rather there is no form, since form is immobile and the reality is movement. What is real is the change of form: form is only a snapshot view of a transition.”