Ritual’s Lecture.

Rituals Definition: A religious or solemn ceremony consisting of a series of actions performed according to a prescribed order. 

Or a series of actions or type of behaviour regularly and invariably followed by someone.

Emic view point: Studying behaviour from inside a particular system, the way the actual people understand what they do and think. 

Etic view point: Studies behaviour from outside of a particular system. The observer. The researcher. 

Repetition: Reinforced the beliefs of the group by fixing them firmly in the memory of those who participate in its rituals. 

• Rituals rely heavily on repetition. 

Marshall island Stick Chart:

• When the islanders went fishing in the turbulent, shark-infested waters beyond the coral reef, they performed specific rituals to invoke magical powers for their safety and protection. 
• These charts, unlike traditional maps, were studied and memorized prior to a voyage. They were not consulted during a trip, and were blessed before a voyage.
• Wave patterns, currents and islands. 

Synchrony: Key to many rituals because it increases social cohesion, one of the main purposes of ritualistic behaviour. 

Example: New Zealand’s All Blacks rugby team, the haka is a traditional Maori dance. 

Rhythmic activities:

• Such as dancing and chanting simulate the release of endorphins: neuropeptides that promote a sense of connection and trust. 
• Examples: Concerts, solstice gatherings. 

Catherine Bell states: “ritual is also invariant, implying careful choreography.”

Rituals of solidarity are very common. Shared, choreographed activities in support of a system or belief. 

The Rite of Ordination to become a Catholic Priest, takes place within the context of a mass. Prostration, (lying on the floor, face down), can carry the symbolism of death-the death to self that comes before the candidate’s rebirth into priestly service. 

Formalism: Ritual utilises a limited and rigidly organised set of expressions, which anthropologists call restricted code. 

Communication:

• Ritual produces conformity according to Maurice Bloch.
• Ritual communication uses a special, restricted vocabulary.
• Restrictive grammer.
• Ritual utterances become very predictable. 

Hindu Marriage ceremony with seven steps. 

Catholic Wedding ceremony. Another restrictive code. 

Votive: Offered, given, dedicated, etc.. in accordance with a vow. 

A Votive Offering:

• An object
• Displayed or deposited
• Not to be used
• In a scared place for religion purposes.
• Made in order to gain favour with supernatural forces. 

Example: Bronze animal statuettes from Olympia, voice offering, 8th-7th century BC. 

Ex Voto Paintings:

• The purpose of the painting is to give testimony and thanks for ‘divine’ help. They use familiar, every day objects and spaces. 

Mexican example:

Silver Catholic Ex Votes: often in the shape of an organ, or healed part of the body. 

A rite of passage definition:

• It is a ceremony of the passage, which occurs when an individual leaves one group to enter another.
• It involves a significant change of status in society.
• What rites of passages have you been through?

Traditionalism: 

• Annette Messager looks at received ideas, familiar narratives, myths and rituals. She looks at death through her work. She clothed dozens of taxidermies sparrows in tiny knitted garments. 
• The Boarders. 1972, it is about received ideas, familiar narratives, myths and rituals, death. 

More familiar rituals:

• Shopping - Christine Dior, Paris. Is laid out to encourage clear buying behaviours. 
• Interiors facilitate out rituals.

Sonia Boyce: Missionary Position II

• Boyce uses the ritual of prayer to symbolise conflicting opinions about religious beliefs across different generations and cultures in British society. 

Jeremy Deller, Alan Kane: Looks at more mundane rituals, the British ritual of making tea. 

Example: Souped up Urn and Teapot 2004.

Objects:

• Ritual as a theme in art doesn’t always show a ritual actually happening. Artists often reference ritual through objects or materials. 
• Artist Paul Neagu used his own body in events which he called ‘rituals’. His ‘palpable’ objects and ‘tactile’ boxes were made to be touched, opened and moved. 

Paul Neagu - Great Tactile Table

Rasheed Areen uses his photography to explore his identity as a Muslim in British society, through photographs which reference Islamic ritual. Example: Bismullah, (in the name of God)

More Examples:

Henry Moore - Mask 1929

Rebecca Horn - Pencil Mask 1972

The idea of a mask. 

Reminds the viewer of elaborate ritual performances. 

• Shapes and patterns are associated with particular rituals. 

Example: Richard Wright’s Untitled III

• Geometric Abstraction, Op art and Minimalism - and patterns derived from Medieval manuscripts, Gothic and Baroque architectural decoration and tattoo and biker- jacket motifs. 

References: 

• Ritual design lab - https://www.ritualdesignlab.org/about-ritual-design/
• Mauss’s essay focuses on the way that the exchange of objects between group builds relationships between humans. - http://www.anthrobase.com/Dic/eng/pers/mauss_marcel.htm
• Barbara Myerhoff - Secular Ritual’s. Barbara G. Myerhoff, “Chapter XI: We don’t wrap herring in a printed page: Fusion, fictions, and continuity in secular ritual.” 

Rituals:

Comfort (coffee helps me get out of bed..) 

Control 

Habitual - auto pilot

Morning and bedtime ritual 

Rituals can change 

Mordern day rituals: snoozing alarms in the morning, checking social media in bed in the morning, catching up on what you’ve missed when asleep.. 

Mobile phones, always in hand

Mindfulness and wellbeing 

Relaxation - candles.. candles are also used in spiritual rituals

Greeting people/introducing people to each other

Birthdays/celebrations 

Getting on the same train everyday.. 

Are rituals always positive?

Addiction, cults etc.. 

Rituals can be both positive and negative. Rituals order a space, giving extra meaning to it, in that moment while you are doing the ritual. 

Home Part 4 Notes: 

9/10/19

Just what is it that makes today’s homes so different? Richard Hamilton, 1992:

• Things have changed a lot.. computer, music system, microwave. This is supposedly a state of the art home, and Hamilton highlights peoples necessity to have the newest things at all time.. consumerism. 

Rachel Whiteread. House, 1993 British artist: 

• “House makes a point about the smallness and fragility of the spaces we actually live in, worry about, decorate.. all those things that are part of life.”
• Mould made from a house. East end London. Road of terrace houses. She filled one with concrete and the house was then pealed away leaving traces of all those lives, additions, bits of decorating, all that had changed over the hundreds of years..
• It's been demolished now.

Jeff Wall. Photographer and artist who makes very interesting observations of everyday life. He actually fakes it: View from an apartment. 2004 Tate.

• Actors and. Stage set - he fools you into thinking things are real, makes you believe that photography tells you the truth. 

Mona Hatoum. Home 1999:

• Quote - “I called it Home, because I see it as a work that shatters notions of the wholesomeness of the home envirnonment, the household , and the domain where the feminine resides. Having always had an ambiguious relationship with notions of family, home,, and the nurturing that is expected out of this situation. I often like the psychological disturbance to contradict those expectations.” 

We have talked about home being a place of refuge where you can make and remake yourself.. here, Hatoum questions that. On the table there are all different kitchen utensils which used in the right way are not threatening, used in a different way, they are weapons. 

Wille Doherty, photograph - The Bridge, 1992: 

• A bridge between two party of Derry, in Ireland. Two religious communities separated, divided, and connected by this bridge. 

An Ideal Home. Bruce Maclean. 

• Prints across the top of his images- some of the words, advertising campaigns, slogans when we see when we are being persuaded to buy things for our homes. 

Gregor Schneider - The Haus ur Totes Haus/ Dead House 2011:

• Germany. Interesting intervention into this ordinary looking house. The rooms are built inside other rooms. Rooms that were hidden, threatening and quite extraordinary. Undermining home as a place of safety. 

Absalon, Cell no 1 - 1992:

• Made a series of cells 
• Wood, fibreboard, fabric and fluorescent lights 
• 3.58 (insert text) 
• From an interior design point of view it is interesting about the requirements he needs for his body.. his mind.. his rituals.. in what he calls a cell. The drawings shows are what he uses to work them out.

Do Ho Soh. Home within a Home within a Home within a Home within a Home:

• National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art (MMCA) in Seoul. 2013. 
• Made from layers of netting. The light goes through the layers and each place lives within a place.  

Staircase III:

• Interested in the bits of the home we forget. (Home within a home is grand..)
• Staircase in an apartment he lived in, he has recorded the broken banister and additional light switches which has been put in..  a forgotten space

Heather Benning: The Dollhouse: Dusk 2 (2007): 

• Found Desert in america. An abandoned house. Re configured it. Re built it and kind of dressed it as a dollhouse with a piece of prospects. Then look at a degraded home, the idea of what home was meant to be.. 

Margaret Harrison - Little Woman at Home 1971: 

• Feminist art. Harrison questions all the things women should be doing in the home. 

Akram Zaatari - Hnayneh Madani’s parents’ home, the Liwan, Saida, Lebanon, 1948-53. Hashem el Madani, 2007:

• Photograph. Quiet, intimate, formal - the little boy has his shirt on, fresh flowers, table cloth. But if you look closely you can see all the props of this home - putting together a narrative of what this persons life is like, the kind of family he lives within.

Sun in an Empty Room, 1963 by Edward Hopper: 

• Interesting image as it is an empty place, there are no props in it. But being a human being we bring a story/narrative - has somebody moved out? Died? Is this a derelict place? Where is it? In a forest? City? 
• Everyone can create their own story - everyone can look at this painting and view it differnt.. just like we all view homelessness differently. 

Luc Tuymans, 4am:

• Making quiet and mysterious paintings of places he’s occupied. He’s woken up at 4am and this is what he sees. 

Luc Tuymans, Bedroom 2014:

• Lie in bed, look up and see the light fitting 

Yayoi Kusama: Obliteration Room, 2011: 

• Airbnb -made a deal. Competition
• Artist will transform the winner’s room into an artwork.

Semi-detached 2004 - Michal Landy:

• Devine gallery - Tate 
• Working class life.
• Identity
• Usefulness
• The home
• Landy wanted to consider what happens to identity when you are no longer part of a productive system.
• His father had been working his whole life and then became ill and wasn’t able to work anymore and was kind of confined to his home. About working class homes. About ideas and usefulness and about the home. 

House of my Father 1996:

• Donald Rodney
• Someways a self portrait. This tiny home made from his skin, he suffered and was very sick, a portrait of himself from himself..
• Identity
• Sickness
• Fragility 

Paula Rego. The Family:

• Is he home safe? An ambiguous, dangerous, political place.
• Family scences, nursery rhymes, children stories.. talks about the home being a safe place.
• Is this a safe place? You bring a narrative to this image.

Phyllida Barlow - Upturned House. 2012:

• Manipulation - Accumulation
• “How I’m physically negotiating the spaces is often more important than the object itself. They are obstacles to be navigated, protagonists that I feel I’m encountering.”
• The house is almost too big for the gallery space 

• A Surrealist approach to home/house Louise Bourgeois 
• A surrealist and made lots of work around the idea of femininity, femaleness  
• The home, our roles, our rituals 
• The materials she uses are interesting - soap, fabric, marble, felt

Beirut Caoutchouc 2004-2008:

• Marvan Rechmaoui 
• The green line that divided Christian and Muslim communities during the Lebanese civil war (1975-90) is absent.
• This art piece maps a terrain empty of political and religious divisions. (perhaps the home he wants)
• It uses rubber to represent the cities resilience. 

What is home?

Where is home?

What is family?

Is a home a battle ground? A place of refuge?

Is it political? Are their hierarchies?

How does the architecture, how do the interiors shape your behaviours?

What are your rituals? Does your home facilitate them?

Home Part 3 Notes:

9/10/19

We can’t think about home without thinking about:

• Homelessness 
• Solutions 

Definition of a refugee: “A person who has been forced to leave their country in order to escape war, persecution, or natural disaster.

• Architecture is a witness to human suffering (Richard Peter, Dresden After Ailsed Raids, bombing, Germany 1945) 2nd world war.

Don McCullin is an interesting photographer: Mother and Son, Bradford 1978

• A relatively short time ago, look at the way these people live.. 
• McCullin is very good at photographing and emphasising with his subjects. 

• 6,500 people sleep rough on the streets of London every year. 
• 1,079 people sleep rough every night in Westminster. (image of the Ritz)
• Peoples lives moving at the same time… we can ignore them if we try.. get caught up in our own busy lives. 
• In London every day 15 more people are sleeping rough for the first time 
• Architecture responds to this.. you will see aggressive pieces of architecture throughout London and other cities which on the face may seem friendly and a place to sit down. But actually is designed to stop people loitreing, sleeping, sitting when they don’t have other places to go.
• Royal Courts of Justice -Interestingly outside the Royal Courts of Justice which would be very hard to sleep on.

• The Camden Bench - you can perch on it while waiting for a bus but their is no way you could sleep on it.. 

• Spikes often put on the fronts of hotels, offices .. again to stop people spending time there.

Waukesha, Wisconsin, United States:

• Fascinating photography from Georgaphic magazine. A photograph of three lives happening in parallel. The guy sleeping or collapsed outside of the coffee shop and the two women inside3 who clearly think the photograph is about them. They are happy, smiling, getting on with their day and these lives are not crossing over although they are so near each other. 

Gardens: Dutch photographer Henk Wildschut travelled to Shousha refugee camp, Tunisia, 2011:

• No longer exists 
• Crazy to think people in such stressful situations still make homes. This is a picture of a places laid out like a home with a garden.

The Global Soul - book extract:

• Talks about somebody who was thinking in an abstract way about homelessness and then becomes homeless 

“When I arrived at my house, high up on a ridge, two-thirds of the way up the mountain, it was to find a smoking ash tray sea. Bronze statues had been reduced to nothing; filing cabinets were husks. All the props of my parents’ sixty years, all the notes and prospects I’d been collecting for fifteen years, all the photographs, memories - all the past - gone.

I’d often referred to myself as homeless - an Indian born in England and moving to California as a boy, with no real base of operations or property even in my thirties. I’d spent much of the previous year among the wooden houses of Japan, reading the “burning house” poems of Buddhist monks and musing on the value of living without possessions and a home. But now all the handy metaphors were actual, and the lines of the poems, included in the manuscript that was the only thing in my shoulder bag when I fled, were my only real foundations for a new fin de siècie life.

•  Andy Palfreeman: photographed all of doorways he slept in as a homeless person.

Home Part 2 Notes:

9/10/19

How our homes are laid out influences our behaviours:

London Victorian homes: 

Quotation from a book called ideal homes: The ideal Victorian home is therefore more accurately defined as a kind of battleground: a place of constant struggle to maintain privacy, security and respectability in a dangerous world.” 

Are those things relevant to me in my home? Ie respectability, privacy and security.

Is it a dangerous world?

Victorian home: Front of the house for people who lived there, back of the house, also for people who lived there but for people who worked as servants or served the people at the front.. Tiny bedrooms for maids.. 

Hierarchies, Relationships and Power are all supported by architecture.. Power structures.

Is the home a complex arrangement of spaces. A place for family rituals. A ‘display cabinet’ of social virtues. Still true?

• Home is a place where space and time are controlled and structured functionally, economically, aesthetically and morally and where domestic communitarian practices are realised. (Rapport and Dawson, 1998: 6; Douglas 1991).
• Communitarianism: Is a philosophy that emphasises the connection between the individual and the community. The community might be a family unit.. 
• William S. Sax - “People and the places where they reside are engaged in a continuing set of exchanges; they have determinate, mutual effects upon each other because they are part of a single, interactive system.”
• The architecture, the house, the family, the ritual.. all roles into one system.

Pleasant Hill. Shaker village. KY, USA.

• Two front doors. Men live on one side, women live on the other.. 
• They invited people to join their families.. even though they are divided by their gender it is a family unit. 
• Isolation
• Communal Living 
• Looking in 
• Religious communities quite often isolate themselves geographically, architecturally from other places. IG - The monastery of Saint Catherine is the Sinai of Egypt. 565 AD. Very hard to get to, very isolated.. looks like a fortress, very self sufficient. 
• Pierre Thilbault, Abbaye Val Notre Dame, France - self sufficiant.. the same thing
• Watkhaobuddahkodom, Chonburi Province - Thailand, completed 2009-2010
• Facilitates the walking meditation the monks do - daily ritual. The architecture they have had built, enables them to practice what they need to on a daily basis. A family unit as such and the architecture in the same system.
• Suriya Umpansiriratana’s “Monk Cell Project” turns the monastery itself into a symbolic visualisation of a monk’s spartan routines.
• Solitary confinement cell at IIa in Norway - Minimal aesthetic
• Air B&B in Mexico - Luxury
• They do have things in common : The spareness, clearly content is important..
• Difference to being alone and lonely.. choosing to be alone
• Dzochen, Sichuan Tibet, 2011 - Alone, Lonely
• Structures found, adapted, built.. which facilitate living solo
• Difference in behaviours when we are alone or with our family.

Dementia village built for people in Denmark :

Residence who live here have their old homes replicated because change is hard to deal with and adjust too. It looks like where they used to live but they can’t leave so is this protection, imprisonment, security, familiarity. Can it be all of those things?

Homes Part 1 Notes:

9/10/19

• Everyone we have ever met has lived on the earth. Our planet is a lonely spec in the cosmic dark. 
• 49% of 20 to 24 year olds live in the family home 
• In 2016 there were 65 million people in the UK, 7.7 million lived alone and most of them were women

Home definitions:

• The place where one lives permanently, especially as a member of a family or household. - Oxford English Dictionary.
• Where are you?
• Someone’s or something’s place of origin, or the place where a person feels they belong. - Cambridge English Dictionary.

 Which one of those is home for me? - For me I wouldn’t say that a place makes my home feel like my home as I have lived in many different places and homes. I would say it is about the people I am living with, my family that make my house feel like a home. So the top definition would voice my definition of a home. 

• Home is (a) place, (a) space, feelings, practices and/or an active state of being in the world.
• Home is an interaction between place and social relationships (what you do with the people you know and love)
• People have been debating the idea of home for hundreds of years - “There is nothing more admirable than when two people who see eye to eye keep house as man and wife, confounding their enemies and delighting their friends.” - Homer, The Odyssey 8C, BC.
• If you type in ‘Home’ on google you get the stereotypical images of a home which are informed by the dominant cultures 
• Home is a powerful idea, used cleverly by the media to sell us things : ie Ikea, British Gas, Halifax, John Lewis.. 
• Nostalgia is important in ideas of selling ‘Home’ to us, as it was always better in the past… Habit 1971, House by John Lewis 2015 
• Western conceptions of home privilege a physical structure or dwelling, such as a house, flat, institution or caravan 

Zadie Smith, White Teeth, 2000 - “These days, it feels to me like you make a devil’s pact when you walk into this country. You hand over your passport at the check-in, you get stamped, you want to make a little money, get yourself started..  but you mean to go back! Who would want to stay? Cold, wet, miserable; terrible food, dreadful newspapers - who would want to stay? In a place where you are never welcomed, only tolerated. Just tolerated. Like you are an animal finally house-trained. 

Transnational : Extending or operating across national boundaries 

• The assumption that people will live their lives in one place, according to our set of national and cultural norms, in countries with impermeable national borders, is not longer true!
• ‘Home’ can be more than one place of emotional or physical importance.

Notion of family:

• The notion of family is broad (and changing) and encompasses a variety of different social structures beyond the classic conception of the nuclear family.
• For most people, notions of home are intimately tied to notions of family
• A network society and the pervasiveness of digital technologies means that the boundaries between our home lives and working lives are blurred 
• Digital technologies help us mediate the absences that come from periods of working or studying away from home
• Rituals are part of family life

Wolin and Bennet have defined family ritual as “a symbolic form of communication that, owing to the satisfaction that family members experience through its reception, is acted out in a systematic fashion over time. 

Bringing family groups together :

• Family film viewing
• Religious practice, Puja as part of the ‘home’
• Birthday candles (celebrations) Home