At times I find myself somewhat disconnected from my surroundings, and turn to walking and drawing to explore the physical city I live and operate within. I use aesthetic practices to explore the spaces in my everyday urban environment.
Firstly I hope to lay the foundation of my theoretical research, based in capitalist and spatial discourse. I then will elaborate on my practice as well as the art practice of others’ who I fell critique and explore some of the issues raised in my research and offer an alternative to an alienated subject; a subject with the power to transform how they experience space.
I have a particular interest in the everyday urban environment. And put forth that it is a space produced by economic, geographical and social circumstances. I explore urban space as a self-generating environment that reflects a dominant culture and has the power to influence and effect individuals. I found in my research and theoretical explorations that modern reality can be seen to alienate the subject to ideals and values that reflect a society driven by capital.
Maybe the best place to begin my exploration of urban space is to start with the quote from the curatorial statement from the Christchurch Biennale SCAPE. This quote makes me think of the shifting values of the city, and of public space, from that of social interaction, to that of consumption.
"A city is a dynamic system constantly in flux that reflects the shifting values of society, where social and political representations, cultural production and consumption, tourism and leisure play out. Globalization has led to greater mobility and increasing migration, transforming cities at an increasingly rapid pace. Culturally, this shift has seen shopping malls become surrogate social spaces, and urban centers designed to capture the tourist dollar over the need for public space that appeals to local inhabitants." (Erdemci & Mosman 2008: 5)
Urban spaces seem to be growing, and once rural areas on the outskirts of cities are making way for shopping centers, business parks, motorways and suburban housing areas. Bethlehem town centre on the outskirts of Tauranga (the shopping centre from this area features continually in the subject matter of my artwork) is an example of this, the once one lane road with a dairy and postbox now boast traffic lights, a sprawling supermarket, a shopping center and shops from the popular chain stores ‘Video Ezy’ and ‘Hells Pizza’.
"In this case, capitalist industrialization has destroyed nature and is replacing it with a “second nature.” The balance between the organic and the human environment is disappearing across the globe because of the production and extension of a second nature- the concrete, material world of organized society (1991, pp. 343-45)." (Gottdiener 1993: 133)
The concrete material world of organized society seems to be a self-perpetuating one. The more we produce, the more we consume, the greater need for access to those products and so on. Modern society is literally organizing the fabric of the city around production and consumption.
M Gottinger writes
"Every mode of social organization produces an environment that is a consequence of the social relations it possesses. In addition, by producing space according to its own nature, a society not only materializes into distinctive built forms, but also reproduces itself. The concept “the production of space” means what Giddens calls the “duality of structure.” That is, space is both a medium of social relations and a material product that can effect social relations." (Gottinger 1993: 132)
The cities’ systems of mobility and production have become signifiers of a capitalist culture. Debord writes in Capitalism: A Society Without a Culture,
"Having from the workshop to the laboratory emptied productive activity of all meaning for itself, capitalism strives to place the meaning of life in leisure activities and to reorient productive activity on that basis. Since production is hell in the prevailing moral schema, real life must be found in consumption, in the use of goods. (… ) The world of consumption is in reality the world of mutual spectacularization of everyone, the worlds of everyone’s separation, estrangement and nonparticipation." (Harrison & Wood 2003: 706))
Subjects of the city seem alienated to their cars, work, production and mobility and what once was public space for social interaction has become a fluid and transient space, in which the subject moves and operates. In Vito Acconci’s writing Public Space Private Time, he offers a description of public space. He describes the city as being a public space, one where there is little social interaction.
"Public space is not space in the city but the city itself. Not nodes but circulation routes; not buildings and plazas but roads and bridges. Public space is leaving home and giving up all the comforts of the cluster-places that substitute for the home. Space on the run is life on the loose. There’s no time to talk; there’s no need for talk, since you have all the information you need on the radio you carry with you. There’s no need for person-to-person relationship, since you already have multiple relationships with voices on your radio, with images of persons in store windows and on billboards. There’s no time to stop and have a relationship, which would be a denial of all those bodies you’re side by side with on the street, one different body after another, one body replacing another." (Acconci 1990: 911)
Martha Rosler makes visible the changing face of public spaces in our everyday capitalist society. A space that is no longer experienced as a space of social interactions but a place people pass through and are alienated to capitalist values. To be a subject in urban space is to be subject to its ideals and values, one that seems to be moving from social interaction with people to a systemized and controlled interaction with the city space.
Vidler writes on Rosler’s work,
"Rosler’s photographs take on the air of pictorial revelations of the underbelly of capitalism, its spaces manifested as empty, sterile non-places, determined more by mathematical calculation of times of arrival and departure than by any regard for the human subjects subjected to this control and surveillance." (Vidler 2001: 180)
Martha Rosler,CEPA Public Art Installation- Bus Show
“In the place of the Public: airport series”,
1999
http://courses.washington.edu/hypertxt/cgi-bin/12.228.185.206/html/wordsinimages/mrairport/roslerview.html
He explains that the absence of people in Rosler’s photographs, are not for aesthetic reasons but to “mark their real nonexistence for space occupied by their transient bodies, moved through as quickly as possible.” (Vidler 2001: 180) These areas are not truly public places; they are spaces of estrangement.
In Vidler’s writing Spaces of Passage The Architecture of Estrangement: Simmel, Kracauer, Benjamin, he explores the spatial and architectural writings of Simmel, Kracauer and Benjamin who develop the concept of estrangement as a modern social condition. He exposes a common theme, that the physical fabric of the city (the environment of consumption) “was identified as the instrument of a systemized and enforced alienation.” (Vidler 2001: 65). The physical make up of the city has a psychological effect on the subject.
The idea that environment affects the subject is one Beate Gütschow has made explicit in her work.
"The S series makes reference to more recent media—black-and-white architectural and documentary photography of the 1950s and ’60s….the S series is post-apocalyptic, revealing failed social ideals through alienating architecture. Photographing in Berlin, Chicago, Kyoto, Los Angeles, New York, and Sarajevo, Gütschow appropriates buildings, parking lots, stairways, and people. Reconfiguring these elements of architecture from different areas of the world, she synthesizes a disorienting cosmopolitan space with a confused temporality…. Gütschow’s S series reveals something about the cities in which they were photographed. Despite the utopian ideals behind the modern architecture, cities are less hospitable than we idealize them to be."
(MOCP 2008)
Gütschow reveals the alienating nature of modern architecture, by displaying spaces devoid of human interaction. The spaces are merely there to experience, not to be filled with social interventions.
Beate Gütschow:
S #22
2007
photographic print, 149 x 237 cm http://www.artnet.com/artwork/425363197/483/beate-gutschow-s-22.html
The environment or space produced around us seems to reflect and perpetuate, feelings of alienation. As I have mentioned above, the actual spaces of the city and how they are inhabited appear to encourage estrangement. Rosler’s airport, which has no ‘place’ for people and Gutschow’s vast, empty, bleak environments seem to highlight these spaces as concrete and unquestionable.
I have explained above that urban spaces have largely been built to reflect the values and ideals of capitalism and that occupants are somewhat trapped within the systems and structures it has put in place to encourage consumption, the city dweller is subject to ‘enforced alienation’. However to me it seems that the issue of estrangement is not entirely situated in the physical space, but how the inhabitant addresses it.
Fiona Amundsen plays with the idea of space being culturally constructed. Space is product of culture, or dominant value systems, it is then represented and its meaning is evaluated by the subject. Amundsen’s work illustrates that the subject articulates her reality, or meaning of space.
Garden Place references theory concerned with the actual medium of photography, instead of its representational qualities. My interest here is twofold: by engaging with how photography socially gathers meaning, Garden Place picks apart how space itself is culturally constructed. These photographs act as both a typology of space, and of the camera at work. Each photographed site highlights how photography operates as a "distinctive temporal articulation of what is, and therefore we, see." (Conland 2006: 1)
It is easy to assume that a photograph is a ‘snapshot’ of reality without question however the meaning and significance of that reality lies in the viewer or the subject’s interpretation of the representation. Amundsen reveals is that space is “projection of the subject” (Vidler 2001: vii).
I propose that the subject has the power to change her position towards spatial systems, opening up new possibilities of interacting and experiencing space, thus having the power to transform urban space from one that is alienating, to one that doesn’t have to be. Someone can either chose to be alienated to her car or make the choice to go against the ‘norm’ and walk.
This is where I see art practice coming into play. In my particular practice, and that of artists featured in the latter part of this essay, I focus on artistic interventions and representations that challenge ones perception of space.
The SCAPE biennale in Christchurch in September this year, focused on placing works of art in the city, hoping to offer people in the city new ways of addressing their environment. In the curatorial statement Fulya Erdemci and Dane Mossman write about the concept behind the title of the show,
"The title Wandering Lines is drawn from the notion that ‘indirect or errant trajectories obeying their own logic’ can provide new understandings of space. Making seemingly invisible contingencies visible, artistic interventions can propose a different experience of locale and situation, or suggest opportunties for more relevant public space, to counter the effects of privatization and neo-liberal economic policies on social space." (Erdemic & Mossman 2008)
I felt that many of the artworks didn’t achieve this goal. Some works simply existed in the city space, sharing ground with the buildings and other city structures. The work that I felt was very successful was the work of Spanish artist Maider Lopez.
Her work addressed the very systems that are in place in the urban environment that we take for granted; systems that control and condition us to act or behave in a certain way. Maider Lopez interrupts the subjects’ assumptions and everyday experience of space by creating interventions in public space, architecture and situations.
"Signs denoting the location of ‘functional’ aspects of the Christchurch Art Gallery are scattered throughout the entire Gallery building, as López puts the microscope to these seemingly insignificant features. From visitor number counters to switch locks, environmental condition monitors to power plugs, the minor details of the pure gallery spaces are suddenly brought to the fore, drawing our attention to the way these aspects disappear and become invisible visual noise as they quietly maintain the processes necessarily for the buildings’ operation." (Erdemic & Mossman 2008)
In the Christchurch Art Gallery Lopez highlights how systems and can become almost invisible to us. I felt this work was successful because Lopez used artistic intervention to challenge the systems of control. Placing the viewer or participant in the work in a position where they are aware of the controlling factors in the environment. This then offered a space for the viewer to question other controlling systems in their everyday environment.
I feel this work was able to change subject’s perception of the environment because it ‘warped’ the view of the architectural space. Through the intervention of the artwork, the architecture does not function or appear as it originally seemed. At the same time the artwork cannot operate without the architecture, they are dependent upon each other.
Vidler writes that a
"kind of warping is that produced by the forced intersection of different media- film, photography, art, architecture- in a way that breaks the boundaries of genre and the separate arts in response to the need to depict space in new and unparralled ways. Artists, rather than simply extending their terms of reference to the three-dimensional, take on the questions of architecture as an integral and critical part of their work in installations that seek to criticize the traditional terms of art….. This intersection has engendered a type of “intermediary art”, comprised of objects that, while situated ostensibly in one practice require the interpretive terms of another for their explication.” (Vidler 2001: viii)
When Rochelle Steiner, the director of the Public Art Fund in New York spoke as the keynote speaker at SCAPE, she mentioned the work of Sarah Morris who had painted on and in a courtyard in New York. Steiner spoke of the space as being a dark and dingy space where few people gathered and with the addition of the artwork, the space was readdressed and people reacted with it in a different way; they went from being mere passers-by to stopping for lunch and socially gathering under the work.
"Morris executes her city-based paintings in household gloss on square canvases, employing rigorous, all-over grids in vivid colours that reference architectural motifs, signs or urban vistas. Morris associates these colours and geometries with a city’s unique vocabulary and palette, and, most importantly, its dynamic." (Cube 2008)
Morris here has used painting to open up and change the architectural space. In a similar way the architecture informs the work, she is using architectural forms and structures to motivate her painting. The viewer can then experience the space as a space to question the tradition of painting and the function of architecture. The artistic interventions within the actual urban space, creates a ‘warping’ of the space in the way that the original (architectural) space can be readdressed and negotiated by the viewer.
The combination of architecture and painting could be looked upon as what Homi Bhabha refers to as a hybrid.
"The… hybrid is not only double voiced and double-accented… but is also double-language; for in it there are not only (and not even so much) two individual consciousnesses, two voices, two accents, as there are [doublings of] socio-linguistic consciousnesses, two epochs… that come together and consciously fight it out on the territory of utterance… It is the collision between differing points of view on the world that are embedded in these forms… such unconscious hybrids have been at the same time profoundly productive historically; they are pregnant with potential for new world vies, with new “internal forms” for perceiving the world in words." (Bhabha 1996: 3)
The painting and the architecture come together in a space of negotiation. The original architectural structure now can be experienced in a different way. The position of the viewer is no longer that of one simply reacting to their environment but as a subject in the position to interpret or negotiate the very environment itself.
Bhabha suggests that the hybrid strategy or discourse “opens up a space of negotiation where power is unequal but its articulation may be equivocal.” (Bhabha 1996: 3).
Both Morris and Lopez work challenges ones perception of space literally by using architectural elements. Architecture as a signifier of the capitalist environment now has the possibility of becoming a space of artistic intervention, questioning and negotiation.
In my own work I use different modes of representation to challenge how representation can be questioned and transformed. I combine elements of traditional perspective drawing as well as photography (in a black and white documentary style) to open up critique of both of these practices.
Rosler’s work The Bowery in two inadequate descriptive systems (1974/75) as another example of a work that explores the space between two modes of representation. Von Bismark writes on this work
"She is making a space between the descriptive systems of writing and picture making. She makes us aware that there is a space in between different representational forms (i.e. photos, texts, performances, videos etc). “She uses the uncertainties that crop up here to make elements and processes of semantic assignment and transformation visible. In a political sense, she reopens our eyes to the fact that “even one and the same sign can be re-occupied, translated, re-historicized, and read in a new way,” a task that Homi K. Bhabha assigns to the “Third Space.” (von Bismark 2002: 264)
The Bowery in Two Inadequate Descriptive Systems 1974-75
A series of 45 gelatin silver prints of text and images on 24 backing boards, each backing board: 11 13/16 x 23 5/8 in. (30 x 60 cm)
http://artg33k.vox.com/library/photo/6a00c2252bb78a8fdb00d09e449db9be2b.html
Through her artwork Rosler reveals that the signifiers of dominant structures and systems, can be negotiated. In relation to alienation, this opens up the possibility that the very structures and signifiers that alienate the subject are at question. The structures thus become open for interpretation and transformation. Once able to be reinterpreted systems and signifiers can now be looked systems other than as alienating.
The subject now has the choice to become a liminal subject “neither here nor there; they are betwixt and between the positions assigned and arrayed by law, custom, convention, and ceremony” (1969: 95) (Shure 2008: 2). A city dweller can exist fully in the capitalist system (and conform to the ideas and values of society) or live in a capitalist environment, and choose not to conform to systems, transforming the very nature of those systems.
"For Turner, liminality is one of the three cultural manifestations of communitas—it is one of the most visible expressions of anti-structure in society. Yet even as it is the antithesis of structure, dissolving structure and being perceived as dangerous by those in charge of maintaining structure, it is also the source of structure. Just as chaos is the source of order, liminality represents the unlimited possibilities from which social structure emerges. While in the liminal state, human beings are stripped of anything that might differentiate them from their fellow human beings—they are in between the social structure, temporarily fallen through the cracks, so to speak, and it is in these cracks, in the interstices of social structure, that they are most aware of themselves. Yet liminality is a midpoint between a starting point and an ending point, a temporary state that ends when the initiate is reincorporated into the social structure." (Shure 2008: 2).
An individual with the choice of maintaining the structures that alienate, or ‘going against the grain’ for example one can pass through public spaces or see that it can be used as a socially interactive space, changing the nature of the space from alienating to interactive, and thus dissolving the capitalist system that keeps the individual alienated.
In this writing I have attempted to explain how my practice and other artist’s practices open up a space of negotiation where there is potential for change and transformation. I propose that through the experience and interpretation of art, one is given the opportunity to fill space with meaning, as well as think about and change their position towards environment they operate within, an environment that sees the subject alienated to hegemonic ideals or values.
Footnotes
1. Artist Vito Acconci “sees the architectural monument as a literal crystallization of power and cultural accretion; as an almost geological phenomenon.” (Vidler 2001: 140) In this sense the actual architecture is a signifier of the dominant culture. The constructed environment seems to perpetuate and produce the social values and ideals, set up by modern consumer culture.
2. Vider explains that estrangement has been a common theme in writings relation to the big cities of the nineteenth century. He describes this estrangements as “the estrangement of the inhabitant of a too rapidly changing and enlarging to comprehend in traditional terms; the estrangement of classes from each other, of individual from individual, of individual from self, of workers from work.” (Vidler 2001: 65)
3. I play with the literal idea of perception in my work. I use the system of perspectival drawing alongside photography to literally change and warp the perception of space within the subject matter of the photograph. To look at the work is to question one’s perception and ask, is that ‘really’ part of the structure of the represented image (the shopping mall) or is it part of the drawing that sits on top of the structure.
Bibliography
Acconci, Vito. “Public Space in a Private Time” Critical inquiry The University of Chicago Press Chicago, 1999: 900 - 918. Jstor. University of Auckland. 7 Sep. 2008.
Barnett, Cassandra. “Stranger Than Kindness: New Works from Garden Place by Fiona Amundsen” 9 Aug. 2008
“Beate Gütschow: LS/S October 25, 2007 – January 10, 2008”. Museum of Contemporary Photography. 2005 – 2008. Columbia College. 25 Sept. 2008.
Bhabha, Homi. “Culture’s in Between- Concept of Culture”. Questions of Cultural Identity. Sage: London, 1996
Conland, Natasha “Fiona Amundsen: Recent Acquisition June 2006”. 3 Feb. 2008.
Cook, Vanessa “Research Seminar: An Exploration of Space” June 2008
Erdemci, Fulya and Dane Mossman. “Wandering Lines: Towards a New Culture of Space”. SCAPE 2008 Christchurch Biennial of Art in Public Space Media Christchurch Art Gallery: Christchurch 2008. Sep 18. 2008
Gottinger, M. “A Marx for Our Time: Heni Lefebvre and the Production of Space”. Sociology Theory , 1993: 129-134. Jstor. University of Auckland. 25 April. 2008
Harrison, Charles. And Paul Wood. Art in Theory 1900 – 2000 An Anthology of Changing Ideas. Blackwell Publishing: Malden, Oxford, Victoria, 2003.
La Shure. C. “About: What is Liminality?”. Liminality… the space in between. 1 – 9. Oct 10. 2008
“Sarah Morris: Robert Towne”. Public Art Fund Projects. Public Art Fund 2002- 2008: New York. Sept 18. 2008
“Sarah Morris”. White Cube. 28 Sept. 2008.
Smith, Catherine. “Looking for Liminality in Architectural Space” http://limen.mi2.hr Oct 1. 2008.
http://www.cartage.org.lb/en/themes/arts/Architec/ArchitecturalStructure/LookingforLiminality/LookingforLiminality.htm
Vidler, Anthony Warped Space: Art, Architecture, and Anxiety in Modern Culture The MIT Press: Cambridge, London, 2001
Von Bismark, B. “Generating Space: Martha Rosler’s Representational Process”. Martha Rosler: Passionate Signals. I. Schube. Hannover, Sprengel Museum Hannover, 2005: 252 – 283
Adapted from my MFA essay 2008, University of Auckland, Elam School of Fine Arts
