A fascinating session with the Saturday Perspectives group this weekend followed into a relaxed and wide-ranging discussion in Thinking Aloud, sitting in the rooftop foyer looking out at the sparkling sea on a glorious Spring afternoon. The Pavilion really comes into its own on a day like that, full of light, and everybody spilling out onto the balconies and terraces.

We started our tour by looking for exemplar works of the two broad strands in the exhibition as articulated by Lutz Becker, namely the geometrical work , and the gestural, or more intuitive mark-making. We then went on to look at writing by Edwin Morgan, Alan Ginsberg, and Gertrude Stein, to try and answer the following question: can literature ever truly be gestural, Expressionist, in the way some of the exhibition pieces are?

An interesting point for me was when a member of the group spoke of the playfulness of the more geometrical work (in this instance the Lissitzky pieces). My personal preference is towards the Expressionist, and I never usually think of geometrical work as playful, so it was refreshing to examine it from that perspective. We discussed the potential for play within construction, and thought of it in terms of a child building things out of blocks and shapes, that impulse is definitely playful and highly geometrical.

Posted by Ryan Coleman on Sunday 18 April 2010