to make the indoors more visual, sits on the table.
This second-century Roman mosaic, known as Unswept Floor, has removed everything thematic or visual that is not about the simple pleasure of indoor looking. We do not see the people or the food table, but what has fallen from it. It is as if someone yanked the tablecloth in a still life.
This is underneath, domestic looking. We see secrets here. A house is full of visual secrets. There is even a mouse nibbling on a nut. In his book The Poetics of Space, philosopher Gaston Bachelard says that our home is our corner of the world, seized upon by our imaginations. It is nested looking. A home is a nest which is contained within larger nests – villages, cities and nations.
In the Tarkovsky image, home is seized upon by his imagination. The camera is not under a table, but is inside. There is a security to the image. We are not exposed, we are not outside trying to get in. We are looking at the children, who in turn look outside. Doors and windows as eyes of sorts. The kids are like Caspar David Friedrich’s man on the mountain top, staring across the misty hills. Again there is a mythic dimension: in Tarkovsky’s image the home is womb-like, a haven, the place where our living starts, our looking starts. It is a harbour image. The sea will be rougher beyond the harbour.
At first glance it seems to have little in common with this image of a home, from Early Summer by Yasujiro Ozu, whose image of red flowers against a green fence we considered earlier.
This home does not exclude light. We can see everything. And where Tarkovsky’s image was high contrast, this one is mostly mid tones, shades of grey. Yet this home invites looking even more than the previous one. The image is rigorously composed of squares within squares. Including its outer edge, we can count five concentric frames. The camera is at kneeling height. A dozen verticals are balanced by a dozen horizontals. Tonality and composition give the scene great equilibrium. Add in the fact that Ozu and cinematographer Yûharu Atsuta have used a long lens to flatten the image and we have the sense that they are trying to deny the z-axis, that mythic departure that the Tarkovsky image evokes.
The fact that the image seems to hold the women within it, rather than encourage them to leave it, resonates in the film and for the theme of looking and home. The woman on the right is Noriko, a twenty-five-year-old whose family thinks she should be married by now, and so has found her a suitor. Their sense of how a woman’s life must unfold in Japan means that she should not still be in the family home. She should be looking for a man and to the future and at her own home. Noriko, however, gently and with good humour, rejects their plan. She feels that her departure should not be so predetermined. And the image seems to back her up. It is unheroic, non-injunctive. It says that a home is not necessarily a departure terminal. It is a waiting area, a place in which to consider, to people-watch, to experience time passing. We can imagine that the two adults in the Ozu image are the two kids in the Tarkovsky image, twenty years later, having done a tour d’horizon and then returned home.
© FLC/DAGP, Paris
In the twentieth century the Swiss architect Le Corbusier started to think about what a home within a home would look like. In his 1959 French priory La Tourette, he wondered what the simplest living space would be for friars meeting for collective experiences – eating, worshipping, teaching, etc. – during the day, within the broader building, but who would then want to retire to private space to study and sleep. After seeing Greek and Italian monasteries and the cabins on ocean liners, he came up with these minimalist, cellular rooms, each of which looked onto a view.
When we want to escape human interaction, he thought, we need a pure space made of simple materials and satisfying proportions. The physical space was small but the looking space was not. Perspective takes your eye to the balcony and beyond. The image is similar to Vincent Van Gogh’s famous painting of his simple bedroom: the bed on the right, a chair and desk to the left, a green floor, a window at the far end, towards the vanishing point.
When we look at our homes and the homes of others we see machines for living. Our sense of the objects in the world grows.
DESIGN AND THE THINGS AROUND US
On the table in La Tourette we can see an Anglepoise lamp, one of the few things in the room that is not at a right angle. Its name alone – Anglepoise – tells us that it cares about geometry and balance. Le Corbusier will have chosen it for its good design.
Design is everywhere. In his book Principles of Gestalt Psychology (1935), German psychologist Kurt Koffka wrote that a handle ‘wants to be grasped’ and that a post box invites you to post a letter. ‘Things tell us what to do with them,’ he argued, and used the word Aufforderungscharakter – literally ‘prompt character’ – to describe how they prompt us to understand how they should be deployed. To ask if something is well designed is to ask if it is a solution, if it functions well in its surroundings, if it makes us think Of course, if it uses materials well, if its form is clear or imaginative, if it makes the thing desirable.
Looking is central to design. A child begins by grasping the things that are closest to it – its own feet and hands. The earliest people shaped tools, weapons and cooking utensils by considering what they had to do, but also what they looked like. We will get to architectural and fashion design later in this book, but for now let’s consider seven objects from the worlds of domesticity, fashion, work, science and sport that early and then later lookers made, and how they were shaped by looking. Each is a design classic. To make it easier to see their forms, none of them have colour.
The first is an Iranian bowl from 3000 BCE, when Egypt was first unified, and when the potter’s wheel was introduced in China.
Its nimble base supports a wide receptacle which might have held herbs, grapes, honey, figs or cucumbers, all of which were eaten at the time. A wider base would have made it sturdier, but the potter will have seen elegance in the contrast in the base and rim circumferences, an opening out, a flowering. Only the inside is decorated. The dark lines are hard edged and bold. They visually echo basket weaving, which was popular in this area of Iran – near both Afghanistan and the Gulf. The painter confidently gives the bowl four rims, and a set of circles which emphasise the volume, the belly. There is nothing figurative here, there are no animals or plants, but there is pleasure in shape, in swooping the eye into the bowl, then around its edge. It was defined twice: once by its maker, then by its decorator. This is a functional object and an optical one.
As is this Celtic St Ninian’s brooch. It is from the early Middle Ages, around CE 800, when Zen Buddhism was dominant in Asia, while Christianity was in central and southern Europe. Vikings were attacking Scotland, where the brooch was found. Made of Pictish silver, it was used to fasten a cape, the centre of the needle being under the material.
In the Iranian bowl none of the bold stripes intersect, but here the silversmith has lines in the top pattern weave under themselves, then dart backwards and repeat the process to meet their own tails and create trefoils. Pictish design delights in moving our eyes in this way. And it loves horseshoe shapes, and playing with circles too. Visually we want to complete the brooch’s main circle, but medallion discs on each arm bring our eyes to a halt with the right amount of visual weight, and five concentric circles in each. The pin boldly bisects all this soft metal curving. The brooch would work just as well with a much shorter pin, but the latter’s length – twice the diameter of the horseshoe – is a confident geometric slash. Wear it at your left shoulder, and the pin points to your heart. Pictish art was often body art, which is why it is so popular in tattoo parlours.
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