Page 17 - Art First: Christopher Cook: a chance encounter on the way down

too, becomes expressive of a shared crisis. Wistful one resolves more completely into
the figure of a single tree, though a tree that appears to float through the air, removed
from the soil that would sustain it. The effect is not poignant, surreal or sentimental, partly

because the artist has inserted a rectilinear ‘window’ against the upper edge of the
paper. It’s a distancing device: the image as a whole includes an inset self-reflection on
its own purpose, and does not provide us with a simple view of what it appears to show.

According to Manfredo Tafuri, the space of Piranesi’s prisons (the Carceri d’Invenzione) [ ]
had strongly social connotations:
‘Here the destruction of the very concept of space merges with
a symbolic allusion to the new condition being created by a radically

changing society . . . In these etchings the space of the building−
the prison−is an infinite space. What has been destroyed is the centre
i
of that space, signify ng the collapse of ancient values, of the ancient
order, and the ‘totality’ of the disorder. Reason, the author of this

destruc tion−a destruction felt by Piranesi to be fatal− is trans ormed
f
into irrationality. But the prison, precisely because infinite, coincides
with the space of human existence. This is very clearly indi ca ted
by the hermetic scenes Piranesi designs within the mesh of lines

of his “impossible” compositions.’
(Architecture and Utopia: design and capitalist development,
)

Christopher Cook’s recent group of works as a whole do not use architecture as their

main metaphor, and they usually prefer curious scrutiny to high drama or polemic;

the violet hour,
, graphite and oil on paper, x

cm