Head on Hand​

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Claudio Sgarbi & Talia Trainin

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A motto abused by architects is “the truth is what you make.” We propose to reflect on  “the truth of what you do not make” by pondering on the melancholic gesture par  excellence: head on hand. 

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What is the hand (the thinking hand) thinking about while holding  its head?  

 

The head has its own heaviness—head on hand is the gesture of  pondering, pondus being weight and weightiness—particularly  heavy for the human species in this “thoughtful” position. Such is the importance of the silence of the gesture in the “language of the  flesh”: the philosophy of the embodied mind. The human “has no  place to lay his head” (Luke 9:58). But this no-place is more of a  place than the many non-places we have created so far.  

 

This emblematic gesture spans from dejection and barrenness through creative doubt and uncertainty to  metaphoric embodiment. We trace this dichotomy between a  negative and a positive mode of melancholia by alluding to the  works of artists and poets-philosophers, such as Shakespeare’s  Hamlet and Macbeth, Keats’ “Negative Capability,” Merleau-Ponty’s  “Cezanne’s Doubt,” Rilke’s “Live the Question Now,” Bachelard’s  “Power-of-not,” Frascari’s “Slowness,” Byung-Chul’s “Vita Contemplativa.”  

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What is the other hand doing while the left is holding the head? Dürer’s angel, who cannot soar, is loosely holding a compass (or a divider) with his right hand on the hidden, uneven surface of his lap. What is the negation that might spring out from this dejected position? The angel does not seem to be able to make sense of the agglomeration of emblematic objects of reason, perfection and techne. In contradistinction,  John Donne’s worldmaking conceit of the relational compass in “A  Valediction: Forbidding Mourning” conjures up the openness of vast, new  horizons and prospects. According to Panofsky, the dejected figure of Melencholia I cannot extend her thought beyond the limits of space: “Hers is the inertia of a  being which renounces what it could reach because it cannot reach for what it longs.” One might even think that the desire of architects for concrete and tangible objects could refer to this renunciation. 

 

While running the risk of sinking into melancholy and inaction is inevitable for those who question meaning, who pause to reflect before acting, an architectural epochè and an architecture of doubt inform artistic creativity, based on the suspension of the head, of judgement—on the slowness  

of hesitation. 

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As Pasolini, contemplating his work of art and comparing it with the tableau vivant of life,  said, “why should we realize a work when it’s so beautiful to imagine it?”. We propose to consider these complementary aspects of melancholia—despondency and  Élan vital —in terms of embodied gesture and embodied language, connectedness versus split (self/world; head/hand); fallow time versus reckless action as fundamental for the  architectural imagination and praxis and suggest that there might be a pregnant moment  whereby the cut between paralyzing spleen and productive joy becomes a trait d’union.