Two enclosures of curtains will rise in the courtyard of Cummings Art Building. The fabrics will be suspended on hooks from poles spanning the open-air ceiling. One curtain series will define the periphery, the other will embrace the center. The inner precinct will contain a golden cube (covered in gold folio) glistening in the light. Textile awning will drape the ceiling and possibly extend into the interior lobby of Cummings.
The goal of this project is to involve students in building a transformative space using curtains and to make them compose a ritual using as model the poetry of Homer, Pindar, and Ovid.
The project stems from an engagement with the pre-modern world. Art appeared in the religious realm as a medium negotiating human divine relations. Students will read the Old Testament's description of the Ark of the Covenant, and recognize in its peripatetic life the curtain-and-pole architecture as the base of religious space. Then they will be introduced to the Parthenon and the transformation of the ephemeral veils and poles into columns and architraves of marble. Simultaneously, students will be exposed to the poetry of Homer, Pindar, and Ovid, all expressive of the glittering phenomenal changing world, ruffling material surfaces. These texts are rich in synaesthetic visions and language, which would serve as an example for the students to write up their own ritual inauguration of the new space. This project would thus expose the young minds to the synaesthetic, corporeal power of art and the interconnection between the poiesis of writing and the poiesis of building. Curtains are a perfect foil for the ephemeral, the shifting, moving, breeze-ruffled surface: an atechnes kinesis, i.e. movement created without art, but naturally, phenomenally. Professor Bissera V. Pentcheva, project director, would like her students to gain experience in this world of presence effects, which saturates pre-modern art, but is drained from and denied existence in the standard museum setting.
Bissera V. Pentcheva, Art1 Instructor
Stephen Atkinson, Architect
Moira Murdock, Sculptor, Gallery & Exhibitions Manager
Daniel Tiffany, Sculptor, Sculpture & Studio Lab Manager
Co-sponsored by Stanford Institute for Creativity and the Arts, and Writing in the Major