barren – 04/06/2013 Failure
Back to George Perec and his note on failure – it is apt to say that it may not be wrong but the space the place where you are putting a mark may be uninhabitable. First impression on the term uninhabitable conjures wasteland – a kitchen with only a tap – a graveyard perhaps with one or two corpses. Likewise the subjects within architecture receive similar contempt especially brutalist architecture and while the term failure is synonymous with the utopian ideas of much architecture and experiments I place myself in the middle right now. I’m not making architecture – I have been dealing with the subject its effect on body and habitation, even organisation, yet applying white pencil marks to a glass cube which summarise utopian architecture and the modern art has ultimately been met with uninhabitable results. Both the replication of projected image and the materials have proved incompatible and it is possible to see the inhabitable as the incompatible. The glass cube, the white cube which frames so much of this stuff creates the distinction and the distance. Working within it makes me reflect on the lack of malleability, lack of giving working in certain conditions. A place such as a white filled gallery has certain elements of out-of bounds. It is not a shanty town nor scattered with jagged glass but it is mean when you are working in progress and process, as the failure is encased within the very nature of its display. It is well known to artists that failure is the gap between intention and realisation yet often offers the discovery. Where there is no discovery or revealed realization Gonzalez – Foerster refers to these as black holes that always seem unsatisfactory ( Le Fauvre. L, Failure, Intro; pg13). I’m right in the smack of that except there is no black just clear glass – a void clear, hard and more reminiscent of glass conservatories!
The other note on inhabitability occurs to me when I think of my studies on edgelands and buffer zones where I’d like to place some works – why precisely because it is not permanently inhabited and is often avoided without perfect conditions. Distance occurs and we use these edges as transition points rather than places deemed hospitable or habitable. They are inhabitable because they are on the edge, contain no distinct purpose of value and certainly have not acquired the value of nostalgic dumping grounds and industrial remains such as with city scenes. It has no ‘lifestyle’ no factor of something yet it is not without nothing – it contains everyday organisation and space. Can spaces be containers for an abstract place where we remember to walk the dog, fly the odd kite, ramble across the field and do we remain looking at it distinct and separate because it’s not just uninhabitable but with many current architectural organisations of work and leisure it is uninhabitable? Perec did add converted attics and superb bachelor pads to his list of uninhabitable spaces – why, because they were for display; the gallery space in some way is similarly uninhabitable for the artist at work for the same reasons.
