Helen Chadwick: Thinking Between Art and Architecture

英国艺术家海伦·查德威克（Helen Chadwick, 1953-1996）使用多种媒介创作了多种多样的作品。这个项目提出了这样一个问题：查德威克的作品以何种方式、在何种程度上为当前的建筑思想提供了信息和活力？马克·斯莱登（Mark Sladen）最近指出，在查德威克去世后的几年里，她作品中丰富的思想在艺术界“耸人听闻和反智”的氛围中遇到了不接受的观众（斯莱登2004）。然而，最近的作品展示了对跨学科工作的日益开放，例如，在学术界，建筑和艺术实践中，查德威克方法的核心思想的交叉融合现在正在得到认真对待。查德威克的建筑思想是作为她的艺术项目中更广泛的思想的一部分而发展起来的；他们的作用是提出问题，而不是提供答案。她的思想并不局限于一个狭窄的“建筑”学科概念，而是喜欢广泛和固有的跨学科方法，包括及时和永恒的问题。她的研究展示了她对建筑问题、历史时期、文化和理论的广泛知识、欣赏和理解，这为已经接受的情况带来了非凡的成熟和广泛的理解。这个项目的目的不是将海伦·查德威克的作品作为“建筑”，也不是对现有的艺术史接受提出质疑：相反，它旨在阐明和探索她的作品如何能够在建筑内部以及艺术与建筑之间的当代辩论中发挥作用。项目问题的重要性和相关性之所以出现，是因为她所解决的架构问题仍然是当前的（实际上，有些问题现在更迫切需要关注），并且因为她的工作可以继续提出问题，从而维持这里的思考。它会问：她对创作过程的概念是什么，这将如何影响艺术家或建筑师的角色？-她认为影响建筑体验的因素是什么，这些因素在身份形成中可能起什么作用？——她是如何构思艺术与自然、神话、历史以及古典科学与现代科学之间的复杂关系的？这种关系在哪里以及如何影响当前的建筑思想？-她的工作提出了关于理论与实践关系的问题？这些研究问题围绕着查德威克的13本笔记和相关论文展开，这些笔记从1972年3月一直保存到1996年她去世，加上她图书馆里的预备演讲笔记和旁注，所有这些都保存在利兹的亨利·摩尔研究所（HMI）档案中。我已经花了一个月的时间在档案馆工作，由HMI资助。这些笔记本证明了一个复杂而纠结的研究网络，关于广泛问题的想法和猜测。在这一纠结中，研究的各个线索是清晰的，清晰的，细致的和三角的：工作的第一阶段是提取有助于她的建筑思维的各种线索，并将它们裸露出来。随后，更重要的是，方法上的变化呼应了查德威克自己的“杂耍”或“分离”方法（她借用了阿瑟·凯斯特勒的一种技巧）。在这里，她的这些作品将创造性地与其他批判和建筑理论相结合，以展示她的研究中已经包含的建筑含义的范围（明确的或潜在的），并在新的方向上发展这些研究，对当前的建筑思想有更切实的影响。该项目将扩大对查德威克作品的理解，展示其持续的相关性和当前研究它的动机，并扩大对她作品的学科兴趣范围。

The British artist Helen Chadwick (1953-1996) produced an apparently diverse range of work using a wide range of media. This project sets out to ask: in what ways, and to what extent, can Chadwick's oeuvre inform and invigorate current architectural thinking?Mark Sladen has recently suggested that the wealth of ideas in Chadwick's oeuvre met an unreceptive audience in the 'sensationalist and anti-intellectual' atmosphere of the art world in the years immediately after her death (Sladen 2004). However, recent work demonstrates an increasing openness to inter-disciplinary working, such that the kind of cross fertilisation of ideas that was central to Chadwick's approach is now being taken seriously, both in academia, architectural and artistic practice. Chadwick's thoughts on architecture were developed as part of a broader raft of ideas at one remove from her artistic projects; their role was to raise questions rather than provide answers. Her thoughts were not constrained to a narrow disciplinary conception of 'architecture,' but instead enjoyed a wide-ranging and inherently inter-disciplinary approach that included both timely and timeless issues. Her research demonstrates a wide knowledge, appreciation and understanding of architectural issues, historical periods, cultures, and theories, and this brings a remarkable maturity and breadth of understanding to an already receptive situation.The intention of this project is not to recuperate Helen Chadwick's work as 'architecture,' nor to contest existing art-historical reception: instead, it sets out to articulate and explore the ways in which her work can be brought to bear on contemporary debate within architecture, and between art and architecture. The importance and relevance of the project's questions emerge because the architectural issues she addressed remain current (indeed, some are now in more urgent need of attention), and because her work can continue to raise questions that sustain thinking here. It will ask:-What was her conception of the creative process, and how might this affect the role of the artist or architect?-What factors did she believe affected the experience of architecture, and what role might these play in identity formation?-How did she conceive the complex relationships between artifice and nature, myth, history and both classical and modern science? Where and how might such relationships bear on current architectural thinking?-What questions does her work raise concerning the relationship between theory and practice?These research questions develop around Chadwick's thirteen notebooks and associated papers, kept from March 1972 up to her death in 1996, plus preparatory lecture notes, and marginal notes in her library, all of which are contained in the Henry Moore Institute (HMI) archive in Leeds. I have already spent a month working in the archive, funded by the HMI. These notebooks evidence a complex and tangled web of research, ideas and speculation about wide-ranging issues. Within this tangle, individual strands of research are legible, articulate, meticulous and triangulated: the first stage of work is to extract the various strands that contribute to her architectural thinking and lay these bare.The subsequent, more important, methodological move echoes Chadwick's own method of 'juggling' or 'bisociation' (a technique she borrows from Arthur Koestler). Here, these strands of her work will be creatively combined with other critical and architectural theories, in order to demonstrate the range of architectural implications already contained within her research (explicit or latent), and to develop the investigation of these in new directions that bear more tangibly on current architectural thinking.This project will broaden the understanding of Chadwick's work, demonstrate its ongoing relevance and the incentive for studying it at the present time, and widen the range of disciplinary interest in her oeuvre.