92615_RAA_LooseCannon_Text_R1_PROOF

object. Any such theory must include, however, a notion of "plasticity;" that is, a confusion between accepted boundaries. Most notably, this confusion occurs between the notions of "inside" and "outside." This ambiguity is inherently designed to slow down the "reading" of an object or painting, but be so overwrought so as to have the underlying concept disappear. To apply these generalizations to specifics, consider O'Keefe's White Canadian Barn II. The barn has been distilled through O'Keeffe's artifice to not a "realist" rep resentation of a "barn," but rather a modernist purification that evokes a barn to the viewer. The barn represented has an almost perfect bilateral symmetry; this lends an organic feel to the object as such symmetry is usu ally the province of organisms and seldom occurs in man-made objects. The whiteness of the walls is unmarked by stains or weathering; it is bro ken only by the doorway and the larger barn doors which are a rich blue. This blue conjures the blue of the sky and its inherent mysteries. After a prolonged viewing, the barn begins to metamorphosize into an almost skull-like form; its white color and socket-like doorways enhance this effect. This further intensifies the organic feel of the painting. There is no doubt that this is a simplified image, with the eye drawn to the detail-obscuring darkness of the barn doors. With such economy of form and the reposeful horizontality of the barn itself, the mind of the viewer asserts itslef to intervene for the artist and apply its own reasons or defini tions to the forms or symbols it perceives. Another way of communicating unity... not necessarily compositional unity, but a unity of forms, like Wright's prairie-like homes. Consider, now, the Keyes House, as designed by Frank Lloyd Wright. Dominating the lines of the house is that same horizontality of the O'Keeffe painting. Wright takes pride in perceiving the horizontal line as the earth line of human life, and thought it important to extend the horizontal as it was the line of repose. This extension simplifies the form of the house by rendering it, in plan, almost perfectly rectangular. An almost heretical sim plification (removal of walls) renders the kitchen, dining area, and living rooms into one great social room where all of the home's activities (exclu sive of sleeping) may take place. A unity of the publiC and the private ensues. Even a unity of "inside" and "outside" is achieved through a com bination of plan and materials. The living room opens onto a partially shel tered terrace, blurring the boundaries between socializing within the enclo sure of the house proper or outside "out-of-doors" but still under its protec tive roof. The copious use of glass around the perimeter of the house pro vides a visual access to the natural world outside.

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