Unfinished

1) Why did you choose to come to Canada? Tell about the conditions before coming and what attracted you here.

"Because Canada is an experiment - think about this, English and French couldn’t defeat each other and so made a nation together. Hence the “other” becomes an essential part of who you are. I thought that would be a fertile ground to strike roots - to do here what I was doing back home in Bombay (oops! Mumbai) – architecture, poetry and calligraphy (though I miss the Arabian Sea as I grew up in a house on its coast)."

Read more…
2) How was the move itself?
3) How easy/hard was it for you to get involved in architecture in Canada? What helped you find success?
4) What would you suggest to new immigrants who wish to get into the field

Interviewed by Rotem Yaniv;
Canadian Immigrant (online magazine)
November 2009

Cross Reference. See also:
"Between Two Tongues: Falling at The Speed of Light" in the Articles Section
"Impossible Toronto"  in the Articles Section
"Meditation on Clockfaces" in the Articles Section
"Flying Into Watercity" in the Articles Section
"The Travelling Nonvegetarian" in the Poetry Section

This is a completion of the unfinished Schubert Sonata in F sharp minor first movement (from the bar after the original score breaks off). If you are interested in the completed fourth movement to have the Sonata complete, please mail me for details.

The Rondanini Pietà (1552-1564) engages the viewer in an embodied and temporal process of perceiving the becomings of sculpted form—rough and smooth surfaces, indentations, fissures andcontours—enfolded in the material and physical qualities of the marble block and its flesh-like surface. Emphasizing the process of creating the work, a multitude of chisel marks animate sculpted matter and prolong the eventual pausing of the viewer’s eyes. The materiality of the stone urges the viewer to move around to perceive the sculpture as it becomes transfigured anew through the continuous morphing of the facial and bodily features of its two figures: Christ and the Virgin. Deterring the comprehensibility of the subject matter, the enfolding of matter and form, conceptualized as the 'infinito', calls attention to the very rhetorical and ontological nature of the work as sculpture.

Kept in private collections for several centuries, the Rondanini Pietà is an uncommissioned sculpture considered to be the last work by Michelangelo Buonarroti. To interpret this Pietà, scholars have utilized established biographical, iconographic, and chronological approaches to the artist’s oeuvre. In 1934, Charles de Tolnay published the first modern study of the work, interpreting it as a testament of the artist’s religiosity—an interpretation that dominates the scholarship. Focusing primarily on a discussion of the Rondanini Pietà, this thesis introduces a concept of the infinito and with it a theoretical framework to expose the overdetermined nature of this scholarship. Judging the work to be either finished or unfinished (finito or non-finito) scholars rehearse the Cartesian dichotomy of res extensa and res cogitans, segregating matter from form and denying sculpture its ontological quality.

In order to understand what comes prior to the processes of description, interpretation and contextualization, what is at stake is to rethink how we approach sculpture as a medium that has specific physical and material characteristics that determine its rhetorical potential. Making the viewer part of how sculpture works to make temporally visible the becomings of form, the concept of the 'infinito' challenges us to reflect upon the methodologies used in the study of sculpture produced in the period.

CONTENTS
Introduction: The Rondanini Pietà and the Infinito
Limits of Interpretation: Historiography and Iconography of the Rondanini Pietà
Leon Battista Alberti: The Rhetoric and Visibility of Sculpture
Locating Sculpted Matter in Sixteenth-Century Art Theory
The Concepts of Matter and Form: A Brief Look at Modern Philosophy
The Infinito: Perceiving the Temporal Enfolding of Matter and Form

In search of the unfinishedness of the theatrical place

Based on that the origin of the word “performance” means "to complete", this article offers a proposition that the spaces where the performing arts are performed, namely the theatrical places, are "unfinished" but complete, even "liberated", when the audience enters and watches the performance. This article discusses this proposition through examples both designed but not built and realized since the 1970s. In the context of the notion of atmosphere in architecture, where the emotions felt while being in “here” and “now” by focusing the bodily presence, it is concluded that the atmosphere of the found spaces contains more of the unfinishedness than the designed ones. The article ends with the question of whether one of the ways to achieve unfinishedness in the theatrical places designed from scratch is through creating atmosphere.

The fist-hand results on Leonardo's technique coming from the analyses carried out on the Adoration of the Magi, currently under treatment at the Opificio delle Pietre Dure in Florence. A scientific systematization and some art-history openness.

This article examines Aleksei Balabanov’s unfinished film The American and the various accompanying texts that contribute to our understanding of its place in the filmmaker’s biography. A published script, a court case, unreleased film footage and the memories of participants exist as interpretations of this unrealised project. The American was a contributing factor to the acknowledged demarcation that divides Balabanov’s life and oeuvre into two distinct phases. Given Balabanov’s enduring popularity, it is also germane to discuss the afterlife of The American, as a completed version might add to the filmmaker’s cinematic legacy. The accumulated texts that accompany this unrealised project must also be acknowledged when discussing Balabanov’s other incomplete projects. In so doing, one gains perspective on the filmmaker’s present, and potentially his future, biography as Balabanov’s posthumous legacy remains fluid six years after his death.

Winner of the 2020 Manfred Lautenschlaeger Award for Theological Promise

"Without question, this is an excellent book. Larsen's writing is crisp, succinct, and evocative. His analysis is fresh and direct. I often find myself wondering, "How'd this guy find all these case studies?"-and every answer I can imagine requires exceptional diligence and ingenuity." -- Greg Carey, Lancaster Theo­logical Seminary, The Christian Century

"This book exemplifies and is itself facilitating a paradigm shift in gospel studies. No longer can interpreters approach the gospels without duly considering what kind of text it is that they are handling." -- Review of Biblical Literature

"[an] elegantly written volume ... An invaluable resource for those seeking a clearer understanding of ancient literature, including (but by no means limited to) religious texts ... Highly recommended." -- L. J. Greenspoon, CHOICE

"I commend this book to a wide reading audience, especially within the guild. All serious readers of Mark -- especially those of us who read it as story -- should engage this book. It invites fresh consideration of the emergence of the Gospel tradition in textual form." -- Danny Yencich, Reading Religion

"With Gospels before the Book, Matthew Larsen offers a crucial intervention in studies of the Christian Gospels. As he demonstrates, anachronistic assumptions about the closed character of books and a persistent investment in the 'genius of the author' have led modern scholars to miss an important fact: the Gospels, and Mark in particular, were not regarded as closed texts by early Christian readers. Instead, they were received as unfinished instantiations of a continuous and fluid gospel tradition that remained open to expansion and revision by later writers interested in 'publishing' (in an ancient sense) books of their own. Larsen's stunning investigation will forever change the ways that biblical scholars, historians, and textual critics approach texts we thought we knew."--Jennifer Knust, author of To Cast the First Stone: The Transmission of a Gospel Story with Tommy Wasserman

"It is rare that one reads a work of scholarship that changes the terms of engagement for an entire field of study, but that is exactly what Matthew Larsen has done in his Gospels before the Book. In this deeply textured study, he dismantles a host of unhelpful assumptions operative in New Testament studies about ancient authors and the status of ancient books as published documents. You'll never view the Gospels the same way again."--Stephen J. Davis, author of Christ Child: Cultural Memories of a Young Jesus

"How often does it happen that you read something new and convincing that solves a large and centuries old problem, especially on such an overpublished field as the New Testament Gospels? This book does that! It is probably the best book on the Gospel of Mark and the synoptic Gospels in general, since they were written. It is a truly groundbreaking book that offers a novel and fully convincing interpretation of the Gospel of Mark, namely as incomplete archival notes. The argument is well-crafted, based just as much in deep knowledge of a wide range of sources (Jewish, Greek, Roman, Christian) as in sophisticated critical scholarship. This work is a field changer and will be the foundation for future gospel studies."--AnneMarie Luijendijk, Professor of Religion, Head of Wilson College, Princeton University

This contribution proposes how beholders may internally process unfinished works of art. It does so by considering five of Michelangelo Buonarroti's interrupted sculptures and pointing out their empathic and imaginative potential. The beholder focused on the surface, I propose, is inclined to mentally simulate the artist's gesture that drafted the sculptures through the visible graphic signs of the chisels. This inner simulation takes place within the activation of various brain networks, located in the brain's motor system. Renaissance authors associated the observation of the unfinished to learning and, as this article shows, this assumption seems to find confirmation in recent neuroscientific studies on mirror neurons and imitation learning. In this way, the empathic engagement established between the beholder and the work of art observed-as well as the role played by embodied simulation and imagination in this kind of visual perception-clarifies how the incompleteness can also have that peda-gogical function recognised by Giorgio Vasari and Benvenuto Cellini.

This essay addresses the debate on the unfinished in the visual arts from classical antiquity to the Italian Renaissance and its aesthetic implications. It is divided into two sections. The first section analyses the history of the unfinished, focusing on the debate that unfinished sculptures and paintings have stirred among theorists, artists, and the public. This provides a definition, or a series of definitions, of the notion of the unfinished and enables us to recognise the formation of what I call the canon of finiteness in visual works of art. In this regard, based on historical sources, I propose that the aesthetic of finiteness can be divided into three categories: ‘finished’, ‘unfinished’, and ‘over-finished’. Finally, the second section explores the various solutions that have been adopted in dealing with unfinished works of art – namely, keeping them as such or completing them through the efforts of other, later artists – in accordance with the canon of finiteness that gradually takes shape.

unfinished (1400-1800)

What is a work unfinished? This panel seeks papers that critically probe this inquiry through early modern exempla of art, architecture, writing on art, and objects of visual culture considered unfinished. Small and multivalent case studies are equally invited, which investigate single objects, art projects, or entire oeuvres labelled not finished, here broadly conceived. Papers can also consider: is unfinished a formal, theoretical, symbolic, or contextual state of being? What or who decides on the criteria of the unfinished? Can an object go from being unfinished to finished? Does unfinishedness accrue value over time? And, finally, can any artistic product of the epoch be considered finished in the longue-durée of history? Proposals of up to 300 words should be sent using the UAAC " Call for Papers" form to Ivana Vranic by July 15.

During the last 50 years, and due to the dilapidation of public funds, hundreds of unfinished public works have been erected Italy. In 2007, the group of artists Alterazioni Video declared these ruins a formal architectural style – 'Incompiuto Siciliano' – and, in doing so, their aim is to change the buildings' dark side and turn it into something positive. One of the tangible outcomes within the artists' proposal is the eventual creation of the 'Incompiuto Siciliano Archaeological Park' in Giarre, a Sicilian medium-sized village that has the highest density of unfinished public works in Italy. This article analyses how such a provocative project contains serious implications in terms of heritage. It is stated that, in order to forge a positivized 'unfinished heritage' , Incompiuto Siciliano Archaeological Park builds bridges between aspects that, in principle, seem to be the opposite of each other. This opens the possibility of putting traditional heritage assumptions in question through the production of a critical heritage whose novelty lies in the constructive use of irony, sarcasm and double meaning.

Between 1932 and 1933, in the context of a new mandate for cheerfulness in Soviet cinema, Sergei Eisenstein, recently returned from a frustrating sojourn abroad, undertook an exercise in genre: the beguilingly titled comedy MMM. The project, which was never completed, has been almost completely overlooked in studies of the director’s works. Against this tendency of Eisenstein scholarship, this paper presents MMM as a serious and highly developed experiment in genre, using archival material – including notes, screenplays, director’s scripts and drawings – to read the work as an expression of Eisenstein’s cinematic process at its most formally inventive and ideologically intricate. The script, composed entirely in verse, is the director’s only fully-conceived attempt at film comedy. It follows a sprawling series of incongruous historical encounters as visitors from medieval Rus’ materialise in contemporary Moscow. The absurd fantasia that ensues is not only Eisenstein’s attempt to probe an increasingly ideologically unstable Soviet reality, but is also his occasion to explore, through self-reflexive comedic techniques, the nature and limits of the cinematic medium, as well as the theoretical question of the mutability of static form and the implications of this conundrum for character, narrative and genre.

Seseña is the main residential project in Spain that was interrupted due to the 2008 financial crisis, though some parts of it were actually accomplished and people are now starting to move there. By using the symbolic figure of an 'archaeological park', the author recounts a trip he made in May 2016 to reflect on whether such a place ceases to be a ruin only for the fact of being inhabited. The material and sociological aspects of this type of urban development are tackled from an ironic and critical perspective to finally conclude that Seseña is a set of ruins 'come what may'.

Every tale is a stratified set of signs, whose surface keeps the marks (often
hardly perceptible) of the different phases of its elaboration: a regularly defective
construction, never perfect as for uniformity and cohesion, where different levels of
expressive intentionality have worked (in the writing phase) and are working (in the
decoding phase), sometimes interfering with each other. There is no text so homogeneous
and compact that it stands only for itself and doesn’t imply a counter-text,
appearing on the surface through gaps, redundancies, small slips, logical and narrative
flaws. This essay investigates the phenomenology of incompleteness and mistake in
contemporary USA narrative.