Cracks, Chairs, and Child-players

An autoethnographic account of a mundane moment in a small café in Newcastle captures experiences, observations and qualities in text. A conscious effort is made not to overlook or filter the minutiae of the setting and events, to focus on the familiar spaces and everyday experiences we typically disregard due to their ordinariness. My concern with the ordinary builds on a lineage of influential Japanese figures who extract meaning from similar, seemingly trivial urban encounters in the city: artist and architectural scholar Wajirō Kon; the Street Observation Society (ROJO), with architectural historian Terunobu Fujimori and artist Genpei Akasegawa; and Atelier Bow-Wow's founding partners, Yoshiharu Tsukamoto and Momoyo Kaijima. This essay explores these figures and their approaches to the city as exemplified in their surveys, moving from Kon's “modernology,” to ROJO's search for “Thomassons,” and Atelier Bow-Wow's guidebooks. Collectively, these surveys – covering different phenomena from the 1920s to the 2000s – show how a consistent observational gaze was preserved and ultimately led to the discovery of singularities that might normally be dismissed or go unnoticed. Extending this observational gaze, I will revisit this lineage of ordinary observation through Gilles Deleuze's figure of the “child-player,” who encounters the world with a radical openness, curiosity and freedom from prejudgment. This Deleuzian re-reading argues that the discoveries of Kon, ROJO and Atelier Bow-Wow constitute a creative practice that begins with the act of noticing and evolves through drawing as a form of interpretive representation. This interpretative form transcends the original goal of documentation suggested by the urban survey. Instead, drawing recreates the original act of discovery, and re-enacts observed phenomena, imbuing them with new meanings. Read the full article online at: https://drawingon.org/Issue-04-02-Cracks-Chairs-and-Child-Players