I present a series of my works here: watercolours of scenes and characters found around Tokyo. These paintings share a common theme, reminding us of Baudelaire’s Painter of Modern Life in which an artist who is now unfashionable and considered to be fairly minor is celebrated for the documentary nature of his works. This celebration of city life is unusual for the time. The novelist and essayist Georges Perec gives useful advice on how and why one ought to concentrate on the quotidian (1997:50); he develops an interest in life as observed that reveals a great deal simply through attendance – by being present and bearing witness.
The first series of paintings here are character sketches of a weekly promenade in Harajuku, Tokyo. Youngsters gathered at the bridge to the Meiji shrine to celebrate the latest fashions in youth culture. In this case, it is the so-called Cosplay Zoku (Figure 2.3), who gathered to display their costumes and meet with friends. This site has been a source of fascination for some time, with the film director Chris Marker7 documenting this zone of permissiveness and individuality in the 1980s, where rock n’ roll hand jives were particularly popular. In the early 2000s, popular manga, anime and video game characters were faithfully recreated by the cos-players in a combination of hand-crafted and off-the-peg costumes before the promenading trend died out around 2010. Other parts of nearby Yoyogi Park continue the subcultural display, with rockabilly dancing, and synchronized pop idol inspired dance troupes sharing the space with strollers and joggers.
The watercolours move beyond the photographs as an attempt to get to know the scene in a deeper fashion. By tracing the outlines, examining the patterns and textures, recreating the postures, I meditate on the scene in a more concerted fashion. I aim also to communicate my understanding of the scene through the studies. One cannot, after all, replicate every detail, so a process of editing and rationalizing is necessary. This editing is part of a cognitive process and determines what I want to show to my presumed audience. These paintings select characters or groups from a dense throng of people, often erasing the background as relatively unimportant.8
The second series of these paintings is more ambitious and looks to scenes such as Gonpachi Restaurant (Figure 2.4), an overscaled izakaya establishment
FIGURE 2.3 Sketches of Harajuku cos-players.
FIGURE 2.4 Watercolour painting of Gonpachi.
with an open kitchen and hollering staff; or the downtown wholesale district of Kappabashi (Figure 2.5) with its piles of kitchenware in bright colours and contrasting patterns. The desire here is to simply understand and to show. The banal detail of a stainless steel working kitchen with worn plastic containers and expert staff putting on a theatrical show for the customers arranged around the counter; or the concentration on the faces of restaurant owners browsing the wares in Kappabashi as they make decisions about the rice bowls they want for their establishment.
Bearing witness to an event is a manifestation of Orwell’s historical impulse behind the drawings, not only to record the event: after all, my photography does that well enough, and books of photographs by professional practitioners are readily available. The drawing is a form of practised understanding, however, and a way of extending that moment. A close study of the photograph might yield some further understanding, but to replicate the visual effect exercises a visual knowledge and understanding, suggesting that – as Gibson9 and Arnheim would support – perception is not a passive reception, but an active engagement. This engagement is heightened and channelled by the practice of drawing.
The question of why I draw is by necessity a reflexive activity and hopefully not tiresomely the case. My intention is to consider the nature of inscriptive FIGURE 2.5 Watercolour painting of Kappabashi crockery store.
practices more broadly as fundamental creative practices, finding them to be more than simply a record and also a process by which understanding can be both sought and shown. My knowledge of these scenes and characters is displayed by the drawings, and this motive is something, which, in Orwell’s categorization of the writer’s craft, might be seen as a political intention – perhaps more broadly understood as a theoretical or critical enquiry into the world around us. This is an intention wholly in line with the investigation into the many possible ways of being, dwelling and living conducted by the discipline of anthropology.
Notes
1 It is not of course the only practice; architecture is a famously diverse profession involving a broad range of skills from model making, client negotiations, finance, construction, community engagement, contract law, landscape and interior design, historical and theoretical research and much more.
2 See https://knowingfromtheinside.org for more details and outputs from the project.
3 See Tafuri (1976) for a problematization of Utopia in architecture, and a discussion of its status as a system.
4 Interestingly, Orwell contends that:
it is also true that one can write nothing readable unless one constantly struggles to efface one’s own personality. Good prose is like a window pane.
(2004:10)
This concept of effacement is counter to the concept of the autographic mark in drawing, and it is true that art history is littered with attempts to occlude and complicate this relationship, from Sol le Witt’s instruction-based wall drawings to drawing with the less dominant hand. This is related to the advice given by Georges Perec regarding the writing of a scene, where he recommends the writer attend to the banal and ordinary:
‘Observe the street, from time to time, with some concern for system perhaps.
Apply Yourself. Take your time.
Note down the place: the terrace of a café near the junction of the Rue de Bac and the Boulevard Saint-Germain
the time: seven o’clock in the evening the date: 15 May 1973
the weather: set fair
Note down what you can see. Anything worthy of note going on. Do you know how to see what’s worthy of note? Is there anything that strikes you?
Nothing strikes you. You don’t know how to see.
You must write about out it more slowly, almost stupidly. Force yourself to write down what is of no interest, what is most obvious, most common, most colourless.’ (Perec, 1997:50 my emphasis)
‘force yourself to see more flatly’ (Perec, 1997:51 my emphasis)
5 For more on the multiple nature of drawing and stacks of tracing paper as a single work, see Lucas (2017b).
6 See Ingold on the lines that act as outliers (2007:50–51), lines that do not fit for more on this – outlines are an artificial form of perception; it is a necessary component of many inscriptive practices.
7 Marker, C. (Dir.). 1983. Sans Soleil. France: Argos Films.
8 It’s something of an aside at this juncture, but I am also interested in colour, with the readymade aspect of watercolours contrasted with the mixing of colour in an acrylic painting. In this respect, my acrylic paintings often engage more with the motive of pure aesthetic enthusiasm, as a source photograph mingles with strong memories of a colour I can often find myself in a fugue over replicating this remembered and recorded colour; finding the right opacity and saturation becomes an all-encompassing activity. This is, perhaps, an issue for another essay.
9 See Gibson (1983:33) and Merleau-Ponty (2002:7) for more on the active nature of perception as opposed to passive reception.
Introduction
This chapter discusses a space of familiarity, the home. Domestic space is where we tend to have greatest agency, we have control over our surroundings, are able to select objects that are useful and meaningful, and often able to decorate or remodel space in order to meet our individual tastes and needs. The very ordinariness of the home is what makes it of greatest interest and importance. As such, homes have a well-developed literature in both architecture and anthropology.
Several theories are used to draw out the nuance of home. These are often applicable to other building types, but heightened in the case of residential architecture. The first is to consider the home not as a physical structure so much as the outcome of a set of complex social relations. This overturns the notion that the home might be a container for social interaction and expresses it instead as the outcome of ongoing relationships. One aspect of the ongoing nature of domestic space lies in practices of maintenance and repair; the home is a perpetually unfinished project and is constituted of what we do there. Whilst acts of cleaning might not seem architectural at first glance, the theoretical implication of discussing maintenance offers a position towards architecture as a continuum rather than a finished article.
This continuum perspective is in tune with broader theories of material culture, placing the home within a broader set of intertwining biographies.
The home is one way in which we both express and establish our identities.
The choices we make regarding how we wish to live can be informed by cultural norms or iconoclasm, and this narrative of co-construction is one
3
Home and What It Means
to Dwell
which can be carried through into other typologies and areas of interaction between architecture and anthropology. Material culture studies are a major cornerstone of anthropological theory, crossing over with a number of other disciplines, including archaeology and museum studies. Material culture is long overdue critical attention in architecture and offers perspectives towards buildings that might enable the full life cycle of components and structures to be reassessed. Again, it is relevant to many of the building typologies presented in this volume, but discussed most thoroughly in terms of the home.
Cleaning offers greater nuance than one might expect, and the discussion of dirt opens up the contested nature of the most basic categories. We might express cleanliness in terms of common sense or tacit knowledge, but our attitudes and definitions of dirt are subject to social construction and agreement.