94. ADAM KNIGHT: A SPACE BETWEEN SPATIAL AND TEMPORAL.
Jencksianagram, The Cosmic House - LONDON.
Adam Knight, Cosmic Viewer (Winter), Various Dimensions, Laminate card and convex lenses.
Please introduce Jencksianagram?
Jencksianagram is an exhibition at The Cosmic House in London. The House is a Grade 1 listed building designed by Maggie Keswick and Charles Jencks modified from a late-Georgian house. The Cosmic House remains one of the most notable examples of post-modern architecture in the UK. It is currently used as an archive, museum and exhibition space open to the public. Jencksianagram comprises a number of works: stereographic slides, a set of viewers, a small publication and sculpture. The title combines Jencksiana – which is Charles’ invented symbol used throughout The Cosmic House– with stereogram: two similar images mounted side-by-side. Since late 2023, I’ve been a regular visitor and researcher to the Architectural Library. The Library contains Charles’ vast architectural slide collection which he used and reused to illustrate his lectures and publications. I spent many months methodically viewing every one of the thousands of slides in the Slidescrapers. In doing so I identified near-duplicates in the archive and used them to assemble stereograms – a pair of almost identical two-dimensional images that when displayed side-by-side in a stereoscopic viewer, is optically perceived as a three-dimensional image.
Adam Knight, Cosmic Viewers (Summer and Winter) and Cosmic Slide, Photo: Thierry Bal.
The accompanying book which supports the exhibition, 'Hold all Holes', is beautiful, in production and also in text. Please can you expand upon the notion of 'a slackened gaze' within the context of the exhibition.
Thank you. I’m always hesitant to include texts as work within exhibitions. I feel there can be an uneasy relationship between writing as poetic inquiry and my tendency to outline a method or rationale for the work. However the silence of the archive initiated a desire to speak aloud, whereupon I fastidiously recorded voice notes as I left the archive each week. These fragmented meditations helped structure ‘Hold All Holes’. The publication’s title is from a correspondence between the architect Terry Farrell and his clients Maggie and Charles early on in The Cosmic House’s construction. The phrase ‘Hold all Holes’ was capitalised and underlined, recommending a pause to construction work. For me this was an important spatial and temporal methodology. It helped me to think about ellipsis within the archive. Charles identifies the intrinsic quality of postmodern architecture as having double meaning. ‘To hold’ being both a command to wait and an act of support. Charles was fascinated by the power of metaphors in understanding architecture; he speaks eloquently about this in relation to Le Corbusier’s chapel in Ronchamp. Charles admired the ability of postmodern architecture to codify and play with different readings. In English, there is a similar metaphorical richness around vision and visuality; ‘tunnel vision’, ‘soft focus’, ‘blind-spot’ and so on. So going back to your citing of the term ‘Slackened Gaze’, I wanted to set up a very particular way of viewing the exhibition. The demand of stereoscopic viewing is to resist direct looking and to occupy a lucid state of gazing, a practice analogous to hearing rather than listening. Even though the Cosmic Viewers are an apparatus enabling specific viewing to take place, the experience is still reliant on the visitor optically completing the work. So this too becomes a kind of allegory for engaging with the work of art: to be aware of the conditions and structures enabling the experience.
Adam Knight, Cosmic Viewer - (Autumn) and Cosmic Slide.
Within this site specific exhibition, the sense of atmosphere is very pronounced. How have you expressed this within the curation of Jencksianagram?
I read a recent review of Tai Shani’s exhibition
‘The World to Me Was A Secret: Caesious, Zinnober, Celadon, and Virescent’ – also on show at The House – saying something to the effect that sites don’t get more specific than The Cosmic House. Having worked with sites and situations for the past fifteen years, I feel the practice benefits from having a relationship with a strong context that often the built world provides.
I deeply enjoy the process of bringing to bear my sensibilities and dispositions alongside existing frameworks and structures. There’s a lot of figuring out, being responsive and attentive to where certain interests may take you. I wrote my MA thesis on the importance of distancing the work from the place of production to the site of presentation. Although I no longer have such a dogmatic position, in a way I’ve understood my work through this dichotomy. This is more pronounced where archival objects remain inside the controlled environment of the archive. My visits would often coincide with guided tours of The Cosmic House. As visitors entered the Architectural Library I would be present at the desk researching. In this setting I had a strong sense that I was ‘performing research’, that is to say participating in the life of The House. I became more and more conscious of the Library as a multi-layered space. I’d have passing conversations with other researchers and ongoing discussions with Archivist and Collections Manager Anna McNally. All these activities got me closer to how I imagined the Library was used when Charles was alive - a place of debate, conversation and wonderment. The original intention for the Cosmic Viewers was to install them on the light-tables in the Architectural Library. The tables operate as windows looking down into the Summer Room. It's a clever piece of design where aspects of the room mediate between environments (similarly the undulating roof designed by Maggie originally followed the curvature of the hanging branches above). The decision to present the work in the room adjacent to the Library (Maggies Study) helps to retain certain atmospherics but without being reliant on the specifics of the Library. In the exhibition, the lightboxes play an important role in illuminating the stereograms. A key gesture was to use a warmer light in the boxes which felt more in keeping with the surroundings of the house, rather than the museological cool blue that I was working with in the Library.
Adam Knight, Cosmic Viewers (Spring and Autumn) and Cosmic Slide, Photo: Thierry Bal.
You mention the notion of boxes holding artifacts, which were not originally intended for that use as being a 'surrogate object'... I found this to be fascinating...
Charles' voice and approach is so strong and present throughout the house, the archive and related materials. In 1972 Charles Jencks and Nathan Silver wrote a manifesto on Adhocism. In it they advocate an approach towards the improvisational by using things to hand to solve design problems. The Architectural Library begins as an ambitious conceptual organisation for Charles’ collection, with each book case designed around a particular architectural style: baroque, classicism and so on. As the library expanded according to his needs and interests, these systems started to break down, or rather became corrupted - additional shelves and compartments were installed to accommodate the growing collection.
The ‘Slidescrapers’ are two 5-foot high towers that are dedicated to his image collection. Each metal drawer is tightly packed with varying configurations and contortions of slide boxes. I could see that some slides were housed in after dinner mint packaging. The boxes’ scale and dimensions neatly stack 35mm mounted slides. In one of our early meetings, Anna emphasised that the word archive has a double-meaning: archive as the both collection and the architecture it resides in. The Library, Slidescrapers and slide boxes exemplify this. What I found fascinating was that in places, different kinds of tape were used to reinforce and repair the boxes. The same tape was also used to crop visual details in the slides that Charles included in his teaching materials. Tape becomes a common motif of repair, maintenance and attention. The context of the exhibition arrives at the moment where institutional structures emerge around the archive, and the tensions between Charles’ idiosyncrasies and archival demands play out.
Adam Knight, Cosmic Viewer (Spring) and Cosmic Slide.
Within your research within this specific archive - have you discovered any unanswered questions within Charles Jencks life's work?
The Architectural Library constitutes a unique body of knowledge that challenges orthodox approaches to archiving and digitisation. I enjoy aspects of research that reveal things that would have otherwise been ignored or overlooked. There is an interplay between the formalities of the collection and playful elements of Charles’ identity. Early on in my research, I came across a torn article from a magazine. On one side was a review of an exhibition on East Asian ceramics at the Victoria & Albert Museum, and on the back an advertisement for Medite - manufacturer of Medium Density Fibreboard (used throughout The Cosmic House). Both pages would have interested Charles equally, but what do you focus on in this instance? Furthermore I’ve come to know Charles via anecdotes or through conversations with those who work at The Cosmic House. For instance, the challenge of deciphering his handwriting or how a recurring set of initials required decoding to understand their purpose. In response to the work, I was asked by Lily Jencks (daughter of Charles, The Keeper of Visions and Chairwoman) to what extent Charles was annotating his slides.
I recognise in that question I hold certain insights into the collection that others may not have, even those who were very close to him. I’ve been the only researcher to look through every slide in the Slidecrapers. The slide pairs in the exhibition would have been taken sequentially, allowing us to share his experiences of time between the two photographs. In this way, the work opens up a dialogue with Charles. My time as a researcher and subsequent producer of Jencksianagram resulted in my admission into the digital archive as a ‘named figure’ (alongside previous artists). In a minor way the project becomes part of the history of the House. The reciprocity of archive to artwork is very interesting to me, and hopefully is in keeping with the spirit of how Charles envisioned the way his work and The Cosmic House could be interpreted.
The Cosmic House Jencks Foundation, 19 Lansdowne Walk, London, W11 3AH.