the world as sculpture

I came across this book this weekend in Philadelphia's Free Library... and it so so SO very good! I spent hours poring over a chapter called The Education of the Sense: Child's Play - which talks about early Montessori schools and their emphasis on TOUCH - "The lost paradise of touch could be regained." I love this quote by Walter Benjamin...

Children are particularly fond of haunting any site where things are being visibly worked upon... In using these things they do not so much imitate the works of adults as bring together, in the artifact produced in play, materials of widely differing kinds in a new intuitive relationship. Children thus produce their own small world of things within a greater one.                                                                                    

                                                                                                          Walter Benjamin

This reminds me VERY MUCH of some of the things Nikolas Berdyev has to say about "man as microcosm" in his book, The Meaning of the Creative Act.

The next chapter, which I didn't get to finish (the library was closing, and I don't live in PA so I couldn't take it with me) is called HOLLOWS AND BUMPS IN SPACE! This is thesis  material, no doubt - right up my alley. Hall suggests that while the Neo-Classicists were obsessed with surfaces, the Modernists have been obsessed with orifices.

I love holes... they're a means of escape or access. They're sexual. Holes are really interesting because they're not there. I like the joke about the guy who dug the holes out of the ground and put them on a truck.                    

                                                                                                                      Damien Hirst

Thinking about holes in this way is also making me think about CONTRANYMS - words with 2 definitions that are opposites of eachother... ex. CLEAVE - means both to bring together AND to divide... hmmmm

The first hole made through a piece of stone is a revelation. The hole connects one side to the other, making it immediately more three-dimensional. A hole can itself have as much shape-meaning as solid mass... The mystery of the hole - the mysterious fascination of caves in hillsides and cliffs.

                                                                                                                      Henry Moore

This has me thinking a lot about POSITIVE and NEGATIVE space...