(Titles are Trivial:) The Honest Process
Wrappings,
beginning to imagine,
to see
in new ways
the old.
The dance
becomes art
as the blur of feet
turn into magic,
musical notes.
And the words
on the page
are suddenly
interrupted
by a scandalous
image.
We seek
the unexpected,
and, regardless,
it will find us.
The “honest” process is one that I have thought long and hard about. Before Tuesday, I did not know it had its own name, title. My most lucid encounters with the honest process have been in our Drawing and Representation class this semester. A continuous theme for us has been “modeling the real”—therefore taking actual objects or movements and rendering them digitally. Due to my want of constant perfection, my mindset going in was to make a duplicate, a digital copy of my real-life things. But this wasn’t what we were supposed to aim for. The class isn’t called “Copying and Representation,” it’s called “Drawing and Representation” because through our drawings we are supposed to re-imagine the object, find new meaning by re-creating it in our own unique style. The Lite-Brite I modelled was no longer a Lite-Brite, but a digital object with more personality (especially in the exploded axon) than the real-life object could ever hope to have. And the photos, the ones where the light bleeds across the page, making the pegs come alive, are another representation of the re-imagined object.
This process of representation I now understand to be the honest process, and I now see the true value in this process that far outdoes copying. I see this process in the work of Christo and Jeanne Claude, whose drawings and actual pieces have drastically different meanings. Their website establishes these different meanings through creating sections on “realized projects” (with images of the preliminary drawings AND photos of the actual exhibits) and “projects not realized.” By celebrating the honest process of inventing the objects via drawing and then actualizing them in reality, Christo and Jeanne Claude have created a metaphor for what architecture school does and is:
The education of an architect is primarily drawing-based and focuses on the honest process—“creating the project (and inventing the object) through drawing while thinking;” contemplative and speculative drawing. The education relies heavily on the explanatory/ generative device called the diagram and utilizes this tool alongside the honest process to create drawings, not buildings. The actualization of almost every project completed will not occur during this education, rather that privilege is saved for the established (and fully educated) architect.
So, for now, I can (and will) enjoy the process of collage and montage and digital rendering of structures and all the other ways possible to “escape the Excel spreadsheet” at UT and beyond.