Courting Dissolution: Adumbration, Alterity, and the Dislocation of Sacrifice from Space to Image 9783839435748

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Michael Lent Courting Dissolution

Image | Volume 98

Michael Lent (PhD) is an artist, researcher, and academic working with visual and textual media. He investigates non-productive expenditure in art and culture and specifically how these ideas relate to space. He is Head of Fine Art at the University of Teesside.

Michael Lent

Courting Dissolution Adumbration, Alterity, and the Dislocation of Sacrifice from Space to Image

Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available in the Internet at http://dnb.d-nb.de © 2016 transcript Verlag, Bielefeld

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. Cover layout: Kordula Röckenhaus, Bielefeld Cover illustration: Video inflection of untitled (meets at the end), digital video, 18min 00sec, by Michael Lent, © 2016 Typeset by Mark-Sebastian Schneider, Bielefeld Printed in Germany Print-ISBN 978-3-8376-3574-4 PDF-ISBN 978-3-8394-3574-8

Contents

Acknowledgements  | 7 Initial Considerations  | 9 OklahomaisOK  | 15

Supporting the Indefinable  | 27 Text as Practice  | 27 Politics of Place | 33

Dis/location  | 37 Disappearance and Reconsidered Experience  | 37 A Transposition of Sacrifice | 44 Destructive Exchange | 50 Locating the Discourse | 53 Raw Phenomenological Method | 59 Foundational Phenomenology  | 61 Strategies and Context  | 64

Courting Dissolution  | 71 A Practice of Adumbrational Space | 71 Experience and Adumbrations | 72 Robert Smithson and Colonisation as an Act of Disappearance | 85 Nonsites and Land Art | 86 Production of Space  | 99 Non-Representational Space | 104

Practising Space  | 111 Alterity as a Reaction to Globalisation  | 111 Fragmentation and Mobility towards a Singular Other | 114 Fragmentation as Radical Alterity  | 125 Mobility and the Conjunctive Loci  | 132 Radicality | 142

Ellipsis  | 151 Appendix  | 157 untitled (meets in the middle), digital video (projection), 9:08 | 157 untitled (meets at the end), digital video (projection), 18:00 | 160 untitled (linear lapse), digital video (projection), 6:25 | 162 untitled, 10 analogue photographs printed on habotai silk on wooden frames with fluorescent lights, each 80cm x 110cm x 10cm | 164 untitled, series of 4,506 photograph installation, each 102mm x 152mm | 175 Bibliography  | 181

Acknowledgements

This book is dedicated to Dr Jared Pappas-Kelley without whom, through his encouragement, commitment and reinforcement, none of this would be remotely possible. I would also like to thank Professor Simon Morris for his help and criticism whilst reviewing all of these thoughts, as well as Dr Ang Bartram and Dr Mary O’Neil for their advice and laughter whilst navigating difficult terrain. I am so appreciative of my colleagues and students at the University of Teesside for allowing me space to work and giving me the support to continue. Lastly, I would like to thank Stephen for always enabling me to question and encouraging my curiosity. I am grateful for the tremendous amount of love I receive from Patricia and Michael (Seal) who are the most generous people I know. And importantly, to Rick, Marcela, and Mila who inspire me tremendously and keep me grounded.

Initial Considerations I fill this great empty space with a beautiful name.1 Joachim du Bellay

How is space made more material or knowable through visual examination? Despite a wide range of contemporary enquiry and study into space and spatiality,2 the specific problems put forth in this book3 shift some of the radical ideas which Jean Baudrillard and Paul Virilio originally ascribe to objects, to space. Specifically, these are Baudrillard’s method for examining disappearance into representation and Virilio’s theories of mobility in a phenomenological context. Through the process of undertaking this research there emerged a problem with how we deal with space, specifically how artists approach the world.4 Art presents an 1 | Du Bellay, J., 1995, Les Regrets; (précédé de) Les Antiquités de Rome; (et suivi de) La Défense et illustration de la langue française, Silvestre de Sacy, S., & Borel, J. eds. Editions Flammarion, Paris. 2 | This is further explored later. 3 | Namely a disappearance of space. 4 | This investigation is rooted in phenomenology, what Sylvère Lotringer calls “living philosophy.” Phenomenology is concerned with being-in-theworld and that reality can only be grasped through experience (of the world). Therefore, larger investigations of the meaning of reality are moot, save for brief references of a Baudrillardian notion of hyperreality (as in more real than real) as an example of things that have disappeared (or perhaps further, what they have disappeared into). Due to the phenomenological perspective of this research, and supported by the writings of phenomenolog-

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opportunity to examine the world in a way that is distinct from a scientific method, but it may be that art is conforming or heading into a similar path that I will discuss later in relation to the works of Maurice Merleau-Ponty.5 I would like to highlight a problem by which utility and a system of difference cause space to ultimately disappear.6 Moreover, this book serves as a metaphorical excavation of a larger problem7 by which experience is utilised towards the production of knowledge as a commodity to be exchanged into this same system, whereby all things are endowed with a use-value, but ultimately disappear as well. Instead, I suggest a practice by which artists might shift the focus of sacrifice in a general economy from the lived-world, and in this case a specifically locative experience, to the image of the art object itself, thus overcoming a sort of 8 spatial dissolution. Much like the theoretical position of this document, as well as the location of enquiry, this book endeavours to provide a textual landscape. Through its reading, it offers a capacity to traverse and meander through a theoretical dialogue which, at times, might not offer itself in easily consumable form—which is the argument made herein. As examined in later chapters, I propose that the form of ical theorists (and those whose practices are rooted in phenomenology) as the basis of this text, the scope of this investigation regarding artists is of their relationship to practices which involve or examine “the world”. 5 | This will be examined in a later chapter. 6 | An interrogation of this problem forms the bulk of the subsequent investigation. 7 | This is a problem developed through this text within a philosophical framework set up by theorists such as Merleau-Ponty, Bataille, and Baudrillard. 8 | “Sort of” as in a “type of”—the language used here is intentional as it alludes to an ephemeral and evanescent fundamental quandary, which is the realm the concerns of this approach are investigating. It implies a grasping of something which is not meant to be entirely understood (known, valued) and an indeterminate imaging/imagining of concept.

Initial Considerations

argument itself must be presented in an unfolding method and one that is not always explicit. The text flirts with the intangibility and pataphysical nature of these ideas both in the practice of its textual explication and informed by studio material. It forms a practice of things that would, or have, disappeared. In this sense, there is a crisis of alterity in which otherness is threatened by its opposition to a system of exchange. According to Baudrillard: “Alterity is in danger. It is a masterpiece in peril, an object lost or missing from our system…”9 With this book, I aim to focus on the otherness of space in order to prevent its ultimate dissolution, promoting a spatial practice of radical alterity. Towards this goal, Baudrillard’s Why Hasn’t Everything Already Disappeared? and Virilio’s The Aesthetics of Disappearance have both been employed to examine the activity of disappearance in regards to experience. Baudrillard writes about disappearance in relation to objects in the world, suggesting elements of Edmund Husserl’s focus in phenomenology. However, Baudrillard goes further to discuss the disappearance of concepts and ideas, which opened the door for thinking about disappearance in the realm of the intangible, that is space in this instance. In Virilio’s case, he offers an explanation of the role that fragmentation plays within the comprehension and subsequent disappearance of experience. This helped to generate an opening for examining the cause and effect of disappearance within the current system. With this foundation, the book takes similar stances based on the anti-productivist perspectives of Baudrillard and Georges Bataille with the view that ”...the visual arts have remained by the wayside as the entire culture is now being threatened by the extermination of space…”10 a quote which will be returned to and unpacked in more detail.

9 | Baudrillard, J. & Guillaume, M., 2008, Radical Alterity, Semiotext(e), Los Angeles. P. 113. 10 | Virilio, P. & Lotringer, S., 2005, The Accident of Art, Semiotext(e), Los Angeles. P. 29.

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With this research, I have hoped to take a renewed action in this regard by developing theory and ultimately works that are informed by the fatal strategies and ‘raw’ phenomenology of Baudrillard. From this vantage, the research model combines disappearance and alterity with traditional phenomenological notions of adumbration (as put forth by Husserl), experience, and perception in order to push the theory in a ‘raw’ method as initially conceived by the fatal strategies of Baudrillard. This ‘raw method’ is noted by Saulius Geniusas in the Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology. In a discussion of Baudrillard’s raw phenomenology, Geniusas proposes that Baudrillard’s philosophy contains two distinct tracts, the semiological and the fatal.11 Whilst the semiological is concerned with “on the one hand: political economy, production, the code, the system, simulation. On the other hand: potlatch, expenditure, sacrifice, death, the feminine, seduction, and in the end the fatal.”12 Geniusas also points out “quite often, unfortunately, critical literature on Baudrillard is limited to the interpretation of the first paradigm.”13 Addressing this gap, my research takes the later as focus. Through this approach this book hopes to open this interrogation a bit wider as Geniusas states too that the fatalist “raw phenomenology becomes capable of opening a new range of possibilities for the development of the leading phenomenological themes.”14 If critical literature on Baudrillard’s later works is rare then an artistic interrogation of these strategies is even rarer, and perhaps more desperately needed with a new emphasis on the 11 | Geniusas, S., 2004. Baudrillard’s Raw Phenomenology. Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology, 35, P. 294. 12 | Baudrillard, J., 1988, The Ecstasy of Communication, Lotringer, S. ed. Semiotext(e), Los Angeles. P. 79. 13 | Geniusas, S., 2004. Baudrillard’s Raw Phenomenology. Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology, 35, P. 295. 14 | Geniusas, S., 2004. Baudrillard’s Raw Phenomenology. Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology, 35, P. 294.

Initial Considerations

problematics of disappearance and representation. Whilst earlier works of Baudrillard have influenced art and media, these latter writings are just beginning to be interrogated. This book hopes to offer invigorating inflection towards these works through practitioner-research. Through interrogation I have also employed an artistic effort towards radical alterity as a practical one. This practice combines a phenomenology of the experience of space with strategies of asyndetic fragmentation and mobility as a production of perception of the world as Other in order to challenge a system of disappearance. This strategy advances discovery of the adumbrational potentialities of site rooted in Husserlian phenomenology and artistic practice, ultimately attempting to break a cyclical system of exchange that causes everything to disappear. Here, I propose that the dissolution of space is more precisely a transfiguration of site into a known and utilised place. It represents a movement into realised place, and a disappearance of the original space that once was. In this way, it has been consumed as a product into the system of difference and absorbed into homogeneity and entropy. Rather than a mediated practice responding to space as commodification, this book instead proposes a different practice; a rethinking of the way we utilise space. Through this it seeks to offer a radical practice, one that preserves the alterity of unnamed space as an act towards singularity—a singular space that resists the urge towards homogeneity. Another aim of this book is to further develop an existing discourse and a movement towards finding possible resolutions. This includes an examination of how one might approach these tendencies and better understand this disappearance into what is represented and is crucial to the methodology. The fugacious terrain of this investigation (both of its subject matter and its theoretical provision) requires this book to focus and espouse on that which is experimental, intentional, and sometimes impenetrable—what is lost in representing experience. This project began as a development from the arising problematics that were revealed through earlier investigations. Previous concerns

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in my own studio practice had been focused specifically on the experience of being in transit and lacking a place, which sparked a number of considerations regarding the way we utilise or mediate space or location especially as a material for artistic activity. I have viewed this mobility as a genuine opportunity to engage with the ephemerality of locative experience. Growing up, I lived mostly in the mid-Atlantic of the US and later the west coast. Just prior to this research and in readying for it, I took several opportunities in the preceding years to drive back and forth across the North American continent in order to become acquainted with a space which I had only ever flown over. I had less of a desire to get to know the people or culture of these sites, and instead wanted to focus on discovering different places I had never been, mostly cities or tourist sites. Through the activity of this desire I found that I became more enamoured with the spaces inbetween; those spaces that allowed for movement. People often call the middle section of the US the “fly-over” states, a reference to their sparse population as well as their perceived unimportance. Whilst spending the week or so necessary to drive across and through them I noticed there were mini “fly-over” (or rather drive past) spaces comprising these—between Memphis and Little Rock, between Amarillo and Oklahoma City, between Albuquerque and Flagstaff. These were the sites that allowed for movement, which were often in a sense unburdened with human habitation or more specifically an abundance of meaning and utility (other than as a means to an endpoint). Between these sites there were often no names, no signs. Frequently, speed limits were virtually non-existent in order to facilitate a rapid passing over of space, a means to get to an endpoint. The only road markers were signifiers of the hundreds of miles to the next city or petrol station. From this experience, I began to educe on the significance of the means to get to these points and the ephemeral experience of moving through space from one site to the next. Being in transit left me with a need to adapt my studio practice, so aside from documenting the journey visually, I woke up

Initial Considerations

early most mornings to describe what I had witnessed that day. This being one example:

O kl ahomais OK I think I’m a little bit in love with Oklahoma. This is new to me because I never expected it. Not that I’m an Oklahoma connoisseur—I’ve only been there twice, and both times within the last eighteen months. But yesterday morning, when I woke up at dawn and started driving westward across it, towards California, it cinched it. I have feelings for Oklahoma. I’m not talking about its people, as I’ve scarcely met any. Or its weather, as I was afraid of being swept up by a tornado (which had hit the region the day before) at any moment. Or its culture or sights, none of which I saw if they exist. But as I drove across it, with the sun coming up from behind me, I saw the point where the Oklahoma sky meets its prairie-tan horizon line. The space between the sun (that I knew was behind me but never looked back) and where the sky touched the ground was filled with the kind of air that you’d only find at midnight. But here it was in the day. Maybe it’s because everything was so flat and open that I could see where the earth curved down towards Texas and beyond. This wasn’t for a moment, or in a certain part of the road, but for the entirety of Oklahoma. If I hadn’t been there before I would have written it off as some kind of traveling delirium. But I had been there before and felt the same way. And it wasn’t just that space. But somehow the space and the light made a pact to imagine the colour of the entire state. It was like messing around with the contrast or colour on an old TV and finding something so mesmerising that you momentarily committed yourself to a lifetime of badly tuned television in order to hold on to the experience. The blue sky

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was like tin. It had that metallic taste of blood. But it was made up of millions of soft, fast-moving dots. The ground was laid in thick strokes, and the colour was sand although the desert was miles ahead. A painter could spend eternity trying to mix those colours and never find success. In places, the ground had giant patches of brown-black char. It formed shapes that must have made sense when viewed from the sky. But there were no structures tall enough to make an attempt. Despite hundreds of miles of fields there didn’t seem to be a single crop growing. There were places where it looked like cotton used to grow, but nothing was planted now. And sometimes there’d be groups of cattle that looked like they were birthed straight from the ground. They came in that exact same brown-black char and sandy ground colour, and were just as ruffled as the landscape. The road seemed to go on forever. Occasionally it would curve to make sure I saw any slight deviation in the landscape. I appreciate that Oklahoma wanted to make sure I caught it all. Every so often I’d burst out with, “I think I could live here!” or “Let’s move to Oklahoma!”—the insanity of my exclamations immediately dismissed the idea as the words trickled out into that air to my half-asleep travel companions. I clarified, “Well, we could have a second house here.” I know that isn’t really likely and I knew that my travels across Oklahoma would be ending. Soon they would be brought to a conclusion by the interruption that is the Texas panhandle. But I need to go back to Oklahoma someday. Still, these journeys for me seemed to focus on arrival, exoticism, and experience not as a phenomenological drive of being in the space but rather to notch up miles as an adventurer passing through. Perhaps this experience, and the work I created around it were my own attempted contribution to a specific American idea/l of being on the road. Road trips of this sort might be viewed as ways to

Initial Considerations

“get to know” America, and even in Kerouac’s iconic novel On the Road he refers to the consistent familiarity and known-ness of this experience. Furthermore we know America, we’re at home; I can go anywhere in America and get what I want because it’s the same in every corner, I know the people, I know what they do. We give and take and go in the incredibly complicated sweetness zigzagging every side.15

Perhaps these journeys had been more about getting to know the space I travelled in, and the country where I grew up. They began as a desire to arrive in places I had never been, but gradually the noticing of the in-between became more prevalent in my mind. Previously, I created video works with footage recorded on these journeys and manipulated them into several short experimental pieces. These works were more specifically focused on recognisable elements, as sites of meaning or representation of specific places (i.e. California Beaches, the Golden Gate Bridge, Oil derricks, fields of wind turbines, etc.) But through these new instances I began taking photographs and shooting video footage of all of these in between places. These included the backs of road signs and the hundreds of miles of seeming nothingness between points on map. At an exhibition of my work, I showed a large grid of these photographs. I was dismayed that visitors to the exhibition would try to guess where these sites were, or that they were sure these places were somewhere nearby. Although they were most often wrong, I was struck by the familiarity of landscape around the world despite large geographic distances and that people might have felt some connection to an image despite never having been to this specific “no place” represented. The subsequent shuffling and reshuffling of these photographs as I installed them meant that I was no longer able to really say for certain where a specific image might be documenting. This impulse and dynamic began to really inform the theory that 15 | Kerouac, J., 1999, On the Road, Penguin Books, New York. unpaginated.

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would become this book, as I wanted to push this distinction apart from the recognisable and familiar, thus investigating a separation of meaning and value from the understanding of site itself. When this book began to formulate, I had also shifted the focus of my visual practice and began to look into relevant literature based on this notion and understanding of space. I sought a simple definition that might separate the notions of space and place (whereas it is often all too easy to regard them interchangeably). Not content with what I gleaned from initial examination of archaeology and geography, the writings of Yi-Fu Tuan initially offered a working definition of the dichotomy between space and place in his book of the same name that seemed to fit. Tuan provided a jumping-off point from my previous observation regarding this slippage between space and place as well as the “non-places” in my previous bodies of work, but moreover he intimated a desire to place meaning and recognise sites as distinct entities defined by their utility which became key as this research continued. In this sense, the phenomenology of geographers became important to this research. However, I sought to have my investigation take shape with the foundation of phenomenology alongside something more updated, contemporary, experimental, and challenging, whilst also continuing to fit in with the availability of site as experienced. Whilst examining this slippage and disappearance between space and place within these sites I was examining, I specifically became interested in Baudrillard’s final book, Why Hasn’t Everything Already Disappeared? which subsequently formed much of the foundation for this entire project. Baudrillard’s book had just been published as I began this research and there was virtually no serious consideration of its impact at this point. In contrast to Baudrillard’s better-known works, Why Hasn’t Everything Already Disappeared? focuses on a different element of his oeuvre, the fatal, which lends itself to this sort of enquiry. Through investigating this strain, which might be termed one of raw phenomenology and fatal strategies, I discovered something that was, to me, important and underutilised. Baudrillard’s writings began to pull these somewhat disparate

Initial Considerations

concerns together and shared an affinity with my earlier observations on the road, whilst guiding the remainder of this investigation. He provided a framework for understanding the tendencies I was investigating when re-applied to a focus on disappearance of space. Initially, my investigation examined the work of artists such as Gordon Matta-Clark and Rachel Whiteread as their practices dealt with notions of spatiality, but it became clear that these works were evidently outside of the area of focus for this book on indefinable spaces. Through interrogation, these works were identified as instead being focused on the extreme familiarity of built space. Whiteread exposes the inhabited shape of lived-space by creating plaster casts16 as the director of the MFA Boston said on the occasion of her 2009 solo show there: “Rachel Whiteread gives meaning to the empty spaces of our lives…”17 Conversely, MattaClark deconstructs lived spaces by bisecting houses or removing architectural segments. Whilst fascinating phenomena, further investigation and interrogation would be beyond the scope of this investigation and might easily have formed another, much different book based on the ideas of inhabited spaces, acculturation, and psycho-geography. These artists are examining places, which for the purposes of this research, might be considered already-disappeared. Matta-Clark evidences this when he remarked: “…the next area that interests me is an expedition into the underground: a search for the forgotten spaces left buried under the city either as a historical reserve or as surviving reminders of lost projects and fantasies…”18 16 | Whiteread, R., Dennison, L. & Houser, C., 2001, Rachel Whiteread: Transient Spaces, Guggenheim Museum Publications: Distributed by Harry N. Abrams, New York. 17 | Rachels Whiteread’s Dramatic Installation, Place (Village) at The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, artdaily.org. Retrieved December 12, 2013, from http://artdaily.com/index.asp?int_sec=11&int_new=26710&int_modo= 2#.Uz001cdV4e8 18 | Wall, D., 1976. Gordon Matta-Clark’s Building Dissections. Arts Magazine, 50(9).

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Artists working with these built spaces address social concerns that are not fundamental to this research into available, Other spaces. Rather, they focus on discovering and recouping the spaces that have already been lost19, forgotten, or disappeared—those which have an already-established meaning, which they have been tasked with unearthing and decoding. Artists such as these became peripheral to this project once Baudrillard’s theories came to the forefront and informed the reapplication of his ideas to a spatial and artistic practice. In Baudrillardean terms, disappearance has already happened once we have given meaning to something and the aim of this research is to find out what happens before this process and to perhaps court the very moment on the cusp of disappearance. Whilst Matta-Clark and Whiteread had been tangential to this research, Robert Smithson offered an alternative approach and opportunity for critique that forms what might be considered a case study later on in this volume. Smithson’s phenomenology became a foundational aspect guiding the thought of this book (alongside Robert Irwin’s) and with Tuan helped build the historical underpinning that this examination is based on. Smithson has provided the capacity to examine Baudrillard’s theory in relation to site-specific work that is also phenomenologically based, and the plethora of texts from Smithson provides a first-person account of his ideas that have helped to underpin the artist’s intention. The publisher Semiotext(e) and the associated theorist Sylvère Lotringer also helped to connect Baudrillard’s ideas to those of Virilio, within this emerging context for understanding the dynamics and loss between space and place.20 Both Baudrillard and more recently Virilio had published books that included conversations with Lotringer on art. This helped bring this book full circle, as I could 19 | See further examination in Arguments for the Indefinable section for the distinction between what this research purports and what I suspect these artists are attempting to examine. 20 | Virilio subsequently suffered a heart attack and was unable to host this event.

Initial Considerations

locate research elements within similar practice and theory. These works offered a better link for examining these phenomena therefore bridging it with methods for understanding and extrapolating its context within the work investigated. Nevertheless, to delve deeper into this notion of space I sought to continue examining material outside of art and philosophy in order to have a fuller picture of related concerns. The writings of Jun’ichirō Tanizaki on the loss of shadows connected with Baudrillard’s disappearing event and further met with similar writing on space I was already doing. Furthermore, Tanizaki’s approach linked to the foundational phenomenology of Husserl, whose adumbrational theories of objects seemed to infer an opportunity for disappearance and its observation. Tanizaki begins to talk about the potentiality of what lies in the shadows in domestic spaces. This understanding helped transition the approach towards its spatial focus, as through this emphasis, shadows are no longer ascribed as being part of an object, such as in the case of Husserl, but rather they become the primary focus for Tanizaki within spatial contexts. This is a distinct notion from works such as the parable of Plato’s Cave whereby the character in the story is effectively focused on shadows and determined to discover what creates them, only becoming free when he has gained a full understanding of what previously was only inferred. In Tanizaki’s text, he discusses the loss of these shadows altogether, which is in essence the loss of a possibility and opportunity, a notion that I sought to investigate through this research. Husserl led to an investigation of MerleauPonty, as his philosophy was based on intensive study of Husserl. In Merleau-Ponty’s writings relating to art and science, I discovered a way to align some of these more contemporary ideas and the critiques of Baudrillard and Virilio within this context. These theories were also grounded in Virilio’s phenomenological background, as a former student of Merleau-Ponty at the Sorbonne. Texts such as Merleau-Ponty’s The Visible and the Invisible hint at this process of experience and disappearance when he says:

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The visible about us seems to rest in itself. It is as though our vision were formed in the heart of the visible, or as though there were between it and us an intimacy as close as between the sea and the strand. And yet it is not possible that we blend into it, nor that it passes into us, for then the vision would vanish at the moment of formation, by disappearance of the seer or of the visible. 21

Parallel threads within the body of these works helped to define and align the concerns of my research as it progressed. MerleauPonty led me to the writings of Francis Ponge, which unpacked the gravitas of Ponge’s poetics of environmental experience. This literature connected back with Tanizaki as descriptive texts that examined spaces or objects within the landscape through a context of phenomenology and began giving a framework. Likewise, Baudrillard’s underutilised raw phenomenology, as developed from a pure phenomenology of these earlier writers, evoked experience as witnessed through disappearance. A new method for understanding this loss into representation that I had begun observing in my earliest road trips and documentations also began to emerge. The reflective quality of these works of literature by Ponge and Tanizaki seemed unmistakably like putting these phenomenological ideas into practice. They formed a template for beginning to understand thought and writing as a practice or intervention toward examining this loss. At the same time, I began editing video works with the same considered treatment that these writers practiced. These initial video works that I made during the time of uncovering these volumes of writing helped to inform the intentionality present in the project and subsequently an investigation into fragmentation in documentations of space. It became immensely important to recognise both the scope and boundaries of this project in order to focus on space as a site 21 | Merleau-Ponty, M., 1997, The Visible and the Invisible: Followed by working notes, Lefort, C. ed. Northwestern University Press, Evanston, Ill. P. 249.

Initial Considerations

of potentiality and possibility that might also have the prospect of disappearance. As there is a seemingly endless supply of texts and artists who are concerned with space and spatiality, it became apparent that my investigation was focused on aligning visual practice with the specific concerns of space and disappearance I had been investigating through these writings, studio practice, and my earliest observations driving and travelling across North America and later the UK and Europe. This necessitated selectivity in the material that would inform this research as it progressed. As stated earlier, I had to be specific with my engagement with other artists firstly to prevent the project from becoming one too focused on art history and critique. Rather, I sought instead to develop works that might consider the repercussions of representing space, as opposed to one simply focused on space in general which was much too broad and not related to the specific enquiry and context I had been observing and examining. Thus, I concentrated on the phenomenological practices of Irwin and Graham that specifically addressed this implied disappearance in their work and writings directly. Through this, I began engaging and writing a specific critique of some of Smithson’s work almost as a case study for understanding this disappearance as mentioned earlier. This investigation considered not only Smithson’s practice but also took a view towards his intent and how these motivations spoke specifically to disappearance and colonisation of space. Utilising his writings as a key for setting forth these intentions within a framework based upon my close readings of Tuan, Baudrillard, and the others, I was able to focus this investigation on the making of work, engagement with theory, and the intention of artists. Similarly, and despite earlier investigations of the expanded field of research, the writings of other theorists and practitioners became less relevant and ancillary. Theorists and geographers such as Edward Casey, Michel Foucault, Gaston Bachelard, and Jacques Derrida emerged as beyond the scope of this investigation, as they seemed to set forth their own concerns apart from what I was examining. These included ideas of art as representation or the symbolic, as well as the interrogation of

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lived-in or sociological important spaces that would be considered already having disappeared from the vantage of this research. Likewise, additional writers such as Henri Lefebvre and Nigel Thrift seemed to have their specific Marxist agendas set in the social science of cultural geography and accumulation, which I will discuss subsequently. Although Bachelard and Tanizaki might first be thought of both as writers of interior spaces (and thus might have been dismissed in ways similar to Whiteread, for example) arguably, Tanizaki’s prose contains a key dissolutive consideration that became apparent as the primary focus of this research when he discusses in what ways the possibilities are lost when shadows are uncovered and also offered parallels for understanding Baudrillard’s notions of alterity. Unlike Whiteread, whose works might be thought of as evidence of an entropic state of loss of socially inhabited space and its subsequent reclamation, Tanizaki speaks to the loss of the space itself as it is experienced first hand and not necessarily as a site for utility (a lived-in space such as Whiteread’s). In effect, Tanizaki examined this event as phenomena, engaged with observing the tension in the potentiality of what presents as well as recedes in these moments, whereas the work of Whiteread seeks to make tangible or monumentalise what has already disappeared through the built space (by “making meaning”). More specifically, Tanizaki remarks on light in relation to this disappearance, which further connects to the work of Smithson and Irwin who discuss light with regards to their practices and in a similar manner. More overtly and in this way, light is examined in the texts on photography theories by Baudrillard. From this, I turned towards Michel de Certeau’s The Practice of Everyday Life as an example of the phenomenology of spatial experience through mobility as a way of making these ideas tangible and relevant to practice somehow. The Practice of Everyday Life offers an explanation of how a fragmented experience might offer the “indetermination” of comprehension. De Certeau, too, suggests that mobility plays a role in this fragmentary act though he does not directly delve into this idea of disappearance, however its application

Initial Considerations

might be implied or extrapolated through a close reading. Reflecting as far back as Aristotle in Physics, Book IV a mobile act is described as a change of place, which similarly laid the groundwork for this research within this greater context. The idea of mobility was informed by my own durational works and largely on the theories of Virilio regarding speed and dromology. Both de Certeau and Virilio discuss the act of movement as an opportunity for experience and critique the notion of the itinerary as a means of intention through the practice of travel. Whilst Virilio speaks of velocity and the desire of arrival, de Certeau talks about the possibilities of journeys on foot and the agenda of the practitioner. Through this, I continued to return to Baudrillard as I expanded upon my investigation of disappearance and his fatal strategies. As discussed in more detail later, Baudrillard’s texts seemed to emerge as writing-as-practice in some of the same ways that artists such as Smithson did, by revealing the intent of specific practitioners. It became essential to think of the relationship between all of these methods of both artistic practice and writing and how both were informed by theory in order to produce research that also practiced the multiple methods that would shape this book. The somewhat complex interrelation between theory and practice, intent and experience, and meaning and dissolution required that this study engage in an amalgamation of these different tracts to ultimately form a specific project in order to understand this disappearance of space and its relation to representation.

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Supporting the Indefinable Behind every image, something has disappeared. And that is the source of its fascination. 1 Jean Baudrillard

Te x t as P r actice As explained earlier, a preliminary investigation of this research was informed by artists as writers and in particular Robert Smithson, whose textual works are arguably as much a part of his legacy as the studio and land works he created. Further interrogation and a deeper understanding of a phenomenological methodology informed a more nuanced discourse which framed this research. It is with this in mind that the written element of this approach should be viewed as a deeply practical one. The written elements of this book are practice as well. Lotringer describes Baudrillard as a “…practicing artist of his own concepts”2 which informs the similar approach in which this research takes shape. What benefit would textual research in fine art have if it does not approach research from an artistic perspective (and this is perhaps its most common pitfall)? Through the process of this research, both the textual and the visual seemed to align somehow with the theoretical in an attempt to merge these concerns, so that indeed the desire is for the writing to 1 | Baudrillard, J., 2009, Why Hasn’t Everything Already Disappeared? Translated by A. Willaume. Seagull Books, London. P. 32. 2 | The Piracy of Art in Baudrillard, J. & Lotringer, S., 2005, The Conspiracy of Art: Manifestos, Interviews, Essays, Semiotext(e), Los Angeles. P. 17.

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evidence some form of writing as artistic practice in itself and not simply supportive material or explication into which it disappears. With this in mind, I looked beyond visual evidence of phe­ nomenological enquiry and examined works by the French poet Ponge, as mentioned, whose approach is also linked with this impulse. Ponge’s environmental narratives evidenced a creative output of theoretical/research methodology (phenomenology) applied in practice and how something with these aims might begin to take form. Similarly, Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities3 provided descriptive texts of spaces that had seemed to disappear, or not exist at all. This also demonstrated how writings could address these themes and considerations in practice. One in particular, stood out as especially relevant to this approach: Perhaps neither the Aglaura that is reported nor the Aglaura that is visible has greatly changed…but what was bizarre has become usual, what seemed normal is now an oddity...In this sense, nothing said of Aglaura is true, and yet these accounts create a solid and compact image of a city, whereas the haphazard opinions which might be inferred from living there have less substance. This is the result: the city that they speak of has much of what is needed to exist, whereas the city that exists on its site, exists less.

It continues: …at certain hours, in certain places along the street, you see opening before you the hint of something unmistakable, rare, perhaps magnificent; you would like to say what it is, but everything previously said of Aglaura imprisons your words and obliges you to repeat rather than say.

And finally: [T]he inhabitants still believe they live in an Aglaura which grows only with the name Aglaura and they do not notice the Aglaura that grows on 3 | Calvino, I., 1978, Invisible Cities, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, New York.

Suppor ting the Indefinable

the ground. And even I, who would like to keep the two cities distinct in my memory, can speak only of the one, because the recollection of the other, in the lack of words to fix it, has been lost.4

Whilst this passage refers to an indeterminate city, the method that Calvino espouses alludes to both the ephemerality of the city itself and the difficulties and loss encountered in conceptualising or defining it. It also describes how experience disappears into our conceptions and gives form to some of the concerns investigated in this book. In the above passage, Calvino is able to demonstrate the fleeting nature of his character’s observation by describing the experience with a poetical phenomenology. Likewise, Merleau-Ponty, who is so crucial to the underpinning framework of this book, utilises the phenomenological works of Ponge to highlight his theory.5 Indeed, the writings of Ponge have been utilised as a touchstone for other key thinkers as a method for approaching this material and both de Certeau and Derrida cite the importance of Ponge in their research.6 Additionally, Baudrillard also espouses a raw phenomenology of concepts springing from a pure phenomenology, explored further later in this book, but it hints at a working practice whereby there is less distinction between what we write and how we write. To this end, the text of this book is similarly a practice of a type of phenomenology that these theorists7 informed, which is discussed in the next chapter. This phenomenology forms a practice of writing where the text is an engagement with the world. Part of this engagement is enacted through the writing (and subsequent 4 | Calvino, I., 1978, Invisible Cities, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, New York. P. 67-8. 5 | Merleau-Ponty, M., 2009, The World of Perception, Routledge, London. 6 | See both de Certeau, M., 2008, The Practice of Everyday Life, University of California Press, Berkeley. as well as Derrida, J., 1988, The Ear of the Other: Otobiography, Transference, Translation, McDonald, C. ed. University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln, NE. 7 | Baudrillard but also Virilio, Nancy, et al.

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rewritings as method of reflection and phenomenological en­ gagement)8 of the text. This forms the practice as well as method, an engagement. “As in poetry, it is inappropriate to ask for a conclusion or a summary of a phenomenological study. To summarise a poem in order to present the result would destroy the result because the poem itself is the result. The poem is the thing.”9  Literature has informed the investigation present in this book and helped to set a framework whereby text is rooted as not only a methodology of theory put into practice, but also grammar later serves as a metaphor to understand some of the theory advanced. However, this is not to imply a connection to semiology—or meaning making, but instead an inversion of meaning-making’s links to disappearance, which will be examined later. In this way these writings must be thought of as practice. It is this engagement, which forms the elements laid forth both textual and studio. Different textual styles may become evident throughout the reading, as Dronsfield points out “The emergent use of theoretical text as a material constituent of contemporary art practice is another way of questioning the order of dependency between theory and practice.”10 This becomes evidence of the role that practitioner-researcher seeks to find through an informed practice of multiple experiences, that is of writing, making work, and the initial experiences that inform both and also finds affinities with Baudrillard’s fatal strategies which will be examined in more detail subsequently. 8 | “The methodology of phenomenology requires a dialectical going back and forth among these various levels of questioning. Language is a central concern in phenomenological research because responsive-reflective writing is the very activity of doing phenomenology. Writing and rewriting is the thing.” in Van Manen, M., 1990, Researching Lived Experience: Human Science for an Action Sensitive Pedagogy, SUNY Press, Albany, NY. P. 132. 9 | Van Manen, M., 1990, Researching Lived Experience: Human Science for an Action Sensitive Pedagogy, SUNY Press, Albany, NY. P. 13. 10 | Dronsfield, J.L., 2009, Theory as Art practice: Notes for Discipline, Art & Research: A journal of ideas, contexts and methods, 2(2). P. 2.

Suppor ting the Indefinable

The desire to explain, to make sense of everything, alludes to the very desire explained throughout this book; to know and name the world for utility. Susan Sontag explains a similar impulse in the examination of artworks as in Against Interpretation she remarks: In most modern instances, interpretation amounts to a philistine refusal to leave the work of art alone. Real art has the capacity to make us nervous. By reducing the work of art to its content and then interpreting that, one tames the work of art. Interpretation makes art manageable, comfortable.11

Whilst research of this nature might require a certain amount of analysis, it is important to let both the written and creative works have some space for possibility. In the same way that summarising a poem might destroy the work itself,12 an over analysis of this type of research would destroy the impulse of the activity. I suspect that this indeterminateness, this potentiality, is firstly what makes artistic research so interesting and secondly what makes it imperative. Sontag seems to advocate this practice in real terms when she states: Ours is a culture based on excess, on overproduction; the result is a steady loss of sharpness in our sensory experience... What is important now is to recover our senses. We must learn to see more, to hear more, to feel more. Our task is not to find the maximum amount of content in a work of art, much less to squeeze more content out of the work than is already there. Our task is to cut back content so that we can see the thing at all. [italics in original]13

11 | Sontag, S., 2001, Against Interpretation and Other Essays, Picador, New York. P. 8. 12 | Van Manen, M., 1990, Researching Lived Experience: Human Science for an Action Sensitive Pedagogy, SUNY Press, Albany, NY. P. 13. 13 | Sontag, S., 2001, Against Interpretation and Other Essays, Picador, New York. P. 13.

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Sontag’s words might speak directly to this particular research, which is based on exploring the process of excess and overproduction—the accursed share. Further, she argues for this return to experience that is a phenomenological impulse. Here, Sontag denotes, as is the basis of this research, an overabundance of meaning, of content, makes it impossible to see or experience what lies before us. As artists and thinkers, it may be difficult to imagine our work simply existing or reflecting some aspect or potentiality of the world without necessarily some larger meaning. In his article, The Writing Artist, Jan Svenungsson speaks of the indeterminateness of work that makes it all the more important. What is it that makes a work of art important? My best answer is that there is something in it that you can’t understand completely. Still, you do understand that this something is there, and that it has the potential to be understood. Because of this presence, the work attracts our attention and curiosity and we keep thinking about it.14

His description of this potentiality seems especially relevant to this research, as it is singularly this potentiality that this research seems to both investigate and practice as a strategy, rather than a total understanding. Svenungsson argues that the fundamental difference between the curiosities of art and science “is that artistic activity’s primary product is not knowledge, but the inspiration— to search for knowledge.”15 This again supports the proposition that potentiality in this work is what is the most important, this questioning and alterity, not the ultimate goal to comprehend and subsequently subsume. And so, if this piece of research is being produced by an artist and asserts that in some way it is attempting to practice the very concepts it describes and reckons to explore in other visual works, then it could be argued in some sense that the text itself might be 14 | Svenungsson, J., 2009, The Writing Artist, Art & Research, 2(2). P. 1. 15 | Svenungsson, J., 2009, The Writing Artist, Art & Research, 2(2). P. 1.

Suppor ting the Indefinable

thought of as an artwork. Further, Svenungsson goes on to describe the research writing of artists: The visual product will always be working on more than one level at once, and it easily incorporates inconsistency and self-contradiction. It is only natural that an artist who chooses also to write, will be attracted to similar goals in her production of text.16

This helps to mark the text of this book both as practice and as a work of academic writing, in themselves perhaps contradictions. Specific descriptions which emerge through this text, such as when I presupposed to “both investigate and evade” something might seem contradictory in written terms, but are not uncommon in artistic pursuits as Svenungsson observed. The impulse to both interrogate whilst being keenly aware of boundaries is why I have termed this study as almost a pataphysical one (and pataphysics perhaps being one of Baudrillard’s most fatal strategies). It is this very play which examples part of what I describe as teasing this dissolutive event, to discover this moment on the cusp of something without causing it to become another thing.

P olitics of P l ace Inevitably the political enters the equation, in a time when politics seems at once so dire and insurmountable. The politics of the practice as espoused within this document is one of an anti-commodification of art; a vision for art. This politics is not necessarily relegated to the art object itself, as may be a more popular position, but rather the commodification of meaning and value in the subjectile of the work (the subject and object together). Similarly, the politics ascribed are one of anti-capitalisation and anti-colonial in a general sense, which is perhaps an outcome of the desire to conquer, claim, 16 | Svenungsson, J., 2009, The Writing Artist, Art & Research, 2(2). P. 4.

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and name. Instead, it presents a practice that intends to explore in an experiential manner, cognisant of the repercussions of commodification. This research might be best described as antiproductivist in the Bataillean sense of the word, thus it advances that sacrifice might be a necessary act within the current system, perhaps even of the art object itself. Further rumination on that act focusing on a sacrifice of objects could form a future direction of this research. Cultural geographer Tim Cresswell says in his book Place “… it is common…to bemoan a loss of sense of place as the forces of globalization have eroded local cultures and produced homogenized global spaces.”17 Taken apart from this opinion, the intent of this book is not to conjure up some sort of sentimentality of site. A reading of it in this way would be entirely counter to the ideas espoused herein. It is exactly that type of sentiment that this approach argues against, a valuing of location—changing it from an ephemeral, elusive entity into one with some memorable value. This is what has been left over after spaces disappear—memories. Emotive or not, these spaces have all disappeared and memories are simply a trace of this disappearance enacted. Instead, this approach seeks to investigate why and how these spaces disappear and not to resurrect or mourn them, as excavations of meaning as Sontag suggests. As evidence throughout this text, in agreement with Creswell, “the forces of globalization have…produced homogen[eity].” This book also does not refer to “sense of place” as it asserts that that sense is a remnant of what has already disappeared into conception. This research takes as its impetus the “…hyperbolic world-views espoused by Baudrillard and Paul Virilio”18 especially towards disappearance and the exchange system within the current restrictive 17 | Cresswell, T., 2004, Place: A Short Introduction, Blackwell Publishers, Oxford. P. 8. 18 | Speakers Series: Sylvère Lotringer—Theory in Art, CCS Bard. Retrieved December 12, 2013, from http://www.bard.edu/ccs/events/ speakers-series-sylvere-lotringer-theory-in-art/

Suppor ting the Indefinable

economy as put forth by Bataille.19 A particular critique of capitalism would be beyond the scope of this specific investigation, however it is entirely necessary to review an economy of value and meaning within the context of this investigation. Namely, what causes space to disappear and what happens to it when it does. Further, as a practice led enquiry it is further necessary to interrogate the role that art plays within this system. Before even Baudrillard and Virilio, theorists such as Merleau-Ponty and Bataille20 proposed that art maintains some sort of “destiny” in the world and critiques its role within culture. Crucial texts for this approach include works with titles such as The Conspiracy of Art, Art and Fear, and The Cruel Practice of Art, so it is similarly necessary to proscribe established practices highlighting the repercussions of intent towards dissolution as put forth in the synthesised theory in this volume. Virilio argues, “there is a catastrophe within contemporary art”21 and goes on to suggest “…they’ve masked this failure with commercial success.”22 This denotes a position that is antithetical to what could be argued is the current system at play, one that obviously exists within a capitalist context but might extend beyond mere commerce. Indeed, Virilio goes further to align this catastrophe with business when he says, “…the failure of the visual arts leaves open the possibility of the optical correction of the world. By whom? By machines and businessmen, who happen to know how to work together quite well.

19 | See Bataille, G., 1991, Accursed Share: Volume 1, Translated by R. Hurley. Zone Books, New York. 20 | The assertions of Merleau-Ponty and Bataille will be explored more closely in subsequent chapters. 21 | Virilio, P. & Lotringer, S., 2005, The Accident of Art, Semiotext(e), Los Angeles. 22 | Virilio, P. & Lotringer, S., 2005, The Accident of Art, Semiotext(e), Los Angeles.

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[italics in original]”23 Further, Baudrillard argued that contemporary art no longer had a reason to exist24 and claimed to envision: ...art laughing at itself and at its own disappearance in its most artificial form, irony. In any case, the dictatorship of images is an ironic dictatorship… It now belongs to insider trading, the shameful and hidden complicity binding the artist who uses his or her aura of derision against the bewildered and doubtful masses. 25

Whilst Baudrillard discusses his ideas about the role of art in the world, he uses the language of corporate economic scandals, insider trading, and mass media to describe what it has become and perhaps for good reason. It would be simplistic to see this just as critique of capitalism within the art world, and perhaps the gallery system. Instead, it expresses a wider context of the role and repercussions that insider trading envelopes, the ethical issues, the arrogance, the laissez-faire attitude, its destructive forces, the collapse of a system, and on and on.

23 | Virilio, P. & Lotringer, S., 2005, The Accident of Art, Semiotext(e), Los Angeles. P. 61 24 | Baudrillard, J. & Lotringer, S., 2005, The Conspiracy of Art: Manifestos, Interviews, Essays, Semiotext(e), New York. P. 9. 25 | Baudrillard, J. & Lotringer, S., 2005, The Conspiracy of Art: Manifestos, Interviews, Essays, Semiotext(e), New York. P. 28.

Dis/location It appears, however, to be something overwhelming and hard to grasp, the topos—that is place-space.1 Aristotle

D isappe ar ance and R econsidered E xperience The dichotomy of space and place is described by humanist geographer Yi-Fu Tuan when he states, “what begins as undifferentiated space becomes place as we get to know it better and endow it with value2…” However, is that endowment the beginning of a spatial dissolution as Baudrillard might suggest vis-à-vis the act of naming?3 What are the implications of practising space as de Certeau calls it,4 and how might artists uncover this moment of transition, which is ripe with meaning and at the same time on the cusp of disappearance? I assert that art has the ability to—was supposed to—do more,5 leading us into the world as explorers rather than actors of 1 | Aristotle, 1999, Physics, Book IV, Graham, D.W. ed. Oxford University Press, Oxford. P. 59. 2 | Tuan, Y.-F., 2005, Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis. P. 6. 3 | Baudrillard, J., 2009, Why Hasn’t Everything Already Disappeared? Translated by A. Willaume. Seagull Books, London. 4 | de Certeau, M., 2008, The Practice of Everyday Life, University of California Press, Berkeley. 5 | A further discussion follows whereby Merleau-Ponty considers the role of art to engage in the world, and Baudrillard discusses art’s destiny.

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an extemporary scientific method, which will be highlighted in a moment. However, the task of this research is by way of a pinpoint consideration of spatial disappearance (defined as an act by which an object or idea ceases), the role of art towards this end, and a new strategy that might be employed towards an intentional, more exacting goal investigating the sites we encounter. Namely, this research is an examination of the moment on the cusp of disappearance whereby experience merges with an imagining. This is a practice toward the potentialities and possibilities of object and space, of discovery, of what lies on the other side (of what we perceive)—as something not necessarily in opposition and not simply different from us and our familiarity, but instead as alterity. There are numerous studies of space and place across disciplines such as landscape geography and architecture.6 Bachelard’s Poetics of Space 7 and Marc Augé’s Non-Places 8 are examples of two oft-cited texts within the canon of space/place studies, but for the purposes of this research emerge inapt, as they are concerned with built sites, which by definition have already disappeared.9 Writers have considered space and its relationship to the built environment; Alongside Bataille (who calls it a “cruel practice”), both Baudrillard and Virilio make remarks regarding what they deem the “conspiracy” in the case of Baudrillard and a “pitiless” art espoused by Virilio. 6 | Please see some general examples in the next passage, however the difference between space/place studies (which are numerous) and the specific focus of this research (which has largely been ignored) regarding the idea of disappearance of these sites, is set forth in the introduction. 7 | Bachelard, G., 1994, The Poetics of Space, Translated by M. Jolas. Beacon Press, Boston. 8 | Augé, M., 2008, Non-Places: Introduction to An Anthropology of Supermodernity, Verso, London. 9 | Built sites are those that have been imbued with meaning and functionality, shifting into place, and have therefore been deemed to have already disappeared by Baudrillard’s definition, which will be examined in further detail. They are sites that have lost what they were originally and

Dis/location

performance and corporeal studies; depictions throughout art history; technology and virtual space; etc. However, this book focuses on a specific arts discourse and practice, which is grounded in a creative process of making and undoing an explication of the encountered landscape. Unlike a scientific discourse that is rooted in a utility of site towards other means, the practice established here is based on experimentation without utility as its endgoal. The phenomenologist philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty finds that science is not adequate to investigate the lived-world of experience and boldly accuses a scientific approach of “…pretend[ing] to have overcome that which it has managed simply to conceal.”10 MerleauPonty looks beyond rational scientific methods as advancing our understanding of the world. While science and the philosophy of science have, as we have seen, been preparing the ground for an exploration of the world as we perceive it, painting, poetry, and philosophy have forged ahead boldly by presenting us with a very new and characteristically contemporary vision of objects, space, animals and even of human beings seen from the outside…11

Here Merleau-Ponty suggests that science has been stuck on the preliminary agreement of how to explore the world whilst artists have been forging an engagement with the process itself. Nevertheless, to better understand the world we inhabit, there continues to be a necessary subjective discourse on contemporary studies of space. He continues:

transformed into a value-laden place for utility. These ideas are further extrapolated throughout. 10 | Merleau-Ponty, M., 2009, The World of Perception, Routledge, London. P. 73. 11 | Merleau-Ponty, M., 2009, The World of Perception, Routledge, London. P. 45.

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It is in this spirit that modern art and philosophy have come to reexamine, with renewed interest, those forms of existence which are the most distant from our own. For they bring to light the movement by which all living things, ourselves included, endeavour to give shape to a world that has not been preordained to accommodate our attempts to think it and act upon it.12

Here, Merleau-Ponty suggests that the attempt of art is to explore lived-experience in a world that was not built for purpose. It allows us to re-examine what is distant from the already-available presence of experience. Art can “give shape”13 to the forms of the world which are most distant or other from our own present experience. However, taking the viewpoint of this manuscript, art has mostly failed to engage in the world in this way and is instead perhaps just as culpable as a scientific method of reducing the world into manageable forms, be it data or aesthetic simulacra. Art has commodified experience and opportunity into objects of use-value that are easily exchanged for capital and meaning (symbolically or otherwise), and something becomes lost or disappeared in the process (much the same way that space becomes utilised as place). Through this, art’s “…contemporary vision of objects...”14 has not been to further an “…exploration of the world as we see it…”15 but rather has been to mine (both literally and figuratively) site for material to exchange. Since the phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty, an ensuing discourse has arisen around the economic issues of exchange and the role of art within a greater context towards our understanding

12 | Merleau-Ponty, London. P. 73. 13 | Merleau-Ponty, London. P. 73. 14 | Merleau-Ponty, London. P. 73. 15 | Merleau-Ponty, London. P. 73.

M., 2009, The World of Perception, Routledge, M., 2009, The World of Perception, Routledge, M., 2009, The World of Perception, Routledge, M., 2009, The World of Perception, Routledge,

Dis/location

of the world. In The Conspiracy of Art16 Jean Baudrillard begins to highlight the problem herein expressed by suggesting that art has strayed from its intent: Art has a destiny. Today, art has fallen into value, and unfortunately at a time when values have suffered. Values: aesthetic value, commercial value…values can be negotiated, bought, and sold, exchanged.17

Art has deviated from its providence18 and wandered into the current system of a restricted economy that Georges Bataille calls an “archaic form of exchange.”19 Through this, only the sacrifice of space itself is available as it disappears into place and value is endlessly exchanged. Baudrillard goes further: From this perspective, art no longer seems to have a vital function; it is afflicted by the same fate that extinguishes value, by the same loss of

16 | Baudrillard, J. & Lotringer, S., 2005, The Conspiracy of Art: Manifestos, Interviews, Essays, Semiotext(e), New York. 17 | Baudrillard, J. & Lotringer, S., 2005, The Conspiracy of Art: Manifestos, Interviews, Essays, Semiotext(e), New York. P. 31. 18 | Its providence as in the destiny that Baudrillard envisions, this is not to suggest that art was one thing and is now something else. Instead, it seems to have veered in trajectory from this destiny and potentiality, which Merleau-Ponty suggests art has the ability to provide. Indeed, this is neither to suggest that “art” is one single entity nor that a western canon has claim to the term. Instead, preliminary agreement is made with the theorists who inform this research on the usage of the word “art” without seeking to further explicate a deeper ontological question that might seem pedantic and aside from this enquiry. 19 | Bataille, G., 1985, Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927-1939, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis. P. 121.

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transcendence. Art has not escaped this tendency to effectuate everything, this drive to make everything totally visible to which the West has arrived. 20

Likewise, I propose that contemporary artworks have strayed from this “new…vision…as seen from the outside”21. Instead, art has become a practice engaged in a tendency to effectuate22, as utility and colonisation through visibility, creating an architecture by which the objects and ideas that artists engage with are disappearing into an economy of value, and spaces dissolve as a result. Art’s function of “giving us a vision…[of] exploration of the world as we see it”23 is misplaced and art no longer becomes a sacrificial object itself (through its imagery) but instead seeks to uncover and bring meaning to site itself—allowing for a colonisation of space by a utility either physically or conceptually able to be valued and exchanged. Likewise, art, through this process, may have become just as guilty of “…pretend[ing] to have overcome that which it has managed simply to conceal”24 which Merleau-Ponty accuses a scientific method. In straying from its destiny, art has failed to provide the vision, which Merleau-Ponty espouses, and afflicts the world with the same faults that a restrictive economy promotes. For the purposes of this research, I focused specifically on expanding the concerns of this principle as a practitioner, so that future artists and researchers might employ similar methods to examine space apart from this approach to economy. The 20 | Baudrillard, J. & Lotringer, S., 2005, The Conspiracy of Art: Manifestos, Interviews, Essays, Semiotext(e), New York. P. 32. 21 | Merleau-Ponty, M., 2009, The World of Perception, Routledge, London. P. 45 22 | Baudrillard, J. & Lotringer, S., 2005, The Conspiracy of Art: Manifestos, Interviews, Essays, Semiotext(e), New York. P. 32. 23 | Merleau-Ponty, M., 2009, The World of Perception, Routledge, London. P. 45. 24 | Merleau-Ponty, M., 2009, The World of Perception, Routledge, London. P. 73.

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convergence of this research came more clearly into focus through initial investigations, which considered my personal location and studio concerns and a theory of spatial disappearance that has been largely absent from discussion by artists. I arrived at this research as a practitioner and theorist firstly, as I perceive a sort of sensorial drive towards the sites I move in and throughout, with no real desire to commune with location, in a larger sense to either stake claim or use for recreation. Secondly, I have shifted my perspective of the landscapes I have encountered many times throughout the last few years. This has been without indeed having an opportunity to spend a great deal of time in one location, by racking up hundreds of hours of travel (often by the least convenient method, such as public transport, trains, driving or walking) in order to discover the sites that lay in between the places I wish to arrive. Previous concerns in my studio practice had been focused specifically on the experience of being in transit and lacking a place. I have viewed this mobility as a genuine opportunity to engage with the ephemerality of locative experience. Thirdly, this research is focused on space because it offers a palpable example of something that is utilised by both artists and a larger geo-economy. Fourthly, it has become important to stretch the discourse of disappearance beyond a discussion of simply objects and/or ideas but something that is at the same time both physical and intangible. More precisely, it is not difficult to envision what is meant specifically by space as it is manifested as sites mostly through landscape of the world with little evidence of a built environment. Concurrently, there is here an avoidance of notions of a romanticised frontier (which would lead to disappearance) and instead I offer an opportunity to examine sites that are perhaps in some ways less socially burdened in a vague way.25 For these purposes, I imagine space as a loose collection of the area between specific locations in the

25 | ie. not cityscapes etc.

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most general of terms. At the same time, space by Tuan’s26definition, has so obviously disappeared when it has been bulldozed over and turned into a village, car park, or airport. The site that was there is no longer, disappeared into conception, although the physical geo-coordinated location remains. Ultimately, this research raises a question of whether these spaces, as so defined, can even actually exist or be examined which is resolved by a courting of this action that attempts to prevent a dissolution whilst at the same time not keeping hidden. Lastly, this research might hint at something about environmentalism and the failure of science and art to take a preemptive stance on space before its disappearance. Although this is something not particularly addressed in this approach, this text might provide a jumping off point to connect an artistic utilisation of space with a more political discourse on the ethics and practices of an environmentally-centred or green economy. In a world that is constantly changing, and seemingly so significantly just in the time I have been writing this, I hope this book might offer an alternative to current practices aside from just artistic ones.

A Tr ansposition of S acrifice The idea of non-use has disappeared into notions of possessing and utilising objects, and more specifically for the purposes of this research, space. Art today makes use of the world for its own purposes to be exchanged into a value system which is defined by the way we commodify things leading to the demise of the very thing art wishes to reveal or put meaning upon. Bataille illustrates this tendency when he states:

26 | “what begins as undifferentiated space becomes place as we get to know it better and endow it with value…” Tuan, Y.-F., 2005, Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis. P. 6.

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we “possess” this world, we make endless use of it, it is made of intelligible and utilizable objects. 27

And further: Today the great and free forms of unproductive expenditure have disappeared. 28

For Bataille, the current restrictive economy sacrifices only in expectation of receiving something further. Instead, art has the ability to provide this “unproductive expenditure”29 by providing the potential of an image to sacrifice that does not seek to gain further utility by this act. However, even contemporary work has been subjugated into this economy of exchange, which seeks to make value of everything encountered. Bataille touches on this when he notes a shift in the way we recognise imagery. The image of sacrifice is imposed on our reflection so necessarily that, having passed the time when art was mere diversion or when religion alone responded to the desire to enter into the depths of things, we perceive that modern painting has ceased to offer us indifferent or merely pretty images, that it is anxious to make the world “transpire” on canvas. 30 27 | Bataille, G., 2003, The Cruel Practice of Art, English translation at http://super ver t.com/elibrary/georges_bataille/cruel_practice_of_ar t originally published “L’Art, exercise de la cruauté” in Médicine de France (June 1949). 28 | Bataille, G., 1985, Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927-1939, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis. P. 124. 29 | Bataille, G., 1985, Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927-1939, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis. P. 124. 30 | Bataille, G., 2003, The Cruel Practice of Art, English translation at http://super ver t.com/elibrary/georges_bataille/cruel_practice_of_ar t originally published “L’Art, exercise de la cruauté” in Médicine de France (June 1949).

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Much of contemporary art displays an image of the sacrifice of which it transpires (making something become known) or which it seeks to reveal. Works of art appear to open a gateway into utilising objects—for these purposes more specifically space—causing them to disappear. Instead, I suggest to turn the art object itself into one of sacrifice, not evidence of what it seeks to make known, which will be discussed later. When Bataille speaks here of making the world “transpire” he highlights an event by which the experiences of this world evaporate into the ether of exchange. This is an event that is set into motion by artists when they seek to unearth or place meaning on the site itself. There is movement within this act, as it is initiated by the desire to make known.31 This desire, whether conscious or not, might be replaced so that meaning is instead available in works of art by hinting at, but not fully developing, meaning of site encountered whereby sacrifice is repositioned from the thing to the artwork. A modern restricted economy in its market form is based on the exchange of things and ideas into a system of difference whereby all is weighed by its use-value and exchangeable for other meanings and symbols (i.e. capital, or like for like). Instead, Bataille proposes a general economy of which sacrifice is essential in order to sustain equilibrium to this system of volatile surpluses, based on a method of circumventing these effectuating tendencies by intentional “unproductive expenditure”.32 Because art has become burdened with utility and value it has left its subjectile vulnerable to dissolution as an accursed share that disappears into this accrued economy. In the alternate exegesis, which I am proposing through this research, there becomes a sort of transposing of sacrifice to the image apart from the site itself so that this desire or ability to explore is made distinct from a desire to conquer (that is, conquering space itself as an object/idea to be exchanged). Art might instead offer an 31 | See further explication in Courting Dissolution chapter 32 | Bataille, G., 1985, Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927-1939, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis. P. 124.

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insight into the experience of space and—distanced from a utility of site encountered—offer itself up as an opportunity to uncover. In this manner, the art object challenges traditional notions of how we explore or utilise space and serves as a surrogate that challenges the perceptive experience of landscape to reorder and reimagine what might seem as an inherent or obvious systemisation of meaning. This makes the practitioner-model of research crucial to this investigation as it places the theories espoused herein into practice to challenge and further the discourse. Jean-Luc Nancy makes specific references to this relationship between the image and sacrifice. He begins by examining how the image is sacred because of its ability to set apart and outside of the mundane. The image is always sacred…The sacred, for its part, signifies the separate, what is set aside, removed, cut off…The sacred is what, of itself remains set apart, at a distance, and with which one forms no bond (or only a very paradoxical one). To avoid this confusion, I will call it the distinct. The distinct is at a distance, it is the opposite of what is near. What is not near can be set apart in two ways: separated from contact or from identity. The distinct is distinct according to these two modes: it does not touch, and it is dissimilar. 33 [italics in original]

Through this, the image has an opportunity to present something distinct, something with distance, from the subject. It accomplishes this from its dissimilarity, its alterity. Such is the image: it must be detached, placed outside and before one’s eyes (it is therefore inseparable from a hidden surface, from which it cannot, as it were, be peeled away: the dark side of the picture, its underside or backside, or even its weave or its subjectile), and it must be different from the thing. The image is a thing that is not the thing: it distinguishes itself 33 | Nancy, J.L., 2005, The Ground of the Image, Fordham University Press, New York. P. 1.

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from it, essentially. The distinct stands apart from the world of things considered as a world of availability. In this world, all things are available for use, according to their manifestation. What is withdrawn from this world has no use, or has a completely different use, and is not presented in a manifestation. 34

Here, Nancy suggests that the image, through its distinction and withdrawal, creates a separateness from the utility of the object it refers to. Whilst the world is constantly opening itself up to potentiality and experience, it is available for use, but that this portion is somehow set apart through an interplay of resemblance and distinctness. Apart from the thing, the image simultaneously presents an unavailability of utility, a withdrawal, or at least one that is distinct from the original thing or the object housing the image. In this way, images present a shadow of the world, which they seek to refer, but as there is otherness, or setting apart taking place in the image—that sacred or distinct aspect—there is also something resembling sacrifice. But the distinction of the image—while it greatly resembles sacrifice—is not properly sacrificial. It does not legitimize and it does not transgress: it crosses the distance of the withdrawal even while maintaining it through its mark as an image. Or rather: through the mark that it is, it establishes simultaneously a withdrawal and a passage that, however, does not pass. The essence of such a crossing lies in its not establishing a continuity: it does not suppress the distinction. It maintains it while also making contact: shock, confrontation, tête-à-tête, or embrace. It is less a transport than a rapport, or relation. The distinct bounds toward the indistinct and leaps into it, but it is not interlinked with it. The image offers itself to me, but it offers itself as an image (once again there is ambivalence: only an image / a true image…). An intimacy is thus exposed to me: exposed, but for what it is, with its force that is dense and tight, not relaxed, reserved, not readily given. 34 | Nancy, J.L., 2005, The Ground of the Image, Fordham University Press, New York. P. 2.

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Sacrifice effects an assumption, a lifting and a sublation of the profane into the sacred: the image, on the contrary, is given in an opening that indissociably forms its presence and its separation. 35 [italics in original]

Here, Nancy denotes the distance of the image from the sacrifice of the thing. Through this, whilst it courts the sacrifice of the distinct, the image by its simultaneous familiarity and potential alterity removes sacrifice from the thing. The image maintains a continuity with the thing, maintains its contact with the thing whilst at the same time transposing and maintaining itself as a distinct thing available for meaning and sacrifice. The physical distance of the image itself is not simply enough to make it distinct from the thing by which it seeks to make known, to transpire. Instead, an intentional distinction or sublation36 must be made which whilst hinting at the thing seeks to make a separate image, something other than the thing. Similarly to Nancy, Martin Heidegger refers to the alterity that can be present in the image. In The Origin of the Work of Art37 Heidegger addresses the traditional role of art to “…manifest something other… brought together with the thing that is made.”38 This implies a practice that unites the imagined unfamiliar with creation of art objects—a key strategy. The image creates a friction between the world and what it displays, by attempting, in this instance, to reveal what lies in the shadows of the world. As examined in a later chapter, this shadow of the world is available both real and imagined which together can intentionally make the image a distinct thing away from 35 | Nancy, J.L., 2005, The Ground of the Image, Fordham University Press, New York. P. 3. 36 | Nancy, J.L., 2005, The Ground of the Image, Fordham University Press, New York. P. 3. 37 | Heidegger, M., Poetry, Language, and Thought, from Cazeaux, C., 2000, The Continental Aesthetics Reader, Routledge, London; New York. 38 | Heidegger, M., Poetry, Language, and Thought, from Cazeaux, C., 2000, The Continental Aesthetics Reader, Routledge, London. P. 81.

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site itself, producing expenditure which is available in its distinction but never truly sacrificial because of the transposition of utility away from site. As I assert throughout, an informed imagining or presupposition (but not of the virtual) is key to investigating space and with it the work of art where sacrifice might take place.

D estructive E xchange Returning to Nancy’s notion of the distinct39, I would like to examine how an image might reference a site but be distanced from representation and eventual dissolution of that space into place. This forms a dilemma of what method, much less methodology, might be implemented in order to engage in the experience of the world that was not built-for-purpose,40 and further, which does not conceal what it purports to have overcome41 in the process. A literalist view of disappearance would be commonly conceived of as something vanishing from sight,42 but for the purposes here refers to an object or idea ceasing to be what it originally was. More specifically, disappearance is the process by which something ceases to be distinct or instead recedes behind the image or our conceptions. With these qualifications it becomes apparent that no single established methodology could be employed for understanding a dynamic through which something appears to be disappearing. Instead, these methodologies must become an enquiry into the experience of these phenomena with the additional challenge of addressing an event that explores what is subsumed into effectuation. In order 39 | Nancy, J.L., 2005, The Ground of the Image, Fordham University Press, New York. P. 1. 40 | Merleau-Ponty, M., 2009, The World of Perception, Routledge, London. P. 73. 41 | Merleau-Ponty, M., 2009, The World of Perception, Routledge, London. P. 73. 42 | Instead, a vanishing of site!

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to examine something distinct or distant from what is presented, and more fully interrogate this process, it becomes essential to implement a methodology based on a discourse driven by a practicebased approach and the material that unfolded as such. As mentioned earlier, this research was initiated by documenting spaces that lay between places encountered through journey. What first became evident was a sort of loss or disappearance. This act of disappearance into exchange may be marked by a dynamic interchange such as potlatch described by Marcel Mauss as an “agonistic type of total prestation.”43 That is, some sort of payment, and one which is particularly combative. It is revealing that Mauss describes it in this way as potlatch originally meant “to consume.”44 In practice, potlatch is a gift giving ceremony where one-upmanship is encouraged so that the gift-giver is ultimately bestowed with some sort of symbolic meaning/value (most often rank or position, officialised or not), which holds even greater value than that of the original gift. Mauss goes on to explain: We need only the elements of rivalry, fighting and destruction for the complete potlatch.45

Here, Mauss denotes the destructive elements that are engaged in this process of exchange. Potlatch itself is a process by which an extra meaning or value is produced with intentional motivation that bring in Bataille’s conception, an accursed share into the exchange. However, this highlights a significant problem with exchange within a restrictive economy that seeks to mark everything by its use-value. Volatile portions build up and have no recourse but to 43 | Mauss, M., 1970, The Gift: Forms and Functions of Exchange in Archaic Societies, reprint ed. Taylor & Francis, London. P. 4. 44 | Mauss, M., 1970, The Gift: Forms and Functions of Exchange in Archaic Societies, reprint ed. Taylor & Francis, London. P. 4. 45 | Mauss, M., 1970, The Gift: Forms and Functions of Exchange in Archaic Societies, reprint ed. Taylor & Francis, London. P. 7.

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disappear and dissolve, perhaps to exact some sort of revenge.46 After all, these volatile portions emerged from things that were endowed with use-value and disappeared into this process of utility already. Potlatch evidences a violence which is created from volatile surplus lacking an intentional non-use of sacrifice—what I purport to supply through practice.47 It is this potlatch event that highlights a reverberative occasion, which will be discussed in a later chapter. Some artists, such as Smithson, have alluded to this occurrence, which takes form when things are on the cusp of disappearance. This is when the opportunity for something distinct attempts to emerge from the resemblance of location. The approach advanced in this manuscript has developed both to recognise and interrogate this process as related to a studio practice. Indeed, it is the territory of much of the studio element of this research that teases with events on the cusp of disappearance without the endgoal being to have the thing,48 in this case space, ultimately disappear into exchange. A theoretical unpacking and description of the disappearance of exchange and studio applications follows in the appendix. Indeed, the intent of this method is to highlight a problem that is often overlooked. Whereby through mobility we move from place to place often ignoring the sites in-between which allow for movement, and the potentialities that these sites contain. Something is missing, and the format of this approach outlines endeavours to underscore this disappearance through utility (as this is what happens through an unawareness of site used as a means to get to places). This examination seeks to bring this problem into focus.

46 | In Revenge of the Crystal and later Fatal Strategies, Baudrillard anthropomorphises object and speaks of its revenge. 47 | In the sense of artistic practice. 48 | Thing here refers to a notion by Nancy which will be discussed later.

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L ocating the D iscourse One strategy of the textual element of this project, is putting forth arguments that are often presented using a polemical discourse or hint at a type of pataphysics which Baudrillard practiced, that is, what Alfred Jarry defines as ”the science of imaginary solutions.”49 These tools of argument take cues from the theorists who are key to this research such as Baudrillard and Virilio as mentioned, and supply a technique (or practice) crucial to this investigation. Further, this strategy emerges as critical for examining alterity within the context of experience and perception. This approach is also vital to highlighting the problematics of this research that might be disregarded as intrinsic or incidental. As mentioned in the introduction, Lotringer, in his dialogues with Baudrillard epitomises the investigation contained herein when he states: …the visual arts have remained by the wayside as the entire culture is now being threatened by the extermination of space… 50

Herein lies the problem. In an ever-changing world stretched by the demands of globalisation, space itself is disappearing and this whilst artists continue on a trajectory that ignores the issue. Instead, space has become overextended as a utility and an instrument to promote meaning as well as both a physical and metaphoric endpoint. However, my goal is not to warn against a utility of travel or a functional utility of all places. Instead, I offer to highlight a problem through which all spaces indeed disappear (if they have not already) and importantly provide an opportunity to reflect upon an artistic methodology that might veer from the problematics of what 49 | Jarry, A., 1996, Exploits & Opinions of Doctor Faustroll, Pataphysician: A Neo-Scientific Novel, Translated by S.W. Taylor. Exact Change, Boston. P. 22. 50 | Virilio, P. & Lotringer, S., 2005, The Accident of Art, Semiotext(e), Los Angeles. P. 29.

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already seems instinctual or natural, but can only be viewed as such through the guise of the current restrictive system. With this in mind, I return to an examination of phenomenology as a methodology that provides a route for an interrogation of the lived-world of experience. Specifically, phenomenology allows for the immersion into the experience of space and serves as an underpinning of studio methodology as well as a base for the theoretical element of this approach. By recording and exploring site first-hand, I begin to investigate a locative experience that would be impossible to assess from a more apparent viewpoint. The writings of phenomenologists, namely Husserl and MerleauPonty, both discuss the perceptual implications of being-in-theworld. Specifically Husserl discusses the notion of adumbrations51, which refer to the shadows, or potentiality of aspects inherent in object that are unseen, unnamed, or unknown. In a later chapter, this book extends Husserl’s adumbrational understanding of object and applies it to the spaces we encounter in order to consider what potentiality these sites might hold. Both phenomenologists provide insights into perceptual experience, which might be used as an artistic strategy to better understand space. In fact, as mentioned previously, Merleau-Ponty explains that it is the task of philosophers and artists to investigate space so that we might come to better understand the world.52 This is the charge that forms the basis of responsibility in this method. I advance that artists have strayed from this vision, this destiny as Baudrillard suggests, and promoted a disappearance of the very sites they utilise. In The World of Perception Merleau-Ponty posits, “…one of the great achievements of modern art and philosophy (that is, the art and philosophy of the last fifty to seventy years) has been to allow us to rediscover the world in which we live, yet which we are always prone

51 | Husserl, E., 1931. Ideas: An Introduction to Pure Phenomenology. Macmillan: New York. Pp. 197-8. 52 | As mentioned in the introduction.

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to forget.”53 Here Merleau-Ponty directly links the work of artists to the basic tenets of phenomenology, namely to uncover meaning in the lived-world, and hints at the potential of a loss of knowledge that he says we are always “prone to forget.” It is this notion that leads this view towards an enquiry into experience, whilst acknowledging the possible concerns in the arena where meaning is revealed. The remit here is not to evaluate this supposition in an art historical context whether present day or in the time of Merleau-Ponty. But instead to find agreement with this idea led by a more recent discourse put forth by Baudrillard that art has failed in some way, also taking his cue from Bataille who was a contemporary of Merleau-Ponty. Husserl intimates that the basis of this kind of research and discovery must be on the encounter of the real and not purely hypothetical when he asserts that “all consciousness is consciousness of something.”54 This intimates the basis of promoting a practice that begins as an uncovering of spaces as-encountered. Interrogating phenomenology is an obvious method relevant to an examination of experiential knowledge. However, it becomes necessary through continued investigation to open into a more contemporary discourse. Phenomenological reduction may open a door into problems by examining our place in the world, although it does not always afford practical solutions. In this way, artists have previously used phenomenology as a means to discover and notice their location and context. For example, Dan Graham’s Performance/ Audience/Mirror 55 is a phenomenologically-centred work in which Graham examines relationships between performer and viewer by describing what he sees during a performance and then what visual information is relayed through a mirror. His live art forms the 53 | Merleau-Ponty, M., 2009, The World of Perception, Routledge, London. P. 39. 54 | Welton, D., 2003, The New Husserl: A Critical Reader, Indiana University Press, Bloomington. P. 13. 55 | Graham, D. 1975, Performance/Audience/Mirror. Video Free America (San Francisco). Performance (22:45).

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basis of interrogating a lived experience of the live and fluctuating occurrence of the audience.56 Firstly confronting the setting directly, but later altering his perception of this experience by examining phenomena based on a virtual perception that is grounded in actuality. His method allowed artists a gateway into thinking about how perception influenced and engaged with the space they encountered. Phenomenology proves crucial as the philosophical groundwork by which this enquiry is underpinned. Ultimately, the overreliance on turning thought into meaning and removing the original intention of discovery grounded in experience has repercussions. Rooted in Husserl whilst incorporating the critiques of MerleauPonty, this methodology becomes a phenomenology of dissolution and disappearance. Perhaps a type of “raw phenomenology” which Baudrillard espouses, a phenomenology of absence.57 To interrogate the implication of disappearance, its necessary, again, to turn to philosophers whose ideas grew out of phenomenology to bridge this gap in understanding. Baudrillard and Virilio provide an updated framework and one particularly relevant towards a critique of the visual arts and the parallel concerns of these ideas regarding disappearance and space. However, neither aligned these ideas in the precise way this document does. Baudrillard provides a method for examining a disappearance into representation, which proves central to understanding the loss 56 | “These (Conceptual Art) ideas came from both phenomenology and perhaps also drug culture. They also might have been, maybe, a way of adapting to this flow of new consumer goods that was flooding the market, maybe a positive way to respond, although on the other hand there was always…an awareness that consumer culture was a problem as well as positive” Dan Graham in Graham, D. & Wall, J., 1999, Two-way Mirror Power: Selected Writings by Dan Graham on his Art, Alberro, A. ed. MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass. P. 62. 57 | Baudrillard, J., 2000, Photography, Or the Writing of Light, CTheory, P. 83.

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into place, whereas Virilio theorises the changing phenomenology of speed’s ability to subsume the way that space behaves, and the means by which it is considered. Whilst it would be beyond the scope of this manuscript to delve into some of their popularised concerns (semiology and speed, respectively) it enlists vital elements of their overarching theories to more succinctly investigate space. Baudrillard declares that in an effort to fully understand something, the thing itself disappears.58 He also suggests that things dissolve and become subsumed into ideas themselves so that they no longer exist as such. The orientation of this research is towards similar concerns with space itself, especially within the definition of space becoming place through an endowment of value.59 Virilio’s own theories are similarly rooted in phenomenology as he examines the experience of phenomena of velocity. In addition, Virilio offers a direct correlation between artistic practice and theory, which is useful in a broader method for approaching his work and applying it to this framework.60 Likewise, Virilio had first hand experience of the arts as a practitioner and was an apprentice of Henri Matisse61 and studied under Georges Braque62, which further exemplifies an artistic heritage that informs his ideas. Virilio’s 58 | Baudrillard, J., 2009, Why Hasn’t Everything Already Disappeared? Translated by A. Willaume. Seagull Books, London. 59 | As previously mentioned, see Tuan, Y.-F., 2005, Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis. P. 6. 60 | Virilio, P. & Lotringer, S., 2005, The Accident of Art, Semiotext(e), Los Angeles. 61 | “Braque, Matisse—I worked with them, which is pretty rare—all the abstractionists, Max Ernst, Viera da Silva, Poliakoff, Rouault, Bazaine, etc.” in Virilio, P. & Lotringer, S., 2005, The Accident of Art, Semiotext(e), Los Angeles. P. 12. see also, Virilio, P., 2001, Virilio Live: Selected Interviews, Armitage, J. ed. Sage Publications, London. P. 18. 62 | Virilio, P., 2001, Virilio Live: Selected Interviews, Armitage, J. ed. Sage Publications, London. P. 18.

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visual concerns along with his theory colluded in the book Bunker Archaeology63 that contained his photographic work alongside texts. These approaches also generate a methodology for the rationale and format of the work put forward in this book. Baudrillard has a similar, if somewhat more difficult relationship, than Virilio with the visual arts. Late in his life, Baudrillard took up photography and images of his work appear alongside text in his later books.64 Whilst he never considered himself an artist, Baudrillard, to his dismay, became a darling of the art world for a short time after the publication of Simulations 65 and the Whitney Museum of American Art sponsored lectures by him.66 Lotringer begins to explain a little of Baudrillard’s rocky relationship with art: He is a practicing artist of his own concepts. This is an art he never betrayed, his only claim to artistry. Exhibiting his photography was part of his work as a pataphysician, as much as attacking art was part of his work as a Situationist. That people would be angered at him for these gestures simply proved that they didn’t have a clue. They hadn’t understood anything about his theory, or about the world we live in for that matter.67

Whilst both Virilio and Baudrillard practiced visual arts in a sense, they rejected classification as artists and instead were focused on 63 | Virilio, P., 1994, Bunker Archaeology, Princeton Architectural Press, Princeton, NJ. 64 | For example in Baudrillard, J., 2009, Why Hasn’t Everything Already Disappeared? Translated by A. Willaume. Seagull Books, London. as well as Baudrillard, J., 1998, Jean Baudrillard: Art and Artefact, Zurbrugg, N. ed. Sage Publications, London. 65 | Baudrillard, J., 1983, Simulations, Semiotext(e), New York. 66 | Towards the Vanishing Point of Art (Lecture at the Whitney Museum, 1987) in Baudrillard, J. & Lotringer, S., 2005, The Conspiracy of Art: Manifestos, Interviews, Essays, Semiotext(e), New York. P. 48. 67 | Lotringer, S., 2005, The Piracy of Art, International Journal of Baudrillard Studies (IJBS), 2(2).

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the theories they each championed respectively. Their practices allowed more of a first-hand relationship with practitioners engaged in theory.

R aw P henomenological M e thod As mentioned, the notion of Baudrillard as “…a practicing artist of his own concepts”68 informs the relationship of this research as a treatise that unites theory with practice, both studio and textual. This approach greatly affects research undertaken rather than being considered separate approaches of theory and practice, it is rather vital to both as practicing art together in some way. In this manner, it is my position to practice this art as simultaneous ideas examined, approached, method and practice. It is this practice that has become entwined with a “raw phenomenology” examining the experience of absence. To further illustrate Baudrillard’s philosophical connection in a type of phenomenology, he extols: We should practise a kind of visionary phenomenology of concepts, rather than insist always that they be right or wrong.69

In this way, Baudrillard deflates the effectuating tendencies of a scientific method that seeks to offer solutions, or is stuck on “preliminary arguments” as Merleau-Ponty suggests. At its core, Baudrillard’s argument adapts a pure phenomenology especially intent on its rejection of solutions or judgements similar to the goal of a scientific method. Further, his suggestion that we “practise a kind of visionary phenomenology of concepts” alludes to his pataphysics, 68 | Lotringer, S., 2005, The Piracy of Art, International Journal of Baudrillard Studies (IJBS), 2(2). 69 | Baudrillard, J., 2004, Fragments: Conversations with François L’Yvonnet, Translated by C. Turner. Routledge, London. P. 70.

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which is discontent with reality and its capacity to represent. He has remarked with characteristic vigour that: Reality is a bitch. Nothing shocking there, anyway, since it was born from the fornication of stupidity with a mathematical mind—sort of sacred illusion thrown to the jackals of science.70

Here, Baudrillard suggests that reality conforms to what we do to it. He goes on to say that: …the main objection to reality is its propensity to submit unconditionally to every hypothesis you can make about it. With this its most abject conformism, it discourages the liveliest minds.71

Through this, Baudrillard implies his pataphysical practice, a practice of pseudoscience apart from the real (as his semiological theory is centred on a type of hyperreality—an excess). Put into action, he further describes its interrogation as attesting to the distancing of a phenomenological method of what exists as real, which faces the same impulse problems as this scientific method. Instead, Baudrillard favours this raw phenomenology, perhaps based in pataphysics, which leaves the concerns of reality aside as a methodology that is necessary to overcome the “real world” applications of theory towards developing solutions only to problems which seem the most apparent. Through this raw phenomenology— his own brand, he specifically relates it to the photographic image as compared to a type of metaphysics (from which pataphysics is born): This raw phenomenology of the photographic image is a bit like negative theology. It is “apophatic,” as we used to call the practice of proving God’s existence by focusing on what he wasn’t rather than on what he was. The same thing happens with our knowledge of the world and its objects. The 70 | Baudrillard, J., 1996, The Perfect Crime, Verso, London. P. 3. 71 | Baudrillard, J., 1996, The Perfect Crime, Verso, London. P. 3.

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idea is to reveal such a knowledge in its emptiness, by default (en creux) rather than in an open confrontation (in any case impossible)72

This phenomenology, as mentioned earlier, is a phenomenology of absence,73 which in itself is perhaps pataphysical and is conceivably what can be most perceived through the reading of this book so far. It is in this vein that I supplant a pure phenomenology espoused by earlier theorists as explicating an exacting of the world through experience. Here the method focuses on a disappearing event and what has been made other through representation. This is the method that Baudrillard provides which fits an examination into space, its experienced and imagined potentialities, its disappearance, and ultimately an alternate way that artwork might provide as a transposition of the sacrifice of disappearance.

F oundational P henomenology It is important to note that a great deal of contemporary thinkers who might not easily fit into categorisation see phenomenology as a relevant if not foundational philosophy by which much contemporary theory is engaged. Rather significantly, as the key authors cited throughout this research, Virilio and Baudrillard might not see themselves as purveyors of postmodernism which they are often grouped with74 and certainly not functioning within 72 | Baudrillard, J., 2000, Photography, Or the Writing of Light, CTheory, P. 83. 73 | Baudrillard, J., 2011, Impossible Exchange, Translated by C. Turner. Verso, London. P. 141. 74 | ”…one should ask whether postmodernism, the postmodern, has a meaning. It doesn’t as far as I am concerned. It’s an expression, a word which people use but which explains nothing. It’s not even a concept. It’s nothing at all…So in a sense there is no such thing as postmodernism. If you interpret it this way, it is obvious that I do not represent this emptiness.

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the context of the traditional art world.75 We might examine the idea of “artists who write”—which encompass the phenomenological works of artists such as Robert Smithson, as well as the examples and excavations provided through many artists’ extensive thoughts and writings on art. However, it becomes more critically focused when focus shifts instead to “thinkers who make art” or even more precisely those theorists who have enough experience with art yet can still be critically engaged from a periphery. Here, there emerges an intellectual kinship with theorists who were not afraid to find fault with art the way that primary practitioners who have a vested interest in the current system might be. This allows a stronger dialogue between the practical element of this research and a theoretical discourse. Ostensibly, the textual element of this project, taking cues from Smithson as an artist-writer, allows for an opportunity to push against an artistic consensus. Artists often align themselves with contemporary and historical practitioners but are sometimes unable to reconcile this relationship when faced with contention. This might, instead, be the very goal of research of this type that is integrated with practice, as it allows an opportunity to reject or at least depart from a traditional art historical canon and the economy/architecture of contemporary I am quite happy to be—I don’t know what—of a kind of void, to analyse the disappearance of a number of things…Everything that has been said about postmodernism was said even before the term existed...I have nothing to say about this because I say, and I know this from experience, even if I prove that I am not a postmodernist, it won’t change anything. People will put that label on you. Once they have done that it sticks.” in Baudrillard, J., 1993, Baudrillard Live: Selected Interviews, Gane, M. ed. Psychology Press, London. P. 70. 75 | For Baudrillard, “I’m not an artist in the usual sense…” in Baudrillard, J., 1998, Jean Baudrillard: Art and Artefact, Zurbrugg, N. ed. Sage Publications, London. P. 3. and is quoted as saying he was “not an artist. I just take pictures” in his Paper Magazine obituary. See also Virilio, P., 2006, Art and Fear, Continuum International Publishing Group, London.

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art. Perhaps future study could involve whether this is a step outside for good, or if that might be the ultimate desire in this process— isolation from this anatomy. Counter, there is arguably a contemporary trend towards creating art that is not intellectual, to return to making work which is twee, functional, decorative or professes some sort of aesthetic value. After this research is complete, would a researcher want to step back into that system? Is an academic model more suitable? What might be gained from a view of this architecture from both inside and out? These are questions for another time, which contend with the very nature and purpose of practice-based research. Instead, it is necessary to make some assumptions about the validity and importance of artistic research in order to proceed without having to reinvent or at least reimagine the wheel so to speak. The process of engaging in this research has at the same time pushed towards strides in my studio work and perhaps placed me on the outside of a cultural zeitgeist—a simultaneously sexy and scary place to be. Here, I will profess it is the effort towards an action or outcome that is ultimately of the most importance. As intentionality becomes a paramount concern when engaging with the discourse at hand, including a specific intention of production and its role within sacrifice and exchange. These are the strategies of intent put into practice, and fittingly in a process that has combined both making and doing alongside writing. Art and theory are not discourses which are packaged for easy consumption—they are large and complicated subjects which are transformed with different textual and studio practices. Likewise, the theory in this manuscript is more likely to end with a metaphoric ellipsis rather than an exclamation or even full stop. This underscores the need for this sort of approach and form and perhaps notes why this kind of research is imperative. Similarly, the practical elements of this research consisted of works created within a trajectory towards the theory approached and engaged. This is not a linear trajectory—and very much like this textual examination elicits, there is no clear endpoint on a larger scale, only efforts toward. This advances the shape of this research

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and methodology in that the textual and studio output sometimes mimic the very theory this research is investigating. In this way, as intimated earlier, this research can be less described as practicebased than practice-integral. Threads might be woven between textual and actionable outputs that are often subtle, though there might be a strong attempt to unpack them in detail. Instead, this action is very much about intent. Whilst at times it might seem accusatory when discussing other artists, this research acknowledges now that intent of historical practitioners is not always conscious nor would they be guilty of some crime if it were. Still, the practice that this research proposes and engages in hopes to shift intent from the act of making (composition, ‘this’ is what I am going to paint/photograph) to an intent of purpose (why am I doing this? what might be the repercussions?) In a way, the most reflective element of the research became the written text itself as it provided an intentional consideration of the theory that informed studio work and of experiencing the conjunction between space and place in the lived world. First there was the intent, and an underpinning of the purpose of making, with a concern more for why it shows what it shows rather than what it was supposed to look like.

S tr ategies and C onte x t As mentioned, through the course of this research I have evaluated existing techniques and concluded that a strict adherence to phenomenology would not be sufficient to advance this enquiry. As Merleau-Ponty suggests, this work is important as it “present[s] us with a very new and characteristically contemporary vision of … space.” 76 Thus, it has been necessary to expand this research to incorporate contemporary thinkers on space whose works have 76 | Merleau-Ponty, M., 2009, The World of Perception, Routledge, London. P. 45

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grown out of phenomenology (namely Baudrillard77 and Virilio,78 but also Foucault,79 Lotringer,80 etc.) in order to practice more of a “raw phenomenology” as set forth. Likewise, aside from phenomenology I investigate some basic theory espoused by Mauss and Bataille who, whilst more contemporary to Merleau-Ponty, represent a different vein (neither lumped together as phenomenologists nor in opposition to them) both of whom have been considered by postphenomenological theorists. Focusing on more contemporary discourse has proven cru­ cial for the purposes of this research, as an investigation of these theorists has uncovered notions such as disappearance and alterity. In later chapters, these concepts have been aligned with traditional phenomenological notions of adumbration, experience, and perception in order to push the theory into a more radical, or as Baudrillard would say “raw” method. Collectively, this practice has allowed an uncovering of important evidence that goes beyond a phenomenological examination of experience—it challenges the way artists use these experiences and the repercussions of this utility. Further, this investigation has also helped integrate studio 77 | “At last a critical volume that dares bringing Baudrillard to where he really belongs: dialectics, hermeneutics, phenomenology, deconstruction, boldly calling upon Hegel, Heidegger, Derrida and Foucault to illuminate the relation of his thought to contemporary society, culture and theory. A real breakthrough.” Sylvere Lotringer from Bishop, R., 2009. Baudrillard Now: Current Perspectives in Baudrillard Studies. Polity: Cambridge. See also Geniusas, S., 2004. Baudrillard’s Raw Phenomenology. Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology, 35, Pp. 293-309. 78 | “His work is influenced by phenomenology, in particular the work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Martin Heidegger, and Edmund Husserl.” From Virilio’s faculty biography from the European Graduate School. 79 | Rajan, T., 2002. Deconstruction and the remainders of phenomenology: Sartre, Derrida, Foucault, Baudrillard. Stanford University Press: Palo Alto. 80 | Lotringer, S., 2010. Jean Baudrillard. European Graduate School, Saas-Fee, Switzerland.

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practice within this research to create work that is vital to this research (placing the theory into a more visual and physical action). In order to examine the problems set forth earlier, a disappearance that Baudrillard speaks of and specifically of space that Lotringer mentions, I return to the phenomenology of Husserl and MerleauPonty. Husserl’s adumbrations suggest infinite possibilities in ways to experience space, thus never fully realising it and hastening its demise, which is examined in the next chapter. Merleau-Ponty provides strategies to document these experiences, and notes the importance of art to rediscover the lived-world of experience in this manner. To push this discourse further, what is this examination into Other spaces? Baudrillard says “the other is an invasion by something from elsewhere”81 and goes on to refer to “the other as mirror, as reflecting surface.”82 Connecting this to the idea of the image and volatile surplus he says “Otherness denied becomes a spectre and returns in the form of a self-destructive process.”83 These spaces with which this investigation engages is alterity as other, which are distinct from a system of meaning and familiarity. Other spaces imply the shape of the available experience alongside an imagined potentiality with a focus on the unfamiliar. This relates to the notion of adumbrational space in this text developed from Husserl, who refers to adumbrations as the constant potentiality of experience of objects. Foucault denotes a similar concept when he speaks of his theory of heterotopias. He explains heterotopias as, “…a sort of simultaneously mythic and real contestation of the space in which we live.”84 While Foucault speaks to his construct of the social theory of place, instead we are specifically focused on unrealised space (space which has not yet disappeared and is still available). This unrealised space is pregnant with potentiality, but lacks the 81 | Baudrillard, J., 1993, The Transparency of Evil, Verso, London. P. 164. 82 | Baudrillard, J., 1993, The Transparency of Evil, Verso, London. P. 122. 83 | Baudrillard, J., 1993, The Transparency of Evil, Verso, London. P. 122. 84 | Foucault, M., 1986, Of Other Spaces, diacritics, 16(1), Pp. 22-7.

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uncovered meaning of familiar places that is later suggested as a focus of Smithson. Here I propose that Other spaces are more easily bracketed so that experience both real and imagined can seduce meaning without fear of dissolution. However, as Merleau-Ponty suggests, it is the endeavour of artistic practice that explores meaning of the lived-world, which is significant in that it enables us to, “…rediscover the world in which we live, yet which we are always prone to forget.”85 Instead of speaking here about rediscovering the memory of a forgotten world, which this may seem to allude, I would rather interpret his thought as encouraging a rediscovery of the world with new and different eyes towards an apprehension of available presence. This is, what “… we are prone to forget” that which is available all around, we forget to notice. Further, Merleau-Ponty states: “…in this drive to rediscover the world as we apprehend it in lived experience, all the precautions of classical art fall by the wayside”86 allowing that this process of rediscovery through experience avoids the danger of classical art to place such significance solely on representation. In viewing the work of contemporary artist Robert Irwin, we find he often deals with the perception of space and object (or lack thereof). There is a significant amount of documentation of Irwin’s words, notably in Lawrence Weschler’s book Seeing Is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees,87 which similarly espouses Irwin’s ideas like that of artists with a strong writing practice. The title of Weschler’s book is a paraphrase of a quote attributed to the French poet and philosopher Paul Valéry: “To see is to forget the name of

85 | Merleau-Ponty, M., 2009, The World of Perception, Routledge, London. P. 7. 86 | Merleau-Ponty, M., 2009, The World of Perception, Routledge, London. P. 52. 87 | Weschler, L., 2008, Seeing is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees: Over Thirty years of Conversations with Robert Irwin, University of California Press, Berkeley.

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the thing one sees.”88 This, again, traces a line of related thought and particularly reminds of Baudrillard’s idea that naming leads to disappearance, explored in the next chapter.89 Furthermore, Smithson and Irwin have been proclaimed at one time or another as artists devoted to phenomenology.90 This further advances the shape of this enquiry as phenomenology has been an underpinning of the practice of several artists investigated. However, the methodology of this book has expanded to incorporate related ideas across disciplines to ensure this research is exploratory whilst remaining focused. As mentioned earlier, the scope of this research has touched upon literary references and specifically poetics as phenomenology. This approach allowed for an examination of ideas outside of solely artistic references, and helped to build a stronger background for the textual element of this thesis. Poet Francis Ponge91 and writer Italo Calvino have already been discussed as authors who wrote phenomenological descriptions of places or objects in the world. This gave guidance to the practical-textual research as well as provided groundwork for what has been explored before. As noted, in Calvino’s Invisible Cities, he specifically describes places that have begun to

88 | Weschler, L., 2008, Seeing is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees: Over Thirty years of Conversations with Robert Irwin, University of California Press, Berkeley. P. 203. 89 | Whilst, I would suggest, at the same time bracketing-out what is already named/known. 90 | For Smithson see Against Absolute Categories in Smithson, R., 1996, Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings, Flam, J. ed. University of California Press, Berkeley. P. 360. and Irwin in Irwin, R., Davies, H.M. & Feinstein, L., 2008, Robert Irwin: Primaries and Secondaries, Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, San Diego. 91 | Ponge, F., 1994. Selected Poems. Bree, G. ed. Translated by M. Guiton, J. Montague & C.K. Williams. Wake Forest University Press: Winston-Salem, NC.

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dissolve into their concept through naming.92 Ponge’s investigation also served as part of an initial enquiry into how nonvisual artists unpack an understanding of things encountered. Further, this research focused on novelist Jun’ichirō Tanizaki and proposes that In Praise of Shadows93 supports a theory of adumbrational space that is critical to the next chapter. This contextual examination has proved relevant to the research at hand and vital to understanding this enquiry. It has built a landscape to view this text alongside a framework to discuss the issues explored deeper than solely a visual arts perspective would allow. Through this, the textual element evolved to become a critical reflection of and about the theory central to this investigation.

92 | Calvino, I., 1978. Invisible Cities. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich: New York. P. 67-8. 93 | Tanizaki, J., 2001. In Praise of Shadows. Vintage: London.

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Courting Dissolution Space is what prevents everything from being in the same place. Language is what prevents everything from meaning the same thing.1 Jean Baudrillard

A P r actice of A dumbr ational S pace In order to proceed, it is necessary to revisit the delineation between space and place as set forth in Dis/location and voiced by Tuan. Namely, that space becomes place when we get to know it better and endow it with value.2 This speaks directly to the utility (use-value) of location and denotes a transformative event by which space becomes more tangible, more familiar and meaningful, disappearing and reemerging as this new entity—place. A further investigation follows, as well as an unpacking of Baudrillard’s notion of how disappearance effectuates and its larger repercussions. As place, like objects, is part of the lived-world it appears to be knowable and therefore something to be utilised, colonisable, changeable, and exploitable. Place is what has been named3, what we have already experienced. However, how is the transition from this ephemeral space to something that seems more material—place? Is 1 | Baudrillard, J., 1990, Cool Memories, Verso, London. P. 191. 2 | Tuan, Y.-F., 2005, Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis. P. 6. 3 | nomen est numen (to name is to know)

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it possible to realise all spaces fully—transforming them into place and thus destroying any notion of space whatsoever? How do we experience this phenomenon and perhaps guide its transition?

E xperience and A dumbr ations When speaking of the perception of objects, Husserl refers to a thing’s adumbrational aspects: “a physical thing is necessarily given in mere ‘modes of appearance’ in which necessarily a core of ‘what is actually presented‘ is apprehended as being surrounded by a horizon of ‘co-givenness’.”4 That is to say, that objects contain perceptible dimensions in addition to what is being experienced at a single moment in time. This adumbrational quality of objects represents möglichkeiten5, as Husserl calls them, possibilities or potentialities. There are near infinite dimensions of potentialities, as objects can always be experienced in multiple ways. Nevertheless, an object exists with all of these possibilities present. Husserl claims that the totality of adumbrations is the essence of the object, whilst the experience currently being opened up is what he calls the horizon of meaning. He states: …it points ahead to possible perceptual multiplicities which, merging continuously into one another, join together to make up the unity of one perception in which the continuously enduring physical thing is always showing some new ‘sides’…in a new series of adumbrations.6

4 | Husserl, E., 1931, Ideas: An Introduction to Pure Phenomenology, Macmillan, New York. § 44 P. 94. 5 | Welton, D., 2003, The New Husserl: A Critical Reader, Indiana University Press, Bloomington. Pp. 37-8. 6 | Husserl, E., 1931, Ideas: An Introduction to Pure Phenomenology, Macmillan, New York. § 44 P. 94.

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Merleau-Ponty goes further: The unity of the object does not lie behind its qualities, but is reaffirmed by each one of them: each of its qualities is the whole.7

Adumbrations permeate the perception of objects so that it is impossible to even imagine an object without knowing it contains adumbrational qualities (e.g. when we view a rock we may see one side of it, but also know that there are other sides). Concurrently, these adumbrational qualities of an object cannot be experienced all at once.8 Moreover, it is impossible to imagine this object from one side without knowing that it has another. Here, I propose that space has similar adumbrational qualities to object. As such, it rejects the apparent duality of space and place.9 Because space is pregnant with adumbrational qualities, the gesture towards knowing it is a multi-layered process. The act of transition itself serves to refute that it is simply one (space) and then the other (place). If space, through its apprehension10 becomes place and space is imbued with adumbrational qualities that, like object, are not fully knowable, then this quality of möglichkeiten represents another aspect that, whilst present, can never be completely experienced or 7 | Merleau-Ponty, M., 2009, The World of Perception, Routledge, London. P. 62. 8 | If we take the view that something must be entirely experienced or that all of its potentialities must be realised to be knowable, then by Husserl’s view, nothing can ever be completely known. 9 | As discussed later on, it may not even be possible for space to fully form into place. 10 | Apprehension means (understanding; grasp: the pure apprehension of the work of art.) by this I refer back to Tuan when he says space becomes place “...as we get to know it better...” I’m speaking here of an gnoseological quandary that seems directly related to nomen est numen (to name is to know) and Baudrillard’s focus on naming as an act of disappearance, which will be discussed later in more detail.

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known.11 Does this mean that there are spaces, or at least dimensions or qualities of spaces, that are therefore resistant to becoming place because we can never know something in the excess of its entirety? This research engages in studio practice that treads in this realm of meaning, courting this dissolution without the end goal being of total apprehension and causing a disappearance of space. Put into practice, this work alters the documentation of space viewed in transit by engaging in an asyndetic fragmentation of visualisation of the terrain of space encountered. This is evident in the studio element of this approach and evidenced in this document as visual inflections of video representing this peripatetic event, which are included in the appendix. Perhaps this unknown aspect is the one element preventing a complete spatial dissolution, hinted at earlier and which will be discussed further later. Here, it is the idea of möglichkeiten that infers the capacity to expect more in what is unseen but can quite possibly be implied or envisaged. Adumbrations represent potentialities, and a great number of these potentialities can be discovered through their being imagined. Husserl claims that imagining plays an important role in revealing information when he says that “…an object can also be explicated in an anticipatory way on the basis of a kind of intuitive picturing in the imagination…”12 This imagined quality lives in spaces both conceptually and physically on the dark side of things; what is unknown but is expected or conceptualised on the “other side” of objects and in shadows. Here, the idea of “anticipatory” is important as Husserl suggests that these imagined qualities, the potentialities of object, are inferred from what we already know or have experienced—they are based on assumptions. Further, the word ‘adumbrate’ comes from the Latin umbrare, literally “to cast a shadow,” and it is this connection between shadow and a type of

11 | It is this approach that the research herein seeks to examine. 12 | Husserl, E., 1975. Experience and Judgement. Northwestern University Press: Evanston, Ill. Pp. 127-128.

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alterity that is key to understanding adumbrational potentiality that is intent on an antipathy to disappearance. In his book on aesthetics, In Praise of Shadows, Japanese novelist Jun’ichirō Tanizaki ruminates on the qualities of this darkness. A Japanese room might be likened to an inkwash painting, the paperpanelled shoji being the expanse where the ink is thinnest, and the alcove where it is darkest. Whenever I see the alcove of a tastefully built Japanese room, I marvel at our comprehension of the secrets of shadows, our sensitive use of shadow and light. For the beauty of the alcove is not the work of some clever device. An empty space is marked off with plain wood and plain walls, so that the light drawn into it forms dim shadows within emptiness. There is nothing more. And yet, when we gaze into the darkness that gathers behind the crossbeam, around the flower vase, beneath the shelves, though we know perfectly well it is mere shadow, we are overcome with the feeling that in this small corner of the atmosphere there reigns complete and utter silence; that here in the darkness immutable tranquillity holds sway. The ‘mysterious Orient’ of which Westerners speak probably refers to the uncanny silence of these dark places. And even we as children would feel an inexpressible chill as we peered into the depths of an alcove to which the sunlight had never penetrated. Where lies the key to this mystery? Ultimately it is the magic of shadows. Were the shadows to be banished from its corners, the alcove would in that instant revert to mere void. This was the genius of our ancestors, that by cutting off the light from this empty space they imparted to the world of shadows that formed there a quality of mystery and depth superior to that of any wall painting or ornament.13

From here, it is amenable to connect Husserl’s adumbrations, the potential of shadows, with Tanizaki’s consideration of the loss of shadows in his home. Both infer a loss towards a utility, even if this utility is one simply of knowledge-gained. I imagine shadows as a place where spiders and lost items dwell, but they need not be 13 | Tanizaki, J., 2001, In Praise of Shadows, Vintage, London. Pp. 32-3.

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so object-specific and literal. Shadows represent a space filled with potentiality in our not-knowing exactly what lies within them. They represent adumbrational qualities of the same potentiality in what is unseen, unknown, or not experienced.14 The artist Robert Irwin talks about the evolution of his practice and a move into phenomenologically based work influenced by MerleauPonty.15 His explorations led him to research object in relation to space and eventually to a complete reorientation of his studio practice.16 From a desire to make work that focused on the experience of perception, Irwin turned to shadows and specifically notes the spatial context of both a tangible object and its intangible shadow. Visually it was very ambiguous which was more real, the object or its shadow. They were basically equal…they occupied space differently, but there was no separation in terms of your visual acuity in determining that one was more real than the other. And that was the real beauty of those things, that they achieved a balance between space occupied and unoccupied in which both became intensely occupied at the level of perceptual energy.17 14 | A good example would be the centuries of conjecture regarding what may lie on the far side of the moon. This area is permanently turned away from the Earth, and to this date has never been subject to ground exploration. This so-called dark side actually gets as much sunlight as the rest of the moon, but as we experience it from Earth, it is always turned away and in assumed darkness. Still, we know it is there. What lies in the darkness is shrouded in mystery. We do know from satellite images that it is significantly different from the hemisphere that we regularly see. 15 | Weschler, L., 2008, Seeing is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees: Over Thirty years of Conversations with Robert Irwin, University of California Press, Berkeley. Pp. 177, 179. 16 | In fact, later abandoning the studio as the location of his practice altogether. 17 | Weschler, L., 2008, Seeing is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees: Over Thirty years of Conversations with Robert Irwin, University of California Press, Berkeley. P. 104.

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Irwin speaks of the occupation of shadows as being one filled with perceptual conditions despite the way it interacts with space versus object. He notices that the quality of object is determined as much by its shadow as by the object itself. When he realises the richness of experiences that shadow contains, and its readiness to be imagined and explored, he abandons object-making altogether. Later: Where I crossed over and recognised the world of phenomena was when I really became aware that the shadow was as real as the centre of the painting. The shadow has actually no physicality. You can’t weigh it. You can’t measure it. It’s completely transient. And so on one level, on a quantitative level, it actually has no existence. Yet, on another level, it is absolutely critical. You cannot see without these shadows. The world of phenomena is that which is in constant transience. These are not lies; these are a part of the textural richness of the world. In terms of our perception, it is filled with these qualities, which really enrich our lives.18 

You cannot see without these shadows.19 Here Irwin infers that shadows, the adumbrations, are essential to seeing and experiencing, indeed they are pivotal to our lived experience. However, is Irwin’s exploration intrinsically an attempt to understand further dimensions of adumbrational space? Alternatively, does it represent a more deep-rooted human desire to destroy? Tanizaki senses this tension when he states (as mentioned above):

18 | Robert Irwin: The Beauty of Questions. (1997) Berkeley, CA, University of California Extension Center for Media and Independent Learning. 19 | Robert Irwin: The Beauty of Questions. (1997) Berkeley, CA, University of California Extension Center for Media and Independent Learning.

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Were the shadows to be banished from its corners, the alcove would in that instant revert to mere void. 20

Baudrillard elaborates: By their exceptional faculty for knowledge, human beings, while giving meaning, value, and reality to the world, at the same time begin a process of dissolution (‘to analyse’ means literally ‘to dissolve’). 21

Here, Baudrillard accuses humankind’s desire to give meaning and value to the world for its destruction. However, how does this specifically apply to space?22 Tanizaki foreshadows Baudrillard’s assumption when he fears that light (a desire to find meaning, to uncover and reveal) will turn the beautiful shadows that he ruminates on into voided space. As noted before, Tuan believes that space is transformed into place when it becomes knowable or valued. When something is known it is named (a signifier of meaning, of value). So, has place become a site for dissolution? Instead, is it an effort to name and value spaces that has led to their disappearance. Baudrillard claims that when something is named it begins its descent and holds liable our exceptional faculty for knowledge23 and a desire to find meaning. However, Baudrillard suggests that the moment just before naming is the most intense. By representing things to ourselves, by naming them and conceptualizing them, human beings call them into existence and at the same time hasten their doom, subtly detach them from their brute reality. For example, the 20 | Tanizaki, J., 2001, In Praise of Shadows, Vintage, London. P. 33. 21 | Baudrillard, J., 2009, Why Hasn’t Everything Already Disappeared? Translated by A. Willaume. Seagull Books, London. P. 11. 22 | Again, Tuan suggests that space is the “everywhere” realm between places, the means to get from one place to another. 23 | Baudrillard, J., 2009, Why Hasn’t Everything Already Disappeared? Translated by A. Willaume. Seagull Books, London. P. 11.

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class struggle exists from the moment Marx names it. But it no doubt exists in its greatest intensity only before being named. Afterwards it merely declines. The moment a thing is named, the moment representation and concepts take hold of it, is the moment when it begins to lose its energy— with the risk that it will become a truth or impose itself as ideology…It is when a thing is beginning to disappear that the concept appears. 24

Here, Baudrillard says that the moment of naming is when a thing, or in this case space, begins to lose its energy.25 In terms of space, it seems the transformative act of it becoming place (naming it, endowing it with value) undoes the very existence of the space itself. Adumbrations, by their nature, are unnameable as they always represent the potentialities of the “other side.” Once an adumbration is known, is named, it is no longer a potentiality. It ceases to be adumbrational and begins to transpose what was unknown or other into representation of meaning. However, because adumbrations are at least partially imagined, does this mean they are never really known or named and therefore immune to the demise of which Baudrillard warns? Do they live in a constant state of being-almostnamed, as Baudrillard mentions, and thus resonate at some superintense frequency? Adumbrations are full of the potentialities of discovery. They are the site of tension between which space and place are the most charged. The adumbrations of space always allude to the potentiality of space, they are a foreshadow of what is on the other side before the utility of place. Collectively, these adumbrational elements, these other sides provide a distinction in the object, or in this case space, which prevents disappearance. When distinction is lost, when everything is made known and made useable, it disappears. Returning to an

24 | Baudrillard, J., 2009, Why Hasn’t Everything Already Disappeared? Translated by A. Willaume. Seagull Books, London. P. 11-2. 25 | Baudrillard, J., 2009, Why Hasn’t Everything Already Disappeared? Translated by A. Willaume. Seagull Books, London. P. 11-2.

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earlier quote regarding otherness and the distinct or sacred aspect of the image, Nancy begins to provide a solution for an art practice. Such is the image: it must be detached, placed outside and before one’s eyes (it is therefore inseparable from a hidden surface, from which it cannot, as it were, be peeled away: the dark side of the picture, its underside or backside, or even its weave or its subjectile), and it must be different from the thing. 26

The image provides a possible method for shifting sacrifice and resisting disappearance from space. It is this adumbrational capacity, which Nancy refers to here when he speaks of its hidden surface, dark side, underside, backside, weave, or most importantly, subjectile, which allows image to house an alterity resistant to the disappearance of space. Whilst able to house this adumbrational aspect—which it is inseparable from—the image must also place itself outside as distinct from the thing or further pull the thing into disappearance. It is this capacity of the shadow, otherness, or alterity to inhabit space and representation that Tanizaki and Irwin allude to in their phenomenological examinations of space and object. In this, it is possible for the image to court (Baudrillard would refer to this as seduction) these opposing tendencies—to represent whilst hastening disappearance and it is through this that it gains its fascination.27 To fully represent would be for the thing represented to shift into representation and disappear. The adumbration therefore allows for an alterity, a shadow, or imagined potential as otherness to inhabit the image, perhaps displacing a disappearance that averts the world from shifting into a surrogate of representation, whilst courting this very disappearance. There needs to be an emphasis of the distinct, the Other, the alterity as the element averting the 26 | Nancy, J.L., 2005, The Ground of the Image, Fordham University Press, New York. P. 2. 27 | Baudrillard, J., 2009, Why Hasn’t Everything Already Disappeared? Translated by A. Willaume. Seagull Books, London. P. 32.

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complete dissolution into knowing of which Baudrillard warns. It is the potentiality and alterity of these adumbrational aspects that resist disappearance as their very definition is of the “shadow of the other side.” The moment they are revealed; the moment they are known, they cease to be adumbrations (they disappear). Along with potentialities, perhaps adumbrations are impos­ sibilities. For a great many of them would be impossible to experience directly with our limited array of perceptual tools. Aside from not being able to experience all adumbrations at once, humans are limited to the senses28 available or inventions meant to modify those senses. As new tools are created to view things on macro and micro levels, and experiment with the limits of bodily sense29 humans might discover new ways to experience. As adumbrations are ripe with potential meaning and shape, perhaps they are the best sites of experience and engagement. Once an aspect of something is revealed it no longer represents a potentiality, we might only intuit from it what else might be discovered. Again, Baudrillard: …disappearance may be the desire to see what the world looks like in our absence. 30

Does Baudrillard infer that the quest for meaning in things is a direct correlation to experience what lies beyond us? Adumbrational qualities possess possible outcomes devoid of our influence since we may not be able to clearly experience them, but rather imagine them. However, do adumbrations represent ineffable space that is therefore “safe” from Baudrillard’s dissolution? Tanizaki suggests adumbrations are not safe. When he describes what lies in darkness 28 | And the strength of those senses! 29 | e.g. sensory deprivation experiments, hallucinogenic substances, virtual technologies 30 | Baudrillard, J., 2009, Why Hasn’t Everything Already Disappeared? Translated by A. Willaume. Seagull Books, London. P. 21.

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—the potentiality of what is not revealed—he mourns the loss of shadows when the western practice of flooding domestic spaces with light takes over.31 Baudrillard goes further. Thus the real vanishes into the concept. But what is even more paradoxical is exactly the opposite movement by which concepts and ideas (but also phantasies, utopias, dreams and desires) vanish into their very fulfilment. 32

So Baudrillard suggests we are to blame on both accounts. First, we name what we experience and are therefore responsible for its dissolution. Alternatively, we conceptualise its potentiality and annihilate the reality of object or experience. When we shine light to discover what lies in shadows, we destroy the shadows themselves. Baudrillard suggests that the very fulfilment of ideas creates their disappearance. However, if adumbrations are infinite and not fully experience-able, how can we fully conceptualise space, thus putting into motion its dissolution? Baudrillard blames technology, and expects that a disappearance of everything includes humans as well. When everything disappears by excess of reality, when thanks to the deployment of limitless technology, both mental and material, human beings are capable of fulfilling all their potentialities and, as a consequence, disappear, giving way to an artificial world that expels them from it… 33

To some extent, Husserl might find agreement with Baudrillard on this point. Husserl recognises instances when objects or ideas do not contain adumbrations.34 In these instances, what is presented to 31 | Tanizaki, J., 2001, In Praise of Shadows, Vintage, London. Pp. 42-43. 32 | Baudrillard, J., 2009, Why Hasn’t Everything Already Disappeared? Translated by A. Willaume. Seagull Books, London. P. 12. 33 | Baudrillard, J., 2009, Why Hasn’t Everything Already Disappeared? Translated by A. Willaume. Seagull Books, London. Pp. 12-5, 33. 34 | Such as in the case of holograms, again a technology that serves Baudrillard’s argument.

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us as real objects are shown not to be, resulting in Husserlian terms “an ‘explosion’ of the noema.”35 However, do we create an excess of reality that is no longer grounded in the material, when we over conceptualise? Instead, this research is focused on mobility as a tool which does not seek to over-imagine adumbrational space in order to guide an understanding which does not seek annihilation as its endgoal. The practice of imagining space through journey is instead mindful of experience apprehended in its intentionality and actuality. Perhaps this is the surest way to advance discovery whilst avoiding the problem of disappearance. In practice, we can be tasked with acknowledging our perceptive experience, whilst imagining adumbrational aspects. We envisage descriptive elements of space rather than trying to (paraphrasing Baudrillard) fulfil our desires.36 We must not over intellectualise object, space, or experience so it disappears into concept but rather be in-the-world (and perhaps document or imagine the perspective act of that being). The practice put forth through this research intimates a connection of the conceptual, grounding it in the actual, attempting to overcome the problems of Baudrillard. Thus, it is necessary to suggest that a practice based on actual space as experienced is key to preventing a completely imaginative subject—this would be void of adumbrational qualities as its experiential dimensions would be limited to simply what is shown in a single instance or the virtual. Adumbrations themselves are still adumbrations of material objects. Even imagined they manifest something of a material experience. Irwin says that the shadows are just as real as objects, and he claims that it is impossible to see (a vital perceptive tool) without shadows. Shadows are still shadows of something, they have a connection to what exists in the lived-world. Adumbrations, even imagined, are 35 | Føllesdal, D., 1969, Husserl›s Notion of Noema, The Journal of Philosophy, 66(20), P. 687. 36 | Baudrillard, J., 2009, Why Hasn’t Everything Already Disappeared? Translated by A. Willaume. Seagull Books, London. P. 12.

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connected to the material. They are the substance that enables perceptive experience, but they are also distinct, helping to understand objects and space more keenly, whilst evading absolute advances of knowing. Through this, adumbrations can never be fully known/ named and conceivably offer sites of resistance from Baudrillard’s disappearance. It is because imagined adumbrations are still rooted in the lived-world of object and/or space that they cannot ultimately succumb to annihilation from absolute virtualisation and utility. When we conceptualise adumbrational aspects of objects or space, we are simply imagining what lies in their shadows. Perhaps the best way to discover this adumbrational space, the site that is filled with intensity, is to be present in experience. To imagine. To interpret boundaries. Adumbrations could be the safety thread that keeps space from teetering off the edge into altogether dissolution. Then, is the exploration of adumbrations the process by which space becomes place? Moreover, is it therefore dangerous? Tuan says space becomes place when we “…know it better and endow it with value.”37 He does not suggest that its moment of transition is dependent on total apprehension. So yes, through exploring adumbrations we begin to know space better. We begin to endow it with value when we see the complexities of its potentialities. This is how we try to know space—by perceiving it from different sides— through experience. Through trying to examine its adumbrations, we immerse ourselves in the territory that has the most intensity available to discover—the moment on the cusp of naming.38 It is dangerous territory as we tread in the realm where meaning is uncovered. This meaning is a value that subjugates space into 37 | Tuan, Y.-F., 2005, Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis. P. 6. 38 | Phenomenologically speaking, meaning is uncovered through experience. When we experience, we begin to “understand and value.” These are the things we name. It is a multi-layered process, which could already be inferred first by the act of experience then understanding better and lastly naming.

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a system of exchange. Because it is not the act of experiencing or imagining that causes dissolution, but the single act of naming. This implies a conscious desire to step beyond merely discovering or exploring and into the focused act of naming, an act implying a desire of fulfilment towards utility.

R obert S mithson and C olonisation as an A ct of D isappe ar ance How does an interrogation by artists guide or alter a discovery of space? Do artists search for meaning by unearthing adumbrational qualities and hasten the dissolution of space? This book suggests that some artists consider the idea of space by attempting to colonise it, as a single act of claiming space, and a conscious effort to name it for use-value. As one example, this research turns towards a brief look at the career of Robert Smithson in order to evidence a practice that examines first the materials of site and later a transformation of space itself. Smithson’s practice flirts with an exploration of the potentialities of space but later engages in a type of colonisation of the very site he feels drawn to and a remaking of it for his own purposes. Not unlike the explorers of old, artists become colonisers when they stamp their name on landscape and claim it for themselves. Through this, the colonisation of space fits Baudrillard’s dilemma of dissolution, and at the very least serves as a means to hasten the disappearance of the space that once was, by claiming site as a utility for artistic projects and forms. In this way, artists often move beyond being discoverers or explorers and become colonisers of space.

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N onsites and L and A rt Smithson created many significant earthworks and gallerybased nonsites39, which spoke to his affinity with space. He takes inspiration from the industrial tools and processes, such as mining, which provide an ability to reform the landscape into sites that are perhaps redeemed from what is perceived as wasteland. Around 1968, he commences digging up the material that landscape is built from: dirt, rocks, chalk, etc. as constituent elements for his works. However, Smithson maintained his relationship with art institutions and transported these materials from their location to galleries and museums. There, he created sculptures that are not site-specific but in a way, rather piles of site-representative, these are the works he dubs as nonsites. Through this action, he validates the raw material of space through a conversion into value as evident by the context of the new location—the gallery. Through this translocation, material becomes more reified not simply as an art-object but as material of meaning, or representation and surrogate of the space it came from. Smithson lays claim to it and seeks to know better the material, absent its original spatial context. In Red Sandstone Corner Piece, 1968 40 he very consciously unearths sandstone from a quarry less than sixty miles from his childhood home and piles it on top of mirrors on the ground and aligned at the corner of the room. Smithson explains the idea. The Non-Site (an indoor earthwork) is a three dimensional logical picture that is abstract, yet it represents an actual site in (New Jersey)…It is by this

39 | Because Smithson refers to the word ‘nonsites’ in various ways, I have chosen to stick with the term as a singular word/entity. Quotes from Smithson will use the form he originally wrote. 40 | Smithson, R. Red Sandstone Corner Piece. 1968. mirrors and sandstone from the Sandy Hook Quarry, New Jersey, 4’ x 4’ x 4’.

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dimensional metaphor that one site can represent another site which does not resemble it - this The Non-Site.41

In this, Smithson attempts to make logical what he perceives as abstract in its spatial context. Whilst it might not hold a resemblance, he expects that site, although disfigured, can represent or become more knowable by transferring some of its elements to the gallery. Later: The site, in a sense, is the physical raw reality…I decided I would set limits in terms of this dialogue…and as a result I went and instead of putting something on the landscape I decided it would be interesting to transfer land indoors, to the nonsite, which is an abstract container.42

Smithson advances, what this book terms, a very deliberate act of colonisation—the desire to impose the utility of place and self into this abstracted container, which delineates the evidence of a space. In his fascination with naming this and later processes (e.g. nonsite), Smithson appears to focus more on his hyperbole than the implications of the site that existed prior to his intercession, which in a sense disappears by the artist’s gesture. He brings evidence of the external space into the gallery where it faces almost clinical scrutiny within those walls—like specimens of a sort of conquest. He intentionally names/claims this space as a site for his own ends. In being specific about where the rocks are derived, Smithson connects to his own mythology of New Jersey—which serves to create a locative narrative to the artist. Smithson begins his practice using materials close to his home and familiarity, perhaps first finding solace in what he seems to already know, but later branching out to sites across the globe. Conceivably, Smithson feels some sort 41 | Smithson, R., 1996, Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings, Flam, J. ed. University of California Press, Berkeley. P. 364. 42 | Smithson, R., 1996, Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings, Flam, J. ed. University of California Press, Berkeley. P. 178.

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of claim or affinity to the material due to its proximity to his home, before later expanding this process by importing and transporting material from overseas. However, in removing these objects from their location they are void of an enormous amount of information about the experience of that space. He strips them of their spatial context, perhaps in a clinical effort to more explicitly know site through this material. In a way, Smithson overstates his intentions when he posits that “one site can represent another site which does not resemble it”43 as the space he wishes to reveal has vacated through this representation. He is instead creating new work, these nonsites which are more akin to a materiality of object. However, it seems evident that Smithson is keen to examine adumbrations through these elements, especially through some of the specific nonsites that contain mirrored structures. He creates a sort of anticipatory potential of these objects themselves, as they are juxtaposed with mirrors and glass to bend what would be the expected visual experience of these things. In an effort to connect to their former site, he attempts to show further adumbrational qualities of these earthen elements, to make abstract44 the space that already was. However, instead his focus is intent on the object. They appear as floating islands of material, ready to be examined from above and behind concurrently. These nonsites form new worlds floating in an imaginary space, an abstract container as he says. In negating the experience of their original space, Smithson turns to object as a source and proxy of experience of the lived-world. Mirrors collocated with rocks make the viewer imagine the larger spatial implication of these objects, creating more of an enormity that is unobstructed by floor (horizontal) or wall (vertical). The abstract container forms only physical construction as the experience of the work gives way to an infinite opportunity. The nonsite creates a floating virtual space by which the object can be experienced as 43 | Smithson, R., 1996, Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings, Flam, J. ed. University of California Press, Berkeley. P. 364. 44 | Perhaps an effort towards virtualization.

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a larger thing, reflected in its mirror symmetry, thus attempting to gather multiple adumbrational perspectives. Even if the original site has disappeared, Smithson has created a new floating spatial representation that reflects back on the viewer an element of its adumbrations in this mirrored symmetry. In mimicking space, through the virtualisation of object, the work speaks less to the original site than what can be imagined with the materials from it. By bringing these elements into the gallery, Smithson arguably makes them more accessible, but at the same time destroys a significant portion of their context. Colonisation is an act of claiming space or imposing idea (stripping it of its own experience), and a conscious effort to name it—both of which Smithson perhaps does here. Indeed, as he dissolves something inherent about the original space, he creates new spaces in the site of the gallery. These nonsites become a new area of exploration but one that could be argued are based more on object than space—or perhaps as space utilised as an object. After turning these elements into gallery objects, his later works begin to focus much more on sites away from the gallery. Perhaps the contrast of site/nonsite is most successful when Smithson removes his process from the gallery space. When he places mirrors into the landscape itself, the focus on the spatial implications of what is around, on the other side, and between sites offers an opportunity to imagine and experience them in other ways. It begins to offer “a displacement”45 of site “as an abstraction absorbing.”46 Although he seems to deconstruct some of these nonsites in situ, Smithson still appears concerned with “a different method of containment.”47 45 | As Smithson terms these deconstructed nonsites within the landscape. See Smithson, R., 1996, Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings, Flam, J. ed. University of California Press, Berkeley. P. 121. 46 | Smithson, R., 1996, Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings, Flam, J. ed. University of California Press, Berkeley. P. 190. 47 | Smithson, R., 1996, Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings, Flam, J. ed. University of California Press, Berkeley. P. 190.

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Smithson builds off these nonsites, which seem intent on acts of attempting an adumbrational investigation and further seeks to discover spaces themselves. He seems to shift his practice at times, from transferring raw material into the gallery, and instead makes efforts towards bending sites to create work and a determinate focus on entropy that endeavours, at times, to be tandem with dissolution.48 Smithson finds some success as he searches out abandoned mines as sites for earthworks. Works such as Glue Pour49 and Asphalt Pour 50 both from 1969 show the artist indeed “putting something on the landscape”51 in what appears, at least partially, as Smithson reclaiming the industrially subjugated location for (his own) art. In this way, Smithson returns to the site where these materials come from and decides to leave his own mark on the already-imprinted landscape. Unlike his nonsites, Smithson leaves material where it is, but stakes his own claim on location for his work. These locations seem to be wastelands where any value has been physically extracted from the earth itself. Smithson utilises these spaces that have already been left barren by industry, reimagining them as sites for his earthworks. Perhaps he took comfort in interacting with spaces that, one could imagine as already damaged and perhaps already disappeared.52 First with Spiral Jetty53 based in the Great Salt Lake of Utah where he is drawn to unusual bacteria-laden red water. However, to say that this

48 | I suspect entropy of this hyperreal site as an act towards dissolution. 49 | Smithson, R. Glue Pour. 1969. Vancouver, Canada. 50 | Smithson, R. Asphalt Rundown. 1969. Rome, Italy. 51 | Smithson, R., 1996, Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings, Flam, J. ed. University of California Press, Berkeley. P. 178. 52 | In fact, all of Smithson’s earthworks take place in less than desirable locations, which are either thought to no longer have value, or are desolate. 53 | Smithson, R. Spiral Jetty. 1970. Mud, precipitated salt crystals, rocks, water coil 1500’ long and 15’ wide. Rozel Point, Great Salt Lake, Utah. DIA Center for the Arts, New York.

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remote desert location was unspoilt and entirely devoid of industrial influence would be untrue. Smithson describes the site. Two dilapidated shacks looked over a tired group of oil rigs. A series of seeps of heavy black oil more like asphalt occur just south of Rozel Point. For forty or more years people have tried to get oil out of this natural tar pool. Pumps coated with black stickiness rusted in the corrosive salt air. A hut mounted on pilings could have been the habitation of “the missing link.” A great pleasure arose from seeing all those incoherent structures. This site gave evidence of a succession of man-made systems mired in abandoned hopes. About one mile north of the oil seeps I selected my site...54

This perhaps signals a shift in location from the desolate mining sites that seem ravaged by industry. Instead, here industry had simply failed at extracting value for its own purposes. Smithson finds comfort in that which is familiar (and therefore knowable) i.e. the remnants of industrial utility, similar to those earlier mining sites. Nevertheless, does Smithson perhaps intend to succeed in mastering the landscape where he feels others have failed? He seems amused that others have abandoned their attempts of utility in this space. Historically, Smithson appears to go into locations after others have used-up or abandoned places as no longer serving their purpose. However, the terrain at this location is so difficult to forage that steely entrepreneurs have given up.55 With each of his works, Smithson seems to push himself a bit more, staying close to what is familiar to him, but expanding further in an effort to make things knowable and utilisable. Here, is Smithson on the quest for adumbrational qualities or simply trying to colonise? He seems less determined to rehabilitate space (as in his prior work 54 | Smithson, R., 1996, Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings, Flam, J. ed. University of California Press, Berkeley. P. 146. 55 | It could be argued that this location is one of Singularity, or at least close to it, as discussed in the next chapter.

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with abandoned mines) than determined to claim, and excel, at the spatial utilisation that others have forsaken. This seems like an opportunity for Smithson to really put (his?) a name on this space— and as Spiral Jetty is one of his most well-known works, perhaps he succeeded. His choice of the Great Salt Lake for Spiral Jetty allows him an opportunity to surmount a location where even fish and mammals fear to dwell. Perhaps he felt an absence that needed to be claimed/named as a location unfulfilled without him in some way. In fact, Smithson seems to suggest that the site itself was left fallow just waiting for his Spiral Jetty to be built there as a sort of manifest destiny so pivotal to the American psyche. As I looked at the site, it reverberated out to the horizons only to suggest an immobile cyclone while flickering light made the entire landscape appear a quake. A dormant earthquake spread into the fluttering stillness, into a spinning sensation without movement. This site was a rotary that enclosed itself in an immense roundness. From that gyrating space emerged the possibility of the Spiral Jetty. No ideas, no concepts, no systems, no structures, no abstractions could hold themselves together in the actuality of that evidence. My dialectics of site and nonsite whirled into an indeterminate state, where solid and liquid lost themselves in each other. It was as if the lake became the edge of the sun, a boiling curve, an explosion rising into a fiery prominence. Matter collapsing into the lake mirrored in the shape of a spiral. No sense wondering about classifications and categories, there were none.56

Are the reverberations that Smithson speaks about some sort of adumbrational energy? He expresses that the space is emanating an enormous amount of energy akin to earthquakes—spinning, and gyrating, and collapsing, and boiling—all in its potentiality. Is he referencing this naming/knowing intensity that Baudrillard cautions and a seduction of that event? The tension of transition 56 | Smithson, R., 1996, Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings, Flam, J. ed. University of California Press, Berkeley. P. 146.

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and the dialectics between space and claiming it as place, a focused act of naming, an act implying a desire of fulfilment could be what Smithson was feeling. He refers to the indeterminate state of this site where his own dialectics whirled. Is this whirling the moment right before a beginning of dissolution because of its colonisation or fulfilment? He speaks directly to the possibility of the Spiral Jetty emerging from the very space itself. Smithson speaks of his “dialectics of site and nonsite”57 in which Spiral Jetty emerged from the “indeterminate state”58 of tension. Here, he seems to infer that the root of his theory, his dialectical practice begins to come to some sort of unified fruition whist examining this space. With this tension present, and from the trajectory of his previous nonsite work, Smithson has turned to an adumbrational space—the potentiality of perception in this location, and specifically how its scale provides a vital perceptive opportunity fundamental to his art. He seems to suggest that to fully appreciate his works, they must be experienced from a multitude of angles, providing further evidence of this connection. Smithson realises that it is the potentialities of space that lies in the shadows of what is perceived through the experience of his work. Further, that if there are multiple ways to experience object, then there are infinite possibilities in the experience and potentialities of space. Smithson talks about the uncertainty (through scale) of the situated work itself: The scale of the Spiral Jetty tends to fluctuate depending on where the viewer happens to be. Size determines an object, but scale determines art. A crack in the wall, if viewed in terms of scale, not size, could be called the Grand Canyon. A room could be made to take on the immensity of the solar system. Scale depends on one’s capacity to be conscious of the actualities of perception. When one refuses to release scale from size, one is left with 57 | Smithson, R., 1996, Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings, Flam, J. ed. University of California Press, Berkeley. P. 146. 58 | Smithson, R., 1996, Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings, Flam, J. ed. University of California Press, Berkeley. P. 146.

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an object or language that appears to be certain. For me scale operates by uncertainty. To be in the scale of the Spiral Jetty is to be out of it. On eye level, the tail leads on into an undifferentiated state of matter. One’s downward gaze pitches from side to side, picking out random depositions of salt crystals on the inner and outer edges, while the entire mass echoes the irregular horizons. And each cubic salt crystal echoes the Spiral Jetty in terms of the crystal’s molecular lattice. Growth in a crystal advances around a dislocation point, in the manner of a screw. The Spiral Jetty could be considered one layer within the spiralling crystal lattice, magnified trillions of times. 59 [italics in original]

Whilst somewhat content with the experience of Spiral Jetty from the ground, Smithson desires to experience it from the sky. He seems to suggest that to fully appreciate the uncertainty of the work’s scale, which is the vital component for him, it needs to be seen from above in order to witness the spiral that has reverberated 60 from the site. In an effort to come to terms with the uncertainty for the work (to make known), Smithson expects a view from the sky will aide in grasping that scale in its entirety, undoing the other opportunities for experience. …I would have myself filmed from a helicopter (from the Greek helix, helikos meaning spiral) directly overhead in order to get the scale in terms of erratic steps.61

Smithson seems to suggest that the means to view the scale of his earthworks is somehow related to the geometry of the land that he shapes, conceivably even the vehicle mimics this spiral artwork. 59 | Smithson, R., 1996, Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings, Flam, J. ed. University of California Press, Berkeley. P. 147. 60 | Smithson, R., 1996, Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings, Flam, J. ed. University of California Press, Berkeley. P. 147. 61 | Smithson, R., 1996, Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings, Flam, J. ed. University of California Press, Berkeley. P. 148.

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Perhaps he sees everything, from site and material to scale and perceptual opportunity as a cohesive structure all birthed from the reverberation of the space/place energy. Smithson continues the idea of the spiral and the semi-circle in subsequent works such as Broken Circle 62 and Spiral Hill 63 both built in the Dutch city of Emmen in 1971. Does Smithson have a crisis imagining the adumbrations of the other side, the adumbrations that are as significant as shadows to object? He began by pouring hot tar and glue over mounds of dirt, but later uses further industrial tools to rip up the landscape. Few locations are as savage as The Great Salt Lake so he might have continued the spiral impulse on further earthworks in an effort to connect to the entropy and power of Spiral Jetty where his dialectical theory and practice seemed to unite. Eventually, Smithson builds up the ground itself to create new patterned landscapes that serve as mazes for his conceptual concerns. Rather than documenting or imaging his perceptive experiences, Smithson appears to dredge up material to bring to the surface. Whereby he appeared keen to witness Spiral Jetty from above and looked down upon mining sites and their gravitational pull of materials, later earthworks bring the material of below into heaps of built structures on the surface. Perhaps Smithson digs to reveal aspects of adumbrational space, but destroys these potentialities in his quest to know/name? Is he desperate for multiple experiences of space in a quest to seek all potentialities from above, below, as well as surface? Is he frantically unearthing elements that make up new spaces, only to destroy them? In naming, is he destroying site and making futile efforts? Baudrillard suggests a possible motivation of dissolution.

62 | Smithson, R. Broken Circle. 1971. Green water, white and yellow sand flats. Diameter 140’ canal approximately 12’ wide depth quarry lake 10 to 15’. Emmen, Holland. 63 | Smithson, R. Spiral Hill. 1971. Earth, black, topsoil, white sand. Approximately 75’ at base. Emmen, Holland.

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Have we not always had the deep-seated phantasy of a world that would go on without us? The poetic temptation to see the world in our absence, free of any human, all-too-human will?64

Smithson exerts his will on the land, making monuments to his colonisation and impact on site. Indeed, Spiral Jetty itself appears and disappears through the gradual fluctuations of the lake. Even when it is gone, as Smithson himself now is, it lays submerged waiting to reappear and claim its location. Smithson’s quest to experience the scale of his earthworks from above continues through his final work in 1973. He dies at 35 in an aeroplane crash trying to survey Amarillo Ramp.65 It is important to note that the crash was not due to mechanical failure, but the distraction of the pilot. At the risk of conjecture, is this the last consequence of an attempt to have multiple perceptive experiences? Has Smithson placed the ultimate value in the scale of these works, eventually leading to not only the site’s disappearance, but absurdly, his own? Baudrillard’s concern is not only when things are named, but also when we give them too much meaning and value. Perhaps Smithson is guilty of placing too much emphasis on making space knowable. Baudrillard suggests that it is intentional. Perhaps that as humans we have an inherent need to colonise. Smithson’s utility of site might similarly be highlighted by further exampling more recent works by two artists. First, Tacita Dean’s 2013 film JG 66 documents the artist’s search for Smithson’s Spiral Jetty only to discover that the work had receded into the waters of the Great Salt Lake. This work contains images that Dean recorded at the saline waters of the Great Salt Lake as well the surrounding 64 | Baudrillard, J., 2009, Why Hasn’t Everything Already Disappeared? Translated by A. Willaume. Seagull Books, London. P. 52. 65 | Smithson, R. Amarillo Ramp. N.d. Tecovas Lake, Amarillo, Texas. 66 | Tacita Dean: JG Ballard, Robert Smithson and me — video preview, The Guardian. Retrieved December 12, 2013, from http://www.theguardian. com/artanddesign/video/2013/sep/13/tacita-dean-jg-ballard-video

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areas of Utah and California. The piece was an attempt to connect the site of Spiral Jetty with JG Ballard’s The Voices of Time in order for her to “…respond directly to Ballard’s challenge—posed to her in a letter shortly before he died—that she should seek to solve the mysteries of Smithson’s Spiral Jetty with her film.”67 In this, Dean seeks to draw connections between the “similar landscapes” of both Smithson’s work and Ballard’s book. Her work contains images of machines dredging up sections of the lake and landscape in reference to what Dean writes: While Smithson’s jetty spiralled downward in the artist’s imagination through layers of sedimentation and prehistory, in ancient repetition of a mythical whirlpool, coiling beneath the surface of the lake to the origins of time in the core of the earth below, the mandala in ‘The Voices of Time’ is its virtual mirror, kaleidoscoping upwards into cosmic integration and the tail end of time.68

These machines might be viewed as trying to unearth the material that spirals downward in Smithson’s work matching his own interest in sites of mining and his use of material in nonsites. The process of Dean’s video work is described as “…running the unexposed film through the camera multiple times, giving each frame the capacity to traverse time and location in ways that parallel the effects of Ballard’s fiction and Smithson’s earthwork and film.”69 67 | Tacita Dean: 13 September 2013—26 October 2013, Frith Street Gallery. Retrieved December 12, 2013, from http://www.frithstreetgallery. com/shows/view/tacita_dean/ 68 | JG Exhibition Opening December 21 at the Hammer Museum, A Film by Tacita Dean, The University of California Institute for Research in the Arts. Retrieved December 12, 2013, from http://www.ucira.ucsb.edu/ jg-exhibition-opening-december-21-at-the-hammer-museum/ 69 | Tacita Dean: 13 September 2013—26 October 2013, Frith Street Gallery. Retrieved December 12, 2013, from http://www.frithstreetgallery. com/shows/view/tacita_dean/

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In this way, Smithson’s work itself might be viewed as a site that has keenly disappeared from what it once was and has taken on a new significance, that of the site of the Spiral Jetty as well as the site produced in Dean’s investigation. Through Smithson’s actions, and even when the work itself has disappeared under the mass of the Great Salt Lake, the place of this work has become a site of importance at least for artists and those who have the desire to make sense or make use of it. This approach also extends to a number of works by the artist Jeremy Millar who has similarly engaged with Smithson’s interrogations of space. Millar begins to contextualise his work in relation to Smithson’s in his 2000 writing, Monument to Entropy in Lost Horizons.70 With this piece of experimental writing, Millar juxtaposes Smithson’s famous texts, The Monuments of Passaic and Hotel Palenque, with Millar’s own descriptions of the same experience. Millar and his wife repeated a stay at the Hotel Palenque that Smithson and his wife took some thirty years previously. Both men wrote descriptive texts of the hotel on the Yucatan Peninsula. Millar made a photocopy of Smithson’s hand-drawn map of the hotel as a guide and tried to recreate photographs that Smithson took. However, Millar left the roll of unexposed film in the hotel’s safe, retaining only the key. Millar exhibited these ephemera (the key and map) alongside other work that related to Smithson including re-creation of his mirror works and displayed books that both he and Smithson coincidentally owned. In 1997, Millar similarly replicated the walk that Smithson undertook in his writing on Passaic, and revisited the so-called monuments there in an effort to get to know the site as Smithson did. Both Millar and Dean example a renewed utility for the sites that Smithson originally encountered and utilised for different artworks. These sites have taken on a new significance in light of their reference to Smithson so that even the artist-as-tourist views them as fodder for the undertaking of new paradigms of artistic encounter. These sites are further distanced from their actuality 70 | Millar, J., 2000, Lost Horizons, London. Unpaginated.

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even as Smithson encountered them as they are now viewed in the context of a hagiography of Smithson as both artist and traveller.

P roduction of S pace Whilst Smithson might be viewed as the pivotal artist of land-art, it becomes necessary to address the Marxist leanings of writers on space such as Nigel Thrift and Henri Lefebvre to view further approach to space/place. Through this lens of the political, Thrift and Lefebvre are arguably linked to studies of spatiality as Smithson is in terms of art. In this sense it becomes a prerequisite for understanding a need to differentiate how space is viewed instead from an antiproductivist sense apart from the utility and production of Marxism, which is a very different concern, and to address why their affinities are more apparent than key to understanding space in these terms. Around the time Smithson was completing many of his earthworks, Lefebvre too published The Production of Space in the mid 1970s, which became a key work for cultural geographers especially those seeking a critique of urbanism. The book offers a Marxist and Semiological approach to the social construct of what he terms space, however I would argue that he refers to place instead as defined by Tuan as sites that have a significant social constituency would already have been transformed from what they were initially encountered. In The Production of Space, Lefebvre puts forth that his “aim will be to highlight contents—i.e. the social (spatial) practices inherent to the forms under consideration.” 71 He categorises space into three distinct concepts. Firstly he speaks of spatial practice, which he sees as a “dialectical interaction”72 of physical space, which likewise shares affinities with Smithson’s approach of dialectics such as with site and non-site. Lefebvre’s method of analysis for this type of space is explained: “…the spatial practice of a society is 71 | Lefebvre, H., 1991, The Production of Space, Blackwell, Oxford. P. 18. 72 | Lefebvre, H., 1991, The Production of Space, Blackwell, Oxford. P. 38.

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revealed through the deciphering of its space…The specific spatial competence and performance of every society member can only be evaluated empirically.” 73 This underscores the human relationship to utilising physical space, ‘practicing’ actions such as mining, which Smithson utilised in a general sense, or likewise football pitches or the land we occupy with our homes or highways, such as Smithson’s Monument of Passaic. The second category that Lefebvre puts forth is representations of space, which would be a more mental or cognitive space of understanding. He views this as “…the space of scientists, planners, urbanists, technocratic subdividers and social engineers…” 74 The third type of spaces Lefebvre envisions are representational spaces. He describes this as space “…directly lived through its associated images and symbols, and hence the space of ‘inhabitants’ and ‘users’, but also of some artists and perhaps of those, such as a few writers and philosophers, who describe and aspire to do no more than describe.” 75 This aspiration of describing spaces, a method Smithson likewise utilised, appears like a phenomenological position, however Lefebvre aligns it with more semiological concerns when he states “It overlays physical space, making symbolic use of its objects.” 76 Through this, space is represented as a source of symbolic meaning, making it available not as a site encountered but rather as a method to reveal or extract some sort of value or as something to be used in order to produce what Tuan might instead term place. In this Lefebvre appears to place an emphasis on space as an object to be utilised which allows it to simultaneously disappear into space produced into place, which is counter to the scope of this investigation. Lefebvre denotes a systematic utility of space by which human actors might create meaning when he remarks that these “… representational spaces may be said, though again with certain 73 | Lefebvre, H., 1991, The Production of Space, Blackwell, Oxford. P. 38. 74 | Lefebvre, H., 1991, The Production of Space, Blackwell, Oxford. P. 38. 75 | Lefebvre, H., 1991, The Production of Space, Blackwell, Oxford. P. 39. 76 | Lefebvre, H., 1991, The Production of Space, Blackwell, Oxford. P. 39.

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exceptions, to tend towards more or less coherent systems of nonverbal symbols and signs.” 77 Lefebvre views spatiality, or rather placeiality, in this sense, as a means to represent value in what might be seen as the symbolic order of communication and simulacra. These representational spaces provide material for artist, philosophers, and writers to create or mine symbols for meaning and value as an excavation. These three categories of space/place, which Lefebvre puts forth, confirm that “…cultural geography is better thought of as a series of intellectual—and, at core, politicized—engagements with the world.” 78 These engagements are utilised as methods for examining or giving meaning to the space we encounter both physically, mentally, and through representation which perhaps underscores the problematics of a disappearance into representation as examined throughout this enquiry. Lefebvre similarly asserts a Marxist position when he questions the use of social spaces: “Might it not be a good idea, therefore, first to make an inventory of them, and then to try and ascertain what paradigm gives them their meaning…” 79 His production of space views space as a raw material to compartmentalise and as something to put to work for our own understanding. Lefebvre, it could be argued within the context of this research and examination, has an almost contrary view towards adumbrational aspects of space to that of phenomenology or even raw phenomenology when he speaks of what he terms the illusion of transparency. He says “The illusion of transparency goes hand in hand with a view of space as innocent, as free of traps or secret places. Anything hidden or dissimulated and hence dangerous—is antagonistic to transparency…”80 Lefebvre sees an unseen aspect of space as a trap or deception which only serves to trick people into thinking they have fully comprehended 77 | Lefebvre, H., 1991, The Production of Space, Blackwell, Oxford. P. 39. 78 | Thrift, N., Anderson, K., Domosh, M. & Pile, S., 2003, Handbook of Cultural Geography, Sage, London. P. 2. 79 | Lefebvre, H., 1991, The Production of Space, Blackwell, Oxford. P. 16. 80 | Lefebvre, H., 1991, The Production of Space, Blackwell, Oxford. P. 28.

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it and made it intelligible. From this perspective, it becomes an impediment in the production of knowledge rather than, as in phenomenology, the thing itself as it is experienced. He then goes on to describe the realistic illusion, what he terms an “illusion of natural simplicity”81 whereby we do not view space as having a need for explanation. Whilst these ideas might assist in the objective of cultural geography itself, providing a spatial context for the human experience, it neglects a view towards space as anything other than material for consumption and production, a thing disappearing into its utility. Lefebvre likewise goes on to align this production with semiology. There are two possibilities here: either these words make up an unrecognized code which we can reconstitute and explain by means of thought; alternatively, reflection will enable us, on the basis of the words themselves and the operations that are performed upon them, to construct a spatial code. In either event, the result of our thinking would be the construction of a ‘system of space’. 82

For Lefebvre, reflection is a means of production into a semiological system that allows spaces to be utilised or harnessed for meaning. Symbols and signs appear as a method for unveiling this “dangerous” illusion that we presuppose on space, instead they allow us to project meaning onto site in order to uncover our cultural awareness of the ways we utilise space. These symbols can then be put to work in order to be exchanged for meaning and value in an effort to contextualise location and places of action within these locations. Lefebvre argues that an “…approach is called for today, an approach which would analyse not things in space but space itself, with a view to uncovering the social relationships embedded in it…”83 which

81 | Lefebvre, H., 1991, The Production of Space, Blackwell, Oxford. P. 29. 82 | Lefebvre, H., 1991, The Production of Space, Blackwell, Oxford. P. 16. 83 | Lefebvre, H., 1991, The Production of Space, Blackwell, Oxford. P. 89.

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is arguably against the intent of this book.84 Instead, the position of this research is pinpointed apart from the cultural concerns of human geography and does not delve into any presupposed system of utility for acculturation within social science, but instead how it actually becomes lost or displaced in this process. The title of Lefebvre’s book reveals its dissimilarity to the arguments supported herein, as production—regardless of the source or politics of that production—is inherently a method of utility. With this emphasis on utility, Baudrillard also finds fault with this position amid Marxism when he states: “Marxism assists the ruse of capital. It convinces men that they are alienated by the sale of their labour power; hence it censors the much more radical hypothesis that they do not have to be the labour power…”85 Through this, Baudrillard argues that the premise of production is what needs to be called into question, and not just the associated power structure of production in the current system which still adheres to a model of exchange and its subsequent loss and disappearance. This could be thought to apply to a production of space as well when Baudrillard says: “The same fate has befallen the concept of need in its present operation (the consumption of use value). It presents the same characteristics as the concrete aspect of labor…”86 To delve into a convoluted discussion of power structures and the value of production in these contexts would be a distraction from the purpose of this text as the very premise of cultural geography is the production of meaning and value behind acculturation, something which the examination of this research secerns through its method. Markedly, the desire of the cultural geographic field to contextualise site as repositories or sources of meaning from the 84 | See further discussion of Baudrillard’s assertion that “to analyse is to dissolve” 85 | Baudrillard, Jean, 1975, The Mirror of Production, Telos Press, St. Louis. P. 31. 86 | Baudrillard, Jean, 1975, The Mirror of Production, Telos Press, St. Louis. P. 32.

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view of social science neither fits the methodology chosen for this research nor the phenomena it is rooted in, which is an examination of a disappearance into representation and the loss of space into place without the aim of excavating meaning which the theorists that inform this research consider to be the hearkening event that causes this disappearance. The type of theory Lefebvre posits might, however, better suit a similar study taken with a semiotic methodology, perhaps investigating the excavated space that Sontag earlier remarked and could interrogate the concerns of artists like Whiteread as mentioned. With this view, the aims of The Production of Space could be seen to run counter to what is being investigated in this study, as it seeks to uncover, produce, or extract meaning from space which renders it into place in Tuan’s terms.

N on -R epresentational S pace Similarly, cultural geographer Nigel Thrift’s book Non-representational theory: Space, Politics, Affect “…presents a distinctive approach to the politics of everyday life. Ranging across a variety of the spaces in which politics and the political unfold, it questions what is meant by perception, representation and practice, with the aim of valuing the fugitive practices that exist on the margins of the known.”87 This book is another key text for human geographers, although Thrift’s terminology non-representational theory, it has been suggested,88, 89 might be problematic in context with other theorists whose works might better be described as non-representational. In this work, 87 | Thrift, N., 2008, Non-Representational Theory: Space, Politics, Affect, Routledge, New York. P. i. 88 | Smith, R.G., 2003, Baudrillard’s Nonrepresentational Theory: Burn the Signs and Journey Without Maps, Environment and Planning D, 21(1), P. 67. 89 | Smith, R.G., 2005, Lights, camera, action: Baudrillard and the performance of representations, International Journal of Baudrillard Studies, 2(1), pp. 1-8.

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Thrift argues that human performances and actions create almost a subtext behind our understanding of spatial representations. He believes that these activities inform our knowledge of space, as the way humans utilise and co-opt space offers background information on the way site functions as an important part of cultural geography. Thrift describes his “overall goal”90 as one “to produce a politics of opening the event to more, more; more action, more imagination, more light, more fun, even.”91 Similar to Lefebvre, Thrift aligns himself with Marxist thinkers with a nod towards semiotics as a method for understanding space when he says, “I argue, a…change in the structure of cognition is occurring but as a general process of the purposeful production of semiosis, in which space is both template and font.”92 This might be thought of as aligning itself almost with a Baudrillardian sense of semiotics, although Thrift does not count Baudrillard amongst his influencers. However, in Baudrillard’s For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign he argues that symbolic meaning of signs themselves affect a value of exchange contributing to this economic system instead of challenging it fundamentally.93 Further, one of the directions through non-representational theory that Thrift sees “…is to try to squeeze every last drop of value out of the system by increasing the rate of innovation and invention through the acceleration of connective mutation. [italics in original]”94 The approach he employs to open his politics is also problematic when considering disappearance in 90 | Thrift, N., 2008, Non-Representational Theory: Space, Politics, Affect, Routledge, New York. P. 20. 91 | Thrift, N., 2008, Non-Representational Theory: Space, Politics, Affect, Routledge, New York. P. 20. 92 | Thrift, N., 2008, Non-Representational Theory: Space, Politics, Affect, Routledge, New York. P. 23. 93 | Baudrillard, J., 1981, For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign, Telos Press, St. Louis. P. 111. 94 | Thrift, N., 2008, Non-Representational Theory: Space, Politics, Affect, Routledge, New York. P. 30.

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relation to Baudrillard’s alterity or even hyperrealism. Again, Sontag cautions against a practice of interpreting meaning that obscures space, offering it as a sign to be decoded, therefore hastening the disappearance examined throughout this research. This might be thought of as quite useful for a cultural geographical study or a social science practice based on Marxism at its crux or semiology, but is antithetical for the purposes of this research that is rather focused instead on a critique of the overabundance of meaning and value. In this sense, the framework presents a need to move on in our understanding of space if it is not to become mired in a discourse aimed at the disappearance of space into its very representation. Similarly, this might align more with Baudrillard’s critique of the value of signs in that it too is critical of a system of exchange and the acceleration of connective mutation it produces. Harkening back to elements of de Certeau’s theory, Thrift comments on the mobile experience of perceiving space, but views this as a method to gain some new information on the actions or affect that humans undertake through mobility. Through machines, he argues, the infinite looping of experience is described in which “perpetually mobile space is seen as one in which joint action arising out of several causes brings new things into the world. The realm of the virtual or quasi-causal is recognized as having an existence, one which continually marks up the world.”95 Here, Thrift is commenting on the availability of virtual spaces and computer systems to present a continuous unfolding. However these virtual sites would be considered already-disappeared through their desired production of knowledge as an expression of surplus content at the expense of the perception of the thing presented before us. For the purposes of the research, however, this approach to sites could be applied to practical works created as elements of this project as they similarly provide a looping of space, however these works are based on the actual not the virtual. In this way, it could be argued, that 95 | Thrift, N., 2008, Non-Representational Theory: Space, Politics, Affect, Routledge, New York. P. 98.

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spaces themselves are not mobile, but rather more stagnant and it is only the itinerary of the observer that is mobile. These might serve as material for Thrift to research, if he wished to continue investigating the human action and meaning behind the mobile act in the position of the observer. To this end, the documentation provided itself might only prove as casual peripheral information. However, the research focus of this book is orientated towards site itself and an examination of its disappearance into representation, whereas an actor-network might be employed towards research such as a consideration of place within the context of representing it in light of concerns including social interactions, acculturation, and economics. Virilio writes of an artistic practice in which “…the representation of movement pushed to the limits of collapse”96 insinuating an eventual dissolution of perhaps both the object and its subject (the subjectile). Whereas Thrift considers “paramount amongst these newly touchable entities will be data of various kinds which, through haptic engineering, will take on new kinds of presence in the world as something closer to what we conventionally regard as ‘physical’ objects.”97 This haptic engagement of spaces not only speaks to Thrift’s aim towards understanding a human contextualisation of geography, but also perhaps speaks of an effort to mediate spaces or at least having a tactile understanding of their utility. Virilio seems to warn of this haptic mediation when he admonishes: Faced with the stereoscopic nature of a reality divided between optics and optoelectronics, acoustics and electroacoustics, touch and teletactility, we have been given notice to quit our customary ways of seeing and

96 | Virilio, P., 1994, The Vision Machine, Indiana University Press, Bloomington. P. 7. 97 | Thrift, N., 2008, Non-Representational Theory: Space, Politics, Affect, Routledge, New York. P. 103.

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thinking, in order to apprehend a new kind of ‘relief’ that even goes as far as undermining the practical usefulness of the notion of horizon… 98

Virilio denotes that a lack of density in regards to the non-tactile experience of virtual projections, which separates our understanding of objects, or in this case, space. This is a desired approach of this book as it aims to separate that very understanding by removing a haptic response, which conversely might be Thrift’s goal towards understanding a human contextualisation of spatial utility. Instead of mediating space, this research seeks to mediate or rather present an asyndetic documentation of space removing the subjectile from instances of disappearance by courting its collapse. Utilising machines, as methods of displaying work, but not engaged with imaginary sites, this work creates not an already-disappeared virtual space, but a fragmentary presentation of sites in the lived-world. In Baudrillard’s nonrepresentational theory: burn the signs and journey without maps, geographer Richard G. Smith, a former student of Thrift, argues that Baudrillard’s critique of representation “…is a quite different form of nonrepresentational theory to anything that Thrift is writing about.”99 Smith notes, through his investigation of Baudrillard, that the semiological has created a world that is nothing but a simulacrum in its entirety as symbols and signs have become inseparable from the things they are meant to signify. In this world “…there is no break between words and things or between representations and the real as the two sides have ‘fused’ (perhaps a better word would be ‘disappear’) into one substance.”100 This speaks to precisely the focus of the research in this book, as through representation and the subsequent meaning of signs, things have 98 | Virilio, P., 2008, Open Sky, Verso, London. P. 44. 99 | Smith, R.G., 2003, Baudrillard’s Nonrepresentational Theory: Burn the Signs and Journey Without Maps, Environment and Planning D, 21(1), P. 68. 100 | Smith, R.G., 2003, Baudrillard’s Nonrepresentational Theory: Burn the Signs and Journey Without Maps, Environment and Planning D, 21(1), P. 69.

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disappeared into a system of exchange, therefore separating the real from its simulacrum of value. To argue the distance of semiotics from Baudrillard’s theories, it is evident that his reliance on signs as a method to investigate meaning is distinct when he says: …we live in a world where the highest function of the sign is to make reality disappear and, at the same time, to mask that disappearance. Art today does the same.101

In Jean Baudrillard’s Contributions to Semiotic and Structural Studies, sociologist Gary Genosko explains that “Baudrillard’s symbolic is opposed to semiology.”102 Baudrillard searches for singularity, an item that has no equivalency, thus negating the semiotics of exchange. His relationship to Marxism is described: Marxism is haunted by these concepts and remains trapped in the logic of representing what it sought to radically critique. As an alternative, Baudrillard proffered symbolic exchange: an incessant agonistic cycle perfused with ambivalence. Baudrillard borrowed from Georges Bataille’s general anti-productivist economy of expenditure and Marcel Mauss’ analysis of potlatch ceremonies involving the reckless destruction of wealth in the establishment of rank, within the triad of obligations: giving-receivingrepaying. Baudrillard may be productively read as a gift theorist.103

Symbolic meanings, even of performative actions as argued by Thrift, have still caused things to disappear through their desire to find an equivalent and assume a use value. Whilst these methods might serve the purpose of understanding human actions in a spatial context, they are for Baudrillard, a needless act as they create 101 | Baudrillard, J., 1996, The Perfect Crime, Verso, London. P. 5. 102 | Smith, R.G., 2007, Jean Baudrillard’s Contributions to Semiotic and Structural Studies, International Journal of Baudrillard Studies, 4(3). 103 | Smith, R.G., 2007, Jean Baudrillard’s Contributions to Semiotic and Structural Studies, International Journal of Baudrillard Studies, 4(3).

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the dissolution of the act themselves by trying to surmise a meaning and causing a displacement of the thing itself. Smith summarises his argument regarding Baudrillard’s nonrepresentational theory by explaining the act of mobility and a desire to make sense of it. In journeying nothing adds up, there are no equations, and no summation. Hindsight, pretending to step outside of language and the simulacrum, creates the retrospective illusion of things coming together into ordered systems, but there are no unities or stable identities.104

It is perhaps this retrospective illusion of order and sense that Thrift utilises through his accumulations in an effort to understand the unintelligible, according to this argument. A semiological approach in this sense, would be counter to the aims as laid out from the beginning, but might prove useful to a study that disregards Baudrillard’s problematics of representation and disappearance if as Smith suggests, we are to undertake a journey without maps.

104 | Smith, R.G., 2003, Baudrillard’s Nonrepresentational Theory: Burn the Signs and Journey Without Maps, Environment and Planning D, 21(1), P. 82.

Practising Space To practice space is thus to repeat the joyful and silent experience of childhood; it is, in a place, to be other and to move toward the other. 1 Michel de Certeau

A lterit y as a R e action to G lobalisation Alterity is in danger. It is a masterpiece in peril, an object lost or missing from our system… 2

There is a crisis of alterity in which globalised meaning is threatened by its opposition to the system of exchange. An artistic effort towards radical alterity is a practical one. It combines experience of actual space with strategies of fragmentation and mobility as a production of perception of the world as other. The goal of which is to break the cyclical system of exchange that causes everything to disappear. First, this practice must be based on actual space; anything else would be purely conceptual and already disappeared. Virtual worlds are simulacra, unsatisfactory imitations, or pure imagination. They are remnants of what has disappeared, or rather, what never was. Fragmentation and mobility are strategies towards discovering some 1 | de Certeau, M., 2008, The Practice of Everyday Life, University of California Press, Berkeley. P. 110. 2 | Baudrillard, J. & Guillaume, M., 2008, Radical Alterity, Semiotext(e), Los Angeles. P. 113.

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of the potentialities of actual space (which will be discussed further), without causing its dissolution. This approach suggests a rethinking of the way we utilise space. This is a radicalised and distinct practice, as artists for centuries have focused first on the representation of space and later on the viability of site—both acts towards disappearance (as discussed previously). Further, contemporary practices engage in the production of art as entertainment, capital, or at least as something slick—all in an effort to utilise and to have the world disappear into exchange. This has left the body count of site (amongst many other elements) in the wake of art’s murderous utility. In accordance with Baudrillard, Lotringer identifies the crime during his conversations with Virilio in The Accident of Art: …the visual arts have remained by the wayside as the entire culture is now being threatened by the extermination of space… 3

This quote from Lotringer bears repeating from a previous chapter, as it is so critical to this notion. To delve deeper, I suggest the extermination of space is a transfiguration of site into a known and utilised place. It represents a movement into realised place, and a disappearance of the original space that once was. It has been consumed as a product into the system of difference and absorbed into homogeneity. Rather than a mediated practice whereby previous artists respond to space as commodification, I might propose a distinct practice. One that preserves the alterity of unnamed space as an act towards singularity—a singular space that resists the urge towards homogeneity. The agency of previous artists made a significant impact on the spaces they interrogated and left evidence of this engagement. They worked by sometimes altering or transforming sites in a very literal sense, but just as often by colonising space as overanalysed sites of 3 | Virilio, P. & Lotringer, S., 2005, The Accident of Art, Semiotext(e), Los Angeles. P. 29.

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utility and homogenised dissolution. Instead, this approach puts forth a practice that preserves the singularity of the unfamiliarised site. Concurrently and startlingly, the new spatial practice proposed of radical alterity also provokes spatial dissolution into a system of difference. This provocation is an interrogation of site to uncover and imagine meaning and potentiality and is different in that its endgame is not to subsume or to conquer. As alluded to by Baudrillard earlier, courting this dissolution enables an investigation of the moment just before naming and knowing—the moment before or at disappearance. This is the moment where the ability to discover is most intense. Here I suggest that in order to court this action in which space disappears (or is consumed through place), but without causing its dissolution, practical strategies may be employed. Two specific strategies are enlisted, namely fragmentation and mobility; they are each intertwined in a spatial practice that explores the experiential meaning of space without causing it to slip away. Again, Virilio starts to hint at these specific strategies, while also warning of this territory: Particular selection of what is seen, recording insignificant facts that gradually transforms the true object into a sort of background against which another designation of meaning suddenly emerges, a background which would be already a kind of dissolving view…all is calm, and yet: this world as we see it is passing away.4 [italics in original]

Here, Virilio might deliver a very literal studio method—recording insignificant facts and making particular selections of what is seen. He cautions against creating a kind of work that serves as the background to the colonisation of a forward object. When documentation is transformed into the purely abstract; the original space will have long disappeared into the concept. Instead, I submit that this recording must still have, at least, an intuition of the real 4 | Virilio, P., 1991, The Aesthetics of Disappearance, Semiotext(e), New York. P. 37.

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or even the familiar. Experiential investigation is paramount, as it presents a resistance to something succumbing to the virtual. Fragmentation removes the linear trajectory of the familiar, preserving this intuition and mystery, while at the same time altering supposed meaning captured in the system of difference. Whilst the ultimate end goal of this practice might suppose itself to be singularity, it is the act towards radical alterity, only, with which this practice is engaged. Paradoxically to this practice, singularity might not be achievable.

F r agmentation and M obilit y towards a S ingul ar O ther Which strategies might be employed towards the knowing of space? And how does it differ from what Smithson practices and this notion of colonisation? This research is an endeavour apropos of an experiential cartography of space. In a sense, a return to cartography as it was initially imagined as a guide to ways of moving through locations.5 Not simply as a map of endpoints in journey, but rather an interrogation of the interstitial space encountered while moving throughout the landscape; an experiential map of journey, rather than a conceptualised notation of city-state boundaries. This movement through location is a type of spatial practice and one that works as an effort towards recording and reordering momentary glimpses of space viewed in transit. This offers another cartography, one that is based on the original function of maps as argued by de Certeau. Rooted in alterity, this return is a cartography of practice and a rejection of a contemporary practice that seeks to have all space disappear. This desire might be exampled by the writing of artists Katrina Brown and Nathan Coley on the occasion of an exhibition entitled 5 | de Certeau, M., 2008, The Practice of Everyday Life, University of California Press, Berkeley. P. 120.

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Nothing at the Northern Gallery for Contemporary Art in 2001. Of this they write: Captain Robert Falcon Scott first sailed to the Antarctic in 1901 on the Royal Research Ship Discovery, his drive to ‘conquer’ the South Pole eventually leading to the infamous, fatal expedition of 1910-12. Scott and his companions did reach the Pole, but only hours after it had been ‘claimed’ by the Norwegian, Roald Amundsen; Scott and his party subsequently perished in severe conditions before they were able to return to base. In his journal for the day they reached the Pole, only to realise they were not the first, Scott wrote: ‘Great God! This is an awful place and terrible enough for us to have laboured to it without the reward of priority (17th January 1911).’ The principal success of Scott’s first expedition in 1901 had been to reach a record-breaking southern latitude, going beyond the 80 degrees South previously attained by other groups. As Scott and his party reached the limit of the territory mapped by former expeditions, the charts that had guided them ran out into blank white paper. We can only wonder at the sheer impact of experiencing that point of coincidence between chart and wilderness on both the bodies and minds of men so steeped in the importance of objective knowledge. The empty chart seems an apt metaphor for what actually appeared before them: an expanse of white space stretching as far as the eye could see—perhaps the best possible map of ‘the last great wilderness’ that was Antarctica.6

In Brown and Coley’s view the expansive empty white pages of the maps of Antarctica reveal both the actual landscape and the limits of discovery up to that point for Scott. The map not only represents a lack of information, but in its void it also reveals the actuality of the site encountered. Antarctica itself evidences an otherness in the world, an uninhabitable and barely explored territory that is unlike 6 | Brown, K. & Coley, N., Scott of the Antartic and ‘The Last Great Wilderness’ in 2001, Nothing, Gussin, G., & Carpenter, E. eds. August Media Ltd., London. P. 41.

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every other continent. In an effort to conquer and claim this site, lives were lost and it seemed like a fool’s errand with no reward. The only real utility of site was to be the first to claim the landscape, and to chart this “terrible” place. Similarly, Baudrillard inclines toward an alterity that is radical and begins to lay the groundwork for an understanding of this notion of radicality. In contrast to the discourse of reality and rationality, which bets on the fact that there is something (some meaning) rather than nothing, and which… wants to be built on the preservative notion of an objective and decipherable world, radical thought bets on the illusion of the world. This thought wants to be illusion, restituting non-veracity to the facts, non-signification to the world, and formulating the reverse hypothesis that there may be nothing rather than something, tracking down this nothingness which runs under the apparent continuation of meaning.7

His methodology continues to function as raw phenomenology, and this radical alterity acts an “illusion of the factual.”8 In this way, the image might become more distinct by just touching upon the familiar and creating an illusion that is not entirely imaginary but appears to be actual. Baudrillard creates an opportunity for putting the other into practice. In The Practice of Everyday Life, de Certeau explains that maps originated as visual documentation of journey. He notes the postEnlightenment transfer in the function of cartography. …if one takes the “map” in its current geographical form, we can see that in the course of the period marked by the birth of modern scientific discourse (i.e., from the fifteenth to the seventeenth century) the map has slowly disengaged itself from the itineraries that were the condition of its possibility. The first medieval maps included only the rectilinear marking 7 | Baudrillard, J., 1995, Radical Thoughts, CTheory, 25. 8 | Baudrillard, J., 1995, Radical Thoughts, CTheory, 25.

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out of itineraries (performative indications chiefly concerning pilgrimages), along with the stops one was to make (cities which one was to pass through, spend the night in, pray at, etc.) and distances calculated in hours or in days, that is, in terms of the time it would take to cover them on foot. Each of these maps is a memorandum prescribing actions. 9

Cartography is a visual template to spatial encounters—a template which once brought the potentialities of spatial experience to the foreground. However, this cartography has been subjugated by a further utility to a recording of geopolitical and conceptualised boundaries. As de Certeau notes, this change coincides with the birth of “modern scientific discourse” which may be further evidence of the different tactics of a scientific method approach to the world as examined earlier in this book. The need to effectuate becomes evident in this visual picturing (image) in order to use the world as an object or a means. Perhaps, in some way this exemplifies a point where visual art aligned more closely with a scientific method on a new trajectory. More often, maps are redrawn to denote world events in which one people overthrow or separate from another. Cartography now offers opportunities for surveillance. Global positioning systems communicate navigational demands that focus only on which ways to go, ignoring the sites in-between. Landscape is sick. The consequences of this subjugation have led to war, colonisation, sequestration, and notably, disappearance of space. Maps can evidence how we perceive and conceive the world and approach it, perhaps these more modern maps reveal an impulse to objectify the world as a commodity (instead of opportunity of experience) and making it disappear into utility. These medieval maps, as de Certeau posits, suggested an active mobility. They offered an itinerary to experience space10, that one 9 | de Certeau, M., 2008, The Practice of Everyday Life, University of California Press, Berkeley. P. 120. 10 | Whereby de Certeau is highlighting a shift from focus on an itinerary of experienced space to one of representation.

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moved through, a temporal itinerary, and one that focused on the possibilities of movement and the possibilities of encounter. This offered a potentiality of discovery of the world encountered, and one that is slipping away vis-à-vis an effort to exact a use-value leading to disappearance. The richness of imagery recording (or prescribing) journey has been misplaced since this post-Enlightenment shift,11 as geopolitical boundaries came more into focus. Instead, the delineation of city-states became the centre of concentration (the objectification of space as an entity), towards the agency of a kind of conquering or mastering of the land and location. Not just of the landscape itself (for agricultural reasons, etc.) or its people, but moreover it presided over the loss of potentiality of experience and possibility by creating a proscription of visual evidence for its utility (through representation). Rather, space imposed itself as an idea(l) as opposed to an experience. Lines were drawn, encircling places and property as well as connecting routes of trade. A rush to explore the ends of the global was prompted by a desire to claim and name, not unlike the description of Scott’s expedition to Antarctica. Again, de Certeau: …the map gradually wins out over these figures; it colonises space; it eliminates little by little the pictural figurations of the practices that produce it.12

Here, de Certeau begins to develop a practice of space and notes that this “pictural figuration” of the perceptual journey is lost. In its place, the focus of spatial study, exploration, viability, turns not towards utilising space as a function of movement, of experience, but rather towards geopolitical colonisation and naming, something changes. Globalisation is the disease of spatial colonialism. Its symptoms are the manageable familiarity of the world. A current shift towards ho11 | As de Certeau espouses. 12 | de Certeau, M., 2008, The Practice of Everyday Life, University of California Press, Berkeley. P. 121.

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mogeneity, not only of culture and capital, but also of space itself, to make all equivalent, interchangeable, and exchangeable—using maps as a guide to an unmitigated apprehension and charting of the world. Through this pervasive apprehension, space disappears from what it once was—a site of potentiality—into the dissolution of what is already known. Space is transformed into knowable place, becomes valued, and part of a system of exchange. No longer sites of experience, space instead becomes a place to consume (or place becomes space consumed). Paul Virilio begins to describe this problem, when he asks—and answers: “what is the danger of globalisation? There is no perspective.”13 The effort towards owning or naming all location on a global scale is an effort towards familiarity, claiming, and a marking of meaning. It annihilates the possibilities of experiential discovery through designating, naming, and denoting—effectuating. Everything is sought to become mapped and understood. Through this, it destroys any notion of the other and alterity inherent—the unfamiliar site of potential discovery. Take for example the photographer Mishka Henner’s work, No Man’s Land,14 exhibited at Fotografia Festival Internazionale di Roma, Museum of Contemporary Art, Rome for which he was nominated for the Deutsche Borse Photography Prize.15 In this work Henner appropriates images taken from Google Street View that uses 15 cameras mounted on vehicles to capture images from roads that are geo-tagged to provide online navigation of spaces. Henner selected images from Google Street View of sex workers at various locations around Europe that were 13 | Virilio, P. & Lotringer, S., 2005, The Accident of Art, Semiotext(e), Los Angeles. Virilio, P. & Lotringer, S., 2005, The Accident of Art, Semiotext(e), Los Angeles. P. 74. 14 | No Man’s Land, Mishka Henner, Works. Retrieved December 12, 2013, from http://www.mishkahenner.com/No-Man-s-Land 15 | Mishka Henner 18 Apr - 30 Jun 2013, The Photographers’ Gallery. Retrieved December 12, 2013, from http://thephotographersgallery.org. uk/mishka-henner-3

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captured by the service. He views this appropriation as a utility “to find a location”16 without concern for any “motivation”17 of the women portrayed. No Man’s Land could be thought of as providing a specific site of meaning and importance, even beyond its utility as a means for travel, along a mundane stretch of road that might otherwise be overlooked. Here too, Henner highlights the activity of these women, despite his intentions, as an other to the normalised practices of society.18 A globalised mapping of space destroys—not the pseudoproduced exoticism of the tourist—but an Other of possibilities that is in direct opposition to what is already known. The Other exemplifies potentiality19 of discovery in our unfamiliarity, it hinges on its infinite adumbrational qualities. It presents something that is not simply different, and therefore comparable and easily knowable, but an unknown element—or what can be distinct or resides in the shadows of potentiality. However, simple difference allows only for a hastening of disappearance by providing a doorway into exchange as set out in Dis/location. Baudrillard discusses a system of difference that is easily organised into a structure of meaning. However, he indicates a phenomenon called radical alterity, in order to highlight illusion of meaning and representation,20 which he defines as essentially a process by which something becomes hyper-other, or more other than simply just different.21 In this case, the radically alterior avoids the system by which everything is known and 16 | Mishka Henner, Deutsche Börse Photography Prize 2013, Vimeo. Retrieved December 12, 2013, from http://vimeo.com/64393166 17 | Mishka Henner, Deutsche Börse Photography Prize 2013, Vimeo. Retrieved December 12, 2013, from http://vimeo.com/64393166 18 | A deeper investigation of social otherness would be beyond the scope of the current research. 19 | See discussion on singularity and Other in relation to uncertainty below. 20 | Baudrillard, J., 1995, Radical Thoughts, CTheory, 25. 21 | As set out in discussion of difference and a system of exchange below.

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communicable. This “super-other” opposes its own disappearance. This radical alterity serves as a strategy of the raw phenomenological methodology of this research in the practice of this approach. One form of radical alterity is to hone a Singularity, defined as something that has no exchange value (symbolic or otherwise) and is irreducible to an equivalent meaning or sign.22 An incomparable solitary instance, which can never be fully realised or known, one that presents possibilities of discovery through its otherness. The Singular is immune from dissolution. The Singular, by its definition, opposes homogeneity and globalised accumulation of exchangeable place—a site that has already been known, named, and valued—but instead not as object, but as singular experience and phenomena. A practice availing radical alterity is an effort towards creating a singularity of space that has no exchange value23, and thus resists dissolution. Or rather, is impossible to exchange24 (for meaning, or symbolic meaning). Radical alterity in other words is an effort towards keeping space from slipping away to preserve the mystery of the Singular. Baudrillard alludes to this practice: Singularity and alterity is a double game... 25 22 | Baudrillard, J., 2011, Impossible Exchange, Translated by C. Turner. Verso, London. P. 131. 23 | One might even say it is a space hinging on the dangers or traps that Thrift previously warned of—the unexchangeable trap of the singular or radical alterior. 24 | “What, then, is the relationship of singularity to exchange? Insofar as a singularity consists of uncertainty, the collapse of laws, and from which the new, or an event, can emerge, it is precisely that which, initially, has no equivalent. It is therefore not exchangeable. Singularity is a ‘unique sign’” in Baudrillard, J., 2011, Impossible Exchange, Translated by C. Turner. Verso, London. P. 130. 25 | Baudrillard, J., 2002, Between Difference and Singularity: An open discussion with Jean Baudrillard (lecture), Europäische Universität für Interdisziplinäre Studien (European Graduate School).

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Here, Baudrillard suggests that the effort is two-pronged, linking singularity to alterity as a practical pursuit. Singularity is the end goal by which the process of radical alterity seeks to achieve, ultimately. In a world, which Baudrillard might suggest, is well on its way to disappearance; we are tasked with a challenge to this system. The spatial practice that is proposed and engaged in the investigation of this method is a component of this game, an active participation. What is the problem, then, with this disappearance of space? It is a symptom of a cultural shift towards globalisation (as evident in post-Enlightenment cartography as de Certeau suggests) in order to annihilate the otherness of space, to make it known and comparable, space as such disappears. Without alterity, the homogeneity of the world takes over. There is no longer any room for possibility and therefore discovery, and as Baudrillard notes, the world continues its trajectory in a vegetative state.26 Baudrillard explains that difference is not the same thing as otherness. Difference is an attempt at finding an exchange value in the other, to search for what is familiar in what is different—to make comparable and dissolve difference into a system of exchange. To subsume the other into this system that analyses things in relation to each other (thus giving value and making them exchangeable, at last leading to their dissolution). When all meaning is uncovered, there is nothing left to experience— all that remains is a flux of exchange like ocean currents. Things, recognisable only in their similarities and the relative differences of what came before, or already. Baudrillard notes the contrast between otherness (the alterior) and simple difference, when he asserts that the system of difference is “…symbolically speaking, truly a matter of life and death.”27 He describes this conflict by comparing it to textual discourse, as de Certeau also does, as this significance is understood through the exchange of meaning and value in language. 26 | Baudrillard, J., 2009, Why Hasn’t Everything Already Disappeared? Translated by A. Willaume. Seagull Books, London. P. 52. 27 | Baudrillard, J. & Guillaume, M., 2008, Radical Alterity, Semiotext(e), Los Angeles.

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…otherness is not the same thing as difference. One might even say that difference is what destroys otherness. When language is broken down into a set of differences, when meaning is reduced to nothing more than differentiation, the radical otherness of language is abolished. The duel that lies at the heart of language - the duel between language and meaning, between language and the person who speaks it - is halted. And everything in language that is irreducible to mediation, articulation or meaning is eliminated - everything, that is, which causes language at its most radical level to be other than the subject (and also Other to the subject?). 28

Wherein lays the problem to bringing the other into this system of difference? The other itself disappears into analysation and transforms into the familiar (perhaps vis-à-vis its comparable difference). Cartography is a visual representation of meaning, which, like language, guides understanding. Both represent a loss and desire of real spaces in the world affected (and dissolved) by efforts to know such as globalisation. The system of difference is an effort towards a global homogeneity. This is the goal of globalisation, to give meaning and value to everything, converting it into a commodity (promoting exchange). Again, Baudrillard explains the problem: One of the strategies of this new order of the world is to transform singularities into differences. As differences they are able to be integrated into the global. As singularities they cannot. It’s an immense attempt of this global world to reduce and annihilate all singularities in order to be integrated into an undifferentiated world. This world of differences, this culture of differences is an alibi for a culture of indifferentiation. 29

28 | Baudrillard, Jean, 1993, The Transparency of Evil, Verso, London. P. 127. 29 | Baudrillard, J. & Guillaume, M., 2008, Radical Alterity, Semiotext(e), Los Angeles.

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The practice “of this new order of the world”30 is similarly one that runs counter to what I am suggesting. It is a practice that is already happening all around us. An intense desire to place a value on everything which Baudrillard cited as the impetus and desire for disappearance, an effort to name and know every thing and every where, causes the very subjectile of our desire to disappear into hyperreality. A culture of indifferentiation31 presents a world without possibility masked as the representation of possibility; within it, any notion of discovery has been annihilated by uniformity and absorption of representation. For example, a far away aboriginal culture is colonisable, is exploitable, despite its abject difference from our own. Yet, a distant microbial life form escapes our efforts to colonise, as it exists as a purely radical other, one that resists our attempts at imagining its differences into our system of interchangeability. Now, we can only imagine the possibility of its alien-ness, as it has yet to be realised as something simply different from ourselves. Baudrillard goes further to suggest a practical solution to this globalisation, and specifically a strategy for artists. …we can oppose this paradigm of the totality of globalization, where all differences can be integrated, but as differences, not as singularities…. you must create your underground, because now there’s no more underground, no more avant-garde, no more marginality. You can create your personal underground, your own black hole, your own singularity. 32

Singularity resist annihilation and absorption into the system of difference, it remains as it is—full of possibility and pregnant with 30 | Ibid. 31 | Baudrillard, J. & Guillaume, M., 2008, Radical Alterity, Semiotext(e), Los Angeles. 32 | Baudrillard, J., 2002, Between Difference and Singularity: An open discussion with Jean Baudrillard (lecture), Europäische Universität für Interdisziplinäre Studien (European Graduate School).

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unfolding horizons of meaning. The spatial practice proposed and practiced herein is specifically an artistic one, as an effort towards radical alterity. This practice seeks to alter the perception of space to make what is experienced—a radical other. An effort to see parts of the world as they are, or could be, without them slipping into the globalised dissolution of space.

F r agmentation as R adical A lterit y Considering how new understandings of the contemporary landscape have resounding effects on the creation of artworks, and perhaps the spaces themselves, this method turns again to a textual discourse. This has proved the best suited frame of reference for understanding how fragmentation can be applied to a spatial practice as it offers a metaphor for better preserving alterity. De Certeau employs a grammatical discourse when he discusses spatial strategies, which seems to fittingly describe this practical methodology. Through selecting or bracketing, de Certeau demonstrates how alterior practice of space can be experienced with its possibilities. Asyndeton is the suppression of linking words such as conjunctions and adverbs, either within a sentence or between sentences. In the same way, in walking it selects and fragments the space traversed; it skips over links and whole parts that it omits. From this point of view, every walk constantly leaps, or skips like a child, hopping on one foot. It practices the ellipsis of conjunctive loci. 33

Here, de Certeau begins to lay the groundwork for a spatial practice rooted in alterity. He notes that the mobile act of walking, a practical act, sets forth a fragmented experience of the perception of space. He suggests an elliptical act that focuses on the parenthetical 33 | de Certeau, M., 2008, The Practice of Everyday Life, University of California Press, Berkeley. P. 101.

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connections between locations. To de Certeau, fragmentation of journey uses asyndeton as a tool of alterity to examine the whole— not as some concentrated reflection on a known place, but rather it jolts our perception on the multiple experiences of space. Experience of journey is bracketed between two points on the map, but this experience also “skips over links”34 by which a rational, and familiar, path might be known. This asyndeton is a return to the original utility of cartography, which de Certeau earlier explained as a method that presents the possibilities of movement, of experiencing space. In this way, journey manifests a more overt connection to spatial adumbrations. Not every path, or experience, is known, but rather provides a map through the possibilities of mobility. We are presented with an unfolding potentiality of space—one that still gets us to our destination, to be sure, but one that creates a fragmented trajectory in memory, speed, and perceptive experience. This trajectory allows for a spatial practice that is exploratory and experiential without the objective of subjugation. De Certeau further explains asyndeton by contrasting it with its opposite, synecdoche. Asyndeton, by elision, creates a “less,” opens gaps in the spatial continuum, and retains only selected parts of it that amount almost to relics. Synecdoche re-places totalities by fragments (a less in the place of a more); asyndeton disconnects them by eliminating the conjunctive or the consecutive (nothing in place of something). Synecdoche makes more dense: it amplifies the detail and miniaturises the whole. Asyndeton cuts out: it undoes continuity and undercuts its plausibility. A space treated in this way and shaped by practices is transformed into enlarged singularities and separate islands. Through these swellings, shrinkings, and fragmentations, that is, through these rhetorical operations a spatial

34 | de Certeau, M., 2008, The Practice of Everyday Life, University of California Press, Berkeley. P. 101.

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phrasing of an analogical (composed of juxtaposed citations) and elliptical (made of gaps, lapses, and allusions) type is created. 35

In essence, asyndeton presents a fragmentation of speech without the conjunctive evidence or replacement that string ideas together, whilst synecdoche concentrates in representing a larger idea, eliminating the possibilities in language as a surrogate referring to the whole by amplifying detail it creates a representation of more complex ideas in order to simplify its consumption.36 Take for example the 1991 film Slackers37 in which director Richard Linklater links together a series of vignettes by transitioning the focus of the camera on different characters as they encounter each other. Each storyline is interrupted mid-sentence and the film never presents a continuous, uninterrupted storyline where the viewer is left with only a momentary peek into the lives of young and bohemian characters. Whilst traditional storytelling conventions are never employed, ultimately the interrelationship of characters is witnessed as representing the totality of a daily experience for a group of people in Austin, Texas. The film reveals the interconnectedness of a community and an asyndetic fragmentation of speech and narrative that string together the film. A studio practice grounded in radical alterity might rather be rooted in this asyndetic fragmentation38 of how experience is presented, thus preventing spatial dissolution. It combines the actual experience of spatial mobility, but reconfigures this 35 | de Certeau, M., 2008, The Practice of Everyday Life, University of California Press, Berkeley. P. 101. 36 | An example of synecdoche would be akin to using the word England whilst meaning the entirety of the United Kingdom. As England only makes up a section of what we would be referring to more largely, the term makes for easy consumption—it becomes a stand-in for a convenience of thought. 37 | Linklater, R., 1991, Slacker, Criterion, New York. 38 | Likewise, this book often uses asyndetic text in the practice of its writing.

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unfolding experience into one that is fragmented and unfamiliar. In artistic practice, this is an act towards a singularity, which may allow for both an imagining and experiencing of the potentialities of site. Beyond the disappearance of places of use-value or perhaps the hyperreal places of colonised site,39 or even the synecdotal approach of fetishistic landscape paintings and photography, an artistic methodology of asyndeton has perhaps previously gone amiss. Paul Virilio elucidates a similar experience of fragmentation when he describes the perceptive experience of what he coins as the picnoleptic—those who subconsciously subvert sections of experience from temporal linearity. Conscious time comes together automatically, forming a continuous time without apparent breaks. For these absences, which can be quite numerous—hundreds every day most often pass completely unnoticed by others around—we’ll be using the word “picnolepsy” (from the Greek, picnos: frequent). However, for the picnoleptic, nothing really has happened, the missing time never existed. At each crisis, without realising it, a little of his or her life simply escaped.40 [italics in original]

Through this picnolepsy, the event of space (and time) can never be fully realised, as it fragments (through mobility) to create an alterior experience. An alterior experience which is unburdened by a desire to situate value into the system of difference (an effort towards fully realising space). This is in contrast to a synecdotal abbreviation of experience whereby the banal is overlooked to produce a conjunctive (and representational) totality. The picnoleptic experiences frequent fragmentation, fully removing sections of the whole journey and presented as an experience of alterity. The totality of experience is not simply an abbreviation for the picnoleptic, but rather these 39 | It could be argued that land art creates a hyperreal place, one that has been colonised for purpose. 40 | Virilio, P., 1991, The Aesthetics of Disappearance, Semiotext(e), Los Angeles. Pp. 9-10.

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gaps in experience simply never existed for them. The picnolpetic experience is instead one that engages in radical alterity. It is not one laden with complete apprehension, an experience of site towards the agency of exchange. Instead, it does not completely make sense. It is familiar, for sure, but, ultimately, an experience that is Other. It resists homogeneity, remaining an illogical a posteriori, one that is fragmented and not an easily exchangeable experience of site. There is a tendency to patch up sequences, readjusting their contours to make equivalents out of what the picnoleptic has not seen and has not been able to see, what he remembers and what, evidently, he cannot remember and what it is necessary to invent, to recreate, in order to lend verisimilitude to his discursus. Later, the young picnoleptic will himself be inclined to believe (like Sextus Empiricus) that nothing really exists; that even if there is existence, it cannot be described; and that even if it could be described, it could certainly not be communicated or explained to others.41

The tendency that Virilio refers to is an effort to marginalise experience, even fragmented experience, into manageable meaning that can be exchanged. The effort to make sense, to fill in the gaps, is an over conceptualisation that would lead to the disappearance of the picnoleptic’s experience. He is taught to “readjust (the) contours”42 of his compartmentalised experience into something which is exchangeable in a value system, to reject alterity in favour of familiarity. However, the indescribability or ineffability of his nonlinear experience creates a singular event, one that is unnameable. This fragmentation, when applied to studio practice, can promote a similar affect towards the exploration of space, by rejecting total familiarity as an effort towards the system of difference and eventually leading to disappearance. It opines that 41 | Virilio, P., 1991, The Aesthetics of Disappearance, Semiotext(e), Los Angeles. Pp. 10-1. 42 | Virilio, P., 1991, The Aesthetics of Disappearance, Semiotext(e), Los Angeles. P. 10.

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fragmenting documentation of space through journey provides a means to better explore the reverberative power of space, which lives on the cusp of naming without hastening its dissolution.43 Towards this action, this text advances a practice that opposes homogeneity throughout. Fragmentation prevents experiential familiarity from causing annihilation (as described in the example) by courting, but not succumbing to, this dissolution into exchange. This practice, rooted in fragmentation, both textual and studiobased, is an examination into Other spaces. Other spaces that imply sites that hold the shape of the just-familiar alongside the imagined and absent, focusing on the fragmentation of linearity of experience vis-à-vis time or intentionality. Similar to the notion of adumbrational space that is rooted in Husserl, as put forward earlier in Dis/location, Foucault’s heterotopias 44 reveal similar comparable concerns; ones rooted in the real, the familiar, but rendered into an experience of alterity. When all space has suffered from realisation (or representation), it disappears from the reality of what it was (alterior) into a commodity (familiar/known/utility) of globalisation. Alterity is a possibility for the distinct, it preserves site in its Otherness preventing disappearance, whilst globalisation is concerned with turning all space into exchangeable capital. In the Aesthetics of Disappearance, Virilio alludes to the dissolution of the potentiality of experiencing the world as globalisation takes over. When all space has disappeared, when it has been subject to a system of difference, when everything has meaning and value, we lose interest in exploration of experience and the world is reduced from the Other to the Ordinary. He observes:

43 | I suspect that this is what allows for movement, speed, memory, etc. of experience in space. 44 | “…a sort of simultaneously mythic and real contestation of the space in which we live.” in Foucault, M., 1986, Of Other Spaces, diacritics, 16(1), Pp. 22-7.

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If you leaf through a collection of photographs from the last century to today, you see in the succession of pictures not only the world in process of passing and succeeding itself, but especially you see the nature of the interest you can have in it disappear progressively: first of all, an interest essentially based on everyday anonymity, circulating in the ordinary then soon beyond, becoming tourist of the extraordinary, of ruins and events, the photograph tries to copy genre painting, is consecrated to travel, exoticism, to news items; all these poles of attraction disappear one after another45

Here, Virilio describes the disappearance of space throughout the last century or at least our mediated interest in it. As an increased effort of globalisation takes hold, experience of space is relegated to the ordinary. A contemporary mobility, a globalised one, cannot reach alterity. The closest it can hope for is exoticism of distance—a false Other, but the exotic is apparent by its inclusion into the system of difference. Exoticism is a utility of difference. It lends a process of understanding, which define elements of the world as valuable by their intelligible difference—an exchangeable value. This might be exampled by returning to the work of Mishka Henner and his project Astronomical 46 from 2011. In Astronomical, Henner documents the solar system in a series of twelve volumes in which each page is the equivalent of one thousand kilometres. Beginning with the sun and ending 6,000 pages later with Pluto, the majority of these pages are black and document the void of outer space. As thousands of black pages are flipped through, the reader is presented with a mundane view of the solar system and the succession of images presents the disappearance and relative unimportance of the universe in this manner. The process of viewing this work leaves the reader with only a sense of exotic tourism in

45 | Virilio, P., 1991, The Aesthetics of Disappearance, Semiotext(e), Los Angeles. P. 47. 46 | Astronomical, Mishka Henner, Works. Retrieved December 12, 2013, from http://mishkahenner.com/filter/works/Astronomical

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which interest rarely holds, based on the actuality of space presented as placeholder and equivalent.

M obilit y and the C onjunctive L oci As de Certeau suggests, from an act of practicing space, journey creates a unique opportunity to envisage the adumbrational experience of site. This mobility creates a set of circumstances for fragmentation. In a globalised world of travel, Virilio sees some peripatetic events as synecdoche (conjunctive) representation. The revolution of transport will coincide with a characteristic change in the meaning of arrival, with a progressive negation of the time interval, the accelerated retention of the duration of passage that holds arrival and depart. Spatial distance collapses suddenly into mere temporal distance. The longest journeys become scarcely more than simple intermissions. …the self-propelled vehicle is becoming less and less a vector of change in physical location than a means of representation…47

This model of travelling is condensed into a conjunctive repre­ sentation focused solely on the exchange of place-value. Virilio claims that as temporal distances between sites decrease due to an increase in the momentum of mobility, it is ultimately a simple journey of departures, and more importantly, arrivals. The interstitial space that allows for journey, the in-between space, is reduced to the compression of synecdoche. In essence, the temporal girth of journey has had its centre disappear and instead becomes merely a representation of the spatial experience of utility. For example, David Hockney’s Pearblossom Highway work from 1986 alters the image of the landscape encountered by presenting documentation of different perspectives. In this work, Hockney and a fellow traveller 47 | Virilio, P., The Last Vehicle, in Kraus, C. & Lotringer, S., 2001, Hatred of Capitalism Semiotext(e), Los Angeles. P. 93.

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photographed images of their journey on a highway from each of their respective windows. Hockney claims that this work was about the itinerant journey of travel rather than a specific site, although the work is focused on a single point in a journey and presented as one static image. Hockney says of this work: The driver and the passenger see the road in different ways. When you drive you read all the road signs, but when you’re the passenger, you don’t, you can decide to look where you want. And the picture dealt with that: on the right-hand side of the road it’s as if you’re the driver, reading traffic signs to tell you what to do and so on, and on the left-hand side it’s as if you’re a passenger going along the road more slowly, looking all around. So the picture is about driving without the car being in it.48

This image represents the conjunctive experience of the journey for Hockney, and even goes so far as to remove the vehicle from the equation, in a way exampling the disappeared centre of traversal. The means of travel, the machine, as well as the internal scope of the passengers are not evident. Pearblossom Highway presents a selectivity in the image, focusing on the detritus of motorway litter and signage, detailing an almost semiotic view towards destination and an embodied relationship to the landscape and a specific place. The vehicles we use for momentous journey become temporary home-places, seemingly mobile only when viewed from the outside. Internally, the focus of experience is simply on the temporal distance to destination by the traveller, and technology seeks to limit this time. We speak of hours to destinations, not kilometres.49 This conjunctive loci is not simply a symptom of any mobility, but rather it is a symptom of a globalised and more modern desire to favour arrival over journey. To better understand this we need to examine 48 | Pearblossom Hwy., 11 - 18th April 1986, #2 , The J. Paul Getty Museum. Retrieved December 12, 2013, from http://www.getty.edu/art/ gettyguide/artObjectDetails?artobj=112574 49 | Or further examine what we encounter along the way.

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the dynamic between motion and change of place in relation to mobility. In Physics Aristotle explains that “…’motion’ in its most general and primary sense is change of place, which we call ‘locomotion’.”50 This locomotion describes how the journey of the itinerant is, in essence, a journey of change. We encounter multiple possibilities in the experience of space, which is dissolved by the practice of the conjunctive loci of more contemporary globalised travel. Aristotle goes further to express the different perceptual opportunities (potentialities) that are otherwise brought to the surface through a more experiential mobility. When Aristotle examines mobility as locomotion (a change of place) he notes the importance of the journey itself as providing potentialities of experience through travel. …these are regions or kinds of place—up and down and the rest of the six directions. Nor do such distinctions (up and down and right and left, etc.) hold only in relation to us. To us they are not always the same but change with the direction in which we are turned: that is why the same thing may be both right and left, up and down, before and behind. 51 …the typical locomotions of the elementary natural bodies-namely, fire, earth, and the like-show not only that place is something, but also that it exerts a certain influence. 52

These regions, by allowing for mobility, also open up an opportunity to experience. They present a navigational occasion, which influences the locomotive process. Aristotle refers to these regions as something not simply prescribed in their experience, but rather 50 | Aristotle, 1999, Physics, Book IV, Graham, D.W. ed. Oxford University Press, Oxford. P. 59. 51 | Aristotle, 1999, Physics, Book IV, Graham, D.W. ed. Oxford University Press, Oxford. P. 59. 52 | Aristotle, 1999, Physics, Book IV, Graham, D.W. ed. Oxford University Press, Oxford. P. 59.

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akin to opening multiple adumbrations of space, or even as a mobile practice to experience these potentialities. He speaks here of the possibilities of site multiplying indefinitely not only by the itinerary of the voyager but also via the possibilities that site has to offer inherently. Our perceptive experience grows according to our own orientation in the site, so that we might understand a bit of the potentialities that site holds. Aristotle remarks that the possibilities of location are not “…h[e]ld only in relation to us”53 meaning that the sites themselves offer some access of potentiality not dependant on our current course and seems to agree with a phenomenological argument mentioned earlier that the world was not built-forpurpose toward utility. The distinctions, the experience, of space is multidirectional and exerts an influence vis-à-vis the reverberative opportunities of its uncovering. In opposition to an experiential uncovering of journey, is the conjunctive loci—a desire to limit the total experience of journey to a representation of simply where we were and where we arrive. Perhaps the global desire to arrive at the endpoints of journey is a manifestation of an impulse to claim and know all space for utility. The interstitial space that allows for journey is reduced to an agent of travel rather than an exploratory opportunity. Indeed, Virilio goes further to claim that audio-visual communication is a further indication of the eagerness to have access to all places as quickly as possible.54 It is the endpoints (arrivals) that are laden with the most desire for immediate access. Via their apprehended importance and familiarity, these endpoints have already disappeared into a system of difference. In this sense, the intermediate spaces that provide access for journey are reduced to mere utility. The conjunctive loci eliminates even the parenthetical need for interstitial space by its desire for representational conjunction valued as an event and a 53 | Aristotle, 1999, Physics, Book IV, Graham, D.W. ed. Oxford University Press, Oxford. P. 59. 54 | Virilio, P., The Last Vehicle, in Kraus, C. & Lotringer, S., 2001, Hatred of Capitalism Semiotext(e), Los Angeles. P. 93.

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means to an endpoint (an arrival). As an example, Virilio quotes a famous actress who, when questioned about her residence, claims “I live everywhere!”55 This refers not only to her image being broadcast in cinema and screens around the world, but also by the immediacy of her international travel to filming locations, press junkets, promotional tours, and award ceremonies. However instead, does she live nowhere? These are all places that have already disappeared. Those places so loaded with value and turned into pure concept that they have dissolved into exchange and no longer rely on an experiential mobility between them. Even the most remote site filmed for cinema disappears when its space is utilised and overanalysed into the system of difference. An exchange value is placed on these sites and they become sites for utility and meaning. Counter to the conjunctive loci, de Certeau writes of ‘practicing space’ and infers a practice that is participatory and exploratory in transit because of the opportunity to experience the potentialities of site. Towards this action, this book proposes that this practice is one of mobility, always moving or changing, never fully realising the familiarity of place. Locomotion is a praxis of change, an effort to not fully realise space. Mobility as agency, alongside fragmentation, is a practice that courts the territory of meaning, but may not ultimately succumb to disappearance. Further, and as previously hinted at, de Certeau states that asyndeton “…practices the ellipsis of conjunctive loci.”56 This infers an analogous notion by which asyndeton shares a certain element of the conjunctive loci action (the ellipsis, or a fragmentary bracketing) but not towards the same endgoal, which is, namely, a conjunctive disappearance into a consolidated event of utility. This monolithic event of utility reduces the journey to a mere representation of a means to get to a specific place and causes everything to disappear in contrast. This differentiates the action of conjunctive loci (to bracket a totality of journey towards 55 | Virilio, P., 1999, Polar Inertia, Sage Publications, London. P. 22. 56 | de Certeau, M., 2008, The Practice of Everyday Life, University of California Press, Berkeley. P. 92.

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representing a utility of arrival) from the action of asyndeton (a bracketing of instances which infers potentiality vis-à-vis experience as presented). As is the position of this research, a practice counter to disappearance57 must intentionally address the dissolutive process, an asyndetic practice dependent on radical alterity as an effort to preserve the potentialities of experience that space has to offer.58 De Certeau explains that movement brings forth the lack of place (that which is an understood space, a site which has disappeared) by using the example of journeys on foot throughout the city. Through this mobility, the itinerant is presented with multiple potentialities (adumbrations) of experience and is not focused solely on site as a location of meaning. This is not unlike the idea mentioned earlier in which Aristotle describes the multidirectional possibilities of movement “…hold[ing not] only in relation to us.”59 The opportunities to move and to experience are compounded with each step, and the itinerant may become aware of the other possibilities of site, which they might never encounter. These are the possibilities, which again, Aristotle says “…exerts a certain influence.”60 A practice engaged 57 | In this instance the conjunctive loci, as an event of utility from representation of total meaning. 58 | It could be argued that asyndeton offers some disappearance through its fragmentation (perhaps this is a literalist view of disappearance). However, Virilio does argue earlier that these “lapses” never really existed anyway. In this way, there might be some interplay between this imagining of journey, adumbrational aspects of space, and the unfolding experience of travel. It also might be argued, that these lapses could be evidence of some sort of intentional sacrifice. Either way, (and I tends to agree with the former) these lapses are safe from disappearance, which is the effort that this practice, through asyndeton and alterity, pursues. Regardless, a type of pataphysics might deem the entire argument moot. 59 | Aristotle, 1999, Physics, Book IV, Graham, D.W. ed. Oxford University Press, Oxford. P. 59. 60 | Aristotle, 1999, Physics, Book IV, Graham, D.W. ed. Oxford University Press, Oxford. P. 59.

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in fragmentation, which this approach provides, prevents the dissolution of space by presenting an interplay between familiarity and alterity. To walk is to lack a place. It is the indefinite process of being absent and in search of a proper. The moving about that the city multiplies and concentrates makes the city itself an immense social experience of lacking a place—an experience that is, to be sure, broken up into countless tiny deportations (displacements and walks), compensated for by the relationships and intersections of these exoduses that intertwine and create an urban fabric, and placed under the sign of what ought to be, ultimately, the place but is only a name, the City. The identity furnished by this place is all the more symbolic (named) because, in spite of the inequality of its citizens’ positions and profits, there is only a pullulation of passer-by, a network of residences temporarily appropriated by pedestrian traffic, a shuffling among pretenses of the proper, a universe of rented spaces haunted by a nowhere or by dreamed-of places.61

To walk is to lack a place.62 Later de Certeau even claims: “In short, space is a practiced place.”63 When there is no pause in journey,64 there is no opportunity for place. We are only confronted with the unfolding horizon of meaning and experience within space. Through this experience, the potential of space that is still to come is imagined, based on what we have just seen. An asyndetic fragmentation of space, of documentation, of experience, creates an 61 | de Certeau, M., 2008, The Practice of Everyday Life, University of California Press, Berkeley. P. 103. 62 | de Certeau, M., 2008, The Practice of Everyday Life, University of California Press, Berkeley. P. 103. 63 | de Certeau, M., 2008, The Practice of Everyday Life, University of California Press, Berkeley. P. 117. 64 | As this text has earlier signposted through Tuan. Both de Certeau and Tuan are relating the differences between space and place to some sort of mobility.

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opportunity to investigate space at its most intense without it sliding into the hyperreal dissolution of place. Perhaps the practice of space could also be an act of reclaiming place from the dissolution of familiarity, of globalisation, by building a fragmentary projection of realised site as an act towards something radically Other. Returning to the grammatical metaphor of asyndetic text, de Certeau alludes to a sort of reclamation of site as a practice. …these words operate in the name of an emptying-out and wearing-away of their primary role. They become liberated spaces that can be occupied. A rich indetermination gives them, by means of a semantic rarefaction, the function of articulating a second, poetic geography on top of the geography of the literal, forbidden or permitted meaning. They insinuate other routes into the functionalist and historical order of movement.65

Reinforcing a theory rooted in practice, Virilio suggests a somewhat similar strategy when he discusses a mobile ability of discovery, which is reduced when looking inwards: This mobility of the synoptic trajectory, in modifying the subject’s pointof-view, is going to allow him the discovery of what, somehow, was already visible. Beyond that…as the perspective point on an horizon of speed, it reduces the rest of the world to nothing. Passing from the course to the finish line…66

With this, Virilio highlights the act of mobility as being one that makes available the opportunity for different perceptive experiences. The synoptic trajectory, a sort of mobile conjunctive loci is indeed engaged in a praxis that presents these potentialities (albeit condensed, but within that, the potential of opening up through a 65 | de Certeau, M., 2008, The Practice of Everyday Life, University of California Press, Berkeley. 66 | Virilio, P., 1991, The Aesthetics of Disappearance, Semiotext(e), Los Angeles. Pp. 108-9.

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practice of mobility). Instead, the itinerant is orientated towards the inside and this experience of home-place of the vehicle that provides a means towards arrival. This orientation is conjunctive or synoptic but an intention of availability through mobility, as de Certeau also suggests, is needed to experience these potentialities. Through mobility, what could be conjunctive might open through a practice of fragmentation of experience of the potentiality of site. Always moving forward, Virilio believes that journeys have no true endpoint in a spherical world.67 The mobile trajectory is informed by our own experiential perspective, and the meaning of the world is uncovered when we accept the singular otherness of site informed by a fragmented, if somewhat mundane, uncovering of space. Perhaps elements of these fragments have already dissolved into the named places of the system of difference. However, strung together by movement (and I believe Virilio would here also suggest speed) we are able to witness them in an experiential alterity. Virilio explains further: A landscape has no fixed meaning, no privileged vantage point. It is oriented only by the itinerary of the passerby…it is no longer the big events that make up the fabric of the landscape of time but the myriad incidents, minute facts either overlooked or deliberately ignored.68

Although space is perhaps loaded with meaning, it does not deliver a perspective which is advantageous to its uncovering. This delivery would be too simple, and presented with limited opportunities for discovery, space would almost instantly disappear into utilised place. Instead, space is presented with multiple adumbrational aspects and unknown qualities, or potentialities, which are ready to be experienced and imagined, and constantly and infinitely available. 67 | Virilio, P., Orlan, Donger, S. & Shepherd, S., 2010, Orlan: A Hybrid Body of Artworks, Routledge, London. P. 188. 68 | V Virilio, P., 2000, A Landscape of Events, MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass. P. xi.

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Through investigation of these elements, this practice69 begins to tread in an important area—that which lies at the edge of the knowable. However, this very strategy prevents space from slipping into the disappearance of hyperreality and exchange by never fully realising/valuing it. As de Certeau suggests, practicing space is a mobile act, which reveals the indefinite amount of potentialities that site holds and unveils its alterior and singular complexity which goes beyond mere utility. Further, as Virilio mentions, the minute facts of space are overlooked or ignored with complacent quotidianity which presents space not as a stasis-place but rather multifaceted. These facts are the meaning that is prepared to be revealed through experience and consideration, constantly uncovering a new series of adumbrations. This spatial practice is tasked with the job of exploring and communicating, to reveal these fragments apart from hastening the dissolution of space through colonisation, or indeed as a globalised familiar in order to experience alterity in opposition to the system of difference. However, in Radical Alterity Baudrillard cautions about the territory of a mobile practice and the appeal of a false alterity: The voyage is thus another type of ruse. But it is the best suited ruse of them all. It simply requires that one not lose sight of the fact that it is not an ethnographic trip or a picturesque tour. One must not be fooled by the voyage, the country, the daily life or the picturesque existence of things, which would lead to exoticism in the wrong sense of the word. …. One cannot be fooled by a kind of identity or similarity with others. Such a game might be enthralling and very seductive but it is not the aim of this adventure.70

69 | This practice as in a combination of a practicing space that de Certeau begins to describe and this approach advances as a textual and studiobased strategy, in a sense here that which “…practices the ellipsis of conjunctive loci” what is termed as a spatial practice. 70 | Baudrillard, J. & Guillaume, M., 2008, Radical Alterity, Semiotext(e), Los Angeles. Pp. 75-6.

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The system of difference seeks to manage experience even of what is in contrast, so that it can be valued and therefore exchanged. It seeks to discover what is merely different through our familiarity of the world, so that experience can be utilised and ultimately disappeared. Searching for this similarity with others, this familiarity subsumes space into the system of difference even by means of exoticism—a false Other which is the commodity of the tourist. By endowing space with this value, it begins to disappear from what it once was and becomes exchangeable. Here, Baudrillard warns of the seduction of exchange of voyage, and how the itinerant might mistake an experience of difference (and even a utility of the voyager, scientist, or artist) for radical alterity. A human desire to territorialise manifests in an effort to recognise things in relation to us. It is an effort to capitalise on difference and to value it.

R adicalit y This investigation targets specifically Baudrillard and his raw phenomenological method of disappearance through his key texts of Why Hasn’t Everything Already Disappeared? as well as Radical Alterity, although I continued to delve much deeper into Baudrillard’s expanded oeuvre throughout the process in order to aid in a critical analysis of these ideas. Likewise, Virilio’s The Aesthetics of Disappearance and The Accident of Art alongside an investigative survey of his writings proved pivotal to this enlisting of his ideas on fragmentation and mobility. In this way, Baudrillard’s method is similarly used for examining disappearance into representation, central to understanding the loss of space into place here. Virilio theorises the changing phenomenology of mobility’s capacity to subsume the way space behaves or our interpretation of experience. The research here aims to shift their ideas, which were originally ascribed to objects on to space. I do not delve into some of their more popularised concerns (semiology and speed, respectively) but rather enlist vital elements

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of their overarching theories to more succinctly investigate space as applied. As a foundational methodology, phenomenology offers a way in to the perception of space. Merleau-Ponty likewise plays a key role in this foundation with texts such as The Primacy of Perception when he discusses the importance of an artistic practice, which is grounded in the lived-world. This begins to set the stage for the role of experience as fodder for art making. Husserl discusses the role of perception in regards to objects in Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy when he discusses the multiple possibilities of perception that objects contain through our experience of them. As these adumbrations are rooted in almost a shadow-effect (the quality of an object not yet discovered), Husserl helped to open the door for an interrogation of Tanizaki’s In Praise of Shadows. Baudrillard describes the radical slant of this methodology of phenomenology. Radicality is not a more sublime virtue of theory. It means isolating in things whatever allows for interpretation, whatever overburdens them with meaning. I don’t derive any malicious pleasure from this analysis; still, it gives me a curious sense of giddiness…71

Perhaps finding kinship with Husserl below, Baudrillard looks towards a radicality that attempts to isolate what overburdens the thing itself with meaning, what offers an alibi or explanation through the apperceptions of past experience and expectations. Baudrillard extends this pure phenomenological methodology that Husserl proposes into one which is raw and radical. Again, Husserl: With these descriptions, the constitutive ones, there is no question of an explanatory genesis. Nor is there one if we move from original impressions 71 | Baudrillard, J., 2007, Forget Foucault, Lotringer, S. ed. Semiotext(e), Los Angeles. P. 74.

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(perceptions)—as a generally typical or generic characterization applicable to all apperceptions—to a constitutive characterization, to descriptions of all the modal transformations in retentions, recollections, expectations, etc., and thereby follow a principle systematically ordering the apperceptions, one that [vertically] cuts across the sorting of the apperceptions according to the most general genera of objects.72

And further: No science...no matter how highly developed, can perform the original and legitimate task of pure description. As for phenomenology, it is concerned to be a descriptive eidetic doctrine of transcendentally pure mental processes as viewed in the phenomenological attitude; and, like any other descriptive, non-substructing and non-idealizing discipline, it has its inherent legitimacy.73 [italics in original]

Instead, the works of art might seek to engage with the very engagement itself, not a characterisation, but a cutting across these apperceptions in order to unburden what is analysed and instead reveal this absence in what is presented. The nature of this enquiry appears to specifically create confusion. This is evident of a raw phenomenological methodology, as introduced, that is rooted in the descriptive analysis that Husserl espouses whilst practicing a more contemporary discourse concerned with radicality and absence. Baudrillard seems to update this phenomenological method of enquiry of the lived-world when he says:

72 | Welton, D., 2003, The New Husserl: A Critical Reader, Indiana University Press, Bloomington. P. 266. 73 | Husserl, E., 1983, Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy: First Book: General Inroduction to a Pure Phenomenology, Translated by F. Kersten. Kluwer Academic Pub, Den Haag. § 74-5 P. 166-7 .

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The world was given to us enigmatic and unintelligible, and the task of thought, if possible, is to make it even more enigmatic and even more unintelligible.74

And this is exactly the point. Whilst it may seem out of place to concern a book with a level of unintelligibility, it is however exactly this disappearance into apperceptions that this method seeks to cut across, and it is through this methodology by which this text seeks to contribute to thought. This work might instead attempt to resist an impulse to commodify art within a system of exchange. The unique synthesis of these sources provided a new method for examining disappearance and the phenomena of space within a context of raw phenomenology as set forth by Baudrillard. This approach has connected previous discourses that correlate artistic practice with Husserl’s notions of adumbration, whilst being mindful of more contemporary discussions (bringing them up to date in order to reconcile—a raw phenomenology birthed from a pure one), namely Baudrillard’s theory of disappearance. Furthermore, this research has generated a methodology for understanding how space can be made more knowable (and the problems involved in this approach) through visual examination, whilst cognisant of the effects of continuing a practice of colonisation and utility. Extensive critical interrogation of the repercussions of land art has only been hinted at in this text, however this research has approached this problem from the position of a practitioner engaged with landscape rather than as an art historian offering critique. To this end, one practical element of my research has been to record the experience of journey as an artistic strategy for considering space, which challenges Smithson’s approach of claiming or unearthing site, in order to offer a critique on knowing and disappearance. Importantly, this enquiry has also generated a number of new studio works that began as phenomenological interrogations of 74 | Baudrillard, J., 2011, Impossible Exchange, Translated by C. Turner. Verso, London. P. 151.

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site and subsequently engaged with the theory presented in the textual element of this research to reflect an intention towards radical alterity. Using mobility and fragmentation as strategies, this approach seeks to examine the ramifications of what might be paradoxically lost through knowing. I offer a few examples in the appendix of expository writing regarding these works. Lastly, some of the key texts that are crucial to this book have either been published more recently or have been somewhat overlooked. A critical treatise on disappearance in this research Why hasn’t everything already disappeared?75 was the final book written by Baudrillard and published posthumously just months before this work began. I believe that this text is critical to an understanding of Baudrillard’s oeuvre as it signifies an important work of the last part of his theory. Returning to this notion of disappearance, which also became pivotal to my studio enquiries and experiences of traveling and documenting spaces, along with this closer examination of theorist such as de Certeau, Virilio, Tanizaki, Merleau-Ponty, and Husserl, this application of Baudrillard became decisive for synthesising a key understanding of disappearance in this context. It aroused the questions of what happened to things when they disappeared; what exactly might cause them to disappear? Baudrillard’s text, The Conspiracy of Art, brought forth the notion of exchange and the valuation of objects that caused them to disappear. A further investigation delving closer into Baudrillard’s outputs including books such as Symbolic Exchange and Death and Impossible Exchange solidified an understanding of the corresponding role of exchange within disappearance to a greater extent. To more fully interrogate this system, I turned firstly to Mauss’s pivotal book The Gift and then to Bataille to investigate notions of the gift economy and exchange. Bataille’s Visions of Excess and Accursed Share: Volume 1 provided a method for understanding the consequences of exchange that Baudrillard 75 | Baudrillard, J., 2009, Why Hasn’t Everything Already Disappeared? Translated by A. Willaume. Seagull Books, London.

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expanded upon. Further, Bataille evidenced a volatile surplus in the restrictive economy that could provide a major impact on disappearance. Bataille’s essay, The Cruel Practice of Art, likewise tied together artistic practice with the idea of accursed share and the possibility that sacrifice might be a key strategy to steady a volatile surplus—itself a potential contributor to disappearance. Rooted in phenomenology, Irwin discusses the role of perception and experience of his artworks. His evolving studio and non-studio practice evidences a desire to make his objects disappear. Similarly, Smithson’s Spiral Jetty disappears and re-emerges within the immensity of The Great Salt Lake in Utah perhaps as a consequence of both the environment and his land art practice. In order to critique a method of studio practice, I turned to Nancy’s The Ground of the Image where he begins to separate the act of image making from the object or site it is intending to represent. The notion of ‘distinction’ from Nancy’s texts informed my practical work in an effort to circumvent disappearance. Similarly, Nancy’s discussion of sacrifice within the image harkened back to Bataille’s discussion of sacrifice. It is essential to understand the specific range of materials that were implemented in the sorting of this particular enquiry in order to examine a disappearance of space into representation. The incipient process of selection of the specific artists, practitioners, and literature that informed this research was determined by an investigation of those whose work aligned with similar concerns regarding spatiality (as opposed to place as defined by Tuan and others) and disappearance as well as by those who recognised the vital importance of the experiential and the indefinable. Through initial and on-going investigation, I became aware of other projects that worked with similar concerns previously and more recently. Notably, these were intently focused on writers previously mentioned such as Baudrillard, Virilio, Merleau-Ponty, Husserl, Tanizaki, Bataille, and Nancy as well as the artists Irwin, Smithson, and Graham. The common thread in all of these was somewhat of a foundational phenomenology or references to an adapted experiential phenomenology from which this emerged. However, for the

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purpose of this investigation a raw phenomenological method was sought through an emphasis on Baudrillard’s raw phenomenology with that of its antecedents. Conversely, this study might have easily undertaken a semiotic or psychoanalytical shape, however this would be to misascribe the phenomenology of disappearance within this context. For example, this investigation might have offered such a psychoanalytical reading through use of Jacques Lacan’s concept of the Symbolic, Real, Imaginary (SRI) that might consider the polarisation of interpreting the meaning of spaces, lived or imagined and the play of their difference in the mind. Conversely, this research might have instead employed a focus of the notions of the phenomenological bent of hermeneutics as a textual analysis which Susan Sontag refers to as an “…aggressive and impious theor[y] of interpretation” 76 and that “…as it excavates, destroys.” 77 As was mentioned before, the focus of this research is not on an excavation of what has been lost or disappeared, but on examining the phenomena and site of this disappearance. This hermeneutics would perhaps better align with the excavation of spaces, which I argued earlier Matta-Clark and Whiteread might have employed as a reclamation or unearthing of displaced meaning. Smithson too might well have fit with a more hermeneutical approach, especially his nonsites, which I likewise read using a raw phenomenological approach. Ultimately, Sontag argues: “In place of a hermeneutics we need an erotics of art.” 78 I believe this erotic aligns with the sensual experiential process of phenomenology, but going a step further and practicing more of an imaginary, or somewhat pataphysical strain; it instead brings us into the fatal strategies of Baudrillard, what is termed ‘raw’ phenomenology. This emphasis allowed me to 76 | Sontag, S., 2001, Against Interpretation and Other Essays, Picador, New York. P. 7. 77 | Sontag, S., 2001, Against Interpretation and Other Essays, Picador, New York. P. 6. 78 | Sontag, S., 2001, Against Interpretation and Other Essays, Picador, New York. P. 14.

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examine these erotics, towards these experiential occurrences into the indefinable and indeterminate, the disappeared. Discussions of the argument in these terms are supported by theorists such as Lyotard who scrutinises the libidinal economy, a drive for exchange beyond a physical economy, and Baudrillard, again, who frequently refers to the seduction of objects. Ultimately, as noted before, artists like Matta-Clark and Whiteread were identified as incongruous for this investigation precisely because of this excavation and their practice towards making or uncovering meaning. Rather, I chose to investigate several artists who were less focused on this effectuation and excavation of lost meaning and instead placed emphasis on the phenomenology of perception in these regards. Graham offered a blanket phenomenology in his performances and I could see how works such as his pavilion and two-way mirror pieces might have evolved from previous works to interrupt experiences of landscape. A case study of these monumental works by Graham or even Tony Smith, who was initially considered, was forgone in an effort to pinpoint the relationship of this argument to Smithson. Smithson’s similar monumentalism was contradicted by his smaller works both in situ and in the gallery space. The abundance of his descriptions of his intents, the emergence and disappearance of his greatest known work, and his ultimate demise proved ripe for exploration within the context of this research. Likewise, Irwin’s practice as an artist seems ever-evolving as his work was first intent on making the lines in his paintings disappear, then his sculptural work, and ultimately his studio practice altogether. Irwin’s words proved pivotal towards investigating this research topic as an artist who was keen to examine perceptual experience.

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Ellipsis From now on, may nothing ever cause me to go back on my resolve: never sacrifice the object of my study in order to enhance some verbal turn discovered on the subject, nor piece together any such discoveries in a poem.1 Francis Ponge

The terrain of this research has been a difficult one to manoeuvre at times, as it deals so intently with the uncertainty of this raw phenomenology of absence. It pays particular attention to that which is sometimes enigmatic, whilst at the same time housed within an academic research framework. With the practice this book puts forth, there is often an uncertain line between knowing and experiencing. Between space and place. Between disappearance and appearance. Between textual and studio components. Between research and practice. And notably, between the image and the thing (or object). As examined earlier, this uncertain line is made more dangerous by a reverberative power by which the courting or seduction of this enquiry engages. This power manifests as conflict, doubt, an interplay of metaphysics and pataphysics, which makes this research all the more challenging and these are to be considered its findings. It is hoped that, through this book, those who come after might find a path available somewhere not unlike the submerging and 1 | Ponge, F., 2008, Mute Objects of Expression, Translated by L. Fahnestock. Consortium Book, Brooklyn, NY. P. 1.

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emerging coil of Smithson’s Spiral Jetty which seems to, somehow, have survived the cyclone. Throughout this text, I sought to examine a perceived disappearance between space and place, whilst introducing the idea of alterity or otherness into the analysis. Seeking to find accord with Jean-Luc Nancy’s notion of the distinct or otherness in the image, along with sacrifice and alterity, this research introduced Husserl’s concept of adumbrations and how this might inform a practice for considering disappearance whilst engaging space—or how this dissolution might be courted as a practice. This research briefly examined the career and practice of Robert Smithson from the vantage point of a practitioner, looking for correlations to this disappearance and indications of how an approach to site and space might evince a desire to lay claim, or what might be termed an adumbrational impact of his approach. From here, an examination of what might form a spatial practice was discussed, considering strategies in how site and space might be approached in order to challenge a cartography of disappearance into representation through radical alterity. Through this, several questions become apparent as an obvious trajectory of theory. Namely, what exactly happens after space disappears? Perhaps at the graveyard before excavation, this research itself presents a bit of a caveat. Firstly, many spaces have already disappeared either forced to disappear into exchange or enact a type of revenge as sacrifice to the restrictive economy. When things, not only spaces, disappear they become a part of the system of exchange. This is not a system of equilibrium whereby like is traded for like and everything has its place and role. This system contains an accursed share which requires sacrifice (or how capitalism extracts profit), a portion which is precarious yet integral in the current system. These questions hint at Baudrillard’s famous quandary, what are you doing after the orgy?2 We might even phrase it to mean after 2 | Baudrillard, J., 2002, Between Difference and Singularity: An open discussion with Jean Baudrillard (lecture), Europäische Universität für Interdisziplinäre Studien (European Graduate School).

Ellipsis

the cyclone or this reverberative event. Baudrillard himself was never fully able to answer this question and an attempt here would again be beyond the scope of this research.3 Instead, this method explores what is happening outside the orgy and here the orgy refers to the whirlwind of exchange and disappearance that subsumes the current economy of knowledge and things. However, I am not intent on approaching this territory in some sort of hermit isolation apart from this event, the orgy, as this book still peers in windows and recognises that a part of it will always be involved: perhaps ringing the doorbell and then peering from behind a corner. Still, this research examines what is available to explore before the entrance, around the outside, and in the path leading to the doorway. So what does happen after the orgy? When everything has already disappeared? One future direction of this research might be to unearth these forgotten or disappeared spaces as hinted at in the beginning of this text as an enquiry Matta-Clarke endeavoured to make as well as perhaps Whiteread. A focus on memory and connection to place seems to be quite a popular area of enquiry. Likewise, research could be further conducted into sites overloaded with meaning such as built space and an architecture of utility. This could further involve the focus of senses of place and nonplaces whereby Bachelard and Auge might become more germane. Research could be conducted on more localised senses of place or globalised ones, something akin to the fate of place that Edward Casey speaks about. Still, I think these focuses would be in fact missing a great deal about what this research endeavours. In a way, the idea of space in this text has been more of a metaphoric device to discuss an overabundance of value and an artistic utility. Some might argue 3 | “There is no answer. The seduction, the paradox, the challenge is in the question itself. But we presuppose that the orgy is over, we are at the end, or beyond the orgy.” in Baudrillard, J., 2002, Between Difference and Singularity: An open discussion with Jean Baudrillard (lecture), Europäische Universität für Interdisziplinäre Studien (European Graduate School).

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that the trajectory of art is moving along just fine and that it is contributing to a system that acts all around us. There also could be another metaphoric argument of the other things art seeks to make disappear, perhaps linked to objects and the immaterial, as well as the repercussions that technology and virtualisation have upon that disappearance. All of this could be viewed in a more rationalist way, although I think that would be a mistake. Ultimately, the process of this research—both textual and studio—has formed a trajectory that I am motivated to follow especially regarding the theory it provides. Finally, as Baudrillard suggests: The absolute rule of thought is to return the world as we received it: unintelligible.4

And it is with this rule of thought that I imagine future efforts to endeavour towards. With this, I return to Heidegger who explains that ”…remarks on art, space and their interplay remain questions, even if they are uttered in the form of assertions.”5 This refers not only to the philosophical difficulty in aligning the relationship between art and space, but also suggests the ephemeral and intangible territory where this interplay might be investigated in a studio practice. Any assertion of a greater understanding or certainty, regarding art and space, neglects the problematic of Baudrillard towards disappearance into representation and requires continual investigation. In this way, each assertion must instead remain as questions—lacking a known place as a practice for engaging with space and evading its disappearance—as a process for unfolding a horizon of meaning through an engagement with experience. In effect, courting dissolution as the artistic practice of un-knowing

4 | Baudrillard, J., 1994, Radical Thought (lecture), Europäische Universität für Interdisziplinäre Studien (European Graduate School). 5 | Heidegger, M., 1973, Art and Space, Man and World, 6(1). P. 3-8.

Ellipsis

space; a practice that engages in the potentiality of experience whilst attempting to evade a spatial disappearance as such. In this sense, space always remains a question, for when it is known it forms into place and disappears into our assumptions, misunderstandings, conceptions, and representation. And perhaps delving deeper, patterns might begin to emerge from fragmentation of experience as practiced through this research, it may offer even more opportunities via a practice which begins here for a distinction of sacrifice, from site to the image.

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Appendix

The following texts were produced in tandem with studio work, videos, and installations that formed much of the practice and research material in investigating the ideas of this book as it developed. In this sense they are included as a resource or insight into this process, yet the video interventions or pieces are not, and in this they are meant to be experienced as one might an invisible city, with each questioning a specific engagement with space or as ideas addressed in the text elsewhere through a raw phenomenology.

untitled (mee ts in the middle), digital video (projection), 9:08 This is a recording of a nine-minute, eight-second segment of journey in-between two endpoints (cities) and begins and/or ends at one of these points. Specifically, this footage was shot somewhere between Paris and London from a high-speed train window. The same video footage was juxtaposed twice side-by-side, with one video segment depicting the same journey in reverse. This allowed the complete journey to be viewed simultaneously whilst creating a temporal distance between the locations encountered as each video segment begins at different locations furthest away from each other. Each video was bisected in the centre and fills opposite sides of the screen so that each could be shown concurrently. Whilst each video plays at the same time, each begins at either end of the documented segment. For one brief moment at the 04:34:00 mark each video

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section aligns to show a complete picture of a shared encounter with space (although each heading in a different direction) before speeding past each other to head to their respective endpoints (which is also, the site where the other half of the video began). In this way, the entire journey that was documented is revealed through the timeframe of this video, albeit never at the same time (save for that single moment, and even then heading away from each other). This video interrupts the linear cohesion of site encountered, by complicating the experience of being in one place at the same time. The fragmentation of this video allows the documentation of site to be viewed not together, but as a temporal mirror-image distance of its match. From the middle mark of this video onwards, the viewer is shown the other half of the journey whose footage they have already seen. Although the entire documentation is not shown together in a coherent whole, from the middle onwards the landscape might seem somewhat familiar as the other half of what they have already seen. Likewise, the entire video builds towards a similarity of landscape as it nears its middle, succumbing to a totality in the aforementioned instance, before moving away from this similarity both in time and distance. This video intimates a familiarity throughout its duration but is never entirely cohesive. A momentary glimpse of an object recognised or suspected is more akin to déjà vu than apprehension. Similar to other work, this video is exhibited on a loop so that there is never really a beginning or end to the journey but instead it presents a perpetual journey or a drawing out or distancing of what lies in between. The audio consists of ambient noise from the recording and is layered to accompany the video in both temporal succession and reverse. As the audio reflects the forward and backward movement of journey in each video segment, the sound has an illusion of being both familiar but somehow undecipherable. This cohesion is intended to create unease in the video so that no one moment becomes the centre of focus or experience. Untitled (meets in the middle) alludes to a process of things perhaps sliding into focus before disappearing again, similar to Marilyn Minter’s 2009 work, Green Pink Caviar. In Minter’s video

Appendix

the viewer is presented with re-emerging images of mouths licking and spitting back out gelatinous and beaded substances. While the mouths retract, the fluids flow back over the camera screen before being re-interrupted by the re-consummation and subsequent drooling out of material. Like a slow-motion shark attack the screen is interrupted by the sharp focus of mouth, tongue, nose, and hair before the retraction when everything becomes a blurred mixture of saliva and a “caviar” substance. Instead of the expectation of focus and emergence that Green Pink Caviar provides, untitled (meets in the middle) provides only a momentary glimpse of convergence which would be unrecogniseable to a viewer unaware of the particulars of the video work. It provides only a millisecond of an image recognised as coherent and utilises endless looping towards a goal of making the familiar less intelligible. Untitled (meets in the middle) might be described as being similar in impulse to some of the work of Yves Klein who describes the intent of an audio work he created: During this period of condensation, around 47-48, I created a “monotone” symphony whose “theme” is what I wished my life to be. This symphony, lasting 40 minutes (but that’s quite unimportant, we shall see why) is constituted of one single continuous “sound,” stretched out, deprived of its attack and end, which creates a sensation of dizziness, of sensibility whirled outside time. Thus this symphony does not exist even while being there, leaving behind the phenomenology of time, for it has neither been born nor ever died, after existing, however, in the world of our possibilities of conscious perception: it is audible silence-presence.1

Klein denotes that his work encouraged possibilities in its encounter, and so too does untitled (meets in the middle) endeavour to offer the

1 | Klein, Y. & Ottmann, K., 2007, Overcoming the Problematics of Art: The Writings of Yves Klein, Spring Publications, Putnam, Conn. Pp. 46-47.

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possibilities to experience journey through its conceptual forms alluding to the familiar but never offering a comprehensive finale.

untitled (mee ts at the end),  digital video (projection), 18:00 (note: the cover of this book features frames from this piece in chronological sequence) This is a recording of a thirty-six minute segment of journey also in-between two endpoints, from a different journey between Paris and London. Again, recorded on a high-speed train journey, it encompasses the ambient noise of both the inside of the train (including conductor announcements) as well as the repetitive mechanical sounds of the train. The video footage was bisected with the second section rearranged to play the video in reverse. In editing, the two video sections were inter-spliced on the screen to play concurrently, therefore encapsulating the thirty-six minute segment into a video work eighteen minutes in length. The asyndetic fragmentation of this recording disrupts an implied narrative of the paired sections and one that makes for uneasy temporal apprehension. The different segments of video are not only interpolated as alternating components, but are also moving in different directions. They move towards the same goal, which is the centre of the recorded journey. Every moment of video unfolds with a new uncovering of the journey and the video footage is never shown as a complete image. Instead, this video presents experience not simply as duality with a suggestion of familiarity and completeness, but also as something foreign and distressing. This distress, the unease, of these works is analogous to a rejection of experience as manageable and known, and instead as something akin to an effort of an experience toward radical alterity. This work displays journey not as something simply unfamiliar or different, but one that avoids an experiential cognisance. Instead, the viewer

Appendix

is encouraged to abandon a desire to discern and instead follow the journey as it unfolds. Each segment of the journey was intertwined on the screen in arbitrary widths to provide documentation of the same journey, which was both moving forward and reverse simultaneously. This refers to an experience that is fragmented and missing but rejects a process of conjunctive representation of experience to offer a manageability of meaning. Through this rejection an apparent linear or temporal model is evident akin to picnolepsy as described earlier. This enabled a fragmentation of not just a visual landscape but also one of duration. Instead of forming a documentation representing the journey itself, this video presents the segment of journey not as condensed, but rather contemporaneous. It disallows a comprehension of which way the viewer seems to be moving with the video and a familiar sense of movement and time as the speed and narrow scope of the image becomes more ambiguous. Instead, this journey begins and ends at the same moment, building towards completeness and teasing with familiarity whilst always avoiding apprehension. One group of interposed footage moving forwards and the other backwards, the end of the video is the same destination—the middle of this journey. Both convene temporally towards the most similarity of landscape at the end of this video. The very last frame of the video provides an opportunity for the physical location documented to meet in a split-second totality, albeit still headed in different directions. Unlike the previous video, this work is moving towards a complete image. However, it is again looped so that at that very instant it separates back to the furthest point of each location. This looping effect creates unease with this work that is similar to Paul McCarthy’s work in Central Symmetrical Rotation Movement that I viewed at the Whitney Museum in New York. In this exhibition, McCarthy displays several installation works and videos and the exhibition as a whole might be thought of as a cohesive work. In it there are rooms that spin and whirl manically with doors that open and slam shut and reverberate throughout the gallery. There

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are two video installations whereby cameras spin on turntables that capture visitors’ images and project them at different angles onto screens surrounding the works. It is impossible to catch which camera is filming at any one moment and the visitor is encompassed with frenetic images and a loss of stability. During the display of untitled (meets at the end) I experimented with using several speaker systems and multiple videos at once so that the gallery space would be filled with overlapping ambient noise and video being projected in different formats. This created an experience whereby audio filled the room and ebbed and flowed indeterminately without a clear direction as to which soundtrack fit which video.

untitled (line ar l apse), digital video (projection), 6:25 This video was created from a recording of about six minutes and four seconds in a segment of a train journey somewhere between Cologne and Brussels. This single video recording was split into six different horizontal sections forming a strata of passing landscape from bottom to top and separated at equal distance by blank video space. This method allowed for an obvious segregation in each section of video and a delineation of fragmentation. Although each video contains footage from the same segment of journey, each section begins after an approximate four-second delay (although each level begins at slightly different intervals) between the previous segments. Thus, the distance between the bottom, and first video segment, and the start of the top/final segment is approximately twenty-one seconds. In this way, the work segregates visual elements of spatial experience, compounds audio that is layered and repetitive, and adjusts the temporal experience of this particular journey so that its totality is always challenged. It eliminates the cohesion of time and travel throughout. Whilst the videos never fully align to form a single image, being offset in time, they still are recording the same

Appendix

experience of journey. Unlike the previous few videos, each segment is not building towards some act of completion even momentarily aligning. Instead, the segments are separated by a short duration. Each video, from the bottom up anticipates the shape of landscape that is to come as the videos above it emerge. However, each segment is unique in that it reveals different horizontal strata of documentation in the site moved through. Reflections from the train window and the ambient noise of travel, connect both the inside mobile vehicle to the railed path that the train weaves through the landscape. The horizontal sections mimic the landscape and reference lengths of tracks and suspended cables, which seem the only constant on long journeys. These continuous lines of horizons and cables connect long journeys despite difference in geography. After viewing the entire video, the totality of this mobile documentation is offered, albeit not in a cohesive succession and apart from the equidistant blank separations. Whilst each video segment gradually enters the picture screen they eventually consolidate with an amalgamation of audio tracks that overwhelm and disturb the expected flow of ambient sound. This video is evocative of John Smith’s The Girl Chewing Gum in which the narrator seems to direct the activity on a busy London street corner. In this work it seems that the “director” is already aware of the action before it happens, although he is not, it creates a subtle tension between action and audio. The Girl Chewing Gum seems to almost imply an action before it takes place. This is similar to untitled (linear lapse) in which each layer of video hints at the actions to take place several seconds later, but rather it builds up with each successive layer so that this inference is happening all at once.

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untitled , 10 analogue photogr aphs printed on habotai silk on wooden fr ames with fluorescent lights , e ach 80 cm x 110 cm x 10 cm Having used digital video and photography in my work for the last few years, I began to examine different ways I might branch out from the processes that were already incorporated in my studio practice in order to investigate some of the concerns of this research more fully. Namely, Baudrillard’s deterrence of the digital and a notion of the hyperreal simulacra of virtualisation. I noted the current trend whereby digital images have been manipulated so as to assume the look of classical film photography (most notably in mobile phone applications such as Instagram or Hipstamatic). Whilst fascinated by the look of these photographs, it struck me that in many ways they were technological simulacra of images that had previously been captured by analogue means. The seemingly disposability of digital images and democratisation affect of media meant that anyone could take any number of photographs and manifest an aesthetical similitude which mimicked a process which has largely been abandoned. Instead, I chose to return to this analogue process of capturing images, which to me seemed like a more reflective and involved phenomenological process. Analogue photography was a return to a process I had ex­ perimented with at the beginning of my education and one that I initially had little interest. Over the past couple of decades, I was quick to utilise emerging digital technologies to create works, being one of the first in my cohort to incorporate digital audio, as well as still and moving images. As I had been capturing images with digital cameras during my travels, I accumulated tens of thousands of photo files. It seemed disingenuous, at times, to make decisions about which images to explore further and I wanted to shift my focus from some sort of arbitrary or aesthetic process of selection to one that was more engaged and intentional. Limiting my selections and a delayed response to viewing the images captured was favourable to my goals for this research as it initiated a distance

Appendix

that disadvantaged meaning production or projection. In a way, it too may have been reminiscent of a moment in my own practical trajectory when I was developing skills and a keen interest in the world outside of my environmental confines. Baudrillard, as well, had a photography practice and he remarked on the photograph as an agent to otherness. The miracle of photography, of its so-called objective image, is that it reveals a radically non-objective world. It is a paradox that the lack of objectivity of the world is disclosed by the photographic lens (objectif). 2

I am especially interested in the way that light passing over site itself makes a direct impression upon film, which is then stored and later uncovered. I appreciate the specificity of a material process that allows me to capture an image on-site and have a delayed uncovering of what I have documented. Furthermore, this delay allows for a temporal distance and gap enabling a sort of forgetting of space. The image captured is not instantaneously revealed and is instead only discovered during development, which creates a further disconnection from the original moment of experience in situ. There is a distance of meaning of what I captured, so that when the image does eventually emerge I am no longer quite sure of exactly where it was taken or what I was thinking. This practice of analogue photography makes these images at once more precious, but also less valuing because of their distance of meaning. Instead of tens of thousands of images to choose from, I have only dozens. Perhaps this might mean that the images themselves take on more value in their simple rarity. But at the same time, I can no longer afford to make decisions on-site to capture minute elements, assured that this is the site I intend to base work on and from viewing a digital screen this is the image I will use. Whilst reviewing these analogue images, I sometimes wonder where a space 2 | Baudrillard, J., 2000, Photography, Or the Writing of Light’, Trans. F. Debrix. CTheory Article A, 83.

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was, and if I am unsatisfied with the photo I have taken I am unable to recreate it—unable to colonise the site for meaning or utilise it as a place for repeated discovery. The process of developing this film revealed a secondary space removed from the primary space in field, which was tied to but also separate from the experience of being in it. It also opened up (re-introduced) an interesting uncertainty compared to the immediate facsimile of digital photography, where the site could be described as re-emerging through the physical process of developing. The distance between developing and the site also introduces an intriguing hesitation whilst in-site as to how it will appear or re-appear. Even further to this research, the act of taking analogue photos themselves means that I have had to change exactly what and how I am recording images. Whilst earlier and concurrently I have captured video and still digital images from moving vehicles (namely cars and trains), the 35mm camera utilises a much slower film and shutter speed. As I alluded to before, this means that I capture these images while almost stationary for moments along a journey. I made more intentional decisions of which moment of exploration I would capture and was more conscious and particular about when and how I would photograph. In a way, these different processes outline the different types of journeys I have undergone during this research. First vehicular ones captured with digital media and later walking journeys where I used analogue means. These analogue photographs still capture moments of mobility, albeit the nature of the journey and the tool utilised coalesce with an understanding of what is advantageous to their discovery, a more intimate journey as opposed to the scale of speed and expanse captured with digital media. When viewing my work, especially still images, often the viewer’s first reaction and question to me has been “where is this” or they project some sort of meaning or familiarity of place upon the images. Perhaps this is a transfer of meaning from the actual site, to the work—enabling a transposition of the sacrifice of meaning to the image. After viewing my photographs in a show,

Appendix

someone remarked that they were “romantic” a critique that initially perturbed me. She had connected these images to a tradition of English landscape photography and no doubt a longstanding British devotion to the countryside. My images had disappeared into her conceptions of romantic countryside and English aestheticism perhaps even through what she envisioned as a convention of how landscape has been traditionally approached. Certainly, I could not deny this, as they were indeed images taken in the fields and forests of Britain. However, my intent is not to achieve a reflection of devotion of the Lake District or rolling hills of the North Yorkshire Moors.3 Instead, I am discovering the minute areas that might be explored. Perhaps in allowing for a transfer of meaning to my images from the actual spaces, I am preserving the potentiality of the site’s actuality. This allows the art object to become an opportunity to examine one potential experience of site without a need to engage or destroy it directly. The attempt to familiarise or romanticise these images stems from a human desire to make meaning, to know. It is undeniable that the reflections upon these images begin with a certain familiarity of terrestrial space, even if one has not set foot in the sites themselves. But through these images I have tried to capture an element of anyspace which does, I believe, preserve the sites as spaces with the potential of experience and exploration whilst still referring to the potential experience that a single site contains. Because of this distance, and in congruence with the manipulation of these images, these photographs are an attempt to work with a radical alterity in this work. Baudrillard comments on this process: In photography, we see nothing. Only the lens “sees” things. But the lens is hidden. It is not the Other which catches the photographer’s eye, but rather what’s left of the Other when the photographer is absent (quand lui n’est

3 | Neither of which have been depicted regardless.

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pas la). We are never in the real presence of the object. Between reality and its image, there is an impossible exchange.4

Here, Baudrillard suggests that the camera itself creates a distance between the subject and object. A framing of the image creates the distinction from the reality of the subjectile experience, which creates an impossibility of exchange. When I first started using an analogue camera again, I was surprised at how foreign it seemed. Although I had a very rudimentary education in film photography, basic elements of it slipped my mind. I forgot how to load film initially. I also forgot about taking light readings, so many of the first photographs I took were only manually focussed and I neglected to adjust aperture and lens openings. It could be argued that the seamlessness of digital photography has lessened the humancentred components of image capturing and it is one that has caused the process to disappear into an act of mechanisation. This return to the analogue reminded me of how relevant light was to a process of not just recording or documenting space, not just to an artistic practice, but also to an experiential process. Not only was light impressing upon the film inside the camera, but also I was able to manipulate its entrance. Baudrillard refers to this process when he describes photography as the writing of light (Photo-graphy): The light of photography remains proper to the image. Photographic light is not “realistic” or “natural.” It is not artificial either. Rather, this light is the very imagination of the image, its own thought. 5

Light passes over or is reflected by objects to impress images on the actual film used to photograph, whilst digital photography records images in manageable form and acts more as a representation of 4 | Baudrillard, J., 2000, Photography, Or the Writing of Light’, Trans. F. Debrix. CTheory Article A, 83. 5 | Baudrillard, J., 2000, Photography, Or the Writing of Light’, Trans. F. Debrix. CTheory Article A, 83.

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what is seen transcribing experience into a series of information. Later, I would have to shield the same analogue film from an influence of lighting in other sites, namely the site of it being rewound, unwound, loaded onto cartridges and developed. This was a process of protecting the image of that space from a corruption of other sources. To keep it a record of specific light, a light from one site, as opposed to light in general (ambient or incidental light). The images as originally recorded were photo sensitively stored on film and carried around with the potentiality of their uncovering and away from a temporal duration of their original experience. For this work, I created four different types of images with a 35mm camera. The first are images taken with Black and White Ilford HP5Plus professional film. Black and White film is an abstraction in itself, relegating images only to the spectrum of light and shadow that they contain. Next, I worked with a handmade film from a small independent company, Revolog, in Austria. This film is called Kolor and the company’s website simply describes it: “Different color [sic] changes over the picture. The effect varies depending on the photographic laboratory where it is developed.”6 In essence, the chemical process inherent in the film is activated and the colour is altered during standard C-41 film processing. This allowed for a chemical manipulation in the image that was entirely by chance and prevented me from having a presupposed idea of what the finished image might look like. With Kolor film, the original chromatic appearance of the site was made irrelevant or shifted. Instead, the image was captured in much the same way as B&W film but without relying on an approximate representation of the actual site encountered. The third type of film is a widely available Kodak 35mm ColorPlus colour film stock. This served as almost a test group within this series as it was the most comparable visually to the digital images I had been recording thus far. As the other films appear as variations on the way site is seen and recorded, this offered a subtler nuance as an image of space. All three of these films were 6 | Kolor, Revolog. from http://shop.revolog.net/product/kolor

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commercially processed in high street labs (the B&W film required out-of-town processing by the local lab). The fourth and final type of image is a result of the same Kodak 35mm colour film that had earlier been commercially processed, but was now instead developed by myself in-studio using household products (primarily instant coffee and citric acid). Whilst I did not invent this method of film developing, it still allowed me a deviation from the colour film. With this process, there was an unlocking of the images contained in the film that differed from the film’s original intention (as colour film). Once developed, the film took on a sepia toned quality similar to black and white film in which the black was replaced by a warm brown colour. Like the Kolor film, this unearthing of images was not prescribed and was dependant on chemical and physical reactions during the developing. Both conspire against the chemical calibration of traditional photography to represent or mimic the natural light and coloured representation of space and image. The finished and set film lost the potentiality of colour as it was developed and became something entirely different from its original design—it lost the synthetic illusion of natural that colour film implies. There was no exact formula for developing film by this method, which created a certain unknown quality in the process. I was able to adjust elements accordingly. In this way, there seemed to be a more manual engagement with the process of image making whereby I had a roll from the initial stages of setting up and capturing the photograph to the somewhat tedious task of unveiling it. Originally I had two rolls of the Kolor film printed on standard photo paper in a commercial lab, but was displeased with the results. The commercial quality of photo printing was blurry and unimpressive, and I thought that the film itself likely held more distinct and interesting images. Subsequently, I developed or had developed each roll of film and began to scan the film with a film scanner. This allowed an uncovering of image akin to a traditional lab process of developing photographs, one that was somewhat more meticulous and monotonous. Upon reflection, it strikes me

Appendix

that the long hours spent scanning film is something akin to the window gazing of long journeys which I remarked on earlier (or even with the sometimes arduous task of the textual element of this book). Each creates an opportunity for reflective uncovering being tied to a practice and location that is at times banal, but ultimately engaging. However, the very act of scanning film is a transcription of the physical capture of imagery into a digital format. This not only served my later desire to produce the image in a different format, but also mediated the relationship between site and gallery. None of the final images were digitally manipulated save for basic scanning, cropping, and lightening to accommodate eventual printing as I still wanted to present the photograph as captured on site. This was an important decision, as I wanted to remain as faithful to the manual process as possible. Despite the image transfer into digital media for printing, the original filmic image remains, which serves as a kind of analogue time capsule preserving an experience. The light that I was continually conscious of during the original recording on film became apparent once again when I scanned the film. Unlike paper or photo scanners, film scanners use lighted bars on both the front and backside of film to capture the image. In a way, this mimics the passing over of objects with which light impresses image upon film. In this instance the artificial lights might collude in the same way that Plato7 observes image: The image stands at the junction of a light which comes from the object and another which comes from the gaze. 8

Obviously, Plato is not here specifically referencing film scanners. However, might this modern object be an artificial simulation of the same process? It is interesting to think that somewhere between light 7 | As quoted Baudrillard, J., 2000, Photography, Or the Writing of Light, Trans. F. Debrix. CTheory Article A, 83. 8 | Plato as quoted in Baudrillard, J., 2000, Photography, Or the Writing of Light, Trans. F. Debrix. CTheory Article A, 83.

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cast and the visual scope of the eye that the image itself is created from site. Further, I like the idea of light coming from the gaze, akin to light as an illumination of site or experience. This might even be extended to a further understanding of the projected video work that is a part of this larger body of research. To this end, there is some sort of temporal distance where the natural light exhibited in sight meets at the projection point of the wall from the artificial cast of the projector (gaze). I had intended from the start to print these images on some type of fabric. After scanning the film in very high resolution, I began a series of experiments to see what fabric would be the most suitable. Again, I wanted these images to reveal light as it passed from behind them, impressing upon the viewer a process that mimicked the original process of their creation. I planned to create wooden boxes that would contain parallel fluorescent tubes. The fabric would be stretched over each one to create work that went beyond just a pictorial image. In this way the works would still reference the photography and the video work which has become so vital to my practice, whilst still engaging with the exhibition space in a three dimensional manner. Towards this, I felt it was important to connect these outside spaces of discovery with the internal gallery site of their exhibition—perhaps sharing a similar impulse that Smithson had with his nonsites. Further, I am interested in showing the function of made objects and how they are built, not hiding away perfunctory elements. I am repeating this effort throughout the work by constantly re-referencing elements of the creative process as subjectile. The desire to reveal constructive elements also references the multifaceted potentialities of discovery in space itself and the possibilities to engage and explore by creating a more three dimensional access to a two dimensional image. I first printed these images on canvases and muslins before finally deciding on silk as both a hardy material and, more importantly, one that would reveal the elements both of the objects construction and the space behind it. These other fabrics were discarded as being too opaque or not producing a decipherable image. In some ways, they

Appendix

referenced traditional landscape painting, which I felt was too loaded with a history of representation and contradictory to my intent. Likewise, I had initially considered coating each image in a layer of urethane, a material that is often used in my other studio work. Often I use this to reveal layers between materials in order to allow for access of discovery into the process of a work’s creation. However, after building a prototype I decided that the urethane clouded the image and more overtly diffused the fluorescent tubes behind the silk so that these objects became nothing more than makeshift light boxes. This would have been antithetical to my goal of revealing the specific elements behind the image and would have instead changed them into display objects. I wanted the work to exhibit more physical depth than the two-dimensional picture plane, to reveal a spatial inconsistency or possibility in order to simultaneously open up the image whilst maintaining a distinction and perhaps a specificity. The lights behind the image reference not only the light which originally passed over the space to imprint on the film, but also the bars of light that are critical to a scanning of the filmic image. They are crucial to recognising that this is not only an image of a facet of space, and not space itself, but also a connection to the process of discovery. They furthermore allow a revelation of the space that is depicted in each image in the dark, but also as the space that the gallery objects themselves currently inhabit. These lights frame the rectangular orientation of both boxes and images and reflect the bracketing of adumbrational experience by emphasising the constraints of the picture plane. They allow for a revelation of the construction of the objects apart from a managed and slick depiction of landscape. These lights also fragment sections of the images, by creating a concentration of bars of light near the edge of the frame that make it nearly impossible to see parts of the image. Throughout the work, light is unevenly distributed around the pictures’ edge in an effort not to mediate the experience in a manageable and familiar format. These lights at once obscure and reveal an image of the space which has become both permeable yet particular through the process.

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The silk that these images are printed on provides a transparency that allows for a more three-dimensional experience of what might initially seem just a flat image. The sheerness of the fabric ensures that whilst the original image is apparent it reveals another dimension behind the work as an intersection between the gallery space and the sites photographed. It was important to have each of these boxes leaned against the wall sitting on the floor, so that they would be more like spaces encountered than images on display hung at eye level. I wanted to break a bit of the formality between viewer and art object so that the work seemed more like something happened upon rather than a window into a representation of landscape. This served a dual purpose, as it created an opportunity for this fluorescent light to travel beyond the constraints of the picture plane so that rather than simply projecting light outwards through the image it escaped through the back and sides of each object and reflected against the wall. Likewise, electrical cords and power strips were visible as they were critical to an opening up of space and a desire to reveal the constructive elements of each object. They linked the works themselves to the space in which they were exhibited and exposed the multiple facets of each object (i.e. as a visual art object, perhaps with aesthetical qualities as well as a functioning object that involved different process in order to be complete). Furthermore, the act of physically stretching the material over these frames allows a subtle manipulation of the image, not to the point where it becomes abstract, but so that it is altered from the initially filmic image. Instead this silk allowed for each work to be altered as a distinction of a specific site itself. Similarly, when installed as a group, an effort was made to arrange each work so as to not allude to any sort of pattern or grouping. I wanted to avoid the potential of having these works read as projecting an intentionality of representation beyond as commentary on discovery and happenstance. I sought to display works with a casualness that reflects the process of uncovering possibilities of site, of an experiential process that shifts with an untroubled action of discovery not guided by an effort to manage and utilise.

Appendix

The light emitted from each work united to fill the darkened space of the room, creating an ambience of light from a collective group of works and not as the result of some sort of curatorial decision. Further, the shiny grey painted floor of the gallery space reflected each work as a diffused mirror image that alluded to spaces both real and imagined. Perhaps these reflections were not immediately noticeable or seen to be intentional, but their implication to other ways spaces might be experienced were critical to this work.

untitled , series of 4,506 photogr aph install ation , e ach 102 mm x 152 mm This installation was reverse-engineered to fit the specific di­ mensions of the Greestone Gallery. First, I measured the di­ mensions and architectural components of each of the five walls of the gallery to determine how many 4x6 photographs could be fit onto the gallery walls in succession in an effort to almost displace the gallery site through this intervention exploring many of the strategies examined in this research. After determining the size of the walls and taking into consideration fire extinguishers, light switches, and so on I discerned that 4,506 photographs would fit the space. Dividing that by the amount of frames per second in a video, I determined that I could make a video just over 1 minute 35 seconds in length that would allow for an extraction of all the video frames to fit within the space. I set about creating the video work with a similar method that was evident in untitled (meets in the middle), that is, an approximately 1 minute 35 second segment of journey recorded in the middle of a train voyage somewhere between the north of England and Edinburgh, Scotland. The video was bisected in the centre and edited so that the left side of the screen showed the left side of what the camera recorded moving forward in realtime. The right side of the screen showed the right side of what the camera recorded moving in reverse from the end of the journey to the beginning. The two halves of the video would ultimately meet in

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the centre, around 2,253 frames into the video, creating what might amount to a complete image (the left and right moments sharing proximity). As the finished work would be an installed explication of the video work, audio was not considered. After the video was completed, I extracted each frame of the video and had them commercially printed as photographs in succession. The photographs were not received in successive order, however, so I spent a great deal of time rearranging them in boxes numerically according to the unique serial numbers inscribed on the back of each. Because of the carelessness of the printers they had to each be manually returned to the correct serial sequence in order to present the succession that corresponded to the specific sites as they unfolded. Each photograph was individually installed in successive order on each of the five walls from left to right and top to bottom to mimic the progression of the video. I decided to install on one wall at a time instead of linearly around the room, as the walls were different heights, which would alter the continuity of the installation. These works took several weeks to install and around 700 man-hours to complete as assistants and myself arranged them in order. Through experimentation, it was determined that the best method of installation would be adhesive dots placed on each corner of the photograph which prompted a process almost like an assembly line of preparation and hanging. I had several tables placed around the gallery site as different elements of the installation were being prepared. Many hours were spent in the space preparing the works, which meant that the experience of being in the gallery was significantly more than the journey being presented. Whilst this might have normally allowed for an extended consideration of the space being depicted, instead it created a further distance in the images as distinct from the site through the mundanity of the installation process. In a sense, what was represented began to disappear into the process of the install as the hours and labour of the endeavour came to the forefront over what was in fact being depicted.

Appendix

Whilst each row of photographs began flush with the left side of the wall, each row ended in disparate ways due to the specific inconsistencies and flaws in the walls’ surfaces and the site the work now subsumed. Due to variations in the walls themselves, specific rows would appear to creep slightly longer or recede somewhat in comparison to others, which became more pronounced on the even longer walls and in a sense appeared to elucidate the specificity of the architecture and site as manifest. In this way the display of the work itself reflected the site of its installation creating interplay between the outside space depicted and the gallery walls. It also might suggest the incompatibility of organising experience and any associate nuance in depiction of site as something distinct from representation. The work ultimately transformed the space of the gallery in ways I had not previously considered. Some who were used to exhibitions that could be installed quickly and changed over rapidly viewed the process as burdensome. In this way it left an impression on the users of the space as something almost, not quite, a finality taking up so much space on the walls but leaving the walkways mostly empty. I made a conscious decision not to show the video work from which the installation came, as I wanted the work to reference video but to be viewed apart from it, much like these writings. The experience of the journey disappeared and became displaced by its exposition in this space. The video might have presented a much more easily digestible version of the installation that could be viewed or understood in mere moments. Instead, this installation sought to examine the telescoping timescale of the process of its install and experiencing it as such. Whilst the installation may be thought of as something akin to Smithson’s nonsites by recreating outside spatial elements inside the gallery, the work itself took over the space and not only significantly impacted the normative usage of the gallery but also altered the way light and sound moved through the entrance of the building. The normally white walled gallery was transformed into a glossy reference to landscape and outside spaces but without presenting a determinate representation of any particular place. The

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reflective surfaces shown back the emerging sunlight of the arriving springtime that sometimes glared at entrants to the building. The mass of photographs muffled the ambient noise and footsteps of visitors to the gallery as it had essentially been completely wrapped in a skin of individually printed photographs. Also, the work was impossible to view all at once as it was installed around the entire perimeter of the gallery and it would require a viewer to circumnavigate the space to see it all. When viewed from a few feet away, the photographs enclosed all of the viewer’s peripheral vision so the sense of sight was overwhelmed with successive images. It would be difficult to reimagine the linearity of the video work without engaging in a frenetic performance of back and forth and circular motion that would also interfere with imagining the duration of the video as originally created. Whilst a durational and progressive mobility might have been inferred, it was unfeasible to insinuate what exactly the specific timeframe of the video work might have been without prior knowledge to the mathematics that informed the installation. There is a loss of temporal scale between the viewing of the work, the installation process, and the original site as documented that alters the way one might view the work as representing something or relating to it in some way. In this way, the work also referenced the wall drawings of Sol LeWitt in its presupposed engagement with the gallery based on formal and conceptual concerns. The consideration of architectural features of the gallery were reminiscent of LeWitt’s Wall Drawing 51: All architectural points connected by straight lines and the process of installing the work by teams of installers similarly took cues from LeWitt. In this particular wall drawing, LeWitt has every corner of all features of a wall connected via chalk line to every other corner, including light switches, fire alarms, doorways, and windows. The result is a somewhat confusing array of lines that is perhaps different than the specifics of his other works. However, many of LeWitt’s other wall drawings allow teams of installers the opportunity to interpret details of his instructions. My installation began to consider the involvement of installers, and I placed some

Appendix

decisions within their hands however still within the parametres of my instructions. This installation grew out of the process of creating visual documentation for this research and namely considered how to evidence video work within a non-durational format. I viewed these images as explications of videos, as I mentioned earlier, and they were created by utilising ImageJ software developed by the US National Institutes of Health. This process was informed by the image processing practices of Professor Lev Manovich, a wellknown media theorist specialising in digital culture who believes “that direct visualizations method will be particularly important for humanities, media studies and cultural institutions which now are just beginning to discover the use of visualization but which eventually may adopt it as a basic tool for research, teaching and exhibition of cultural artefacts.”9 I believe this visual form of research might serve as a unique tool to render data that might begin to interrupt an expected and ordered progression. Manovich himself utilised the software to create the work, Mapping Time, in which he visualised the cover of every Time magazine from 1923 to 2009. In this way, the overabundance of images not only destroys the specific linear and temporal reference to the original video work but also creates a distinction from familiarisation due to its saturation of material. In a very physical sense, the work and install process attempts to make manifest a disappearance that all of this research hitherto took as its theme. The labour disappeared into the final results, which were simply a gallery wrapped in images of successive spaces in a journey, but even this journey documented was ultimately displaced by its representation of the minutia (each frame) of the journey. Likewise, the initial experience presented something in the gallery space, metaphorically, where one could no longer detect the forest for the trees in a sense. The experience became one 9 | What is Visualization? Software Studies Initiative. Retrieved December 12, 2013, from http://lab.softwarestudies.com/2010/10/new-article-isvisualization.html

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disappearing into the mass of detail presented. The gallery space itself, disappears. No longer are images of the landscape presented to evoke a sense of place or meaning in the site, or to visit an embodied relationship to space, but instead there is a flux of disappearance between the gallery space and the work itself—creating a tension similar to what Smithson described. It mimics this “…whirl[ing] into an indeterminate state...”10 that Smithson felt his Spiral Jetty evoked. Despite the weeks of intensive installation, the work was ultimately removed in several hours. Afterwards, visitors that were familiar with the space described that they felt something was missing in the building. Throughout the installation they remarked that they had difficulty remembering what the space was like before and that the work became an integral part of their experience of the building.

10 | Smithson, R., 1996, Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings, Flam, J. ed. University of California Press, Berkeley. P. 146.

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