Life and Death

La Soglia Magical is a light and steam installation in airport Malpensa in Milan. All passengers have to go through the installation to exit the airport.

What does it mean when people have no choice about engaging with an installation? Or what about when they have to make a choice themselves? Is it possible not to engage with an installation?

I found this an interesting concept and one that was incorporated into a Carsten Höller exhibition at the Hayward Gallery.

To enter the gallery, the viewer is presented with a choice between going through tunnel A or tunnel B. Although the viewer seemingly has a choice about how they enter the exhibition, the choice of how is removed.

We completed a mini module looking at curatorial principles. First we explored examples of successful and unsuccessful curation.
Josephine Pryde, Turner Prize nominee originally used a circular track for her train which people could actually physically interact with by sitting on it but with her Turner prize installation, she opted for a stationery train on a straight track. This changed the work significantly in that the connection and interaction with the audience was lost.

This led me to question was this a deliberate decision by the artist or not and what does it mean when work is changed? Is it just a different version of the same thing? How does the meaning of the work change?

It could be argued that the artist has used one of Viktor Schlovsky’s identified devices of defamiliarisation by removing the train of its primary function. By rendering it stationery it forces the viewer to re-evaluate the object in a different context, opening up the possibility of relating to it in a new way.

An example of a curatorial success was the Louise Bourgeois’ exhibition at Tate Modern. A selection of work was displayed in a large open room. How the work had been placed had been very well thought out, allowing movement and interaction between the pieces.

Viewers could explore the work from all angles. Some of the work was suspended from the ceiling allowing it to make shapes and visual patterns that seemed to create a cosmos, further accentuating the space.

For my professional practice I collaborated with sculpture artist Pauline Bickerton. We agreed to make a piece of work in response to the land space called the Hermitage at Letheringham Lodge.

We looked at other artists who had taken on similar land art projects, although on a far bigger scale, one of them being Jean-Claude and Christo. They erected an 18 foot running fence covering 24.5 miles across the hills of Sonoma and Marin counties in northern California, United States. It was only up for fourteen days and then removed leaving no trace of it.

This gave us the idea of the possibility of making it a performance piece, something that was documented rather than permanent. This was something we had not originally set out to do or really spoken about but from then on it was almost as if the process started to take care of itself

Somehow the idea of a sphere started to materialise and we ended up with two spheres, one small and one large. The outside coating of the sphere was ciment fondue, so it was extremely heavy and organic in its shape.

We started to explore ideas around the Greek Myth of Sisyphus and pushing the sphere up a hill to demonstrate the concept of the meaninglessness of life and how this can only be seen when a person becomes conscious of the absurdity of life.

As Albert Camus explains, it is when Sisyphus makes his way down the hill to his rock to start pushing it up the hill again that he reflects on his punishment and is truly conscious of the hopelessness of his situation, “Weariness comes at the end of the acts of a mechanical life…” (1975,p.11).

The actual idea of rolling the bigger and the smaller stone towards each other did not materialise until the actual day of filming. The stones became symbols of personal experience, frame of reference and struggles to connect with other human beings on a deeper level. The performance demonstrated the ability to connect but that in reality, these connections are merely fleeting moments before we have to move on to continue our journey alone.

This work was not necessarily about the finished product, it was about the process of connection. The feeling of connecting with someone on a deeper level and the work coming from that place.

As Jean-Paul Sartre expressed in his lecture Existentialism is a Humanism:

We find ourselves in a world which is, let us say, that of “inter-subjectivity”. It is in this world that man has to decide what he is and what others are (1946)

Link to the film Myth of Sisyphus: https://vimeo.com/166343798

Reference:
Camus, A (1975) The Myth of Sisyphus, London: Penguin Books
Kaufman, W. (ed.) (1989) Existentialism from Dostoyevsky to Sartre, Meridian Publishing Company. Available online at: https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/sartre/works/exist/sartre.htm

I wanted it to be an everyday journey so I decided to walk it from my house down to the University on the Waterfront, a distance of about two and a half miles.

I started out with the idea to maintain the shape of my space for the whole journey, but obstacles on the way made this impossible. It was a constant struggle to try and maintain the shape of the sphere. I was getting tired and my hands were cut and bleeding from sharp bits on the wire. The fact that it was not a solid structure added to the pressure to bend and manipulate it to fit rather than struggle to maintain and protect it.

I constantly felt the pressure to compromise the space. Trying to maintain that shape, even only for a short time, it felt so heavy and all I wanted to do was condense it so that it was more manageable. The sphere represented the constant struggle and difficulty of maintaining personal space and boundaries on an everyday basis.

Link to film of Space Journey:https://vimeo.com/211377852

Looking at some of the wire sculptures of Antony Gormley, I liked how his sculptures looked so simple but were very complex, the patterns he created not only with the material but with the spaces between the materials. I thought about how easy would it be to maintain the spaces between the materials?

I started to experiment with the measurements of my body. Using wire I made circles which were the circumference of my wrists, my forearms, my upper arms, my thighs, my calves, waist, hips and chest. I then attached these wire rings in different orders to create different shapes that still represented the measurements of my body.

At this time, one of the other students sitting next to me was constantly invading my studio space with his work, materials and personal possessions. This got me thinking about how our personal space is constantly being invaded or tested.

I had been exploring circles and spheres so I decided to make a sphere out of wire which represented the invisible boundary of my personal space around me. I wanted to explore the idea of my space in the world and how this actually worked in everyday life.

I made the sphere 64 inches high, which was my height and 64 inches wide which was the measurement of my arms outstretched. I then worked out roughly how many smaller circles I would need to make which I then attached together using more wire and stabilised with smaller circles in the gaps between the bigger circles.

With Gabrielle Orozco’s Yielding Stone (Piedra Que Cede) (1992), a plasticise ball, more or less his weight was rolled around the streets, where it picked up dust and debris, its surface sculptured by the surfaces it encountered. (Buchloh,1993,p10)

The idea of my sphere going on a journey and being impacted by the environment it travelled through appealed to me because of the parallels with how the human body is impacted everyday.

I found Francis Alys Sometimes Making Something Leads to Nothing (1997), a fascinating concept and this gave me the idea of actually taking my ‘space’ for a walk to see what would happen.

I liked the idea of it being something that I would find difficult because of having to be exposed to the looks and judgement of other people and how it would push me out of my comfort zone.

Reference:
Buchloh, B.H.D (1993) ‘Refuse and Refuge’ in Yve-Alain Bois (Ed) (2009) pp.1-15.