Utzon

Utzon

Utzon

1. concrete primal naked forms—
the anti-constructs of
cranes
stooping
low over the quays—
theme &
variation—
the harbour's in-
violate curve
de-scribing
a law of
simultaneous contrast / in sections of
scaffolded light

2. . . . c.1970 le repos
du modèle
(vivisection of
the nude, industrial:
sub-
cutaneous geometries
proliferate
towards incompletion)
sur cette verge
terrestre
like an immovable sphinx
absorbed
in its own enigma

3. “a sail surmounts the steep slope
of this
            white profile”
[the incongruous object had to be
arranged pictorially—
the investigation of depth
study of volumes, measures—
re-assembled as hypothesis
vis-à-vis eroded limits of
the body
a radial (system) of convex
                    &cylindrical surfaces . . .]

4. fluid mechanism of a frame &
wave-motion
writes / into the littoral, parabolic . . .
a crisis versus: angular inclined forms
lit from behind, hard and solid
“correspondences”
which nevertheless remain detached
from any “natural history”
emblematic
of what, there, barely remains /
                                    no longer remains

5. withdrawn beneath its shell the sea
enormous & delicate
like a soprano—allegory of silences, of
being silenced
“words that have no (other) past” . . .
re-inforced concrete surfaces  arranged along
an axis of the visible / invisible—
vertiginous
zone of gravitation (the weight
of hollow sentiment
falling in sculptured folds about the spectral
body) ciphered
in fake notations of
                                  perspective, an eyelid
caught mid-beat & dark iris looking out
through a haze
of rain on discloured wave-forms

6. in the sky its reflection had become “overcast”
ambivalence masking the arduous futility
human-animal-skeletal abstraction
or paradigm for representing death? each of its veils
caught in the freeze-frame of involuntary
memory-mockingly fatalistic
as the ever arched backs of approaching waves
like endlessly repeated question marks
[perceived at a distance this ballet mécanique
resembles a process
                                      in differing stages of term-
ination—casting the delayed substance
in ration to ephemerality] & always en retrait(e)
from that impossible traverse-rigor mortic
in the too literal gaze of conscientious on-lookers