barren day 11
Monkey’s wrench
The Gallery is quiet except for steady dripping and some trickles loitering in the drains. Thunder and lightning has broken and it’s pretty loud on this broken roof and dirty skylights. I was thinking of the Lightening Field (Walter de Maria; 1977) and all those land works that amass a multiple site because the images are so striking they are reproduced through experiences and memory. Like Nancy Holt’s Sun Tunnels (1976) and Richard Serra’s Shift (1970) they continue to occupy the site in memory and imagined experience if you haven’t seen them firsthand. This idea of multiple and simultaneous experiences seems exemplified that thunder followed by lightening work together in a partnership each with a direct signature of their own one visual and one audio which blends to make an atmosphere of heaviness and awe.
I’m not advocating that collaboration has the scale of thunder and lightning but it does occur to me that atmospheres and spaces are made by more than one sense and often more than one mind. We have been able to identify certain ways we collaborate adding to an idea one has started or simultaneously wanting to work with a particular material or problem solving. Similarly writers work with more than one voice to carve and define the experience and space of their novel. Primo Levi a favourite and The Monkey’s Wrench delivers this countenance of wit and blunt observation by the labourer Faussone and Levi’s alchemic narration combined to make pithy observations with a philosophical bent. It is a narrative of a work life and combines attributes from very different paths maintaining something of an architectural back scene through Faussone who builds towers and bridges.
What is appreciated by Levi is his deference to expertise – Faussone’s comment ‘ I don’t mind telling you rigging a crane is a great job, and a bridge crane even more; but they’re not jobs just anybody can do’ (Levi;pg9)One of the difficulties with experimentation is when you discover a skill you would like to use but it would take some time to learn. A few are invented but mostly desired skills end up being a list of parallel lives. When facing collaborative proposals or projects ideas sometimes runaway ignoring practical skill set and material resources because the imagination goes large. Especially when as artists and designers we are meant to market, business propose, blue sky think for every organisation spoken to and somehow able work, rest and play but go umpteen forests, be self sufficient, ride a bike to collect your child from nursery, go all over Ray Mears, design everything including your interiors to the coolest kitsch possible and become an expert baker, expert virus solution solver and have fly by night fingers for running three machines at once. This is the scenarios of everyday life and it has been easily transposed onto collaborations to superficial effect.
When spaces speak it demands a different type of interaction not one entirely planned, proposed and transferable skills of the mind which can cause detachment and allow for the resting of an idea fixed onto a space, something that is made to shoehorn. When spaces speak our senses have to be attuned with the mind so when I think of collaboration now I do not think so skills and ideas but the senses. These senses are finely tuned through experience and one that moreover simplifies and shifts spaces from constructions to atmospheres. Whilst the thunder and lightning bombarded this roof and the leaks grew leaky and louder, I could hear emptiness – the audio of spaces and architecture assert themselves as collaborative when producing spaces.
barren day 10
Indifference to forgery
To bring together components is described as assembly; rigid elements that lead to some articulation. (Ingold.T; 2012) They can be criticised for being negative, the enemy of conjuring a ‘sense of’ and arresting feeling. Luc Tymans deliberately aims for some indifference to his work by this strategy creating detachment by limiting time spent on a piece and assembling stand in components. He uses what is already represented and can be challenged as inauthentic.
This space holds components. Some of them literally taken from houses, window displays found and recycled, into a rigid set to frame and structure the space. Even the digitally printed screens are assembled from my photographs and altered blueprints, re-assembled to construct a still and distant image. The use of technical drawing, photography and components does have a telling of indifference. It is looking between the components that unfolds the personal knowledge of the space, reflects on encounters with elements and seeing them in a different manner ensures we look at the weakness of these components, their indistinctness in our everyday lives yet their prolific nature in ordering and producing our spaces.
Gerhard Richter uses both photography and painting to oscillate between realism and abstraction and when looking inside the space I can see the components which are realistically presented and then how they have shifted in horizon, setting and assembly. The set is familiar but unfamiliar – I dismissed its potential to be uncanny yesterday and deferred to Dave on this but the more I look, the more I see how utterly exposed the structures as a dwelling are. There is no hiding, and no encasing – it is transparent and relies on realistic components to do so. While we may have closed doors and private spaces how many of us feel transparent and exposed in living quarters and wish to look for a hole to run down.
From the female point of view I have to come to understand that homes are built for the functions of many things and they are rarely to do with the person of the female but female gender and her assumed roles akin to visiting within the home for domestic and family availability. So it is here, exposure, weak frames form a space with frailty drawing upon Lewitt like drawings of space to realistic structures; realism combined with abstraction rather than the formalist modernisms or representational drawing of spaces. This combination is I understand to be two of the components revealing themselves in my methods which create distance and an unease bordering uncanny, certainly it is unhomely and the insubstantial nature of many of the pieces echo this.
Another aspect to Tuymans is his use of amateurish , immediate and indifferent attitude to his own methods which comes under the scope of talks on failure and authentic forgery. For myself I see that time spent on a piece or the level of production value is entirely dependent on such intentions, and diffidence given. It is not required that I slavishly turn some of these frames into beautiful pieces, these frames are loose, exposing their very constructions. This is continued through the weave of thread that hangs pointlessly after being liberated from its structure. This loose attitude to materials evokes the temporal but more importantly the fleeting negation we pass over many of the spaces and surroundings we come across. We construct spaces according to another design influenced by a copy of somebody’s idea, we mimic spaces for lifestyles we don’t have but desire and so I feel many of our spaces are abstract to ourselves which I find unsettling. This notion of authentic/forgery directed at Tuyman’s (Dexter.E;2004)work and part of his critical output is one to toy over when considering how we live in spaces because I’m not sure how often we are living according to an abstract idea that bears no authenticity to how we really occupy and live in spaces. Therefore the space now seems far more satisfactory as a loose framework, supporting beams which look stable but at once flimsy, fragile representing much of how briefly we authentically forge spaces.
barren day 9
White silence
Sacred spaces are shrouded and encased with white with polished surfaces. Valuable materials to common materials such as concrete are subject. In the tiresome exposition of concrete we have found words such as contemporary, brutal and austere while we still attribute qualities of soft, luxurious and awe to hard materials such as marble. Building materials, stones and such appear in many works of art and reflect so much intensity, they have a deadening affect to sound so that while we think we are being quieter in such spaces we are already silenced.
The white space now floating here has a similar affect. The whiteness while not illuminated and projected by stone or anything magnificent but by its very reflection of light and its more enveloped feel has an effect upon behaviour which quietens and also appears to absorb and swallow sound. The result is even with a radio there is persistent hush.
It does appear to echo the space within myself which is one of clamour and hush equating quiet and freedom. A sharpening effect to materiality occurs and elements of what it is to dwell breathe. The artist Cabrita Reis produced works based on the domestic architecture recalibrated as stage set in including The House of White Silence (1990). His use of situation and experience from childhood memory instigate these sets, a common thread. It i snot that these are recognizable experiences or the intention to incite and understanding of childhood memory but rather to investigate how our unconscious displaces place and at the same time focuses a consciousness – makes sharper.
If I honestly trace much of my work back 10yrs it did not start as I thought at the time with memory, movement and the body, but rather with place and the body. Sitting in stairs and feeling the cold wall infuse and push movement through my body like passing through a sheer veil. Doris Von Drathen (2004)recounts how this work dislodges place from the everyday configuration and focuses certain states of consciousness. In Reis’s work Von Drathen refers to threshold. In all my work the shift of that threshold and precisely what it is when dealing with body, architecture and place is essential. For Dave the assertion of the state of consciousness is predominant referring to finding the ‘other’, his eye becoming the sharpening tool for that seizure.
In tracking our intersections I would say we have a ratio of both threshold and a narrowing of gaze towards a certain censoriousness anticipated, however it is this combination which is showing the nature of our collaboration. We are not of adding physical components to each other we of adding tipping and countering that ratio with each other in every discussion of the work that is in this place. Dave identifies the uncanny of space and the body and we both have swallowed Anthony Vidler (Warped Space; 1994)quite whole on this. For my part I’m not sure that is what I’m doing now, but simply upending what causes discomfort rather than focussing on the unsettling feeling itself. Perhaps inverting everyday configurations is my preoccupation with the architectural components of certain spaces and a conviction that I find it unsatisfactory.
In that vein the white silence and this temporary white house I am living in appears to silence that dissatisfaction and shout loudly at possibility – It is perhaps the O’Doherty (Inside the White Cube;1999)idea of the blank canvas and by returning to it quietly imagination can imprint a more satisfactory space.
barren day 8
Space frame
Walking into the studio this morning the transition from work placed within the space to the space becoming the work is clear. A threshold has appeared and it is like stepping into a stage. The changeovers Dave and I completed this weekend have caused a rupture between site and place. The site of the work is the work and now seems to hang unsteadily between the apex roof of artsmith and the surrounding space. At some point we do plan to address this contrast and converse with the rest of the space. For now we have moved to making a space within a space or even a frame within a frame.
In architectural and structural engineering a space frame or space structure is truss like, rigid but lightweight and able to withstand the strain of bending moments. It can take the strain due to triangle like structures which make the load bearing flexible and weight distributed along the length. Dave and I have made frames and altered them to begin to echo floorplans due to my current ruminating over architectural plans but there is no doubt that his photography captures space frames and I keep altering the ways to frame and re-frame spaces including the frame being the work itself. In fact we keep looking upwards to how tops of buildings are supported, their fragility, and exactly what are their bending strains. It is interesting how these vary and how they change the nature of a space – they may not be particularly significant or resonate a poetic moment for interpretation but they do provide comprehension of the function and unity of a space. Most importantly they show the production of the space. Therefore the process, materials and this can be similarly applied to the canvas frame. The stretch bar frames altered and standing as screens in the space offer a view into the production of space including surface, materials and construction. The paper only part fills it and the openings open out onto the space it is within. Dave has now added a found object for his projections – a screen of an open space which now acts like a window. The frames frame the window and the window in turn re-frames the gallery space. This reflective thinking on framing spaces is a part of our re-drawing of this space. It has reproduced it as a floating sterile and purely ideological space with an ideological pictorial image of landscape framed within it.
The four photography of El Taller (1993) document studio space and rely on structure to unify them. It is the focus for discussion on the topography of the photographic space. The blueprints that I have begun to work on which use frames are the beginning of a topography of spaces created and imagined but heavily reliant on structure, process of production, not for preparation but for its image itself. The space assumes a complexity and starts to address the relationship of figure/ground. When separating the components that are in this space I can now see clearly how the addition of Dave’s screen and the use of frames within frames, moving architectural details as borders and horizons begin to make distinct the figure/ground. Rather than my frames being the figure and the spatial ground of the gallery the work itself has become the ground, the apparatus on which to hang the view, images and pictorial images presented. Perhaps it begins to critically look at how the idea of the picture is perceived and in that case sings in unison with Ian Wallace who wrote ‘Corner of the studio and El Taller’ (1993) on these observations. To further emphasise this, is that the gallery space can and does act as ground within contemporary practice and addressing its mode of production and spatial qualities can at times be crucial to the seeing of the image stretched upon it.
barren – conquest
Day 5
Spaces are fragile and worn away by wear and tear. This is a list of the wear and tear I’ve noticed in this building:
Taped roof patches for leaks
Worn yellow line bordering between the row of seats and display cases
Chipped wooden cobbles
Where the floor partitions meet they are scuffed.
Several tea and coffee splats now darkened despite mopping; I have added some encaustic wax marks
Dirty finger marks around the handles of the kitchenette doors
Dark brown stains on the light brown flooring in the studio workshop
Moss and dark stains running in the trail of rivulets down the apex windows
Scratches in the top of the glass cabinet
Rust on the edges of the girders sometimes mixed with pigeon poo
Flaked white paint peeling away from the bricks in the workshop studio
What I notice is that while looking at these signs of wear I am remembering a short while ago when the space appeared differently for the show. We put flour formulas in the courtyard and there still remain faint signs of them. Cars have since scuffed at the edges of some and there are skids of flour dashed away at the formula corners. One formula by the wall remains intact, flour ridged, perfectly sturdy. These are embellishments which also wear away.
I have also noticed that whilst observing wear and tear I am marking time like a furrow noting a few signs. This is because the first sense of urgency of this residency has subsided. Subsidence could resemble the house on the cliff that has tipped due to erosion, but I’m not going to list off the edge just yet. What I have reflected on is Perec’s reflections on how we conquer a space and now I see that in occupying any space the details, the wear, the embellishments, its incompatibilities, the duration, the poetics are the narrative we often wish to escape lest it becomes a stiff neck brace and to return to in order for the space to not conquer you.
Adios amigos and speak on Monday…
