John Hejduk’s poems situate the audience in an intriguing overlap between architecture and poetry. They stimulate reflections on sensuality of architectural space and gradually resonate to the memories unique to the Chinese culture. The poems demonstrate the potential of “building worlds” in a medium other than conventional buildings. The unfamiliar medium of poetry sensitizes the architect in understanding the construction of spatial meaning.
Architectural thinking permeates Hejduk’s poems: observations of architecture, such as La Roche (1972) and Palladio Plans, self-reflections on a project, such as Berlin Winter Mask and Victims, as well as speculations of paintings, such as Without Interior (Ingres Painting), To Madame D'Haussonville (Ingres Painting), Oslo Room (Munch Painting), The Metronome (Matisse Painting), France Is Far (Hopper Painting), and Nature Morte (Braque Painting). Regardless the literal architecture is present or absent, the poems arouse the feeling of otherness. Hejduk defines “otherness” as “the attribute of being inexplicable.”1 In an interview with Donald Wall, otherness was also referred to as a spatial organization with straightforward yet betraying elements2 -- when the audience detects the concealment in the work, the feeling of otherness is evoked. Hejduk’s poems exemplify otherness through weaving together sensual bodies, unexpected observations, fragmented rhythms, discontinued narratives, and hinted suspicions.
In Oslo Room, one may visualize the body through nouns such as “flesh arm,” “black hair,” “[bleeding] wrist,” “palm,” “breast,” but also experience feeling through adjectives such as “heavy,” “smooth,” and “sweet.” The woman’s body is stressed through the sensation of weight, which is created by the positions of the body parts. The arm is “limp”: and hair “extend” towards the floor; the mattress cover “billows”: and the Siena bed “slides deep.” Moreover, the wrist that bleeds into the palm exemplifies the weight of drops of blood. The notion of torment is embedded within the body, or the body represents a result of torment, which leads to suspicion about what has happened to this woman. While reading “perhaps the wrist bleeds into the palm” and “mouth nose eyes might be kissed,” viewers might be able to construct a tragic love story, arousing suspicion that the woman has been tormented. However, since they do not know what has happened, viewers are left in a mental state of doubt and uncertainty, producing the feeling of otherness.
Otherness is also embedded in unexpected observations. The strangeness of Madame D'Haussonville derives from the opacity of the mirror – ““no reflections.” The relationships among the body parts of the lady are also aberrant. The woman’s hands are too large, the breasts seem to be confined to too small a space between her arms, and her tummy is oversized. One would never expect this young lady to scratch the earth with her hands or to use the tip of her tongue for infusion, both associated with the actions of monsters. As Donald Wall said after discussing a similar subject with Hejduk, “if the malignancy doesn’t lie in the parts, then it must reside in the way the parts are being assembled.”3 It is exactly how the feeling of otherness is created in this poem. It derives from the unusual relationships among the seemingly normal objects.
The depictions and suggestions of the body is always in isolated pieces, which culminates in the structural and narrative fragmentation in France Is Far of 55 lines on 21 Edward Hopper’s paintings and one photo of his. The paintings in the poem render a strong sense of detachment, which is translated to poetic depictions and rhythm. The poem alludes to people isolated from others in the paintings -- most scenes present either one lonely character or two unrelated characters. It shows detachment by the discontinuity between events and settings -- “he read the paper in the park at 10 p.m.” defies common sense. Additionally, the poem detaches the audience’s expectations by only providing limited details about each painting with no clear thread connecting one painting to another. In fact, all of these etchings and paintings are found in the same book and described in the same sequence as they appear in the book, completely defying a coherent narrative. As the observer is surrounded with opacity, otherness is expressed in a covert manner.
Hejduk criticizes architecture surrounding him that “there is no life in it and consequently and horribly there is no possibility of the death of it.”4 His poems protest and demonstrate the opposite. Sensuality is highlighted through the fragmented, detached, estranged, and even tormented bodies; the challenge to the body is then played against the audience’s mind. While the feeling of otherness emerges, the audience is alerted to a reality that only lives through bodily and mental engagement.
The feeling of otherness is intensified in the Chinese audience. Not only have they not expected to read poems in an architect’s exhibition, but also, the poems are displayed in fragments of time and perspectives. Their viewing experience embodies otherness. In literal darkness, the audience is compelled to see the correspondence between the sonnets and odes of poetry and the structure and balance of architecture.
The poem installation was constructed in a segregated space defined by two free-standing walls backed up by an end-wall in the exhibition hall. Enclosing the semi-open interior area are three projection surfaces. Once arrived at the area, the audience is surrounded by looming images and texts. They appear, disappear, and sometimes scroll. All three walls refer to the same poem at one time, but no two walls display the same composition of images and texts. No position in the space provides a comprehensive viewing of all three walls. What one can see is always a partial of the whole display and sometimes at a 45-degree angle from the previous focus. A spare and minimal presentation of the material supports the sense of a silent other, inviting viewers to observe through the poems’ alienated point of view. No visual effects or additional styling were utilized, only a gradual fade, and scrolling text where needed to accommodate font size within the projected area. The subtle fragmentation of the visual layout only changes once every few minutes with each poem and its related artwork, cueing viewers to resituate and reorient themselves within the architectural space. As, perhaps, with any window, architectural space must be negotiated to peer through. The frame both occludes and displays.
The partial viewing of the poems is heightened in that poems are displayed in English and Chinese but not always side by side. Any audience who does not speak both English and Chinese may encounter moments of alienation to the display. However, to the Chinese audience, this alienation contrasts to their familiarity to poetry, both the ancient poems with predetermined formal structures of tones and lengths and the Misty Poetry resembling a similar free style and ambiguity in Hejduk’s poems. Reciting ancient Chinese poems has been a common experience to most Chinese children. The free style poems always belong to much smaller literary groups. The intriguing fact is that the short-lived Misty Poetry in the 1980s overlaps with a period of Hejduk’s poetry writing. While poetry became experimental space of otherness for an American architect, it had been a sanctuary and a battlefield for Chinese poets to search for individuality and societal hopes after the pernicious Cultural Revolution. A profound hint of otherness arises as Hejduk’s poems coincidentally allude to the Chinese cultural memories.
At moments, when all three walls are black and blank, the audience returns to the pauses in Hejduk’s poems and resets their minds and emotions. A silent sound of the poetry lingers, reminding the audience of the aura that, as Hejduk pointed out, has been lost in Architecture. It is not “sound in the pragmatic way” but “an unearthly sound,” ”a soul sound,”5 or perhaps the sound of otherness.
Notes