The Mystic Egg
...And when the cycle of his sufferings ended
From an Antarctic refuge he ascended
Into the cold nude beauty of the night
Expanding, full of holes, immense yet light
So light that he was almost immaterial
Though strangely fluid-he could feel the soft
Rolling of earth that ghost ship in the ethereal
Abyss-then cometlike he shot aloft
And grew more until swallowing up
Whole galaxies and universes he
Usurped the being of infinity,-
At that moment reality went pop
And in the distance suddenly he saw
The one whose dreaming is eternal law
Whose utterance fecund in the dark of night
Is a giant Egg of violet light.
"This is a 1.4 million sq.ft. mixed-use complex on the outskirts of downtown San Antonio, Texas. A monumental 45 story arcade facing the city is sited on the crest of one of the highest hills in San Antonio. The arcade marks the entrance to a new suburban center located at the intersection of two major expressways. The four glass towers are linked on the upper 6 stories to provide large and flexible office space for an anchor tenant. Three of the towers make 800,000 sq.ft. of office space; the fourth is a 366-room hotel, apartment-hotel, and health club. The arcade rises from a 200,000 sq.ft. two-level glazed retail mall. Parking for 2750 cars is concealed in a 6-story terraced platform. On top of this platform are three restaurants (located in the base of each office tower), a swimming pool, tennis courts, a running track and lawn. The platform is sliced by a street lined with shops, which provides a neighborhood scale to contrast with the heroic towers. A sprawling 'Dallas' style mansion sits on axis with tree-lined promenade and is to be converted..."
Looking closely at the (never-realized) Horizon Hill Center project, an uncomfortable whiff arises. The Superstudio, by way of Sol Lewitt, by way of Oldenberg scaling, is certainly appealing. The monumental metaphor of cube supporting cube (like latter day pyramid) would be spiriting, if it weren't for its Iacocca brain and Reagan heart. Another homage to ego psychiatry.
It is an immense pleasure to find objects incongruous with their own time but much in accord with another (Biedermeier or Hans Belmer pieces come to mind). Here are a pair of objects designed by Hans Arp, both circa 1916, which appear as if made by Sottsass or Mendini circa 1980. The one on the right is labeled as a
powder box; the left one, was probably was utilized similarly.
Allen Jones, a painter of shared territory to that of Christina Ramberg, referred to his work as dealing with “predicaments”. Obviously there is nothing novel about the sentiment, but in relation to this “type” of painting it rather succinctly cuts to the heart of the matter: sexuality
is a predicament.
The semiology of sexuality or the study/depiction of sexual signs/imagery is a dilemma of transcription: the transubstantiation of mental image into plastic object and the resultant ambiguity as to the success of the translation. Of course all human difficulties result in an imbroglio of some sort of language, but it is unequivocal that one of the most pungent viewings of humanity, in the ill-throws of translation, is sex.
Ramberg’s ambiguity is not centered around her “subjects” enjoyment or displeasure, of that there is no question; the subjects are at least very uncomfortable. Her indeterminateness is more of a smog, swirling around her subject’s status as objects or victims. Coitus is a murky, unctuous volley between the miserly and the hospitable; Ramberg is explicit in depicting characters bound to their receivers and the resultant enigmatic losses. It is hard to tell whether her “women” actually lose faces, hands and limbs or whether they are bound or held from sight. Or whether their situation is self-inflicted.
Ramberg painted an aftermath of strange, gauzy, symmetrical delicacy. Her bruise-tone work almost has the touch of a poet-mortician. The bodies and torsos are less prey-in-strife and more inanimate-decorated-entity (this is definitely an expression shared with the aforementioned Jones). Although, mummified in corsetry and bandage-like foundations, they are not without their fetishistic allure. One does not have to see The Night Porter to know that the grist of sexuality is often misperception translated into ritualistic deviation. Sexuality is ambiguity. Christina Ramberg died at the age of 49 in 1995.
