Space Matters : Exploring Spatial Theory and Practice Today [1 ed.] 9783990435762, 9783990435632

Citation preview

SPAcE MAttErS Exploring Spatial theory and Practice today

Edited by Lukas Feireiss space&designstrategies

Exploring Spatial Theoryand Practice Today

Lukas Feireiss

Space Matters. Exploring Spatial Theory and Practice Today Space matters. It represents a prominent aspect of humanity’s existential nature — as the primordial basis of architecture and a basic prerequisite for our exploration of the world. Our entire lives are literally embedded in space. We are constantly surrounded, affected and shaped by it — whether consciously perceived or unconsciously experienced. Space is the context in which we live: it acts as storage media of our historic situatedness and testimonial and symbol of the respective historical and cultural fabric we live in. Space is defined in individual, social, geographic, historical-temporal, cultural and political terms. It is the primary space, the space of dwelling, the individual and personal space, the social and collective space, the space of architecture and the city, the space of the informal and formal, the space of the exterior and the interior, the fictional and visionary space, the artistic space — to mention only a few. Indeed, the theme of space lends itself to infinite descriptions and interpretations of which none can do without the others. Each lives on an symbiotic complementarity that alone give it meaning. With this in mind Space Matters explores contemporary languages of space in theory and practice, re-evaluating spatial production modes beyond disciplinary boundaries and protocol. In a two-fold approach the book at hand thereby firstly attempts to explain why the discussion of space does matter, Exploring Spatial Theory and Practice Today

3

Space Matters. Exploring Spatial Theory and Practice Today

and secondly what constitutes matters of space today. With this intentional double meaning, Space Matters creates a bridge between critical and creative approaches to the interdisciplinary study and analysis of spatial matters. In what follows the reader is presented with an collection of essays that explore the notion of space in all its complex and diverging, contemporary exposures: an eclectic panorama, an unorthodox assortment of ideas, interpretations, hypotheses, and debate presented and encouraged during a two day international symposium I curated and moderated in my capacity as visiting-professor at the Bachelor and Master programme space&designstrategies, that was graciously hosted by the University of Art and Design Linz in spring 2012. The illustrious group of international speakers at the symposium were called upon to reflect and speculate on the multiple meanings and definitions of space in contemporary culture, and to do so from the perspective of their own professional, academic, theoretical, or practical expertise. An intriguing series of talks and performances by theoreticians, practictians, architects, artists, and curators alike succeeded over the course of two days, that created a focused intellectual exchange between disciplines, unleashing provocative argumentations and inspiring discussions. Amongst all participants a stimulating, mutual curiosity about spaces of manifold differences and similarities was felt. Now presented in this book are the multiple outstanding contributions to the symposium under four interconnecting thematic clusters that invite for reciprocal exchange as they remain essentially open to actively foster the dialogue of ideas. Whilst the first chapter Education: Pedagogics of Space focuses on contemporary examples of pedagogical and educational strategies in the critical and creative discussion and design of spaces of all kinds, the second chapter Theory: Semantics of Space brings Space Matters

4

Space Matters. Exploring Spatial Theory and Practice Today

together theoretical approaches that react to both historical and contemporary contexts, ultimately turning a critical and speculative gaze on complex scenarios that may have remained unquestioned or seem straightforward at a first glance. With an overall attentiveness towards the complex relationships of context and site, the third chapter Practice: Performance of Space examines examples illustrating the performative and transformational power of spatial interventions in the built environment. Last but not least, Curatorial: Mediation of Space looks into the world of curators dealing with modes of spatial representation and ways of translating spatial discourse, that raise the bar of contemporary exhibition-making in both galleries and public spaces. Against the backdrop of these diverse accesses to the phenomena of space, the book attempts to acknowledge the possibility to comprehend and create spaces of knowledge that present us with a prerequisite for identifying the broader reaches of reality. Space Matters does not aim to reduce and idealize the concept of space but rather promotes the preservation of complexity as well as the study of space in all its historical and sociopolitical mediation, interconnectedness and transformation. It seeks out the common areas between differing approaches and highlights the multitude of ways to approach seemingly-familiar problems in radically new ways.○

Exploring Spatial Theory and Practice Today

5

Table of Contents

3

Foreword and Introduction: Lukas Feireiss

A Education: Pedagogics of Space 10

Elsa Prochazka



flagship europe: space&designstrategies on Tour

16

Hubert Klumpner & Alfredo Brillembourg



Gran Horizonte: Curriculum for a New City

26

Martha Thorne



Real Space,Virtual Space:What Really Matters?

36

Annett Zinsmeister



The Art of Thinking and Designing Space

B Theory: Semantics of Space 48

Jane Rendell



When Site-Writing Becomes Site-Reading Or How Space Matters Through Time

60

Felicity D. Scott



Inhabiting Space

68

Thomas Macho



Hopper’s Windows

84

Bruno Latour



Some Experiments in Art and Politics

Space Matters

6

C Practice: Performance of Space 98

Marjetica Potr



A Vision of the Future City and the Artist’s Role as Mediator: Learning From Projects in Caracas and Amsterdam

108

Michael Obrist / feld72



Trojan Horses and Other Social Animals

120

Luis Berríos-Negrón



Manners, Parameters, and Other Gay Sciences: Realities From the Paramennerist Treatise

138

Iris Touliatou



The Cities Where he Worked are no Longer There

D Curatorial: Mediation of Space 148

Carson Chan



Measures of an Exhibition: Space, not Art, is the Curator’s Primary Material

164

Markus Miessen



Critical Spatial Practice and the Role of the Crossbencher

174

Lilli Hollein



All Kinds of Spaces

182

Rani al Rajji



Fifty Percent

187 Appendix 189 Biographies 192 Imprint

Exploring Spatial Theory and Practice Today

7

Education Pedagogics of Space

A Section

Pages 9 – 45

Pedagogics of Space focuses on contemporary examples of pedagogical and educational strategies in the critical and creative discussion and design of spaces and built environments today.

Pedagogics of Space

9

Pages 10 – 13

Elsa Prochazka

Flagship Europe: Space&designstrategies on Tour Just one year after the EU expansion in May 2005, space& designstrategies started an expedition downstream the Danube from Linz, Austria to the Black Sea for two months. They chartered an old vessel and transformed and redesigned it themselves into a mobile base for their special purpose with accommodations for 6o persons: students, faculty, and guests as well as workspace and a medialab.

Filling up the white spots in the mental map The prior topic was mobility and transportation as cultural technique. Even though our university is located on the banks of the Danube, the cultural and political phenomenon of this river is still hidden for many of us. There is no static result, but rather more of a processrelated series of events, which we transformed into a fluctuating project. The outcome is the experience of travel preparations of a journey, and the ongoing documentation of the trip. The number of ideas we create throughout will contain an abundance of materials that we gather by drifting along —  transformed into flagship_ the Danube. The “Negrelli”  europe — allows us to understand the condensed potential of this stream of communication for the European community. A Education:

10

Flagship Europe: Space&designstrategies on Tour

living

eating media workshop sanitary room

cooking

crew

Moments we sometimes miss become extra important: reflection, slow-down, and refinement: developing things not forcefully but slowly: attentive, awake, versatile and at the same time disciplined, social and focused — all that during a “boring” cruise. The intersections within our program between art, architecture, design and digital media allows us to process our experiences in various ways.

Research: mobility — transportation — mental mapping The paths of “cultural mobility” are laid out anew. How can we set up cooperation for the future? How do the ideas of mobility and transformation affect the present society and cultural production? The success of this expedition does not consist of the results but a long-lasting process. Pedagogics of Space

11

flagShip EuropE: SpacE&dESignStratEgiES on tour

a Education:

12

flagShip EuropE: SpacE&dESignStratEgiES on tour

pEdagogicS of SpacE

13

Flagship Europe: Space&designstrategies on Tour

Strategies: workshop —  communication — documentation The vessel as a floating university, the University of Art and Design Linz, Austria allows workshops, events and performances to come together with local artists, architects, cultural organizations, universities and companies. All these different results from research and workshops, as well as the different impressions are documented continuously and registered in the logbook, which is published in real time on the Internet and communicated trough different media. The low-budget situation comes as part of the program and leads us to develop our own marketing strategies to cultivate a sustainable way to master improvisation as a form of art without diminishing our approach to the high quality of our activities. The speed of our times transforms motion into a condensed dot — we slow it down and reconfigure it into a line again — the Danube. ○

A Education:

14

Pages 16 – 25 Alfredo Brillembourg & Hubert Klumpner with ETH Zürich research assistant Daniel Schwartz

Gran Horizonte: curriculum for a new city On December 7, 1972, a few hours into their mission, the crew of the Apollo 17 spacecraft turned away from their destination — the moon — and looked back to where they had come from — the Earth. They photographed what they saw, and their photograph of a fully illuminated Earth has become one of the most widely distributed images of all time. What captured the world’s imagination on that day was not an image of what lay in outer space, but a new image of our own world; a new way of perceiving what we thought we understood. Today, again, we are in need of a new picture of the world. A broader, clearer understanding of just what our planet looks like, and how it is changing. More than half the population of the world today lives in cities. In India alone, it is estimated that within the next two decades, 380 million people will migrate from rural areas into metropolises. That would mean creating twenty new cities the size of Mumbai. Because demographic and geographic developments in Asia, Africa, and South America will inevitably lead to increased urbanization, one might think that cities in these regions should prepare for the numerous consequences that come with dramatic population shifts to urban zones. Surprisingly, however, few politicians, bankers and urban planners have found it necessary to take action. After founding Urban-Think Tank [www.u-tt.com] more than ten years ago, we began to explore the conditions that often correlate with a city’s successful transition to a megacity. Cities must not only adapt to population increase, but also to the A Education:

16

Gran Horizonte: curriculum for a new city

increased environmental pollution, traffic congestion, crime, and poverty. Of the 3.45 billion people who live in cities today, 29 percent — a billion people worldwide — live in slums. Can we, as architects, propagate the city as a model, when the scale and dimensions are so new to us (even if we ourselves live in cities)? Our early work grew into a fundamental research project, questioning this central issue. Today, U-TT sees itself as an agency for research and development and an instrument for social change. It became clear to us that greater simplicity in architectural concepts and construction details could improve the design for our planet. Phrased another way, we became poignantly aware that to operate in poor urban zones, we would have to overcome real limits in regard to land, money, and time. Given this dilemma, as a design firm we decided to implement realizable micro-projects, rather than proposing grand master plans that would end up in the dark recesses of a bureaucrat’s drawer. Indeed, we decided that we could change market interests and institutional priorities within cities and slums through organic and rhizomatic development. Our project is not philanthropy. It is an attempt to redefine design and our socioeconomic system in a more integrated way — to see the urban planet in its interconnected entirety, not in fragmented parts. Socially responsible urban planning begins with an exchange between local conditions, populations, and multi-disciplinary experts. For the ever-growing city, we need a form of architecture that includes the lower strata of society and receives their input and support. In this vein, we seek to implement a democratization of the planning process. Our office’s design approach favors alternatives to the existing planning culture — we want to move away from a maximization of consumption towards a maximization of production. We believe in cities as centers for learning, creativity, recycling, and distribution, though this Pedagogics of Space

17

Gran Horizonte: curriculum for a new city

vision has not yet firmly taken root in the public’s imagination. Our first task as designers is to catalyze the process of turning the growing metropolises in the southern hemisphere into a network of innovative nodes. Caracas, the city where Urban-Think Tank has its roots, is a huge and ideal testing ground. In the metropolitan region, two million social housing units are needed, but only 50,000 to 80,000 are built annually, despite continuing population growth. The slums of Caracas are the result of three decades of politicians ignoring the reality outside their offices. Population increases between 1958 and 1989 brought roughly four million new inhabitants to the city, 60 percent of who now live in slums. The problems of city growth must not be delegated to an undefined later date. Such political negligence in Venezuela is illustrated by the caraqueño who pays more for a liter of drinking water than a gallon of petrol. Crime is another frightening aspect of this situation. The murder rate in the city is the highest in the whole of Latin America. Within this reality, one must address the lack of alternatives facing residents — particularly the young people — through the development of new building types and spatial programs. The house is often cited as a metaphor for the city and the city as a metaphor for the entire planet. The identification of simplicity within complex urban forms has led us, at the beginning of the 21st century, to develop the concept of an “urban planet.” The idea embodied in this concept is of a modern “macropolis,” or one globally connected city. If we accept the idea that we live on a unified, urban planet, we can reassess development on the basis of our built city ecology. The project for an ongoing process of urbanization can be seen in two ways: on the one hand, the model of the global city for metropolises like London, New York, and Tokyo; and on the other, the global slum for cities like Caracas, São Paulo, Lagos, A Education:

18

Gran Horizonte: curriculum for a new city

etc. Today, we know that these two are intimately linked, like the two sides of the same coin. The global metropolises are in the process of linking up as hot spots — not just physically with buildings, transport links and power lines, but virtually, too, by means of radio, mobile phones and social, economic, and cultural networks. For the first time in the history of man, one does not have to live in a city to live an urban lifestyle. Indeed, one can no longer flee the urban environment, as it has been transplanted into pockets of suburbia, ex-burbia, and even rural lifestyles. That is why we, within our 2003 Caracas Case project, proclaimed, “Caracas is everywhere.” We no longer live on a planet full of houses, but in a house the size of a planet. The three megatrends — urbanization, globalization, and informalization — have helped to spread gated communities, which are often referred to as “islands” or “ghettos.” They are the dominant expression of modern urbanization. In most cases, they come about without the participation of architects. These two urban species have become the focus of our research. Their resilience and potential of informality have made them even more interesting as a motor of urban production and change. Informal practices are economically so successful that they have aroused the interest of leading groups in the field of urban planning and economic science. The Dharavi slum in Mumbai, for example, shows that such areas are often considered the sole remaining large-scale reserves of land in city centers. What is lacking, in our opinion is a joint effort to link “top-down” and “bottom-up” initiatives. In other words, municipal administration and the general public must sit down together to draw up an agenda for the planning of our environment. Only then can we meet the basic needs of the population in terms of energy, transport, infrastructure, construction, waste disposal, food, water, and social relationships. The cities Pedagogics of Space

19

Gran Horizonte: curriculum for a new city

on our planet need more than office tower blocks, museums, opera houses, airports, stadiums, etc. The Guatemalan architect Teddy Cruz put this concept of meaningless development in a nutshell, when he remarked: “It’s time to put Marcel Duchamp’s urinal back on the wall.” We know that urbanization in the form of prestigious and signature buildings attracts investment and creates wealth. However, this story too often seems like an American or European fairy tale, imposed upon other regions of the world where wealth does not flow, but rather accumulates in bubbles. Cities in these “developing” regions witness a marked increase in the income of a small segment of the population, while the majority remains or sinks lower into poverty. The consequences of this global trend are evident even within the wealthier geographies such as the banlieues of Paris or the shrinking cities of the American Midwest. What we witness in contemporary slums is the result of decades of neglect. In South America — and recently the Middle East — we have learned that delaying action in this state of urban crisis leads to revolution. As Joseph Schumpeter predicted at the beginning of the 20th century, creative destruction will lead to greater problems for all of us. The base of the population pyramid living in slums gives hope for a new dialogue in architecture through reforms on a small, yet comprehensible scale. This is the line of thought and action we are pursuing at U-TT. All our prototypes, from dry toilets to inner-city cable cars, are assembled in our “urban toolbox.” Simplified forms of construction are the only realistic design position possible for architects operating in slums. The cities we imagine will not be new, but rather retrofitted. Novel urbanisms will emerge on top of existing models. The concept of planning an ideal city or new town for the vast majority of people is unrealistic. It is a concept grounded in the modernist denial of limits and diversity. It is a mode of design that claims omniscience without proof. A Education:

20

Gran Horizonte: curriculum for a new city

The lack of institutional structures, such as schools, hospitals, post offices and police stations, along with the absence of public buildings and traffic infrastructure, has led to a void of responsibility in cities of the South. With spaces, programs and typologies, we are trying to fill this void by inventing a city that is in the process of acquiring a form. We seek to foster a city that exists in a state of constant self-recognition. In the Caracas San Agustín barrio, which extends over a steep, 200-metre-high hill, some 40,000 local residents protested against a planned network of roads that would have required the clearance of significant housing and communally valued spaces. At the time, we urged the government to build on the specific qualities of the barrio, arguing that this was not a hill covered with houses, but a house the size of a hill. Vertical lift, we identified, was missing. In order to avoid the roadcentric proposal, which would have been a typical slum eradication project based on the car city, we conceived a cable-car line. The outcome was a minimal-intervention transport system, with a maximum capacity of 1,200 persons per hour who could be conveyed in both directions. With the collaboration of the local authorities and other organizations, we looked for suitable locations for the masts and stations so as to integrate the system as delicately as possible. Inaugurated in 2010 with five cable car stations, the system has been built by the Doppelmayr / Garaventa Group, an Austrian ropeway engineering company. Two of the stations are situated at the foot of the hill directly above existing underground stations. The three other stations are laid out over the long slope and are combined with recreation facilities for education, sport and music. In this way, the connection points of the system have multi-use functionality and strengthen each element of the programming. The Caracas Metro Cable shows how hillside communities can be integrated into a metropolitan transport system that serves all Pedagogics of Space

21

Gran Horizonte: curriculum for a new city

citizens, regardless of their income and the local topography. This concept of a city without car traffic can be adopted as a model for other metropolises. While technological innovations are certainly crucial for such development, we see the design process, in these contexts, as a matter of creativity and social organizing. This is the turf of 21st-century urban design. The Vertical Gym is a prototype for a sports complex comprising vertically stacked basketball courts, weightlifting areas, a running track, a football pitch on the roof, a climbing wall and relevant athletic facilities. Sports grounds are usually the only remaining street-level spaces in cities left unbuilt or structurefree. But these spaces are often insufficient — they can only host one football field or a miniature baseball diamond. Thus, the sole direction in which sports facilities can be extended is vertically: layers create increased surface area. In this way, a ground area of 1,000 m² can be built up to provide facilities covering 3,800 m² on four floors. To meet the needs for sports and recreation in the barrios of the city, more than 100 of these vertical gymnasiums would be needed. Therefore, in 2006, U-TT proposed a plan for “100 Gimnasio-Verticales para Caracas.” The project is based on a feasibility study that would closely link the barrios to form a more cohesive citywide network. The first model built in Santa Cruz is active day and night and is used on average by some 15,000 visitors each month. Since it’s opening, the crime rate in the area has decreased by 30 per cent, and the building type has now become part of a nationwide anticrime program bearing the name “180 Degrees.” We may not be able to stop drug usage and violent crime, but we can offer alternative activities, such as football leagues organized in an environment where concepts of fair play and tolerance are communicated. We developed the prototype of the vertical gym from the YMCA sports centers in New York City. But in translating it to the Caracas context, we A Education:

22

THE CITIES ON OUR PLANET NEED MORE THAN OFFICE TOWER BLOCKS, MUSEUMS, OPERA HOUSES, AIRPORTS, STADIUMS, ETC. pEdagogicS of SpacE

23

Gran Horizonte: curriculum for a new city

determined that it must be a flexible design — adaptable to a variety of urban spaces and needs. Now, in Caracas, one of the new vertical gyms adjoins a cable-car station and is specifically tailored to the recreational activities of the San Agustín community. To simplicity one can add the necessary complexity and specificity. For example, different spatial programs for the ground-floor zone necessitate individual planning. Shops may be incorporated for local vendors; a swimming pool can be added with seating for 500 spectators; or educational facilities for younger visitors. All these variations are based on standardized, simple plans, which U-TT makes available free of charge. The prototype is in the Creative Commons, as we believe that for this tool to be successful, it must be replicated and reinterpreted, whether we are directly involved or not. Urban-Think Tank is also working in Paraisópolis, São Paulo’s second-largest favela. On a steep 6,000-m²-landslide site a music center is taking shape. The Centro de Acçao Social por Música (CASM) has existed as an institution for more than 36 years. The building we have designed for it is the first of its kind and profits from the experience we gained in developing the vertical gyms. It fits precisely in its unique urban situation and contains a variety of spaces for musical education. Tangentially, it offers a wide range of cultural activities. Here, we proposed a new vertical organization. The actual “building” is a space set between the terraced landscape and the stacked, specialized rehearsal and performance areas for music and dance. The CASM is not based on any model, but it can serve as a model for other communities. The scheme attracted the attention of the acoustic specialist Karl-Heinz Müller, who is now a member of our planning team. Driven by the need to create an appropriate environment in our cities for large sections of the population, we have also studied the situation of children and senior citizens more A Education:

24

Gran Horizonte: curriculum for a new city

closely. In the favelas, the bulk of the population is disadvantaged in one way or another. The lives of children with autism or Down’s syndrome are particularly difficult, as few public and private spaces are designed or adapted to fit their needs. In locating the school for autistic children, known as FAVA, on a sloping site, it was important for us to leave open as large an area as possible for a park, which is something rare in the center of the city. Therefore, we designed the building as a compact volume and set it in one corner of the site. As a result, the spatial program extended to a five-story structure. In Caracas, however, lifts are service-intensive installations and would make a building of this kind unsuitable for the students, many of whom experience increased anxiety in elevators. Our solution was to build a long ramp around the outside of the building. Access to the first two floors is via the sloped topography. The development was financed from a new tax conceived to flow into structures with a social role. Companies can donate up to 100 percent of their annual tax to finance such schemes. We work in a complex environment that calls for simple solutions. That means using available local materials and labor. Most people believe that low-cost construction must be inferior to expensive forms of building. We wish to overcome prejudices of this kind as well as outdated ideas regarding how a project should be developed. Only if we shift our expectations away from a product, to a process, and reconsider traditional development strategies, will we be able to find economically feasible solutions for the masses of people in the slums. And only if we do that will we have vibrant cities for every stratum of society that lives in them. Looking at our Earth as a whole, we find a new vision for our urban planet, and for all of us who live within it.○

Pedagogics of Space

25

Martha Thorne

Pages 26 – 35

Real Space, Virtual Space: What Really Matters? Dealing with a complex issue such as architecture and how to teach architecture, is today almost like trying to hit a moving target — even those with the best aim often miss the mark. The difficulty has to do with important changes in recent decades, especially in the areas of technology and globalization. Currently in the academic and professional communities, there is great discussion about the boundaries and focus of the profession, as well as a questioning of what to teach within the framework of an architectural degree. Stan Allen, former Dean of Princeton’s School of Architecture spoke in detail about these issues and others in an article titled “The Future is Now,” 1 in which he reviewed the past few decades of architectural education. By way of background, a summary of some of his conclusions, which are especially insightful and relevant to any discussion about architectural education of the future are outlined here: 1  “When

we look back over the past 20 years of architecture education, three overriding tendencies stand out. The first is the shifting relationship between

1

‘The Future That Is Now’ appeared on the website: http://places.designobserver.com/feature/architecture-school-the-future-that-is-now/32728/ and is excerpted from a chapter of the same name in Architecture School: Three Centuries of Educating Architects in North America, edited by Joan Ockman with the assistance of Rebecca Williamson, and published by MIT Press. Architecture School was commissioned by the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture to mark the centennial of the organization.

A Education:

26

Real Space, Virtual Space: What Really Matters

the profession and the schools. In many cases, passionate academic debates have brought to light a deeper anxiety about the changing role of the architect in society. Architects, as Rem Koolhaas has pointed out, are at once immensely arrogant and massively powerless. That is to say, they are no longer effective in many areas traditionally seen as the domain of the architect, but potentially powerful in other, perhaps unanticipated arenas. One task of schools today is to identify these new arenas and capacities.” 2  “We

are in a climate of increasing pluralism. Clearly, no single design direction dominates today, and while it is possible to map shifting intellectual agendas, the situation is not so much that one agenda supplants another, as it is that one is layered over another, multiplying the possibilities and points of view. This can be confusing to a student, who is often thrown back on his or her own resources. Young architects need to cultivate intellectual independence, but students need stable landmarks as well.” 3  “The

leveling effect of new technologies (I would say the enormous increase in the use of technology in architecture and education) and the tensions between the global and the local. Not only are there more choices out there; the differences among them are ever smaller. As information proliferates and the speed of access accelerates, it is more difficult to identify specific local design cultures. Architects today work in distant locations, and students are highly mobile.”

Pedagogics of Space

27

Real Space, Virtual Space: What Really Matters

Returning to the questions of How do we teach? and Where do we teach? I would argue that the model of architectural education has not evolved as much as one would have expected from a “creative” discipline. In many cases, we are still using an early 20th century model of teaching and learning. Put simply, common models we often see are a lecture hall with fixed seats and students listening to a professor. This format supports the idea of students as recipients ready to receive the truth from a teacher. In studio courses, we often see the Beaux-Arts model of master and disciples, working side by side in an atelier where the master passes from table to table imparting advice and knowledge. Studio learning is a format almost unique to architecture. It uses the coaching method and encourages student learning by doing. It is problem based, usually without textbooks, but rather with a goal to arrive at a design or project that responds to a set of parameters, which have been previously defined by the teacher. Many schools have a model of “studio” where students work at the school or home for hours and hours with the professor passing from table to table to suggest changes and improvements. Another standard model that goes hand in hand with the studio is the process of review and correction. It is often the traditional “design crit” or presentation by a student for feedback and judgment by a panel of experts. The aim of the design crit is to provide ungraded oral formative or summative feedback, and to comment on students’ work and to prepare them for their careers as professional designers learning how to present their designs to clients. The design crit has, without a doubt, positive value, but according to one study, “Redesigning the Design Crit” by Christine McCarthy of Victoria University,2 the traditional format of a jury with a student in front of a panel produces A Education:

28

Real Space, Virtual Space: What Really Matters

2 http://akoaotearoa.ac.nz/download/ng/file/group-6/redesigning-the-designcrit.pdf

anxiety (nervousness, fear, intimidation) in about 45% of the students prior to the session. Other questionable aspects of the traditional crit include: the student’s inability to learn from the feedback given due to the heightened atmosphere of the crit, placing more emphasis on absorbing the professional culture rather than student learning, fostering the imbalance of power between student and teacher or the outside “experts,” and, as was previously mentioned, unnecessary student anxiety. Several variations have been put forth, and often these, these used in combination with the traditional crit have provided significant learning opportunities and have also reduced the drawbacks associated with the usual once or twice a semester jury process. For example, the speed crit, whereby students present their work to one other student in a very short time, which could be as little as a minute, and then receive feedback from their fellow student about the clarity and structure of the presentation. This type of exercise is repeated several times, with the students changing partners, in an effort to practice, refine and feel comfortable prior to the larger or more public crit. Another technique is the blogging crit, which relies on software and has students review and comment on each other’s work, thus encouraging the participation of all, yet not requiring the time or difficulties of public reviews. These and other variations on the crit can lead to the more efficient use of time, provide a greater variety of meaningful feedback, involve active learning techniques and engage students in the work of their peers. While “learning by doing” is probably the most common method for design studio, there are additional ways that Pedagogics of Space

29

Real Space, Virtual Space: What Really Matters

could be contemplated for teaching architecture. If we look at these methods as a continuum, it is possible so see an evolution from the very formal rigid lecture hall where students passively listen to one professor speak for a defined period of time, to much more varied and interactive ways of teaching and learning, where the student becomes increasingly the focus and the structure becomes less formal. Some researchers have listed learning models as environments for delivering, applying, creating, communicating knowledge, and environments where knowledge is used for decision-making. A commonly held tenet related to physical space for teaching and learning is that specific space can foster a certain type of behavior. As teaching becomes more students centered, often there is a call for more “brightly colored sofas to promote communication.” It may be thought that a flexible classroom that accommodates a range of activities and “promote” certain behaviors is the best option. It has, however, been shown that this common sense “behaviorists” approach is flawed and doesn’t necessary lead to the conclusions one expects and while spaces can be designed with one intention, they may be interpreted by users in a completely different way. Rather than review the literature on this, I would simply suggest that the characteristics of physical space can grant message to those using it and can encourage or enhance behavior, but not necessarily determine it. And, an oversimplification of the relationship between physical space and behavior may not always hold true. The key here is to accommodate a range of activities and behaviors, recognizing that the boundaries of behavior and space are fluid. Without a doubt learning models are multiple and depend not only on the space, but also on the processes used, protocols, activities employed, as well the interpretation by the A Education:

30

Real Space, Virtual Space: What Really Matters

participants. In architectural education, the most common setting for delivering knowledge is the formal classroom or lecture hall. Applying knowledge could be achieved through prototyping, model making or design built activities. Extending the range of ways that learning for architecture can be achieved, an example of creating and communicating knowledge among the participants could happen through more cross disciplinary activities and / or using multiple formats for discussion and group work and relying less on a teacher and more on a facilitator. Finally, learning where a course of action is the goal or called, “knowledge for decision making” needs the commitment of all parties to pursue a goal and to follow through. Participants should feel engaged and that their opinions and actions matter for the outcome. Innovation or thinking outside the box should be regarded as a positive component of these exercises.

Real Space vs. Virtual Space Increasingly institutions are looking into the possibilities of on line learning for architectural studies. Powerful names such as Harvard and MIT are entering this field, as well as other higher education institutions from around the world are moving forward in this direction. The first attempts at online learning have been commonly associated with awkward attempts to provide static information on line, have students read and study independently, and then measure their knowledge through multiple-choice tests. Clearly, from these first attempts, enormous progress has been made, and the possibilities of technology are being exploited and expanded in astonishing ways. The experience of 45 year old IE Business School, located in Madrid, for the past decades and subsequently, the “younger” IE School of Architecture and Design present Pedagogics of Space

31

Real Space, Virtual Space: What Really Matters

interesting examples and point some directions for the future possibilities of teaching and learning in virtual space. The first point to be made is that online learning is not merely a replica of the classroom experience or techniques. Online learning must take into account the opportunities and limitations of technology. It requires an investment in software and perhaps even more importantly, an investment of time for teacher training. Blended learning — meaning some face-to-face settings and some online settings — seems to have the potential to provide the best of both worlds. And finally, blended learning is merely a reflection of the way we live our lives today. If we simply consider that, most teachers and students use a variety of online and on site methods (or hard copy) for communicating, researching, and for developing, producing, storing and presenting information, ideas and projects means that we already inhabit a “blended world.” If we take this a step further into the professional realm, we can easily recognize that it is becoming almost common to work remotely, at least during certain periods, or collaborate across the miles with clients, consultants, branches of a firm, or associated firms. At IE School of Architecture and Design, we have designed and implemented a blended format of teaching/learning for both undergraduate and graduate, post professional education. During four months, undergraduates in their second, third and fourth years of study of their 5-year bachelor degree, participate in internships at private firms, ngos, companies or magazines while they also study online. These placements may be located almost anywhere in the world. Graduate programs lasting slightly more than a year have three face-to face periods of about three weeks each and the rest of the course is talk online. The online components used at IE may be synchronous (all connected at the same time in real-time), such as video conferences with active participation by the students. Participation A Education:

32

Real Space, Virtual Space: What Really Matters

may take many forms such as, questions, surveys, responses and commentaries by students and even student presentations with feedback — written, drawn or spoken — by the professor. Asynchronous learning takes place through focused discussion forums, group work by the students using a variety of communication tools, and individual work including the review of case studies and multimedia resources, just to name two examples. What is truly exciting is that new developments, ideas and experiments for online learning seem limitless. Surveys have already shown us that online learning, if undertaken in a quality way, has the advantages of freedom for both the students and teachers, allows a global reach, and embodies much greater flexibility that standard course structures. Additionally, at IE we have seen that the sense of community among online students in courses of a limited size or among students undertaking group projects is greater than students who are in traditional settings. The participation of all students on equal footing is also enhanced. No longer is the quiet person at the back of the classroom ignored. Finally, tolerance and cultural understanding is fostered as students from around the world are connected and work together.

What is really important in architectural education? In my opinion, I believe there are four points that could be made that could contribute to improving and enriching architectural education in the future.  1  We need to use existing research and develop research for proposing and testing new methods of teaching architecture. Efforts already undertaken in other disciplines, especially educational psychology, can provide valuable information as we move forward. We must innovate and not Pedagogics of Space

33

Real Space, Virtual Space: What Really Matters

become complacent to teach as we were taught or perpetrate traditional models without evaluating and challenging them.  2  We need to expand the repertoire of methodologies we use and combine many types of teaching and learning to make sure that the skills and knowledge that we are trying to impart is in accordance with the methodologies and spaces we are using.  3  Online learning gives freedom to work, study, and undertake other activities in more places, responding to many situations and many needs.  4  We have seen in our work related to online learning at IE University that forming communities is integral to learning and are very possible and at times even heightened with online learning. Today those communities are not limited by geography, a positive aspect of globalization. In conclusion, the choices in education are not “either-or.” Learning is not all directed from the teacher to the student, nor is it all student self-discovery. Just as the panorama of architecture is mixed and varied, the ways we learn and the places we learn should also be many and different. At times, the spaces may be specially designed for education, but other times, learning may occur in unexpected settings where groups gather in more random ways. Likewise, the argument of face to face vs. online education is no longer relevant. We learn in many and varied situations, some flexible and some structured, sometimes alone or in groups, both in real space and in virtual ways. Technology can assist us in opening the door to new opportunities. The key is to know what skills and knowledge we are trying to foster and conceptually, which methodologies and settings real and / or virtual are the most appropriate for our objectives.○

A Education:

34

Real Space, Virtual Space: What Really Matters



Selected bibliography: Boys, Jos. Towards Creative Learning Spaces: Re-thinking the Architecture of Post-Compulsory Education. London: Routledge, 2011. Iñiguez de Onzoño, Santiago. The Learning Curve: How Business Schools Are Re-inventing Education. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. McCarthy, Christine, ‘Redesigning the Design Crit’ Ako Aotearoa, New Zealand. Pdf file online, accessed June 1, 2012. Ockman, Joan. Architecture School: Three Centuries of Educating Architects in North America. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012. Stover, A. ‘Learning architecture online: New directions for distance education and the design studio?’ Unpublished master’s capstone project, University of Maryland University College, 2004.

Pedagogics of Space

35

Annett Zinsmeister

Pages 36 – 45

The Art of Thinking and Designing Space Our way of living, our way of working, of communicating, of learning and teaching, etc. changed radically in the past twenty years. New technologies, the consolidation of a global market, political impositions, and the continuous and massive acceleration of data and information flow is speeding-up our whole day-life and is expanding our professional operating range. Virtual trading and virtual social networks determine and control a togetherness in parallel worlds apart from our real surrounding world and change our relation to real distances as well as our perception of space. The boundaries between private and public, between internal and external, between real and virtual space are becoming blurred. These changes cause a deep impact on our needs, on our way of understanding, reflecting space and, last but not least, on the way of designing our daily and future environment. These far-ranging alterations are an essential topic in my art practice and require fundamental considerations in thinking and designing space. When I moved to Berlin after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1990 the quick dismantling of DDR culture was omnipresent. The successive disappearance of cultural and commercial goods, the racing changes of urban space in East Berlin gave me a cause to confront myself with the parameters of cultural identification and to explore the complexity, problems and potentials of such a unique situation of radical change. The forceful transformation of Berlin, that continues to warp its urban countenance in the most varied of ways, became an important topic in my artistic work. A Education:

36

The Art of Thinking and Designing Space

Primarily I work with places of transition, whose past has a strong impact on history and whose future is uncertain. The search of evidence in different cities and studies about spatial urban change is an attempt to get on the track of the particular, the specific, the identity of spaces, places, cities — even though these may at first glance seem so forbidding or unspecific. Scientific research and studies of the environment as mapping, photography, recording, etc. mark the first step of my artistic investigations of space. I try to discover and unsheathe structures and patterns in urban space and architecture, let’s say, spatial codes, find out their origins, meaning and function. Like Roland Barthes’ definition of structural practice (L’activité structuraliste), I disassemble the detected urban codes and spatial elements and rebuild or sample them in different creative ways, to know more about the relevance of the combination system, the composition model and also about the complexity of the complete texture and structure of the investigated architecture, city, space. Thus, my understanding of experimental work with space is characterized by conceptual considerations and versatile studies on perception, motion, form, and space determination. Instead of the application of supposedly venerable solutions, the experiment and the process are in the focus. Theoretical analyzes and conceptual considerations build an equally important basis for my art and design practice as the experimental handling of different material, media and its specific techniques. The development of new technologies broaches the issue, of how urban space constitutes virtual space and how virtual spatial elements transform real spaces. Installations like outside_in and virtual interiors represent this engagement: one could say that this is a strategy of urban hacking that stacks real and virtual space, or simply conjoins them. These works address less the practical tweaking of structural Pedagogics of Space

37

The Art of Thinking and Designing Space

substance or the illegal appropriation of spaces; it rather allude to the question how to identify urban and architectural structures and codes. 

Art and Technology today In his book, The Language of New Media, Lev Manovich supports the assumption that the design principles of the Bauhaus and the avant-garde only attained wide-scale acceptance with the development of digital media. According to his theory, the Bauhaus is not only a historical role model haunting the buildings of all colleges of art and design, but in graphic form it also encountered on every user interface. Indeed — what we know as design today evolved with and in the combination of art and industry at the Bauhaus. The development of new technologies, especially the computer, means that for the first time the technologies of art, design, production, and distribution have come together in one medium. Today, this link-up prompts the much-repeated, yet altered question of innovation in production processes and its significance for design competencies, since the innovation of mass customization and design on demand is based on a merging of serial production technology and individual customer wishes. This goes much further than what began in the Bauhaus and has been common practice in the car industry for several years now. Le Corbusier once said: The problem is the form, not its beginning. Due to Nietzsche’s once formulated insight of mediatheory that the instrument will always play its part in writing our ideas, one could answer to Le Corbusier that today it is the other way round. In contrast to the beginning of the 20th century and the idea of a universal artistic practice with higher art A Education:

38

The Art of Thinking and Designing Space

and design principles beyond human nature (like transformation of geometrical rules into perfect form e.g.), today we have to deal with highly different individual tasks and living concepts. There is no universal form we have to believe in or think about, but we have to consider the content and the impact of formation and new design tools and their potential for urban life. Technical media, particularly digital tools, have developed a key function in design, communication, production, and distribution. Media competency is a wide-ranging ability, which we now have to consider in a previously inconceivable form. Rather than adopting a viewpoint that ignores history and identifies one single approach as the correct, path-breaking approach, we need to consider a wide spectrum of strategies, methods, and tools in our design practice and teaching. Meaning when we refer to digital media, we also need to be aware of the importance of analog media and deal with and care about both competencies. Instead of arguing about taste and the beauty of forms we have to think about new concepts of life in a changing society and environment, and its consequences for the design of space to live in. Referring to this we need to understand the quality and relevance of closeness and distance, of privateness and publicity, of foreignness and security, of movement and stagnancy, of the environmental value and the significance of identity. Those essential questions and thoughts rise beyond disciplinary boundaries and discussions about a perfect and universal form. There is no absolute space, space relates to our individual perception. Concerning questions of design or Gestaltung that is to say: there cannot be any perfect solution and any universal concept. If we want to handle current essential environmental questions and need to find innovative approaches, we have to develop individual design strategies, which are based on our individual understanding of space. Pedagogics of Space

39

The Art of Thinking and Designing Space

Architecture as hybrid discipline and the change of knowledge Architecture, as the so-called “Mother of Arts,” embraces different artistic and scientific disciplines. It has always been a hybrid discipline that demands and combines a broad spectrum of competences from architects and has expanded in its scope of duties in the last several years. The design and construction of space does not only play a role that is literally supporting in constructed environment but more and more in the design and construction of virtual spaces as, for instance, with information architecture, in virtual cities and computer games, but also in art, urban interventions, in exhibition design, in scenography, and so on. This range of opportunities is a chance for graduates to apply their talent and competence in designing space throughout the borders of the building industry in a market that constantly changes.

Teaching: Transfer of knowledge —  Crossing the disciplines These changes have an effect on gaining and transferring knowledge and on consequently educational systems and strategies. Training posts have to stay abreast of those changes, because the content of teaching today is the groundwork for an expert knowledge of tomorrow. So how to deal with these changes, especially at art and architecture schools, which today find themselves in a permanent dilemma: fluctuating between maintaining and continuing an existing tradition and the desire to break with this tradition. But before we may break traditions we should be aware of them. What kind of traditions and current models are we talking about? What can we learn from former avant-garde concepts, what should we deny? A Education:

40

The Art of Thinking and Designing Space

Annett Zinsmeister: Installation outside_in 2005

Annett Zinsmeister: Installation virtual interior 2005 Pedagogics of Space

41

The Art of Thinking and Designing Space

Annett Zinsmeister: Installation urban hacking — container projekt, paraflows. Artfestival Vienna 2009

A Education:

42

The Art of Thinking and Designing Space

Since 2002 I am teaching Gestaltung, Experimental Design, as well as Design and Media Theory at the Bauhaus University in Weimar, Kunsthochschule Berlin Weissensee, University Wuppertal and at the Academy of Art and Design in Stuttgart. My current class in the department of architecture and industrial design is the only class at the whole academy where students from different fields are trained programmatically together. Gestaltung is a genuine German expression with a certain tradition and role in the education of applied arts. The course Gestaltungslehre is a descendent of the Vorkurs at the Bauhaus, in which artistic skills form the basic knowledge for the applied arts like architecture and design. Gestaltungslehre is an innovation of the avant-garde of the 20th century and in itself the most integrative and interdisciplinary subject at the academies until today. The professors are mainly artists and sometimes also related to applied art. Due to my education and practice in fine arts, architecture, design and also cultural and media science, I am able to resort to a wide-ranging knowledge that is compulsory for an interdisciplinary teaching, cause the design of architecture and living space does not only touch questions of structural engineering, economy, and sociology, but also of perception (psychology), of conceptual thinking and representation (artistic practice), and of media theory (cultural technique). With the integration of these different disciplines into teaching, new perspectives are introduced: interweavings and the blurring of boundaries of various approaches and strategies uncover potentials to capture our environment in an unfamiliar manner, to think about space differently and to design it innovatively. Their own practical and theoretical work is one of the central basis for a range of knowledge teachers may convey to the students. My teaching concept stands for the integrative connection between different fields. It may point out Pedagogics of Space

43

The Art of Thinking and Designing Space

future-oriented niches in an occupational field that continuously become more versatile, and may also convey competences that lead beyond a venerable architectural education. Thereby, the interlocking of different disciplines is indispensable. My courses create links between free and applied arts by pointing out specific differences and borders, as well as, analogies, intersections, and possibilities. Each approach to design, either in the free or in the applied arts, is a dynamic process. In teaching, we convey design practice as a process which does not primarily orient towards a static goal, but which reflects on our perception and on the possible and feasible versatility of places, spaces, and objects. The learning units are accompanied by an interdisciplinary lecture series and symposia. At these occasions/events, artists, architectures, designers, and scientists present their work, as well as, the ideas, methods, materials, and techniques that determine the design process. An increasingly complex world means that the essential spectrum of competencies is constantly expanding in all areas of life and work. Contemporary teaching models, but above all those tenable for the future are challenged to react to those developments and, therefore, to offer and mediate an extended range of content. The future — or let’s say — the art of thinking and designing space lies in the reflection on the possible and not in the execution of the feasible. Unconventional settings of tasks and questions allow unconventional approaches and solutions. The concentration on the process and on the experiment supplies the needed space for an intense analysis of the practice of designing and drafting. Here, the journey as an individual discovery of social and aesthetic practices is the destination.○ →p. 45 Installation Grid Architecture Museum of Contemporary Art Stuttgart 2012  All pictures © Annett Zinsmeister

A Education:

44

The Art of Thinking and Designing Space

Pedagogics of Space

45

Theory Semantics of Space

B Section

Pages 47 – 95

The symposium section Semantics of Space focuses on theoretical approaches that react to both historical and contemporary contexts, ultimately turning a critical and speculative gaze on complex scenarios that may have remained unquestioned or seem straightforward at a glance. Semantics of Space

47

Pages 48 – 59

Jane Rendell

When site-writing becomes site-reading or how space matters through time My essay explores — briefly — how I evolved the term‚ “critical spatial practice” from my earlier introduction of it as a concept in 2003 to indicate an interest in the specifically spatial and critical aspects of interdisciplinary processes that operate between art and architecture, to my current practice of sitewriting which performs acts of critical spatial practice through the writing of criticism, anticipating a space in which a writer might meet a reader.  My initial training is in architectural design, and my interest in spatial constructions has influenced the work that I have gone on to do, first as a feminist architectural historian studying the gendered spatial practice of the rambler in 1820’s London, a precursor to the more famous Parisian flaneur, then as a theorist of critical spatial practice, and more recently as a site-writer. My first introduction to site-specific practice was in 1996 when I was invited to Chelsea College of Art and Design in London to teach on and later direct their MA in the Theory and Practice of Public Art and Design. I quickly became fascinated by public art, by what seemed a highly unstable form of practice, which insisted on locating itself “a place between” fine art and spatial design. Two years later when I was invited to guest edit a special issue of The Public Art Journal, I had become interested in examining the overlapping concerns of those artists and designers engaged in various forms of “spatial practice” and the writings of cultural geographers and other cultural B Theory:

48

When site-writing becomes site-reading or how space matters through time

commentators and philosophers interested in “spatial theory.” In 2003 I came up with the term “critical spatial practice” to describe projects located between art and architecture, and the standpoints theory offered for playing out disciplinary definitions. I developed this concept further in Art and Architecture, in which I examined a series of projects located between art and architecture — defined as critical spatial practices — since they both critiqued the sites into which they intervened as well as the disciplinary procedures through which they operated.1 I argued that such projects operated at a triple crossroads: between theory and practice, between art and architecture, and between public and private, and I was keen to stress three particular qualities: •  the critical: I proposed that the definition of the term “critical,” taken from Frankfurt School critical theory, be extended to encompass practice — particularly those critical practices that involved self-reflection and the desire for social change, that sought to transform rather than to only describe. 2 1 I first introduced the term ‘critical spatial practice’ in my article Jane Rendell, ‘A Place Between Art, Architecture and Critical Theory’, Proceedings to Place and Location (Tallinn, Estonia: 2003) pp. 221 – 233 (published in English and Estonian) and later consolidated and developed as a concept in my book Jane Rendell, Art and Architecture: A Place Between (London: IB Tauris, 2006). Since that time, the same term has been taken up by individuals such as Judith Rugg in her seminars at the RIBA, London, from around 2008; Eyal Weisman to describe activities as part of the ‘MA: Research Architecture’ at Goldsmiths College of Art, London; and most recently by Marcus Miessen to identify the ‘MA: Architecture and Critical Spatial Practice’ launched in 2011 at the Städelschule, Frankfurt. 2 Critical theory is a phrase that refers to the work of a group of theorists and philosophers called the Frankfurt School operating in the early 20th century. The group includes Theodor Adorno, Jurgen Habermas, Max Horkheimer, Herbert Marcuse, and Walter Benjamin; and their writings are connected Semantics of Space

49

When site-writing becomes site-reading or how space matters through time

by their interest in the ideas of the philosopher G. W. F. Hegel, the political economist Karl Marx, and the psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud. Taken together, their work could be characterized as a rethinking or development of Marxist ideas in relation to the shifts in society, culture and economy that took place in the early decades of the 20th century. See Raymond Geuss, The Idea of Critical Theory: Habermas and the Frankfurt School (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981).

••  the spatial: drawing on the work of Michael de Certeau and Henri Lefebvre, I made a distinction between those strategies that aimed to maintain and reinforce existing social and spatial orders, and those tactics that sought to critique and question them, defining the latter as “critical spatial practices.” 3 •••  the interdisciplinary: the interdisciplinary: I was most interested in practices which desired to transgress the limits of their particular disciplinary procedures and to explore the interdisciplinary processes that operated in between them. For Julia Kristeva the interdisciplinary is a “site where expressions of resistance are latent,” and where the methodologies that must be invented take place along a “diagonal axis.” 4 Homi Bhabha has also described the encounter between disciplines in psychoanalytic terms as an “ambivalent movement between pedagogical and performative address.” 5 It is precisely for this reason that I am a passionate advocate for interdisciplinarity; 3

4

See Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1991) and Michael de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988). Julia Kristeva, ‘Institutional Interdisciplinarity in Theory and Practice: an interview’, Alex Coles and Alexia Defert, [eds.], The Anxiety of Interdisciplinarity, De-, Dis-, Ex-, v. 2, (London: Blackdog Publishing, 1997), pp. 3 – 21, pp. 5 – 6.

B Theory:

50

When site-writing becomes site-reading or how space matters through time

5 Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture, (London: Routledge, 1994), pp. 163. See also ‘Translator Translated’, (interview with cultural theorist Homi Bhabha) by W.J.T. Mitchell, Artforum v.33, n.7 (March 1995) pp. 80 – 84. © Artforum International Magazine Inc. 1995, http://prelectur.stanford.edu/lecturers/bhabha/interview.html.

such work is not only critical and intellectual, but also emotional and political. In demanding that we exchange what we know for what we don’t know, and give up the safety of competence for the dangers of potential incompetence, the transformational experience of interdisciplinary work produces a possibly destabilizing engagement with dominant power structures allowing the emergence of new and often uncertain forms of knowledge. I found Edward Soja’s examination of the interrelation of the conceptual categories of space, time and social being,6 highly productive; reading his texts suggested to me that my understanding of critical spatial practice, in terms of the interdisciplinary place between art and architecture, needed to be understood through three distinct aspects: the spatial, the temporal and the social. The focus on the spatial, entitled “Between Here and There,” investigated three particular issues: first, the relationship between site and non-site as put forward by Robert Smithson; 7 second, the potential for redefining Rosalind Krauss’s notion of an “expanded field” with respect to contemporary urban and explicitly interdisciplinary practice; 8 and third, the 6

7

See Edward Soja, Thirdspace: Expanding the Geographical Imagination (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996) and Edward Soja, Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Social Theory (London: Verso, 1989). See Robert Smithson, ‘Earth’ (1969) Symposium at White Museum, Cornell University and Robert Smithson, ‘Towards the Development of an Air Terminal Site’ (1967), Jack Flam [ed.] Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1996).

Semantics of Space

51

When site-writing becomes site-reading or how space matters through time

8

See Rosalind Krauss, ‘Sculpture in the Expanded Field’, Hal Foster [ed.] Postmodern Culture (London: Pluto Press, 1985) pp. 31 – 42. This essay was originally published in October 8 (Spring 1979).

possibility, following Michel de Certeau’s notion of space as a practiced place, for creative interventions to transform places into spaces of social critique. The focus on the temporal dimension, entitled, ‘Between Now and Then,’ highlighted the relation of past, present and future in allegorical, montage and dialectical constructions and, through exploring the time of viewing and using art and architecture, sought to complicate the distinction often made between the allegorical experience as passive melancholia, and montage as active shock.9 Finally, the focus on the social, entitled, “Between One and Another,” examined the “work” less as a set of “things” or “objects” and more as a series of exchanges that take place between people — subjects — through such processes as collaboration, social sculpture and walking.10 9 Walter Benjamin’s clearest descriptions of his concept of the dialectical image can be found in Walter Benjamin, ‘Materials for the Exposé of 1935’, The Arcades Project (1927 – 39) translated by Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), p. 911 and Walter Benjamin, ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History,’ [1940] translated by Harry Zohn, Hannah Arendt [ed.] Illuminations (London: Fontana) pp. 245 – 55, p. 254. While his study of allegory can be found in Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, [1925] translated by John Osborne (London: Verso, 1977), his account of montage in film can be found in Walter Benjamin, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,’ [1936] translated by Harry Zohn, Hannah Arendt [ed.] Illuminations (London: Fontana, 1992) pp. 211 – 44, p. 231. 10 Here I refer to two much referenced contemporary texts Nicholas Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics, [1998] translated by Simon Pleasance and Fronza Woods (Dijon: Presses du reel, 2002) and Grant H. Kester, Conversation Pieces: Community and Communication in Modern Art (Berkeley: B Theory:

52

When site-writing becomes site-reading or how space matters through time

University of California Press, 2004), but also make the link back to earlier feminist work in this field, for example, Suzi Gablik, The Reenchantment of Art (London: Thames and Hudson, 1991).

Art and Architecture aimed to reflect upon different kinds of critical spatial practice. From researching and writing the book, I discovered that my position with regard to the concepts and works I was studying emerged in response to my situated experiences of ideas and artefacts. I became increasingly intrigued by taking the act of criticism be a form of critical spatial practice, a writing practice which makes sites between work and critic, essay and reader; that remakes works in textual forms; and rather than write about sites, aims to write sites. Site-Writing: The Architecture of Art Criticism, is a collection of essays and text-works, written between 1998 and 2008, which investigate the sites between critic and work, not only the material sites of production and reception of a work, but also those imagined and remembered, near and far.11 Site-Writing is an attempt to explore a form of situated criticism, to investigate the position of the critic, not only in relation to art objects, architectural spaces and theoretical ideas, but through the site of writing itself. My research took place in parallel to teaching an MA and PhD module on site-specific writing. I was interested in encouraging students at the Bartlett to bring their design skills to explore the spatial structure of writing: to examine, for example, how the material, political and social qualities of a site might get transposed into a textual form, become reinserted into a site as a text installation, and might meet its reader through a performative event. 11 Jane Rendell, Site-Writing: The Architecture of Art Criticism (London: I. B. Tauris, 2010). Semantics of Space

53

When site-writing becomes site-reading or how space matters through time

I think my attitude to writing is no doubt influenced by my early training as an architectural designer. I consider writing to operate as a creative response to a brief, and most of the writing in Site-Writing, was produced in response to particular invitations either to write or talk about particular works. The approach combines different kinds of response, from the critique of a brief, so those which are more intuitive, emotional, associative, dreamy, meandering, out of place. I have an interest in the design of writing, in the composition and arrangement of words in relation to one another, on a page, in a book, operating through devices which I consider to be spatial, such as voices, frames, returns, view-points … Site-Writing was not written at once, nor is it organised as a linear and sequential argument. I see the arrangement and re-working of the writings in relation to each other as a form of architecture. I decided to structure the book not into chapters but into spatial configurations, where in each, the writing aims to perform the spatial patterning suggested by the architectural conditions and psychic states discovered in the artworks for example: Triangular Structures with Variable Thirds, Back and Forth, A Rearrangement of Words and Things, Déjà vu: That Which Keeps Coming Back, and Decentering / Recentering. Drawing on Howard Caygill’s notion of strategic critique, which shares with immanent critique the capacity for discovering or inventing the criteria of critical judgement in the course of criticism,’ 12 I suggest that with his/her responsibility to convey an experience of the work to another audience, the critic occupies a discrete position as mediator and that this situatedness conditions the performance of his/her interpretative role. 13 12 Howard Caygill, Walter Benjamin, The Colour of Experience (London: Routledge, 1998), p. 34. See also p. 79. 13 For a discussion of the politics of spectatorship see for example, Umberto B Theory:

54

When site-writing becomes site-reading or how space matters through time

Eco, ‘The Poetics of the Open Work’, [1962] in Claire Bishop [ed.], Participation: Documents of Contemporary Art (London and Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press and the Whitechapel Art Gallery, London, 2006) pp. 20 – 40 and Claire Bishop, Installation Art: A Critical History (London: Tate Publishing, 2005) p. 13 and p. 131. For texts which argue for the performativity of criticism see for example, Gavin Butt, ‘Introduction: The Paradoxes of Criticism’, Gavin Butt [ed.] After Criticism: New Responses to Art and Performance (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2005) pp. 1 – 19 and Amelia Jones and Andrew Stephenson, ‘Introduction’, Amelia Jones and Andrew Stephenson [eds.] Performing the Body/Performing the Text (London: Routledge, 1999) pp. 1 – 10.

Interested in how the spatial and often changing positions we occupy as critics — materially, conceptually, emotionally and ideologically — create conditions which make possible acts of interpretation and constructions of meaning, my practice of “site-writing” operates in the interactive space between artist /designer and work, essay and reader. This is an active writing that constructs as well as traces the sites between critic, work and reader and in so doing constructs an architecture of art criticism. And so to end, I’d like to present a short site-writing which explores the interaction between writer and reader at the level of the macro and micro — cosmic and psychic — and how different spatial experiences and representations — text and image — real and imagined — come together when reading and looking at words and images. One might think of this as a moment when site-writing becomes site-reading or how space matters through time.

Alien Positions For their exhibition at the Rijksmuseum in 2006, artists Bik Van Der Pol displayed one of the oldest items in the museum’s collection, a piece of rock brought back to earth from the moon Semantics of Space

55

When site-writing becomes site-reading or how space matters through time

in 1969 by the crew of the first manned lunar landing mission, Apollo 11, in an exhibition space where visitors could come and reflect on this alien object.14 In his remarkable essay, ‘The Unfinished Copernican Revolution,’ psychoanalyst Jean Laplanche draws connections between astronomy and psychoanalysis, discussing the de-stabilizing affects of reversing the structures of relationships we take for granted socially, culturally and personally, from the macro-scale of the cosmos to the micro-scale of the psyche. Laplanche argues that the revolutionary move made by Copernicus in 1543, which demonstrated that the earth revolved around the sun, rather than the reverse, can be paralleled to Freud’s discovery of an unconscious whose existence de-stabilized the central position of the ego in the formation of the subject. In Laplanche’s view Freud did not pay proper heed to the possibilities inherent in his discovery, and went astray: ‘the wrong path was taken each time there was a return to a theory of self-centering.’ 15 This notion of going astray, Laplanche relates to astrology, describing how the word for planet derives from the verb planao, ‘to lead astray, to seduce.’ 16 Laplanche writes of how the unconscious implanted in the subject by the enigmatic address of the other can be thought of as an internal foreign body: ‘the unconscious as an alien inside me, and even one put inside me by an alien.’ 17 14 Bik Van Der Pol, Fly Me To The Moon (2005) Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. The project was commissioned by Het Nieuwe Rijksmuseum as part of the arts programme ‘a contemporary view of the Rijksmuseum’ during the renovation of the building. Bik Van Der Pol commissioned a range of writers — Jennifer Allen, Wouter Davidts, Frans Von der Dunk and myself —  to respond to the moon rock. See Bik Van Der Pol, Fly Me To The Moon (Amsterdam: Rijksmuseum and Sternberg Press, 2006). See also www. sternbergpress.com/index.php?pageId=1156&l=en&bookId=56&sort=year; www.rijksmuseum.nl/pers/tentoonstellingen/fly-me-the-moon?lang=en; and www.bikvanderpol.net/. B Theory:

56

When site-writing becomes site-reading or how space matters through time

15 Jean Laplanche, ‘The Unfinished Copernican Revolution’ [1992] translated by Luke Thurston, in Jean Laplanche, Essays on Otherness (London: Routledge, 1999) pp. 52 – 83, p. 60. 16 Laplanche, ‘The Unfinished Copernican Revolution’, p. 54, footnote 6. 17 Laplanche, ‘The Unfinished Copernican Revolution’, p. 65.

The Blue Marble. View of the Earth as seen by the Apollo 17 crew traveling toward the moon. This image was taken on 7 December 1972. NASA still images are not copyrighted. This image was reproduced from the NASA website. .

Semantics of Space

57

When site-writing becomes site-reading or how space matters through time

Alien Position One Go to the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. Find the fragment of the moon on exhibition in the gallery. Stand in front of it. Think about where it comes from. Contemplate its strangeness. Consider its alien-ness. Ask yourself this: ‘Is this alien really outside me?’

Alien Position Two Ask the gallery attendant for a copy of Jean Laplanche’s Essays on Otherness. Return to the fragment of the moon. Draw up a chair and sit down facing the moon fragment. Turn to page 52 of Essays on Otherness and start reading. Read until you have completed ‘The Unfinished Copernican Revolution’. Ask yourself this: ‘How does the moon see me?’

B Theory:

58

When site-writing becomes site-reading or how space matters through time

Alien Position Three Find out the date and time of next full moon. Take up a position where you can watch the full moon rise. Wait until the moon is at its zenith. Turn to page 57 of this book. You are looking at an image of the earth taken from the moon. Lift the book to the night sky with the image of the earth facing you. Position the image of the earth so that you can see the moon at the same time. Hold the images of the earth and moon together and wait … 18 ○

18 A delightful twist to the tale: The Rijksmuseum’s moon rock is a fake! Inherited from the estate of a former prime minister, when recently tested it was found to be a piece of petrified wood, possibly from Arizona. See for example www.usatoday.com/tech/science/space/2009-09-14-moon-rock_N.htm (accessed 2 September 2012). Semantics of Space

59

Felicity D. Scott

Pages 60 – 67

“Inhabiting Space” The invitation to participate in Space Matters proved a more complex provocation than I had initially imagined. For of course “space matters” in so many ways, particularly when considering what the organizers call “today’s global realities.” As a historian, much of my current work tries to reflect on the nexus of architectural space and the geopolitical or territorial transformations informing those “global realities,” attempting to identify the ways in which architectural practices and theories have responded to a very different experience of “space” in the late 1960s and 70s. (I am thinking here both of space as experienced locally or proximately to the body and in the sense of a radically transformed social and technological environment and, accompanying those changes, the often-noted feeling of a collapse of geographical distance.) So what I thought I would put on the table are two brief vignettes from opposite poles of a larger body of my current historical research, each of which speaks, in a slightly different way, to the pressures exerted on “space” by technological and political transformations, and hence, implicitly or explicitly, on architectural conceptions of space. The protagonists of each, in some regards, are read to have formulated modes of counter-occupation of space, not always to progressive ends. The first concerns the Open Land communes that emerged in Northern California in the mid-to-late-1960s as environments within which to test alternative modes of life. These were attempts to develop strategies for living during an imagined postapocalyptic era to come, a time during which access to advanced technologies was understood to have been foreclosed. The second concerns B Theory:

60

“Inhabiting Space”

the Aspen Movie Map project developed by the Architecture Machine Group at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology a decade latter, a heavily funded research project that forms an important landmark in the history of so-called virtual space. What follows, then, is an attempt to suggest how such occupations or alternative inhabitations of space reflect, or are symptomatic of, larger historical transformations. Each case study, that is, hopefully also indicates how, to cite the invitation to the symposium, I “understand as relevant ‘matters of space.’” My first example, Open Land communes, did not emerge from within the discipline or discourse of architecture, but they nevertheless offer one of the most remarkable attempts to forge a counter-inhabitation of space, a form of inhabitation that was intended to serve as an explicit critique of the impact of architecture upon one’s body and psyche. The key theoretical document associated with the movement, Open Land: A Manifesto, was not of course written by architects but by the communards of Morningstar Commune and Wheeler’s Ranch. Open Land communes emerged in the mid-to-late 1960s in reaction to what their earliest proponents, Lou Gottleib and Ramon Sender (both San Francisco-based musicians working with electronic technologies), called “cybernation.” Responding at once to the imminent possibility that human labor would be rendered unnecessary on account of automation and the feeling that those same technologies harbored the threat of atomic and nuclear warfare and with it a forced return to a pre-industrial living condition, they adopted an ethos of “voluntary primitivism,” a performance of survival strategies or anticipatory experimental testing of an alternative form of life. Central to this testing were attempts to cede private property rights to a domain involving communal stewardship of the land, to make land available rent free for anyone to use, to open a space without governmental regulation, or as they put it, “with no authorities and no rules.” Semantics of Space

61

“Inhabiting Space”

Exodus from official systems of managing land and the built environment — from property rights and trespass laws to building codes as well as health and safety regulations — was not, however, as easy as declaring, “Permit not required to settle here.” Indeed, the sign served less as a performative or speech act in the sense theorized by J.L. Austin (actually freeing the land of the need for permits) than it did as a polemical and political gesture.1 And the local authorities soon fought back, giving rise to what came to be known as “code wars” and with them an escalating set of tactical and counter-tactical maneuvers between the commune, on the one hand, and local police and state governing institutions, on the other. After initially trying to charge the communards with harboring dangerous persons, then repeatedly rounding them up and arresting them for health and safety violations, local government agencies eventually bulldozed the ad hoc settlements at both sites. It was, we might say, a battle over such alternative management of space. A section of the manifesto entitled “Our Beleaguered Homes,” outlined their ethos of self-build, no-code homes. “How about building yourself a house? No, no, you don’t need money, architect, plans, permits. Why not use what’s there.” “[R]estrictive codes on home-building,” they insisted, “make it just about impossible to build a code home that doesn’t sterilize, insulate, and rigidify the inhabitants. … So it falls down in the first wind storm. The second one won’t. Dirt floors are easy to keep clean. Domes are full of light and air.” 2 If the cost of materials and do-it-yourself ethos certainly informed the nonnormative character of the ad hoc constructions, the manifesto 1

For an important reading of Austin see Thomas Keenan, ‘Drift: Politics and the Simulation of Real Life,’ Grey Room 21 (Fall 2005): pp. 94 – 111. See also J. L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1975), cited by Keenan. B Theory:

62

“Inhabiting Space”

2

See ‘Judge’s Ruling: God Can’t Own Morning Star,’ in Unohoo, Coyote, and The Mighty Avengers [eds.], The Morning Star Scrapbook: In the Pursuit of Happiness (Occidental, CA: Friends of Morning Star, n.d. [circa 1973]), p. 157.

reveals that the teepees, lean-tos, tents, open-sided A-frames, simple tarpaulins, tree-houses, geodesic structures, vans, school buses, brushwood hogans, were not simply the product of a lack of building expertise (although this did of course often factor in). The so-called “philosophy of architecture” developed at Wheeler’s and Morning Star worked against many central tenets of architectural modernity: functional distribution of programmatic elements (bathrooms, kitchens, bedrooms, dining room, etc.); use of modern technologies and materials; standardization, rationalization, and mass production; structural stability; and even standards of plumbing, lighting, and hygiene. The designers of these structures, that is, identified points within the design process in which contemporary forms of governmentality impinged most directly upon the subject, where techniques of power were most evident within the organization and regulation of space. My second example embraces that “cybernation” and takes it to another extreme. Arch Mac’s Aspen Movie Map, an experiment in “surrogate travel,” stands not only as a landmark in the history of architects’ involvement in developing so-called virtual space, but quite literally as a precursor to contemporary paradigms of spatially managed data and interactivity via desktop computer interfaces, modes of interaction all too frequently celebrated as enhancing individual agency and choice. As with many Arch Mac research projects, it was funded both in response to the so-called urban crisis of the 1960s in America and on account of US concerns regarding insurgent groups in Vietnam, Latin America and the Middle East; it demonstrated how architectural expertise might Semantics of Space

63

“Inhabiting Space”

be brought to bear within interdisciplinary research groups working toward developing urban (highly militarized) counter-insurgency measures for the management of spaces and the populations which inhabited them. The Movie Map was a computer-controlled, video-discbased system that simulated movement through a virtual environment by drawing upon a multimedia database. As student researcher Robert Mohl explained, users (implicitly soldiers) “are able to learn about an unfamiliar urban space by ‘traveling’ around at will through sequences of photographic footage and ‘helicoptering’ above dynamic aerial photos and reference maps.”3 While traveling they could access other data sources, from “micro-documentaries,” historical photographs and interior shots to “data data” on statistics such as “cases of beer consumed per week and number of beds.”4 With regard to the anticipatory spatial knowledge the interface was able to convey, Mohl concluded, “movie map training leads to superior wayfinding competence in the real setting.”5 In Principle Investigator Andy Lippman’s words the goal of this hypercinematic technology “was to create so immersive and realistic a ‘first visit’ that newcomers would literally feel at home, or that they had been there before.” Speaking more directly to its military applications he added, “DARPA realized the need after Israeli soldiers practiced for the recovery of an airplane hijacked to Entebbe by using an abandoned airfield made up to look similar.”6 With the Movie Map the Israel Defense Forces’ now-legendary physical mock-up of the airline terminal in which the 3 Robert Mohl, ‘Cognitive Space in the Interactive Movie Map: An Investigation of Spatial Learning in Virtual Environments’ (PhD, MIT, 1981), i. 4 Michael Naimark, ‘Aspen the Verb: Musings on Heritage and Virtuality,’ Presence: Teleoperators & Virtual Environments 15, no. 3 (June 2006): p. 331. 5 Mohl, ‘Cognitive Space in the Interactive Movie Map,’ i. 6 Lippman (2004), cited by Naimark, ‘Aspen the Verb’, p. 331. B Theory:

64

“Inhabiting Space”

hostages were held was to be replaced by a virtual space produced through or within electronic media. The Movie Map project appealed to the Department of Defense (DoD) on the assumption that computers could achieve spatial simulation much faster, and at much lower cost, allowing the military more effective advanced knowledge of hostile territories. As Lippman explained of the Movie Map, the driver or “map reader” was presented either with sequential photographic images of Aspen or, through switching to another “channel,” with a digital animation produced through “computer synthesized replicas of those images.” Through controlling the speed, route, turning, viewpoint, and type of information accessed, the driver could undertake a simulated drive—what they termed surrogate — or vicarious-travel through this “virtual” space. Switching to an aerial view routine, he or she could also choose to hover over the terrain and zoom in or out of maps stored in the database. Following the nomenclature of Disneyland, Mohl referred to these two modes as “travel land” and “map land,” emphasizing the ease of switching between them. It was even possible to switch between fall and winter via a “season knob,” causing leaves to disappear and snow appear, and vice versa.7 Indeed, the system was set up to re-function spatiotemporal distinctions such as “here” and “there,” “near” and “far,” “now” and “then,” “real” and “virtual,” all of which now seemed to belong to a pre-electronic spatio-temporal topology. The animation component of the Movie Map system was developed by student researcher Walter Bender using his

7

Andrew Lippman, ‘Movie-Maps: An Application of the Optical Videodisc to Computer Graphics’, ACM SIGGRAPH Computer Graphics 14, no. 3 (July 1980), p. 33. See also John Free, “Through the Electronic Looking Glass into Living Pictures: Videodiscs are Combined with Computers for Create-it-Yourself TV,” Popular Science 1981, pp. 68 – 70. Semantics of Space

65

“Inhabiting Space”

Quick and Dirty Animation System (QADAS). Deploying the same interactive navigation tools and spatio-temporal logic as its film component, and designed to match the film footage exactly through careful registration of frames, QADAS was developed, as Bender put it, specifically “as a supplement to the Movie Map.” Unlike its filmic counterpart, however, QADAS could “fill in where practicality or reality leave off.”8 The system permitted a level of editing or “systematic selection” of information not easily achieved in film, a capacity that could emphasize or deemphasize certain components and hence “direct attention.” In 1998, Michael Naimark, a student at MIT’s Center for Advanced Visual Studies in the late 70s who worked on cinematography for the Movie Map, presented a paper describing his Movie-Map projects, beginning with Aspen then moving to that of Karlsruhe (home of the ZKM), Banff (home of another media center) and related panorama projects such as Be Now Here for UNESCO World Heritage Sites including Jerusalem, Dubrovnik, Timbuktu, and Angkor. All attempted to simulate place and create modes of “telepresence.” While acknowledging that computer simulations could not represent everything, that experience within them would “never be the same as ‘being there,’” he came to the conclusion that place, or its simulation, was not ultimately the point. As he put it, in terms that might give us pause: “Whoever controls representation, controls all.” My point here in bringing together these two very different reactions to the radical transformation brought about by cybernetics and computerization during this period in order to be able to speak to how “space matters” in my work is a very simple one. Both the Open Land communards and the 8 Walter Bender, ‘Computer Animation via Optical Video Disc’ (Master of Science, MIT, 1980), pp. 20 and 21, respectively. B Theory:

66

“Inhabiting Space”

Architecture Machine Group had recognized that architecture was a key site in which emergent forces governing the environment met the body and the psyche of the subject in a powerful manner. Both had recognized, that is, that while architecture certainly operated, in the first instance, in the visual realm, in the second instance it operated to manage the subject’s behavior in more complex and often less visible ways through regulating space and our encounter with it. Space matters, then, as the very matrix within which emergent forms of power and the dispositif to which they give rise are articulated and serve to structure the very interface of such encounters. Hence, space matters in turn as the site through which one might identify and critically interrogate such machinations as a first step towards tactically refusing architecture’s role in serving normative mandates.○

Semantics of Space

67

Thomas Macho

Pages 68 – 83

Hopper’s WindowS Where wall was window will come.1 In the search for a convincing image for the history of architecture, one might say that the longue durée of building and dwelling consists of the gradual transformation of walls into windows. At first walls predominated; windows, by contrast, were small and narrow. In Jericho the city walls were eight hundred meters long, crowned by a stone tower with a diameter and height of nine meters; in Catal Höyuk, the Anatolian settlement from the eight millennium before our era, the buildings were erected so close to each other that — without windows and doors — they could only be entered via skylights and ladders. Throughout ancient times windows were normally sharp-cornered or oval holes in the wall, covered with stretched hides, parchment, or linen; it was not until late antiquity that the difficult production of glass window panes was successful. This is why the Emperor Hadrian had the Pantheon erected — between 118 and 125 AD — without windows in the walls and just with an opening in the domed roof; almost two hundred years later windows increased the pleasures of bathing in the Baths of Diocletian.2 At that time, the architects could have no idea of the dramatic lighting later practiced in the Gothic cathedrals — or in the basilica of Santa Maria Degli Angeli E Dei Martiri, built by Michelangelo from 1560 in the ruins of the 1

2

See Sigmund Freud’s 1933 New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis (Lecture 31), where Freud sums up the goal of therapy with the evocative sentence: “Where id was, there shall ego be” (Wo Es war, soll Ich werden). See Helmuth Schneider, Geschichte der antiken Technik, pp. 62 – 63.

B Theory:

68

Hopper’s WindowS

old thermal structure. In 1700, a meridian was worked into the floor of this basilica, which served for examining the course of the sun — and checking the Gregorian calendar. Where wall were windows will come: this programmatic maxim accompanied modernism. Just five hundred years after Leon Battista Alberti proclaimed that a painted picture is an “open window” (aperta fenestra),3 and even before the world wars of the twentieth century turned many cities and buildings into rubble and ashes, in May 1914 Paul Scheerbart announced the revolution of glass architecture: “Most of the time we live in enclosed rooms. They form the milieu from which our culture grows. To some extent our culture is a product of our architecture. If we want to bring our culture up to a higher level, we are forced, like it or not, to transform our architecture. And this will only be possible if we take the enclosed quality away from the rooms we live in. But we can do that only by introducing glass architecture, which lets sunlight and the light of the moon and the stars into our rooms just through a few windows but indeed through as many walls as possible made of glass — of colored glass. The new milieu that we make for ourselves in that way must bring a new culture with it”: a culture that will even eliminate the word “window” from its dictionaries.4 By now, Scheerbart’s revolution has been largely completed: a triumph of windows over walls; since Romanticism at the latest, the window in the picture — quite apart from all theories of central perspective or sophisticated trompe-l’oeil techniques — has become one of the canonical motifs of painting.5 3 Cf. Leon Battista Alberti: De Pictura / Die Malkunst 19, in: De Statua / Das Standbild. De Pictura / Die Malkunst. Elementa Picturae / Grundlagen der Malerei, translated by Oskar Bätschmann and Christoph Schäublin [eds.] (Darmstadt: 2000), pp. 224 – 25. 4 Paul Scheerbart, Glasarchitektur (1914), edited by Mechthild Rausch (Berlin: 2000), pp. 13 and 61: ‘Das Wort Fenster wird auch im Lexikon verschwinden.’ Semantics of Space

69

Hopper’s WindowS

5

See, for example: Einblicke – Ausblicke. Fensterbilder von der Romantik bis Heute, exh. cat. (Recklinghausen: 1976); D’Un Espace À L’autre: La Fenetre. Oeuvres du XXe siécle, exh. cat. (Saint-Tropez: 1978); The Window in Twentieth-Century Art, exh. cat. (New York and Houston: 1986); Carla Gottlieb, The Window in Art. From The Window of God To The Vanity of Man. A Survey of Window Symbolism in Western Painting (New York: 1981).

I Display Windows There is hardly an object so frequently presented by Edward Hopper as the window: windows in a wide range of forms and variations, windows with and without people, windows from inside and outside, individual windows, house windows, windows in rows. He has not only painted the familiar motif of a woman waiting at a window— or other combinations of windows and figures— as some commentators have pointed out,6 but often pictures as well as windows that show nothing but themselves: display windows for display windows displaying their function, as it were. One example: Drug Store of 1927. What do we see? — In the first place signs, numbers and letters; a drugstore which — correctly — calls itself Pharmacy even though the title of the picture is Drug Store; an announcement promising prescriptions and drugs, and lastly an advertisement for a well-known laxative: Ex-Lax, a name that already seems to anticipate the drug’s effect. “When Hopper took the finished painting to his dealer, Frank Rehn, it bore the title Ex-Lax, the picture’s meaning presumably related to something inducing shit. Rehn’s wife complained though, and Rehn reminded Hopper that one of his watercolors had recently been returned 6 Cf. Stefan Rasche, Das Bild an der Schwelle. Motivische Studien zum Fenster in der Kunst nach1945 (Theorie der Gegenwartskunst, Vol 15) (Münster, Hamburg, London: 2003); pp. 77 – 79. B Theory:

70

Hopper’s WindowS

because the buyer’s wife disliked an outhouse he’d included. Valuing sales at this point more than themes, or smirks, Hopper renamed the painting Drug Store, and altered the sign from ExLax to Es-Lax. Within a month, the painting sold. Fortunately, thanks to its buyer’s insistence, Hopper restored the sign to its original form.” 7 Drug Store is a reminder of Hopper’s professional beginnings, of long hours of work as a commercial artist and illustrator; even in later years, the successful painter sometimes cited some brand names in his pictures — for example in The Circle Theatre (1936), Gas (1940), or El Palacio (1946). Advertising serves as mass communication; but Drug Store is one of the night pictures of Hopper that need no people. The scene looks so abandoned that it does not even occur to us to ask whether the pharmacy is open at night. Even so, Walter Wells, — referring to Drug Store — emphasized Hopper’s sense of humor, though without precisely explaining the joke which associates the display window and the oil painting, advertising and art, the aesthetic expression and the relief of constipation through laxatives. Quite early Hopper became acquainted with psychoanalysis, which is indicated by a pencil caricature of 1934 (Caricature of The Artist As A Boy Holding Books By Freud And Jung). “It bears remembering that Hopper admired both Jung and Freud, whose theories of dreams and the unconscious the read avidly (along with most of his intellectual generation, the abstract expressionists included).”8 Against this background, some of Hopper’s lighthouse pictures from the same years — Lighthouse Hill (1927) or Lighthouse At Two Lights (1929) — seem a little ambiguous, as if they were to comment on archetypical kinds 7 Walter Wells, Silent Theater: The Art of Edward Hopper (London and New York: 2007), p. 32. 8 Ibid., p. 17. Semantics of Space

71

Hopper’s WindowS

of relationships between men and women. Hopper married his wife Josephine — a painter — on 9th July,1924; she was soon to become the most important model in his pictures: the woman in the display window. While she looks out the window, the viewer looks into the interior of the picture; he sees the woman in the morning (Morning Sun, 1952), in sunlight (A Woman In The Sun, 1961), naked or skimpily clad, sitting on the bed, standing at the window (Morning In A City, 1944). Display windows are windows that seduce indiscreet looks: the look from the outside to the inside. Normally this look is blocked by curtains, blinds, or window shutters, as in Thomas Demand’s Fenster (1998) or Embassy I (2007): only the look from inside to the outside is permitted. Display windows, however, reverse the direction of the look; they function like theater or cinema, making the appearance of things and persons on the lit stage or the canvas possible. First, certainly, the curtain has to be raised; in most of Hopper’s theater and cinema pictures it is still down: for example in Two On The Aisle (1927), in First Row Orchestra (1951), and in Intermission (1963). The promise of a show, the invitation to a voyeuristic gaze, is restricted in time and can be reversed. This is also the message of display windows at night (such as Drug Store) or early in the morning: Seven A.M. (1948). Framed by the dark forest on the left side and a halfopen window on the right side, this display window revokes any intention to seduce. We do not see much: three bottles, a wall clock, two small pictures, a shelf on the left wall, the upper edge of a till. Neither sign nor flag betrays what is on offer here: “That dark, impenetrable wood is death’s harbinger.” 9

9 Ibid., p. 28. B Theory:

72

Hopper’s WindowS

II Windows as Media Where walls were windows will come. In alternation between the interior and exterior points of view, the windows function as media, which can be opened or shut, switched on or switched off. In that they resemble our eyes, which can be opened and shut, whether asleep or waking. Just born, the child opens its eyes, and the eyes of corpses are pressed shut. It is not by chance that Hopper painted so many morning and night pictures, fascinated by the subliminal transgression of sleeping, dreaming, waking; those moments when — according to Walter Benjamin — “things put on their true — surrealistic — expressions”10: When they are looked at, they look back; and a look out the window — for example in Morning Sun (1952) or Morning In A City (1944) — again strikes windows. “Windows are symbolic eyes: eyes looking outward from the confines of one’s own soul onto the larger world, or eyes into which light and truth from outside enter the mind and spirit within. (Window itself comes to us from the Old Norse vindauga, the ‘wind-eye.’) Hopper told Brian O’Doherty that he tried, as an artist, to see inside and outside simultaneously — and ‘that,’ he said, ‘needs a window.’”11 Windows are often symbolic eyes precisely when no gaze passes through them, when no-one is looking out the window. “No other look stands opposite mine apart from that of a right angled, bright emptiness on the horizon. A point of view which is not that of another person but of an impersonal arrangement, which the viewer himself turns into representation.”12 10 Walter Benjamin, Das Passagen-Werk. Gesammelte Schriften, vol. V.1, Rolf Tiedemann [ed.] (Frankfurt am Main: 1982), p. 579. 11 Wells, Silent Theater, p. 17. Hopper’s remark is cited from Brian O’Doherty, ‘Hopper’s Voice.’ in: American Masters: The Voice And Myth (New York: 1973), p. 26. Semantics of Space

73

Hopper’s WindowS

12 Norman Bryson, Die Logik des Blicks. Visualität und Bildlichkeit, translated by Heinz Jatho (Munich: 2001), p. 137.

The look at the Night Windows [fig.→](1928), behind which a woman in nightwear — with her back to the viewer — is performing some action, is answered only by the lit windows; this look at the windows (clearly through another invisible window), a look from inside and outside at the same time, almost reminds one of Alfred Hitchcock’s film version of a story by Cornell Woolrich: Rear Window (1954). At the center is a window: as medium. “The film scarcely permits one to doubt that the window is a self-reference on the screen. The film begins with a camera movement directly toward the window, stopping just over the window ledge, so that the central frame of the casement window literally covers the screen.”13 The window belongs to the apartment of the photo journalist with the plaster-cast leg played by James Stewart; his window forms the point of view, through which the cinema audience will also view the other windows on the yard. “I bet that nine people out of ten, when they see a woman at the window opposite who is preparing for bed and is getting undressed (…) cannot stop themselves from watching.”14 But the windows onto the yard are no longer cinema screens; they are already like TV screens, where various music programs, entertainments, and talk-shows are running at the same time. Hitchcock could sense the coming triumph of television; just under a year after Rear Window, the successful TV series Alfred Hitchcock Presents started, and in the following decade the director produced a total of 369 television films. 13 Bernhard Siegert, ‘Der Blick als Bild-Störung. Zwischen Mimesis und Mimikry,’ in: Claudia Blümle/Anne von der Heiden [eds.], Blickzähmung und Augentäuschung. Zu Jaques Lacans Bildtheorie (Zürich und Berlin: 2005), pp. 103 – 26; here cited from p. 104. B Theory:

74

Hopper’s WindowS

14

Francois Truffaut, Mr. Hitchcock, Wie haben Sie das gemacht? Translated by Frieda Grafe and Enno Patalas (Munich: 2002), p. 212.

Edward Hopper, Night Windows. 1928

Semantics of Space

75

Hopper’s WindowS

It is still a matter of debate whether Hitchcock was really inspired by Hopper’s House By The Railroad (1925) when he created the house of Norman Bates in Psycho (1960).15 Did Hopper, back in 1949, paint the murderous (Stairway) where Hitchcock has the private detective Arbogast fall to his death? Hopper’s cinematographic aesthetics, which make his pictures sometimes look like stills from films, frozen movements, or interrupted narratives, have often been admired. Windows are eyes; at the same time they are rectangular panel paintings, like the windows onto the yard. Psycho also begins with a tracking shot to a window, whose blinds repeat the abstract graphic of Saul Bass’s opening credits. In the room behind the halfclosed window, a pair of lovers is lying on the bed; the audience shares the voyeuristic gaze of the camera. Later, Norman Bates (Anthony Perkins) will watch through a small hole in the wall — camera obscura — as Marion Crane (Janet Leigh) undresses to take a shower; just before that we will see a painting next to the stuffed birds in the office: it shows Susanna And The Elders. The eye seeks the hole in the wall; but the window frames a picture, and in doing so suggests other pictures and media, mirrors or reflections. In Hopper’s Girl At Sewing Machine (1921), Eleven A.M. (1926), Hotel Window (1955), or A Woman In The Sun (1961) the pictures on the walls remain unnoticed by the pictured persons; even so they respond to the pictures that appear or disappear in the window frame — for example in Compartment C, Car 293 (1938).

15 Cf. Wells, Silent Theater, pp. 172 – 73, or Steven Jacobs, The Wrong House: The Architecture of Alfred Hitchcock (Rotterdam: 2007), p. 127. B Theory:

76

Hopper’s WindowS

III Waiting Hopper repeatedly re-surveyed the borderline between picture and film, stillness and motion — and in doing so had perhaps his most long-term effect on contemporary art. Using painterly techniques, he anticipated experiments that are today being developed in the works of such media artists as David Claerbout and Gustav Deutsch: for example in American Car (2004) or in Wednesday, 28 August 1957 (2007/08). In hints, quotes, and explicit reconstructions, the feature that characterizes some scenes in Hopper’s work — such as Four Lane Road (1956) or Western Motel (1957) — becomes visible: a horizontal dynamic, which breaks on the unmoving faces like waves on a coast of cliffs. While the filling-staton attendant with the cigar demonstratively ignores not only the woman in the background but also anyone who looks at the picture, the woman in the motel — strangely cramped — looks out at a possible public. “In the total composition, she looks like a portrait against a background that has frozen into the picture. But it is sufficiently remarkable that in this motel scene moments of rigidity are combined with moments of movement. It is true that its signs, car and street, are at first sight weakened in their dynamism by the motionless attitude of the woman at the picture’s focal point. But, in compensation, the light shining into the room enlivens its warm colors just as it lets the landscape outside the window freeze. While the interior of the room suggests movement, the view out onto the American landscape is transformed into a gaze at a stage set.”16

16 Rolf Günter Renner, Edward Hopper 1882 – 1967, Transformationen des Realen (Cologne: 2003), p. 46. Semantics of Space

77

Hopper’s WindowS

The great majority of Hopper’s figures seem to be waiting. They wait in train compartments, bars, cafeterias and restaurants, in frugally furnished rooms, in hotel rooms or in the lobby, in theaters and cinemas; they wait at transitional places or in their own homes, in offices or at filling stations, in bed or on the balcony. They wait for an arrival or a departure, for the beginning of a performance or — as in New York Movie (1939) — for its end; and they wait at doors and windows. Occasionally the waiting resembles a longing, such as when the open-hearted clothing of the women in Highnoon (1949), Summertime (1943), or South Carolina Morning (1955) seems to announce the openness of the doors behind them, or when the women — as in Morning In A City (1944) or Eleven A.M. (1926) — stand and sit undressed at the window. The atmosphere of waiting — this implicitly cinematographic effect — usually comes from the tension between movement and rest, the effort of the withstanding an undertow. This articulates, for example, the uncanny quality of the small lit filling station in Gas (1940). It betrays its real purpose, the imperative of mobility, the acceleration also represented by the winged red horse on the sign, the possibility of an interruption; of all things, the filling station overcomes the urgent desire to follow the road into the dark forest. “ It is almost unimaginable that a vehicle would find the way from this filling station back to the road, if only because the exit seems too narrow due to the mast and the high grass.”17 It is not by chance that the French verb poser (from Latin pausare) has undergone a remarkable change in meaning in modern times. Originally poser meant simply “pause, rest,” but later: “set down, put into a position.” The derived noun 17 Heinz Liesbrock, ‘Die Wahrheit des Lichts. Zum Werk Edward Hoppers,’ in: Edward Hopper, Die Meisterwerke (Munich: 2004), pp. 7 – 29; cited from p. 24. B Theory:

78

Hopper’s WindowS

pose “unnaturally artificial attitude, affected position” — shows clearly how the ideal of relaxation, of inner peace, has been charged with tensions of waiting. Pauses are changed into poses of waiting at the moment when — at the pictures’ vanishing and addiction points — it becomes perceptible that the waiting people are, in turn, longed and waited for; in a similar way, a look through a window can attract a look through another window. The concern with such interactions is exemplary in the portraits of male prostitutes which Philip-Lorca diCorcia photographed at the beginning of the nineties; for a fee — recored in the picture title — for the necessary time take, he persuaded young men to pose at previously selected places. In many cases, diCorcia used windows, behind which, for example, Eddie Anderson; 21 Years Old; Houston Texas; $ 20 (1990 – 92) or William Charles Everlove; 26 Years Old; Stockholm, Sweden,Via Arizona; $ 40 (1990 – 92) showed themselves without looking into the photographer’s camera. In this very absence they seem to be waiting; and in the same way, the enigmatic Brent Booth, 21 Years Old; Des Moines, Iowa; $ 30 (1990 – 92) waits next to the street, which, like the street in Hopper’s picture of the petrol filling station, is not and cannot be driven on.

IV Series of Windows, Pictures of Light Hopper’s windows design a choreography of time; they second a phenomenology of waiting, like that splendidly developed by Sergio Leone in Once Upon A Time In The West (1968), which shifted from the transformation of the cinematic frontier myth — of Go West — into the cinematographic myths of Hollywood, at the Pacific Coast, reached at last. Among the fascinating windows painted by Hopper there are, therefore, Semantics of Space

79

Hopper’s WindowS

the windows that — on the far side of person and media perspective- form a series, as if they wanted to simultaneously accelerate and slow down fictions movements of the observer. On Early Sunday Morning (1930) Mark Strand remarked: “The powerful horizontal thrust of curbstone, the dividing line between the ground floor and the first floor, and the edge of the roof give us the feeling that the street and the building continue far beyond the limits of the picture. How far they go is not important because we, as observers, set ourselves roughly in the center of the picture, somewhere between the fire hydrant and the hairdresser’s pole. We can be fairly sure that, even if the picture were to be extended, it would show us merely a continuation of the components we are already familiar with. There is no progress in the windows with raised and lowered blinds, neither in fact nor in suggestion, and no more in the entrances and shop fronts.”18 The series of pictures that fill in the three-part window of Room In Brooklyn (1932) could be described in a similar way, as could even the windows on the top floor of the House At Dusk (1935): while marching on, they stand still. To some extent these window series embody texts, a kind of semaphore or optical telegraphy, a code that is only waiting to be decoded. But what code? Hopper provides clear answers again and again in the titles of the pictures: Evening Wind, Night In The Park, Night Shadows, Sunday Eleven A.M.; Red Barn In Autumn Landscape, Night Windows, Early Sunday Morning, Cape Cod Sunset, House At Dusk, Cape Cod Afternoon, Five A.M., Nighthawks, Dawn In Pennsylvania, Summertime, Morning In A City, October On Cape Cod, Summer Evening, Seven A.M., Conference At Night, High Noon, Summer In The City, 18 Mark Strand, Über Gemälde von Edward Hopper, translated by Wiebke Meier (Munich: 2004), p. 33. B Theory:

80

Hopper’s WindowS

Cape Cod Morning, Morning Sun, South Carolina Morning, November  / Washington Square. All the tittles in this, no doubt, incomplete list name certain times: times of day (morning, midday, afternoon, dusk, evening, night), seasons of the year (summer, autumn), months (October, November), and even specific hours of the day (five a.m., seven a.m., eleven a.m.). Often the times are supplemented with references to the sun: sunrise, sunset, morning and evening sun. For Hopper, the painter, time is a matter of light: the windows are like pincers on a sun-dial. Like the meridian in the Roman basilica Santa Maria Degli Angeli E Dei Martiri, they announce the time of day and season of the year in terms of angles of light, which they permit and — through the various positions of the blinds, which are recorded in many pictures — regulate. Windows are optical media that function not only as eyes and picture surfaces, in an interaction with persons and buildings, but also as projectors of light. The best window portraits of Hopers show no people, buildings, or streets; they are pure images of light, photographs in a literal sense. Pictures like Rooms By The Sea (1951) or Sun In An Empty Room (1963) are, therefore, often interpreted as dark messages: “What we see is a wall with a window framing the lit leaves of a nearby tree, and a back wall, something conclusive, on which tow grave-like light parallelograms are standing. This picture, painted in 1963, is the last major painting of Hopper, the vision of a world without us, not just a place that shuts us out but a place that has been emptied of us. The light, in this case a pallid yellow against sepia walls, seems to initiate the last stages of his mortality; his own naked story is coming to an end.”19 The pathos is not justified; it transforms an aesthetic 19 Ibid, p. 96. Cf. a similar passage in: Renner, Edward Hopper 1982 – 1967, p. 77, or in: Wells, Silent Theater, pp. 186 – 87. Semantics of Space

81

Hopper’s WindowS

experiment into a philosophical attitude. It overlooks the fact that the two parallelograms of light are associated with each other; in fact, Hopper’s wife died only nine months after her husband. It overlooks the fact that the association of death and light also has positive connotations (or may have such connotations); it overlooks the fundamental metaphysics in Hopper’s work, which inspired Arnold Newman to make an impressive photographic portrait: Hopper sits in the foreground on a chair; behind him stands a house with a huge 36-part window, taking over almost the entire wall. On the right next to the house stands Hopper’s wife, with half-raised arms. Where there was wall window will come: openings, movements, contacts. Hopper’s polymorphous reception history contradicts the widespread impression of the great lonely figure. Some pictures have not only influenced particular films — such as Hitchcock’s Rear Window (1954) and Psycho (1960), Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (1982), and Wim Wender’s The Million Dollar Hotel (2000) — but have even provided a definition of entire genres. From this point of view, Nighthawks (1942) became a stylistic icon of film noir — and, by the way, one of the most popular pictures of the twentieth century; Dario Argento reconstructed the painting in a street scene in his thriller Profondo Rosso (1975). Hopper’s work has inspired photographs, projects in media art, room installations, sculptures, new aesthetic theories, literary texts like Peter Handke’s The Lesson of Mount Sainte-Victorie (1980), and musical compositions. A fascination for windows and their architecture of light can be demonstrated with a wide range of examples from contemporary art: from the video installations of Jonas Dahlberg to the oil and acrylic paintings of Tim Eitel. For example, Diskurs (2001) can be seen as a kind of response to Hopper’s Excursion Into Philosophy (1959); the radiant exit of a door or window is not noticed in the two pictures. Openings in the B Theory:

82

Hopper’s WindowS

wall and the interaction between interior and exterior are also operators in Untitled (Pink Room) by Rachel Khedoori and, for example, in the short films of Mark Lewis. — No window is closed.○ Originally published in Kunsthalle Wien and Gerald Matt, Western Motel. Edward Hopper and Contemporary Art, Nürnberg 2009, pp. 12 – 25.

Semantics of Space

83

Bruno Latour

Pages 84  – 95

Some Experiments in Art and Politics The word “network” has become a ubiquitous designation for technical infrastructures, social relations, geopolitics, mafias, and, of course, our new life online.1 But networks, in the way they are usually drawn, have the great visual defect of being “anemic” and “anorexic,” in the words of philosopher Peter Sloterdijk, who has devised a philosophy of spheres and envelopes.2 Unlike networks, spheres are not anemic, not just points and links, but complex ecosystems in which forms of life define their “immunity” by devising protective walls and inventing elaborate systems of air conditioning. Inside those artificial spheres of existence, through a process Sloterdijk calls “anthropotechnics,” humans are born and raised. The two concepts of networks and spheres are clearly in contradistinction to one another: while networks are good at describing long-distance and unexpected connections starting from local points, spheres are useful for describing local, fragile, and complex “atmospheric conditions” — another of Sloterdijk’s terms. Networks are good at stressing edges and movements; spheres at highlighting envelopes and wombs. 1 2

B Theory:

Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social. An Introduction to Actor-Network Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005). Peter Sloterdijk, Sphären III — Schäume (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2004) [partial translation: Peter Sloterdijk, Terror from the Air, trans. Amy Patton & Steve Corcoran (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2009)]; see also Peter Sloterdijk, ‘Foreword to the Theory of Spheres,’ in Cosmograms, Melik Ohanian and Jean-Christophe Royoux [ed.] (New York and Berlin: Lukas and Sternberg, 2005) pp. 223 – 241.

84

Some Experiments in Art and Politics

Of course, both notions are indispensable for registering the originality of what is called “globalization,” an empty term that is unable to define from which localities, and through which connections, the “global” is assumed to act. Most people who enjoy speaking of the “global world” live in narrow, provincial confines with few connections to other equally provincial abodes in far away places. Academia is one case. So is Wall Street. One thing is certain: the globalized world has no “globe” inside which it could reside. As for Gaia, the goddess of the Earth, we seem to have great difficulty housing her inside our global view, and even more difficulty housing ourselves inside her complex cybernetic feedbacks. It is the globe that is most absent in the era of globalization. Bad luck: when we had a globe during the classical age of discoveries and empire, there was no globalization; and now that we have to absorb truly global problems …

I Saraceno’s Galaxies Forming along Filaments So how can we have both networks and spheres? How do we avoid the pitfalls of a globalization that has no real globe in which to place everything? In a work presented at the Venice Biennale in 2009, Tomas Saraceno provided a great, and no doubt unintended, metaphor for social theory. In an entire room inside the Biennale’s main pavilion, Galaxies Forming along Filaments, Like Droplets along the Strands of a Spider’s Web (2008) consisted of carefully mounted elastic connectors that produced the shape of networks and spheres. If you were to avoid the guards’ attentive gaze and slightly shake the elastic connectors — strictly forbidden — your action would Semantics of Space

85

Some Experiments in Art and Politics

reverberate quickly through the links and points of the network paths, but much more slowly through the spheres. This is not to say that spheres are made from different stuff, as if we must choose between habitation and connection, between local and global, or indeed between Sloterdijk and, let’s say, actornetwork theory. What Saraceno’s work of art and engineering reveals is that multiplying the connections and assembling them closely enough will shift slowly from a network (which you can see through) to a sphere (difficult to see through). Beautifully simple and terribly efficient. We should have known this all along: a cloth is nothing but a finely-woven network, with a clear transition between one thread and the next, depending on the density of the stitching. By deploying this “obvious” truth within the main exhibition space of the Italian Pavilion, Saraceno performed precisely the task of philosophy according to Sloterdijk, namely of explicating the material and artificial conditions for existence. The task is not to overthrow but to make explicit. As Deleuze and Guattari have shown, a concept is always closely related to a percept.3 By modifying our percept, Galaxies Forming along Filaments allows those who try to re-describe the loose expression of globalization to explore new concepts. Instead of having to choose between networks and spheres, we can have our cake and eat it too. There is a principle of connection — a kind of movement overlooked by the concepts of networks and spheres alike — that is able to generate, in the hands of a clever artist, both networks and spheres; a certain topology of knots that may thread the two types of connectors in a seamless web. More interesting still is the theory of envelopes — the concept implied by this percept. In this proposition, walls or quasiwalls are supported by both external and lateral linkages. Again, we all know, or should know, that identities — the walls — are made possible only through the double movement of connecting B Theory:

86

Some Experiments in Art and Politics

distant anchors and stitching together local nodes. If you believe that there are independent bubbles and spheres that can sustain themselves, you are clearly forgetting the whole technology of envelopes. But it is one thing to say it, for instance in political philosophy—that no identity exists without relations with the rest of the world—and it is quite another to be reminded visually and experientially of the way this could be done. Standing in the middle of Saraceno’s work, the experience is inescapable: the very possibility of having an envelope around a local habitat is given by the length, number, and solidity of the connectors that radiate out in all directions. I would have loved to see, when the exhibition was dismantled, how quickly the spherical patterns would have collapsed once a few of their outside links had been severed. A powerful lesson for ecology as well as for politics: the search for identity “inside” is directly linked to the quality of the “outside” connection — a useful reminder at a time when so many groups clamor for a solid identity that would “resist globalization,” as they say. As if being local and having an identity could possibly be severed from alterity and connection. Another remarkable feature of Saraceno’s work is that such a visual experience is not situated in any fixed ontological domain, nor at any given scale: you can take it, as I do, as a model for social theory, but you could just as well see it as a biological interpretation of the threads that hold the walls and components of a cell, or, more literally, as the weaving of some monstrously big spider, or the utopian projection of galactic cities in 3D virtual space. This is very important if you consider that all sorts of disciplines are now trying to cross the old boundary that 3 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, What Is Philosophy?, translated by Janis Tomlinson and Graham Burchell III (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996). Semantics of Space

87

Some Experiments in Art and Politics

has, until now, distinguished the common destiny of increasing numbers of humans and non-humans. No visual representation of humans as such, separated from the rest of their support systems, makes any sense today. This was the primary motive for Sloterdijk’s notion of spheres, as well as for the development of actor-network theory; in both cases the idea was to simultaneously modify the scale and the range of phenomena to be represented so as to renew what was so badly packaged in the old nature / society divide. If we have to be connected with climate, bacteria, atoms, and DNA, it would be great to learn about how those connections could be represented. The other remarkable feature of the work is that although there are many local orderings—including spheres within spheres—there is no attempt at nesting all relations within one hierarchical order. There are many local hierarchies, but they are linked into what appears visually as a heterarchy. Local nesting, yes; global hierarchy, no. For me, this is a potent attempt at shaping today’s political ecology — by extending former natural forces to address the human political problem of forming livable communities. Too often, when ecologists — whether scientists or activists — appeal to nature, they speak as if it were the big global container inside which all other entities are arrayed in order of importance, from, let’s say, the climate system to the earthworms and the bacteria, while humans meanwhile are situated somewhat in between. This gives a youthful image to the old image of the scala naturae, the great chain of being from the Renaissance. But this is not the representation that Saraceno explores, as there is no overall container to his work. (Well, there is one, obviously, but it is only the physical quadrilateral of the Italian Pavilion’s great hall. If you speak metaphorically, and to borrow another metaphor from Sloterdijk, this container must necessarily be the Crystal Palace of the international art market in B Theory:

88

Some Experiments in Art and Politics

which the artist’s creation is “embedded.”) In his work, every container or sphere is either inside another local one or “inside” the network of outside connections. But that’s the point: networks have no inside, only radiating connectors. They are all edges. They provide connections but no structure. One does not reside in a network, but rather moves to other points through the edges. To think in these terms is to find a way to avoid modernism —in which case the hierarchy moves from bigger to smaller elements from a central point — but to also avoid, if I dare say, postmodernism — in which case there would be no local hierarchies and no homogeneous principle by which to establish the connections (in this case the elastic tensors that provide the language for the whole piece). For me, that is the beauty of Saraceno’s work: it gives a sense of order, legibility, precision, and elegant engineering, and yet has no hierarchical structure. It is as if there were a vague possibility of retaining modernism’s feeling of clarity and order, but freed from its ancient connection with hierarchy and verticality.

II Who Owns Space and Time? To explore the artistic, philosophical, and political questions raised by Saraceno’s work, it might be useful to turn to another locus classicus — not the sphere versus network debate, but the debate over who owns the space in which we live collectively. There is no better way to frame this question than the bungled dialog (well, not really a “dialogue,” but that’s the point) between Henri Bergson and Albert Einstein in Paris in 1922. Bergson had carefully studied Einstein’s theory of relativity and wrote a thick book about it, but Einstein had Semantics of Space

89

Some Experiments in Art and Politics

only a few dismissive comments about Bergson’s argument.4 After Bergson spoke for thirty minutes, Einstein made a terse two-minute remark, ending with this damning sentence: “Hence there is no philosopher’s time; there is only a psychological time different from the time of the physicist.” While Bergson had argued that his notion of space and time had a cosmological import that was to be carefully meshed within Einstein’s remarkable discoveries, Einstein argued that there was only one time and space — that of physics—and that what Bergson was after was nothing more than subjective time — that of psychology. We recognize here the classical way for scientists to deal with philosophy, politics, and art: “What you say might be nice and interesting but it has no cosmological relevance because it only deals with the subjective elements, the lived world, not the real world.” The funny thing is that everyone — including, in a way, Bergson — was convinced that he had lost, and that indeed the whole question was another episode in the gigantomachy of objective reality versus subjective illusion. To the scientists, the cosmos, and to the rest of us, the phenomenology of human intentionality. So the answer to the question “Which space do we live in?” is clearly: we live in a subjective world with no reality for physics. Einstein: winner. But this was the beginning of the twentieth century. Can we do better at the beginning of the twenty-first century? In other words, is it possible to give Bergson another chance to make his case that, no, he is not talking about subjective time and space, but is rather proposing an alternative to Einstein’s cosmology? To explore such a possibility, I decided to rely on the fascinating genre of the reenactment. As many artists have shown, especially Rod Dickinson in the amazing staging of 4 Henri Bergson, Durée et simultanéité. À propos de la théorie d’Einstein (Paris: PUF, 2009). B Theory:

90

Some Experiments in Art and Politics

Milgram’s experiment, reenactment is not a mere facsimile of the original but a second version, or a second print of the first instance, allowing for the exploration of its originality. This is why, in a series of lectures at the Pompidou Center in June 2010, I invited, among many others, the artist Olafur Eliasson and two scholars, a historian of science, Jimena Canales, and a philosopher, Elie During, to reenact the famous debate by allowing the conclusion to shift somewhat, thus reopening a possibility that had been closed in the twentieth century.5 Who owns the concepts of space and time? Artists? Philosophers? Scientists? Do we live in the space-time of Einstein without realizing it, or, as Bergson vainly argued, does Einstein, the physicist, live in the time of what Bergson called duration? Those questions, it seemed to me, were just as important for physicists, historians, and philosophers as they are for an artist like Eliasson, who has populated museums and cities around the world by publicly demonstrating, through many artful connections between science, technology, and ecology, that there are many alternatives to the visual experience of common sense. The art form — or forum — that I chose consisted of asking the three of them to conjoin their forces in presenting films and photographs to set the stage for this famous debate, with Eliasson “refereeing” the debate through his own work.6   It may seem silly to ask an artist to adjudicate a debate between a philosopher and a physicist — especially a debate whose pecking order had been historically settled once and for all: the physicist speaks of the real world, and the philosopher Jimena Canales, A Tenth of a Second: A History (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2009). 6 This reenactment was pursued in February 2011 at Eliasson’s Institut für Raumexperimente in Berlin and is still in progress. 5

Semantics of Space

91

Some Experiments in Art and Politics

“does not understand physics;” the artist is irrelevant here. But that was precisely the point, a point shared by Saraceno’s heterarchy: that it is now possible to complicate the hierarchy of voices and make the conversation between disciplines move ahead in a way that is more representative of the twenty-first century than of the twentieth. No discipline is the final arbiter of any other. That is exactly what Elie During did in a brilliant piece of philosophical fiction in which he entirely rewrote the 1922 dialogue as if Einstein had actually paid attention to what Bergson had told him. In the end, Zweistein — that is, the Einstein of 2010 — was not, of course, convinced (that would have been a falsification, and no longer a fiction), but he had to admit that there might be more philosophy in his physics than he had claimed in 1922. Where Einstein had won, Zweistein had to settle for a draw.7 So now we have a more balanced situation: the space and time in which we live — experientially, phenomenologically — might not be a mere mistake of our subjective self, but might have some relevance for what the world is really like. Instead of accepting the divide between physics and philosophy, this reenactment was a means of answering Alfred North Whitehead’s famous question: “When red is found in nature, what else is found there also?” 8 Likewise, is it possible to imagine a world where scientific knowledge is able to add to the world instead of dismissing the experience of being in the world?

7 8

Elie During, Bergson et Einstein: la querelle du temps (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2011). Alfred North Whitehead, Concept of Nature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1920).

B Theory:

92

Some Experiments in Art and Politics

III Composition? One could object that such a reenactment, no matter how intriguing in its own right, does not have much to do with politics. The question has been asked many times by the public, especially when, during one of the keynote lectures I had organized to launch a new master’s program in arts and politics, I invited Donna Haraway and Isabelle Stengers to present their understanding of “the political arts.” To the total dismay of many politically-minded French citizens, Haraway spoke mainly about learning how to behave politically anew from her dog.9 “From her dog! What does this have to do with politics? Tell us more about domination, inequalities, power struggles, elections, and revolutions.” And yet, as Isabelle Stengers quietly but forcefully explained, the new vocabulary of politics — what, for this reason, she calls “cosmopolitics” — will come precisely from a new attention to other species and other types of agencies.10 Here again, art, philosophy, ecology, activism, and politics exchanged their repertoire in order to redefine the actors, the aims, the forums, and the emotions of political involvement. I have come to use the word “composition” to regroup in one term those many bubbles, spheres, networks, and snippets of arts and science.11 This concept plays the same role as Saraceno’s percept of elastic tensors. It allows us to move from

See Donna J. Haraway, When Species Meet (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 2007). 10 Isabelle Stengers, Cosmopolitics I, translated by Robert Bononno (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010). 11 Bruno Latour, ‘Steps Toward the Writing of a Compositionist Manifesto,’ New Literary History no. 41 (2010): pp. 471 – 490. 9

Semantics of Space

93

Some Experiments in Art and Politics

spheres to networks with enough of a common vocabulary, but without a settled hierarchy. It is my solution to the modern/postmodern divide. Composition may become a plausible alternative to modernization. What can no longer be modernized, what has been postmodernized to bits and pieces, can still be composed.○ Some Experiments in Art and Politics was first published in e-flux journal issue #23, March, 2011.

→p. 95 Tomas Saraceno, Galaxies Forming along Filaments, like Droplets along the Strands of a Spider’s Web, Installation view, 53. Biennale di Venezia, Italian Pavillion, Venice, Italy, 2009 B Theory:

94

Some Experiments in Art and Politics

Practice Performance of Space

C Section

Pages 97 – 145

With an overall attentiveness towards the complex relationships of context and site, Performance of Space brings together examples that illustrate the performative and transformational power of spatial interventions in the urban realm.

Performance of Space

97

Marjetica Potr

Pages 98  – 106

A Vision of the Future City and the Artist’s Role as Mediator: Learning from Projects in Caracas and Amsterdam How Two Places in Crisis Envision the Future City What does an ecologically safe dry toilet in Caracas’s informal city have in common with a community garden in an immigrant neighborhood in Amsterdam? Both are community-based projects characterized by participatory design and a concern for sustainability (Dry Toilet, Caracas, 2003, and The Cook, the Farmer, His Wife and Their Neighbor, Amsterdam, 2009). But what is more important, they represent a vision of the future city that is shared, perhaps surprisingly, by the very different communities who collaborated in these projects. What else do they have in common? The informal city of Caracas and the modernist neighborhood in Amsterdam are both considered to be places in crises. What will the future city look like, in their vision? It will be a city of strong, small neighborhoods, not a metropolis. Here, shared space — community space — is more important than public space. The emphasis is on collectivity and a new culture of living, as well as the preservation and protection of the local culture and the local knowledge. Cities are redefined into smaller sustainable territories organized on the local level. C Practice:

98

A Vision of the Future City and the Artist’s Role as Mediator …

Dry Toilet, 2003, building materials and sanitation infrastructure. La Fila, La Vega barrio, Caracas. Supported by La Vega community, Caracas; Caracas Case Project and Federal Cultural Foundation of Germany; Ministry of Environment, Venezuela Photography by Andre Cypriano. Courtesy of Liyat Esakov and Marjetica Potr

The dry toilet project was the result of a six-month stay in Caracas, during which time Liyat Esakov and I researched the informal city under the auspices of the Caracas Case Project. A dry, ecologically safe toilet was built on the upper part of La Vega barrio, a district in the city without access to the municipal water grid. The project attempts to rethink the relationship between infrastructure and architecture in real-life urban practice in a city where about half the population receives water from municipal authorities no more than two days a week

New allegiances are forged as local communities connect with the world and with each other on their own terms. In an age of local collaborations, sharing ideas and practices with the world is essential. Today, after the financial crisis of 2008 and the Occupy movements of 2011, this vision matters more than ever. In 2007, I saw the exhibition Design for the Other 90 % at the CooperHewitt National Design Museum in New York. The cover of the catalogue showed an African woman drinking from a puddle of muddy water using specially designed filter that looked like a simple straw. The title of the exhibition implied that I, as a visitor to the show, was part of the 10 percent. I was reminded of this last year when I came across a photo of an Occupy Wall Street protester holding a poster saying “We are the 99 %.” And I was surprised at how rapidly our sense of which world we belong to had changed — in only four years. Performance of Space

99

A Vision of the Future City and the Artist’s Role as Mediator …

That said, I believe that people who live in stressed conditions can develop the tools they need for transforming their communities and their environment for the better. By doing so, places of crisis become places of hope. For me, the communities I worked with in Caracas and in Amsterdam are just that. They articulate a new culture of living that other communities, in seemingly more stable environments, can learn from in the search for a sustainable existence.

The Local, the Small, the Independent Is this vision merely a utopia, or is it a credible reality for the future? And if it is a credible reality, then it is possible to transform society from below. What role do politicians play? Today, even the current right-of-center British government is talking about “a ground-breaking shift in power to councils and communities” — a phrase you might sooner expect to hear from Hugo Chavez. But beyond making such strange bedfellows, this enthusiasm for the local pushes us to redefine the meaning of such terms as “social innovation” and “sustainability,” which have been clouded by the neoliberal discourse and hijacked by neoliberal practices that cater to a vanishing middle class. With the lost promises of modernism, the hopeful equalizer, the focus now shifts to the local, the small, and the independent. We see this in the European Union with the decline of the social state and the decentralizing of the nation state. At the same time, the world is experiencing a backlash against globalization and looking for solutions to the questions posed by climate change. It is in this context that we need to understand the potential of small-scale territories (the local) and social architecture (communities). C Practice:

100

A Vision of the Future City and the Artist’s Role as Mediator …

What does self-sustainability mean after the disintegration of twentieth-century modernism? What does it mean to live “off the grid”? How much can individuals contribute to the world by doing just that — by following local sustainable principles, or attempting to live a self-sustainable existence? The construction of the world from below, from the bottom up, must be seen as a viable, even crucial, paradigm that contributes to our knowledge in essential ways. In fact, we are already living with this paradigm, as witnessed in numerous examples like the Transition Towns movement [www.transitionnetwork.org]. We need to learn from community-based projects and be inspired by them; they are a vital laboratory of human coexistence.

Rural vs. Urban Culture, Community Space vs. Public Space It is often said that Caracas is, in fact, two cities in mutual conflict: the formal city and the informal city — modernist Caracas in the valley and the barrios that dominate the surrounding hills. Beyond the topographical differences and different architectures, the roots of their conflict are found in their different cultures: one urban, the other rural. In other words, if we ask the question, “Which comes first, culture or architecture?”— the answer must be: culture. The urban culture of Caracas has produced a modernist architecture, which celebrates the public space. The rural culture has produced a barrio architecture, where community space prevails. While the people who live in the barrios are in fact the same people whose labor built the formal city of Caracas—and so are well acquainted with the urban culture—they have insisted on constructing their neighborhoods Performance of Space

101

A Vision of the Future City and the Artist’s Role as Mediator …

in their own way. Their rural culture consists of small-scale, self-built neighborhoods, which form village-like communities. The barrio residents prefer to live in a city of communities and not in the modernist city of individualism. When I lived in Caracas in 2003, I encountered many prejudices against the informal city, including the notion that barrios are chaotic, unmanageable structures. But what I saw was that barrios are in fact highly regulated structures, only the regulations are oral ones, negotiated through discussion, while the formal city is guided by written regulations. I also saw libraries and hospitals in the barrios, only it is not possible to tell what they are from the fronts of the buildings; typically a doctor’s office was located in someone’s home. Perhaps the most striking thing I experienced was the lack of any permanent public space. The alleys we walked through were a temporary shared space and the control over them could change unexpectedly. Over the decades when the modern city was being built in Caracas, the rural culture of the Caracas barrios endured and proved resilient to changes and shocks from the outside. This rural culture is also resistant to the neighboring urban culture. Unlike the experience of the Caracas barrios, where the rural culture was not essentially about cultivation of food crops — although on my visit there in 2003, I saw the timid beginnings of an urban agriculture — in the on-site participatory project The Cook, the Farmer, His Wife and Their Neighbor the rural culture begins with food. In the New West district of Amsterdam, where I collaborated with the Dutch collective Wilde Westen, the rural culture in the middle of this modernist district was celebrated in a community garden and community kitchen. Although the garden abounded with fresh vegetables, which became part of the meals prepared by the gardeners, the real value of the community garden was symbolic. C Practice:

102

A Vision of the Future City and the Artist’s Role as Mediator …

Ritual and Place-Making One of most striking things I learned from The Cook, the Farmer, His Wife and Their Neighbor was the importance of ritual for the community that cared for the garden. Their community functioned as an organism: they worked on the land together, and working together became a ritual, a rite of transition, through which they were intuitively reclaiming their community, their neighborhood, and their city. They worked on the land not only to grow food for themselves, but also to “ground” themselves; they had been living in a state of continual migration —  first migrating from their native countries and then being forced by redevelopment to move again. Many of the residents came from a rural background and were familiar with vegetable gardening, and they also valued community and sharing. The two community spaces — the garden and the kitchen — fulfilled their desire for a shared space. In fact, the success of both spaces and the vibrant activities associated with them exposed the emptiness of the public space in the neighborhood. This public space was clearly not performing the task it was intended for, while these new community spaces were operating very well. Becoming engaged in the creation of a shared space was, for the residents of the neighborhood, an act of place-making. Discussions about the role of space in cities — in general and with regard to public space in particular— can easily turn into abstract debates, so it was refreshing to be reminded how crucial place-making is for any group that seeks to be recognized in the larger society. Space matters. The placemaking of the community that formed around our garden was, in fact, an assertion of their determination to participate in the city — to be included.

Performance of Space

103

A Vision of the Future City and the Artist’s Role as Mediator …

The Cook, the Farmer, His Wife and Their Neighbour, 2009, building materials, energy infrastructure, vegetable garden. Stedelijk Goes West, Nieuw West, Amsterdam. Project by Marjetica Potr and Wilde Westen (Lucia Babina, Reinder Bakker, Hester van Dijk, Sylvain Hartenberg, Merijn Oudenampsen, Eva Pfannes, Henriette Waal). Supported by the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam; Far West, Amsterdam; The Netherlands Architectural Fund, Rotterdam Photography by Henriette Waal and Lucia Babina. Courtesy of the artist and Wilde Westen

The project is a community garden and community kitchen in the Nieuw West district of Amsterdam. A previously unused site at Lodewijk van Deysselstraat 61 becomes a community kitchen. The vegetable garden is located behind the kitchen in a former fenced-off ‘look-only garden’ (kijkgroen). The garden and the kitchen create bonds within the neighbourhood and become a catalyst for transforming not only the public space but also the community itself. The project is an example of ‘redirective practice,’ with people from various disciplines and backgrounds working together to find new ways to build a shared community. The project is a case study for redesigning the modernist neighbourhood from below and redefining rural and urban coexistence

A Vision of the Future City Both the ritual of working on the land and place-making point to the city as an intuitive, unplanned organism. Through their involvement with the garden and the kitchen the residents of New West began the process of making the city they lived in their own. They began to re-imagine the city from below by practicing self-organization. In my view, the unprecedented success of community gardens in both Europe and North America points to the desire of local residents to rebuild their cities from the bottom up. This new sense of ownership of the space combined with an emphasis on community values rather than every-man-forhimself individualism became the basis for the residents’ vision of the kind of city they desired: a city of villages where community space is more important than public space. In this sense, their vision matches the culture of living in the Caracas barrios. Both groups celebrate community space and both use rural C Practice:

104

A Vision of the Future City and the Artist’s Role as Mediator …

culture to build their desired environment. Rural culture was pushed to the side in the twentieth century’s emphasis on urban culture and the city. Is it possible that today the rural condition is a catalyst of change for societies in transition?

The Relational Object For residents, the dry toilet in Caracas and the community garden in Amsterdam were relational objects; each was a catalyst of change not only for their neighborhood, but also for the city. We know that if you want to bring change to society, it is not enough to talk. The relational object is what matters.

The Artist as Mediator Dry Toilet and The Cook, the Farmer, His Wife and Their Neighbor were successful projects because they were collaborations between many individuals who came together from different disciplines and backgrounds. A diversity of knowledge is crucial in “redirective practice” — a collective action that demonstrates the process of cultural remaking. Today, there are many reasons why the sharing of knowledge is necessary, but perhaps the most important is that, still haunted by the lost promises of modernism, we feel that the world must be reconstructed. The success of participatory projects is a frank acknowledgment that we live in cities in transition, where the culture of living is being re-defined. Artists have an important role to play in this process. They can bring an “outside the box” perspective to communities under stress. Working in collaboration with residents, they Performance of Space

105

A Vision of the Future City and the Artist’s Role as Mediator …

help to envision and realize a project that will serve as a catalyst of change. The artist’s role and the meaning of art changes as the culture changes. Art is a living practice. In contrast to the object sculptures that were erected in modernist public spaces in the second half of the 20th century, the community garden of The Cook, the Farmer, His Wife and Their Neighbor developed in a shared community space. Here again, if we ask, “Which comes first, culture or art?” — the answer must be: culture. When the culture changes, so does art. Today, when I speak about my on-site projects, I describe myself as an “artist-mediator” who views art as “a medium of expression where the individual and culture come together.” In other words, in my work, art’s role is to mediate and help envision a project that articulates a new culture of living. Speaking generally, art mediates our relationship with the world. More specifically, it can mediate the relationship between the residents of a neighborhood and the city they live in — I am not talking only about mediation between, for example, residents and local authorities, but also mediation between residents and the envisioned city that reflects their culture. In this light, the dry toilet in Caracas and the community garden in Amsterdam are both relational objects that can by used by the people in these communities as tools for changing their culture of living. By reaching out to a community in a shared endeavor, the artist and art become engaged in social processes that aspire to transform society from below. Along the way, the artist loses the aura of individual authorship and art loses its objectness.○ Project by Marjetica Potr and Wilde Westen (Lucia Babina, Reinder Bakker, Hester van Dijk, Sylvain Hartenberg, Merijn Oudenampsen, Eva Pfannes, Henriette Waal) →p. 107 Dry Toilet, 2003, building materials and sanitation infrastructure. La Fila, La Vega barrio, Caracas. Supported by La Vega community, Caracas; Caracas Case Project and Federal Cultural Foundation of Germany; Ministry of Environment, Venezuela Photography by Andre Cypriano. Courtesy of Liyat Esakov and Marjetica Potr

C Practice:

106

AVisionofthe A Future Vision City of and the theArtist’s Future Role City asMedia andtor: the Learning Artist’s from Role Projects as in Mediator Caracasand … Amsterdam

Performance of Space

107

Michael Obrist / feld72

Pages 108  – 119

Trojan Horses and other social animals In 2007 Gilberto Kassab with one law changed the perception of the public space and the possibilities of architecture in a city of 11 million people (20 millions in the greater metropolitan area). The Mayor of São Paulo with the “Lei Cidade Limpa” (The law for the clean city) re-defined the rule of advertisement in public space, and in fact he banned it. Empty billboards have become the fragile remains of a formerly overexposed city, but it is in the night, when the main difference between the present and the past is evident: No memories of Time-Square, no global competition against Tokyo’s Ginza, no evocation of Bladerunner. A city where light has just been reduced again to illuminate, and not to communicate. A city full of beauty farms and cosmetic surgery, but no billboard with seduction through advertisement of the perfect female body in public space anymore. As director (and educated architect) Fernando Meirelles (“City of God”) stated, for the first time he can “see” the city without having to “read” it continuously. As our perception is focused on recognising those things that are new and “added” to our visual field faster than those that are removed, it becomes a surreal experience going through São Paulo at night. A city-walk with phantom pains. The biggest urban agglomeration of South-America has become one of Italo Calvinos “Invisible Cities,” where one defining and C Practice:

108

Trojan Horses and other social animals

exaggerated element creates a specific city. São Paulo’s naked architecture.

Architettura é (soltanto) architettura, Aldo Rossi? It were billboards and sign system that created a new impulse to architectural theory, when Venturi, Scott Brown, and Izenour in 1979 “learned from Las Vegas,” and it was just a little law in 2007, that made the “decorated shed” impossible in the most prestigious Brazilian urban area of 1500 km2.

Informal advertising in São Paulo, Brasil, 2007 Photography by “feld72. Urbanism – for sale”

Space matters But some parts of the advertisement industry tried to find alternative ways: An informal system has emerged, people hired for “carrying” advertisement on movable signboards and even on their clothes are popping out on different part of the streets, flexible enough to react on police presence and on customer’s Performance of Space

109

Trojan Horses and other social animals

behaviour. The informal and the illegal formed a strong alliance. It’s the body that now becomes the last frontier, the remaining moving spatial element for advertisement free of restrictions. When feld72 was invited by curator Lilli Hollein as the Austrian contribution to the São Paulo Biennial in 2007, it were exactly those mechanism that intrigued us and that we reflected with our installation and intervention on site. It is the relation of space and our contemporary society and those shifting borders between architecture, urbanism, art, and other disciplines that interest us and define our practice. To react on the complexity of our world, we have to redefine the “arsenal of architecture” and to enrich it with new tools, strategies and tactics. The “urban agglomeration” that could once been easily called the “city” still is the most complex social, cultural and technological artefact mankind has invented. Today the dynamics of the development of our build environment and the new technologies of zenithal perception like satellites has brought us an epistemological dilemma. The more we see from above, the less we seem to understand. In the manifestation of the chaos of late 20th century urbanism like in the Rorschach inkblot test we think to recognize forms, but they tell us more about ourselves and our starting points of perception than about the object of our perception. Territories of amnesia, schizophrenic landscapes, hysteric cities. All in search for a definition of their new identity. In this past century of fastest acceleration of mankind, the world has changed, even there where its form seems to have remained.1 To understand the transformation of software in our build hardware, we have to go deeper, amplifying our methods, trying to understand “context” in the broadest of its sense. We have 1

Michael Obrist in ‘Von göttlichen Augen und menschlichem Irren. Raumphänomene in Zeiten von Google Earth’.

C Practice:

110

Trojan Horses and other social animals

feld72: PublicKaraoke, one of the PublicTrailers in Shenzhen, China, 2009 Photography by feld72

to immerge in the labyrinth of the daily (urban) life, without being deluded by the tricks of Daedalus, as Michel de Certeau reminds us in “The Practice of Everyday Life.” Space is not a neutral box. Space is the result of social relations and cultural techniques. Without knowing the different codes and rituals of the different societies we are operating with, we will be always “lost in translation.” If modernism called for a design from “the spoon to the city,” we now might ask ourselves, if we don’t need to expand this line on both ends to respond in an appropriate way to the complexity of contemporary social space. “The study of the established body of knowledge of various disciplines is paired up with a “theory through praxis,” whereby the experiment seems to be the only possible way to respond to the new conditions of contemporary space, because there are no “users’ manuals” around to follow. A new discourse Performance of Space

111

Trojan Horses and other social animals

is formed on the edges of the disciplines, the emergence of a new practice, which is grounded not only in the broad tradition of knowledge of classical architecture schools, but is amplified with the experience of different cultural strategies and tactics of our urban culture (from Dadaism to Situationism, from Punk, DIY, and Hacking to participation methods and Cultural Jamming, just to name one line of thought) as well as with the experiments of the “prophets in the desert,” the thinkers and protagonists of the Californian counterculture, and their focus on tools.”2 [→ 1] In the foreword of Steward Brand for the Whole Earth Catalogue in 1969, which he founded inspired by the ideas of Buckminster Fuller, lies a whole program of what design could be about: His intent was to provide “access to tools” so that every reader could “find his own inspiration, shape his own environment, and share his adventure with whoever is interested”. It was a search for new urban tools for specific contexts that was at the beginning of some of our projects: The FILEkit©, a survival kit for traffic jams, which should enable the traffic jam victims to understand and use the possibilities of that specific temporary public space, by giving them small tools which could make the distinction between indifference or acting and communicating. The PublicTrailers©, an armada of specific bicycle trailers developed for the public space of such diverse cities as Shenzhen, London, and Milan, are based on the idea of offering mobile units with different functions for public space, which alone or in combination could form new situations and possibilities within a city. Tools, flexible enough to be used in different ways, creating an informal system able to react on the temporary needs of some areas. Toronto Barbecue, a 2-week-Intervention based on a temporary “Schrebergarten” (allotment garden) at the forecourt of the Museums Area of Vienna, was offering a variety of tools to C Practice:

112

Trojan Horses and other social animals

create settings and situations free for everybody to join us. A informal happening based on the idea of increasing possibilities in public space and exploring a unused area in the middle of a city by offering new ways of using and sharing space. All of this tools were based on the idea of community building, of shifting perception, recreating communication and experience in areas where this elements have gone lost or new potentials were yet undiscovered. They were conceptually conceived as “platforms” and open structures on which the users could build up and find their own way of interpretation — not a linear time setting for a performance, but the construction of a common ground based on increasing possibilities and an ontology of coincidences. Opening up choices. Creating responsibility. “Only those questions that are in principle undecidable, we can decide.” [Heinz von Foerster] These urban strategies are based on the idea, that in most complex systems there is a specific spot where with a minimum of amount of forces and material you can convert the whole system or change its direction. Bucky’s Trimtab. As the architectural theoretician Kari Jormakka stated, “the architects of feld72 do not approach architecture in terms of established categories of function, form or kind, but rather ask what the city is capable of. (…) while it is certainly possible to appreciate architecture as one of the visual arts, or even study buildings semiotically as systems of signs, the interest in the work of feld72 lies elsewhere. In their performative design the focus is on how the build environment contributes to the construction of a life-world, i.e. how architecture partakes in the constitution and perpetuation of quotidian social relations through the interaction of the body with a structured environment.” 3 Performance of Space

113

Trojan Horses and other social animals

3,4 Kari Jormakka in ‘Theory and design in the Fourth Machine Age. On the experimental projects by feld72,’ published in ‘feld72. urbanism – for sale.’ [Edited by Lilli Hollein] (Vienna, New York: 2007).

feld72:Housing Settlement with participatory process, Caldaro, Italy, 2011 Photography by Hertha Hurnaus

Buildings as performative instruments and generators of social space. Trojan Horses with inherent additional programs and platforms for possibilities, that can surprise the users, let them re-discover the adventure and poetry in the everyday. For the village square in Paasdorf, a little village in Lower Austria, feld72 developed a hybrid little building: a “pimped up” bus-stop that parallel to his function as bus-stop through his design has become a landmark, an information compass for the surrounding land art / public art projects, a stage for the “everyday” and special events with an accessible roof that can become lounge, DJ’s pulpit, speaker’s corner, and openair gallery … The transformation of the village square throughout a system of parking lots, that have an additional function, C Practice:

114

Trojan Horses and other social animals

creates responsibility: every citizen decides if the space he uses becomes just a parking place or remains public in its best ways. The idea of building as social incubator and as a stage for public life is evident also in the Festival Centre for the Art festival “Steirischer Herbst” in Graz, a temporary building just made of material which was hired for the time of the festival: 2000 recyclable Euro pallets — a cheap, standardized mass product developed for smooth movement of goods for our global economy — were masterfully stacked up to create an annex, that transforms the existing building into a hybrid with unsuspected new possibilities and works as coffee-house, club, lounge, information desk, and ticket office, academy, casino, stage, concert hall, in short: as a new agora in town. Can we build and program Heterotopias, Temporary Autonomous Zones or other specific territories, where the social space is crystallized in another way — opening up for experiences of freedom, experimentation and communication, and thus to discovery and education? In “The Zone,” the winning entry for the competition for the subsequent use of a former NATO-Areal in South-Tyrol in Northern Italy, feld72 developed the idea of an enclosed area, that paradoxically generates freedom in its inside. The former military area is transformed slowly in a field of cultural experiment and social and spatial research. A process-orientated project with no final masterplan, but with the flexibility to let things grow according to needs and feedbacks. A work in constant progress, based on the creation of desire: to enter “The Zone,” to be part of this process, to become one of the pioneers changing a place. The negotiation of space and the process-oriented development of an alternative to the mostly too restricted idea of the traditional masterplan are constant topics in the projects on a big urban scale, i.e. the proposals for the “Manual for Public Performance of Space

115

Trojan Horses and other social animals

Space” for Seestadt Aspern, a new urban area for 40,000 people in Vienna, and for the “Bildungslandschaft Altstadt Nord” in Cologne. The latter is a strategic framework plan based on the creation of a new educational landscape made of different pedagogical institutions in a park in the middle of the city. As in the educational buildings planned by feld72, space was seen as the third educator. The framework consisted of developing strategies based on sharing of space and spatial implementations for new concepts of education, transforming the park into a landscape of education and leisure, for children, students, and citizens. As in most of the project by feld72 in social space, different methods of participation played a fundamental rule. Participation not as a supply of services with an already known and pre-defined output, but as a starting point for an open process and shared adventure. The expertise of the inhabitants as “connoisseurs” of their own surroundings is incorporated into the body of knowledge formed by the other experts, creating a broad understanding of place and social context. Also in those social housing projects by feld72, where the possible future inhabitants were known, the methods of participation defined an environment, where already from the beginning they have taken responsibility. Through the whole process of participation a community has evolved, supported by their clear comprehension of the design and space decisions that formed the different housing complexes. Sharing experiences to become part of one story. “A story is a little knot or complex of that species of connectedness which we call relevance. In the 1960s, students were fighting for “relevance,” and I would assume that any A is relevant to any B if both A and B are parts or components of the same “story.” Again we C Practice:

116

Trojan Horses and other social animals

face connectedness at more than one level: first, connection between A and B by virtue of their being components in the same story. And then, connectedness between people in that all think in terms of stories.” [Gregory Bateson in “Mind and Nature”]

feld72 in 2005 was invited to Prata Sannita, a village in the Matese regional park close to Naples, by the “Paesesaggio workgroup” for the “Villaggio dell’Arte” project, to work on the questions of migration, identity, and territory on site. More than 70 % of the population in Italy lives already in that what we define as “cities,” and this number is growing. This percentage not only means the constant growth of (in-between) cities but also and above all the disappearance of the cultural and natural landscapes familiar to us. In a complexity that we possibly are not aware of. The future of these zones threatened with extinction is also Italy’s future. The concept for the project and the starting point of the process was to perceive the shrinking 1500-person-village in whole as a diffuse hotel with still some rooms available: the abandoned spaces. In just one month, with no architectural plans, but a clear concept and just based on improvisation and research on site, the project was evolved. The Million Donkey Hotel was created with the help of up to 60 volunteers of Prata Sannita, who then worked for an estimated 4300 hours on site, and with the very small materials budget of € 10.000. With a variety of techniques and the different skills of the “local heroes” (the volunteers who helped to build the project) formerly lost spaces from the abandoned architecture of the medieval village were reactivated as “hotel rooms” with a special “bathroom.” All those elements were connected to the already existing micro-economy on site. During “off-season” these spaces can be used by the Pratesi as an extension of public space. Performance of Space

117

Trojan Horses and other social animals

In the following years the process continued, spaces were re-cycled, and new rooms and an amphitheather created from the ruin of a house followed. Work is ongoing today, and the hotel is run by an association of the “local heroes”. In an area, not far away from the territories which have been precisely described by Roberto Saviano in “Gomorrha” as the “Black Hole” of Italy, in which the main paradigm of space is related to “(in)security,” the population has shown resistance to depression, and we were able to start a collective adventure with an open outcome based on one of the simplest, but most important and defining elements of social space: trust. The Million Donkey Hotel, despite defined by a budget that is ridiculously small compared to our big building projects, shows the same kind of complexity and variety of approach we searched in all our projects. “… there is no break between the theoretical and experimental projects of feld72 and their designs for buildings: all of their work, irrespective of scale or means, investigates how the world is engaged and perceived through the lens of architecture. And there is an architectural lesson we can draw from this work, namely that the essence of architecture is nothing architectural.”4 [→3] [Kari Jormakka ]

○

→p. 119 feld72: Million Donkey Hotel in Prata Sannita, Italy, 2005 – ongoing Photography by Hertha Hurnaus

C Practice:

118

Trojan Horses and other social animals

Performance of Space

119

Manners, Parameters, and other Gay Sciences: […]

Verde que te quiero verde. Verde viento. Verdes ramas. El barco sobre la mar y el caballo en la montaña. Con la sombra en la cintura ella sueña en su baranda, verde carne, pelo verde, con ojos de fría plata. Verde que te quiero verde. Bajo la luna gitana, las cosas la están mirando y ella no puede mirarlas.

Compadre, quiero cambiar mi caballo por su casa, mi montura por su espejo, mi cuchillo por su manta. Compadre, vengo sangrando, desde los puertos de Cabra. Si yo pudiera, mocito, este trato se cerraba. Pero yo ya no soy yo, ni mi casa es ya mi casa. Compadre, quiero morir decentemente en mi cama. De acero, si puede ser, con las sábanas de holanda. ¿No ves la herida que tengo desde el pecho a la garganta?

Verde que te quiero verde. Grandes estrellas de escarcha vienen con el pez de sombra que abre el camino del alba. La higuera frota su viento con la lija de sus ramas, y el monte, gato garduño, eriza sus pitas agrias. ¿Pero quién vendrá? ¿Y por dónde...? Ella sigue en su baranda, Verde came, pelo verde, soñando en la mar amarga.

Trescientas rosas morenas lleva tu pechera blanca. Tu sangre rezuma y huele alrededor de tu faja. Pero yo ya no soy yo, ni mi casa es ya mi casa. Dejadme subir al menos hasta las altas barandas; ¡dejadme subir!, dejadme, hasta las verdes barandas. Barandales de la luna por donde retumba el agua. Ya suben los dos compadres hacia las altas barandas. Dejando un rastro de sangre. Dejando un rastro de lágrimas. Temblaban en los tejados farolillos de hojalata. Mil panderos de cristal herían la madrugada.

Verde que te quiero verde, verde viento, verdes ramas. Los dos compadres subieron. El largo viento dejaba en la boca un raro gusto de miel, de menta y de albahaca. ¡Compadre! ¿Dónde está, díme? ¿Dónde está tu niña amarga? ¡Cuántas veces te esperó! ¡Cuántas veces te esperará, cara fresca, negro pelo, en esta verde baranda! Sobre el rostro del aljibe se mecía la gitana. Verde carne, pelo verde, con ojos de fría plata. Un carámbano de luna la sostiene sobre el agua. La noche se puso íntima como una pequeña plaza. Guardias civiles borrachos en la puerta golpeaban. Verde que te quiero verde. Verde viento. Verdes ramas. El barco sobre la mar. Y el caballo en la montaña.1

1 García Lorca, Federico, Romance Sonámbulo, Obras completas. Vols. I, II, III, Arturo del Hoyo [ed.] (Madrid, Aguilar: 1991). C Practice:

120

Luis Berríos-Negrón

Pages 120 – 137

Manners, Parameters, and other Gay Sciences: realities from the Paramennerist Treatise* Abstract We are aware that our world, our mind, our knowledge is replicated by the cloud, and the cloud strives to replicate the universe, ever deepening, ever expanding. In this delightful yet frightening outward motion, and as temporary space continues to flourish, we find ourselves understanding this broader, endless system of unstable balances, of beautiful uncertainty, being sustained by our continuous abilities to deliver cogent mediation. The problem is that we acquiesce, we surrender to power structures that profit from our homogenized fragmentation and its ensuing enslavement. In 1967, the founder of the MIT Center for Advanced Visual Studies, György Kepes said: “There is a reciprocal relationship between our distorted environment and our impoverished ability to see with freshness, clarity, and joy. Fed on our deformed and dishonest environment, our undernourished visual sensibilities can only lead us to perpetuate the malfunctions of the environment that we create. To counteract this spiral of self-destruction, we have Performance of Space

121

Manners, Parameters, and other Gay Sciences: […]

to re-educate our vision and reclaim our lost sensibilities. The formlessness of our present life has three obvious aspects. First, our environmental chaos, which accounts for inadequate living conditions, waste of human and material resources, and pollution of air, water and earth. Second, our social chaos—lack of common ideas, common feelings, common purposes. Third, our inner chaos—individual inability to live in harmony with oneself, inability to accept ones whole self and let body, feelings, and thought dwell together in friendship.” 2 For us to cogently mediate this complex “reciprocal relationship,” we are required ever more to grasp and make sense of these broader, difficult to discern constellations of social, historical, and climatic networks. Therefore, with our abilities, our specialized skills, we must continue to struggle to see and make visible these broader complexities, not to reduce them to a marketable product, but to find delight in the process of finding, creating, and nurturing those unstable balances of environmental form. With that, this paper before you aims to remind a brief projection about the inseparable difference between mental and physical space. This projection intends to thicken the aesthetics of sustainability by rejecting social Darwinism as the normalization of chaos and the irrational by way of evolutionary teleology and technocratic domination. To do so, I describe a mannerist recurrence in cultural production and how I hope it may inform a revitalized movement beyond an age of mass industrialization towards the age of mass customization, and 2

Kepes, György, Education of Vision (New York: George Baziller Publishers, 1965), p. 2.

C Practice:

122

Manners, Parameters, and other Gay Sciences:

into the Anthropocene. I question efforts trying to end Modernism, both technically and socially, past in Post-Modernism, and currently through claims of Parametricism, which still fail to slacken the preconditions of classical modernity and industrial, free-market capitalism. I argue that this slackening can be activated by revising Charles Peirce’s Infinite Community of Inquiry, and Gerald Raunig’s notion of Abstract Machines, as vehicles for anthropocentric cybernetics and contemporary ecology. This argument will ultimately focus on briefly asserting differences between an architectonic and the architectural. This is not about metaphorical relations between the visual arts and the hard sciences, but to set forth a topological heuristic, an ongoing inquiry to further categorize aspects between the human and non-human worlds through the gay sciences.

General Introduction to the workflow … The poem “Romance Sonámbulo” by Federico García Lorca, seemingly serving as bookends, but rather being a Kleinform, builds an endless point of entry… that by entwining “Green how I want you green” it provides motion into a workflow, not as a body, but a concatenation, as an elusive mental ecology that steers away from expressionist form, towards environmental form. This effort, of producing work that has no interior, that is all exterior, is introduced by presenting this poem in parallel with the video titled “Verde que te quiero Verde” . This was the video component-as-document to the 2006 public art workshop I conducted with Rahraw Omarzad and his students of art and architecture at the Centre of Contemporary Art of Afghanistan in Kabul, all part of my larger installation titled Nonspheres IV. Performance of Space

123

Manners, Parameters, and other Gay Sciences:

Nonspheres IV, Program, curated by Carson Chan and Fotini Lazaridou Hazigoga, Berlin, 2007

The installation stemmed from two precedents: one, Soviet geochemist Vladimir Vernadsky’s version of the concept of nöosphere, of how human agency itself is a natural force, not outside, but expanding within and transforming beyond the biosphere; two, the essay titled Acid Visions by Felicity D. Scott, specifically the section that reads: “Despite being haunted by the endgames of the Cold War, the end of Drop City [1960’s alternative fringe community living in, and professing the use of, Geodesic domes] would not be the result of nuclear catastrophe but of its inscription into the media […] But if Drop City functioned all too effectively within ‘Media America,’ with its experimental geodesic domes serving to promote Buckminster Fuller’s invention to the counterculture, the commune’s ambition had been quite distinct: it had aimed to articulate a dissident C Practice:

124

Manners, Parameters, and other Gay Sciences:

and political refusal of American, and hence Global, capitalism. Although domes are ‘Not Quite Architecture,’ to cite Reyner Bahnam’s formulation, such alternative critiques of architecture and urbanism, which functioned at the nexus of spectacle and use, raise the question not of how architecture might escape from this technological condition (an impossible and not entirely progressive ideal) but of what sort of ethical and political strategies might remain open as modes of encounter with it. These historical practices point to the danger not only of mysticism but also of an unwitting integration into contemporary articulations of geopolitics and digital tools. I stress unwitting to distinguish modes of experimentation from the savvy, even selfconscious strategies of uncritical integration that gave rise to, among other recent events in architecture, the ‘Bilbao Effect.’”3

Acid Visions is a delightful call to arms … Along with equally significant diatribes by Hal Foster and Andrea Fraser, Felicity Scott’s staunch parallel of Buckminster Fuller’s technical and social development of geodesics to Frank Gehry’s “little fish,” on one hand, loudly registered to be what we now know all too well about the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, as an unchecked misappropriation of digital fabrication and parametrics for the sake of sculptural gymnastics and

3

Scott, Felicitz, ‘Acid Visions’, Grey Room, no. 23 (Spring 2006), pp. 35 – 36.

Performance of Space

125

Manners, Parameters, and other Gay Sciences:

self-referential glorification. This formal expressionism, exacerbating nothing but the oppressive elitism of the neoliberal market, underscore today’s misleading overdevelopment of often publicly funded iconic buildings that seem to then become Trojan Horses to an unsustainable cultural and environmental homogenization and defamiliarization. On the other hand, and more importantly, this parallel puts into context the dual-edged sword of mid-to-late 20th century countercultural activism and alternative education in the United States, exemplified by the political and experimental work of Buckminster Fuller, exercised to an extent during his time at Black Mountain College. It dynamically materialized this recent chapter about the historical ebb and flow between art and science, of emerging socially motivated ecological production and its subsequent, if seemingly inevitable ideological instrumentalization. With these two precedents in mind, I briefly visited Berlin on my way to Kabul for the collaboration with the CCAA. Unexpectedly, it was then that I first visited the once secret military installation Teufelsberg (or “Devil’s Hill”), the landfill of ruins of post-war Berlin. I could have never imagined that the volunteered instrumentalization of Bucky Fuller’s geodesics could ever be manifested as a “little fish” the size of a gigantic penis with hairy testicles on top the ruins of the Second World War… and never could I ever so underestimated the sense of humor of the American military, this building being in my mind the mother of all post-modern ironies. This lesser known residue of the Soviet-Allied geopolitical phantasmagoria of the Cold War in Berlin became materialized in Nonspheres IV as the parametrically unfolding of this gigantic penis into an expansive tetrahedral rope (noose) lattice. →p. 126 Teufelsberg, Berlin C Practice:

126

Manners,Parameters,andotherGaySciences:realitiesfromtheParamenneristTreatise

Performance of Space

127

Manners, Parameters, and other Gay Sciences:

The unfolding was a personal reticulation of social, historical, and technological threads, hoping to reconnect a topological system that was not subject to a conclusive answer, but as an endless interrogative about the still on-going, abusive victimization of the Afghan people for the sake of the colonial pageantry of the former Soviet States, the Allied Forces, and the United States of America. Surely eclipsing the self-referential, sculptural blasé of the Gehry-Glymph slippery carp and the Hadid-Schumacher flat skyscraper, this phallic hubris, whether witting or unwitting, represents how delicate innovation can be, of the selective amnesia that power structures are able to induce, and us to accept, by applying the most offensive ideological agendas cloaked in the most innovative visual and form-finding techniques. These anxious notions continue to respond to that delightful call, underscoring my current efforts towards environmental form.

General Abduction to the Paramannerist Treatise … The architect Inge Rocker recently wrote that: “The formal exuberance characteristic of parametrcism’s architecture and urban planning scenarios pretends to cope with societies’ and life’s complexities, while in fact they are at best expressions thereof, empty gestures of a form-obsessed and strangely under-complex approach to architecture and urbanity.”4

4 Rocker, Ingeborg, ‘Apropos Parametricism: If, in what style should we build?’ Log, no. 21 (Winter 2011), pp. 97. C Practice:

128

Manners, Parameters, and other Gay Sciences:

This statement reminds me, that despite desires to the contrary, there is little evidence pointing to the passing of modernity.* To make this absence visible, I will further quote a passage from Arnold Hauser’s analysis the Social History of Art to retrospectively insert a mannerist context for cultural production, filtering a review of classical, and post, modernity: “We are the first to grasp that the stylistic efforts of all the leading artists of mannerism, of Pontormo and Parmigianino as of Bronzino and Beccafumi, of Tintoretto and El Greco as of Brügel and Spranger, were concentrated above all on breaking up the all-too-obvious regularity and harmony of classical art and replacing its superpersonal normativity by more subjective and more suggestive features. At one time, it is the deepening and spiritualizing of religious experience and the vision of a new spiritual content in life; at another, an exaggerated intellectualism, consciously and deliberately deforming reality, with a tinge of the bizarre and the abstruse; sometimes, however, it is a fastidious and affected epicureanism, translating everything into subtlety and elegance, which leads to the abandonment of classical forms. But the artistic solution is always a derivative, a structure dependent in the final analysis on classicism, and originating in a cultural, not a natural experience, whether it is expressed in the form of a protest against classical art or seeks to preserve the formal achievements of this art. We are dealing here, in other words, with a completely self-conscious style, which bases its forms not so much on the particular object as on the art of the preceding epoch, and to a greater extent that was the case with any previous significant trend of art. The conscious attention Performance of Space

129

Manners, Parameters, and other Gay Sciences:

of the artist is derived no longer merely to choosing the means best adapted to his artistic purpose, but also to defining the artistic purpose itself — the theoretical program is no longer concerned merely with methods, but also with aims. From this point of view, mannerism is the first modern style, the first which is concerned with a cultural problem and which regards the relationship between tradition and innovation as a problem to be solved by rational means. Tradition is here nothing but a bulwark against the all too violently approaching storms of the unfamiliar, an element which is to be a principle of life but also of destruction. It is impossible to understand mannerism if one does not grasp the fact that its imitation of classical models is an escape from the threatening chaos, and that of the subjective overstraining of its forms is the expression of the fear that form might fail in the struggle with life and art fade into soulless beauty.”5 This mannerist recurrence is not a call to build an analytical structure, but rather to reposition the objects of mannerism embodied in this essay that intend to provoke a continuous array of collective inquiry,6 what American philosopher Charles Peirce calls the Infinite Community of Inquiry, where collectivity leans on the hypothesis as principal object of evolutionary 5 Hauser, Arnold, The Social History of Art (New York: Vintage Books Random House, 1957), pp. 100 – 101. 6 “… the real is that which sooner or later information and reasoning would finally result in, and which is therefore independent of the vagaries of me and you. This conception, not of the individual mind, essentially involves the notion of a community, without definite limits and capable of an indefinite increase of knowledge. It would be better to think of mind as the shared thoughts of the infinite community, perhaps extending beyond the human realm which constitutes the universe of semiotic activity.” Writings of C Practice:

130

Manners, Parameters, and other Gay Sciences:

Charles S. Peirce: A Chronological Edition, Vol. 2, Five volumes to date, Edward Moore, Christian Kloesel, et al. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1002), pp. 239 – 240.

thought, favoring instinct over intuition, where the mind is the shared thoughts of an infinite community. This form of inquiry simultaneously hones in our visual skills—to see wider and deeper into the social and political spaces that operate around us. It also slackens that modern stasis by dynamically projecting elusive and opaque constructs of collective labor and material parameters that inherently challenge neoliberal enslavement by calling its fallacious cause célèbre, the individual, for the autodestructive mirage that it is. As we sluggishly struggle to usher the Anthropocene and its evolving notions of contemporary ecology, yes, we ought to strengthen unstable balances of fortuitous chance over mechanistic order, not as a method to control and exacerbate class disparity, but as a cosmology of recurrence where human agency has a definitive role in historical and environmental events, where unexpected diversity is the only constant common. Again, there is no purpose aimed to crystallize a style out of this construct, but to remind the delightful complex of selfinquiry and self-regulation, of those interrogative practices that seem to be consumed by the oceanic void of religious fanaticism and free-market, technocratic capitalism. In the same essay, Felicity Scott sustains her concerns about the unwitting implementation of technology in parallel to the potentially pathological instrumentalization of religion and justice by stating: “In the opening pages of Civilization and its Discontents, Freud noted the troubling nature of his friend Romain Rolland’s identification of religion with “a Performance of Space

131

Manners, Parameters, and other Gay Sciences …

feeling of something limitless, unbounded—as it were, ‘oceanic.’” Freud sought a psychoanalytic explanation of what he regarded as a crisis in the demarcation of the ego and the external world. He conceded that beyond the nonpathological situation of two people in love, perhaps such primordial oceanic feeling might coexist in some individuals as a counterpart to a mature “ego-feeling”. But rather than accepting it as religious, he recast it as a symptom of regression to “infantile helplessness,” a defense against suffering, that in addition to the mass delusion of religion, might manifest in other pleasures such as art or even eroticism. If civilization was supposed to protect man from the destructive forces of nature through advances in science and technology, just as it would protect one man from the “brute force” of another through notions of justice and of rights, even in the late 1920’s it was evident to Freud that something had gone awry.”7 Lets say that such productive arrays become visible by way of differentiating the narrow relationship between an architectonic and the architectural. This difference, that could suggest Facebook’s long-awaited dismissal of public space as a separation between the mental and the physical, is required when considering the compounded mixture of meaning propagated by postmodernity, the etymological hodgepodge originated from the very same intent to dismantle the fascist narrative of the 20th century. More specifically, it has been a concerted effort that in large part relied on the simulation of styles through decorative bricolage, in art and architecture, and later through electronic and mass media, in order to, among other purposes, 7

Scott, Felicity D., ibid, pp. 33

C Practice:

132

Manners, Parameters, and other Gay Sciences …

blur those fissures of disciplinary fragmentation, of specialization that have been fundamental to the profitability of Fordist ideology. But, this effort has become subjected to its own resistance by increasingly depending on the arm-chair monologue that has reverted onto itself, leaving behind yet another vast, phantasmagoric wasteland, destroying all possibility to discern an architectonic framework — a tangible chora, that formless Platonic womb, for public (as opposed to inertial, if esoteric) discourse, and for an architectural production that is celebrating, instead of constricting, the paradoxical pleasure that is the human condition. This intent can be traced to the activism associated with general intellect,8 now reminded through Post-Operaism, generating confrontations against, and infiltrations within, religious indoctrination, exploitative labor, and the vacuum of knowledge that ensued late 19th century modes of production on through 20th century professionalist individualization. In that spirit, one can certainly continue to side with the broadening of knowledge, through collectivity and experimentation. But, the problematic byproduct of this broadening rupture, of what Bateson refers to as schismogenesis, 9 has increasingly become prey to both, not the loving amateur, but the selfaggrandizing dilettante, and not the situated model, but the digitally rendered image.

8

9

“While all men are intellectuals, not all men have in society the function of intellectuals. Thus because it can happen that everyone at some time fries a couple of eggs or sews up a tear in a jacket, we do not necessarily say that everyone is a cook or a taylor” Gramsci, Antonio – Selections from the Prison Notebooks, Quentin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith [ed.], International Publishers, New York, 1971, p. 8. Bateson, Gregory, Steps to an Ecology of Mind (San Fransisco: Chandler Health Publications, 1972), pp. 64 – 65.

Performance of Space

133

Manners, Parameters, and other Gay Sciences …

The Turtle Two, Berlin, 2009

It is the professionalist dilettante and his / her squelching, rendered image that are the unseen protagonists to this empty, current phantasmagoria. It is exemplifying the perpetuation of power structures leveraged by immaterialized capital rather than through protracted knowledge, strengthening the resolve of the corporate apparatus against public interest. The most extreme sampling being the re-entwining of military and religious fanaticism to feed the consumer gluttony, if the deformed definition of growth, shamelessly enacted through recent wars designed to brutally target labor and natural resource exploitation, strategically perpetuating the speculation bubble and the real estate debacle that the art gallery and the architectural profession certainly have had a hand on, if, at best, in collusion with by acquiescence. This phantasmagoric nature of today, of an inability to discern the real from illusion due to free-market euphoria, has collapsed into absurd discussions, most prescient, the passively suicidal negation of the idea of evolution and the blindeye to the blunt hand of human agency over climate change (better characterized as climate radicalization and the agricultural crisis to ensue). And as any unresolved wasteland, it is a C Practice:

134

Manners, Parameters, and other Gay Sciences …

moment, and a site, full of potential, a terrain vague that can fruitfully mobilize previously unsought discourse. Unsought because, despite that there is a cyclical nature to this historical recurrence, computational and communication technologies do in fact formulate a previously unseen landscape. More specifically, that the effort to fragment the human condition in order to better control its enslavement will continue to manifest unabated, unless we take a closer, less market-oriented look at an anthropocentric, and not a servo-mechanistic, implementation of the circuitry in human relations, of cybernetics, helping us usher a more cogent evolution from mass industrialization into mass customization. My efforts to materialize aspects of this evolution focus on preparations, of what Hans-Jörg Rheinberger characterizes as epistemic interfaces for curatorial action. These mediations can be traced to Nonspheres IV. Also in more recent works such as The Turtles (2005 – ), The Anxious Prop (2009 – ), and the recent collaboration with Paul Ryan in his Threeing project (2010 – 12) for documenta (13). These works aim to transversally network, or rather build concatenations that both make-visible and further process these polemical wastelands… to remind this entwined division between the architectural and the architectonic as manner and method to reconfigure the socio-economic disparities that professionalist artists, curators, and architects have, and continue to foment in the absence of doubt, self-inquiry, self-regulation, that for us, by far and in large, suck the life, the delectability out of artistic sovereignty and collective inquiry. In that rhythm, I join the voices that continue to call upon an architectonic that aggressively flows between the transcendental and the mechanistic so to deduce spatial phenomena by suspending the particularities of a broad mass into the monads that we come to understand as a situated construct. It is the Performance of Space

135

Manners, Parameters, and other Gay Sciences …

correlation of these particularities, within an artwork, a building, or an entire body of work, that, just as light is intrinsic to color, and scale is intrinsic to density, the mastery of this tact is intrinsic to tectonics, not necessarily through phenomenology, nor communal space itself, but through the elusive spaces that constitute the collective mind, not unlike Raunig’s precarious monster10 that blossoms through time-based collectivity and its implicit material semiotic. This material system of symbols I want to re-mind, whether with god, or through the grand unified theory, can be drawn from a parallel triptych that was the élan vital, continuity, and the eternal return — from Bergson’s insistence on intuition as the ever-novel reptilian nerve, Pierce’s topology of instincts nurtured by the community of inquiry, and of Nietzsche’s gay mediation, which validates the meta intervals of human experience, all rooted in challenging the cosmological mind-fuck that still is Kant’s transcendental object. Despite the recalcitrant nature of this position here before you, I still aspire to shape an heuristic, a manner that does not condemn us to a world of illusion, but to the abstract world of position-takings, an environment of what Ernest Mandel would title as parametric determinism. He explains that — “Men and women indeed make their own history. The outcome of their actions is not mechanically predetermined. Most, if not all, historical crises have several possible outcomes, not innumerable fortuitous or arbitrary

10 Raunig, Gerald, The Monster Precariat, http://translate.eipcp.net/ strands/02/raunig-strands02en/print, 2007. 11 Mandel, Ernest,  ‘How to make no sense of Marx’, originally published in Analyzing Marxism. New essays on Analytical Marxism, edited by Robert Ware & Kai Nielsen, Canadian Journal of Philosophy, vol. 15, (1989) pp.105 – 132. C Practice:

136

Manners, Parameters, and other Gay Sciences …

ones; that is why we use the expression ‘parametric determinism’ indicating several possibilities within a given set of parameters.”11 In considering this much more comprehensive notion of parametrics, we can rethink the passive suicide of biospheric severance imparted by the modern industrial project, where we begin to seam into a far more pleasurable life, stretching the technological envelops that allow those contracts that we have to each-other, our contracts of citizenship12 to continue to flow embodied in our natural laws as an absolute imperative to maintain awareness of each other’s well-being and not to relent in producing more elusive forms of community that do not circumvent fairness and the social interest. In order to then substantiate this environmental form towards a heuristic space between the architectural and the architectonic, to dismantle the technocratic cage, challenge anthropocentric conviction, and strengthen the human / nonhuman envelop, I loop you into the same question that the eternal demon in Nietzsche looped us into a century ago: “The question in each and every thing — ‘Do you desire this once more?’ This question would lie upon your actions as the greatest weight. Or how well disposed would you have to become to yourself and to life to crave nothing more fervently than this ultimate eternal confirmation and seal?”13 ○ *

Manners, Parameters, and other Gay Sciences: realities from the Paramennerist Treatise, runs as a parallel writing with the science fiction story One Micron a Light Year Ago into Thirdness: fictions from the Paramannerist Treatise published in Nadin Heinich’s book, Digital Utopia, Akademie der Künste, Berlin 2012.

12 Guattari, Felix, The Three Ecologies, (New York: Athalone Press, 2000). 13 Nietzsche, Friedrich, The Gay Science, Walter Kaufmann trans., (New York: Random House, 1954), pp. 274. Performance of Space

137

Iris Touliatou

Pages 138  – 145

The cities where he worked are no longer there 1 The facts of Stephen Kane’s 2 activities remain to a large extent unspecified, even to those who follow closely the developments in the contemporary art world.

*

Sometime in the mid-2000s, a group of students filled Dublin’s University College’s main lecture theatre to hear Stephen Kane deliver a series of lectures on ‘Process and Reality.’ There was a mood of eager anticipation. The audience awaited enlightenment, but they were about to be severely disappointed. According to the program the lecture would be given in two parts, on successive days. Inaugurating the series, the head of the

1

2

Borrowed from Bertolt Brecht’s poem The Friends (Poems; p. 415), this title was originally attributed to an object I realized in 2012, appropriating the form of a Screen; a recurring typology in my artistic practice. Through the use of an austere and historically accurate range of materials such as glass, concrete, steel, wood and replicating modernist vocabulary, The Cities That He Worked Are the Screens are often perceived as objects that sugNo Longer There. Steel, ca. H gest architecture. Placed halfway between matter 201 x 265 x 4 cm, 2012 and representation, they are serving more as a device to frame whatever could be observed through their surface. Resembling an internal grid they guide and engage the audience to look through and through the other side of grounds and things and relate appropriately, to the concepts of existence and absence, appearance and disappearance, inside and outside, here and there, now and then. Stephen Kane was introduced for the first time in a text-based project commissioned and published in Cura Magazine (issue 12, September 2012)

C Practice:

138

The cities where he worked are no longer there

under the title POP QUIZ, which is reviewed above. (i) The author is from here on in indissolubly bound with a co-author, compliant to the Gestalt system of thought that combines a number of different voices in order to form one’s character. Stephen Kane serves as an alias that examines the principles that traverse my own oeuvre. This search for teammates and Friends allows me a certain production of space or stage upon which they’re then placed.

Department of UCD School of Art History and Cultural Policy, introduced the speaker and announced the first part of the lecture. Tall, lean, in his mid thirties, Stephen Kane stepped up to the podium and delivered in a high, uninflected monotone voice: “Stephen Kane remains within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails.” 3 Then he stepped down and left the room. General confusion and outrage followed from the audience and the coordinator decided to proceed to the next speaker, delivering a lecture on speculative collectivity, avoiding further comments of the incident. Due to the uproar about the episode, an even greater number of people turned up the following day for the second and last part of the lectures. The speaker was called to the podium, the lights dimmed; a spot remained lighting the stage. However, Kane was nowhere in sight, in his place hanged a hand written banner running across the entire length of the stage: “Concrete Jungle Mother Farewell to Your Stairwell Forever.”4

3

Stephen Kane’s persona is based upon Stephen Dedalus, one of the main characters in James Joyce’s Ulysses. In June 2011, I bought a used copy of Ulysses from an Athenian flea market. In the margins of the pages there were hand written diary entries and personal notes from a certain Stephen Kane. The above text is based entirely on these findings.

Performance of Space

139

The cities where he worked are no longer there

4

Mural in Ballymun, Dublin. Author unknown.

[...]5 This spectacular anticlimax in many ways epitomized Kane’s theoretical life. No trace of Stephen Kane or Kane’s practice has been found ever since. Earlier that decade he had been fully commissioned by Eight Seconds,6 an artist-run initiative focusing on performance and time-based art, in a project known as Act of Faith. 5 Immersed in the immense flow of information produced every day and the constant examination of reality that an artist is obliged to undertake, I decided not to create new objects, but through metaphors to create new meaning for the things that are already there. In a process of associations and juxtapositions between historical facts and several inaccuracies, missing information, unfinished sentences and encyclopedia pages torn and restored, my work takes the form of a postscript, or an editor’s note. For instance, the title of my contribution for the Space Matters Symposium in Linz was MATTER ENCLOSED IN HEAVY BRACKETS, hinting or naming this work process through the typographical terminology. 6 Eight Seconds, was a contemporary artist-run space that took over a block of semi derelict flats, which is currently under demolition in Ballymun Dublin, Ireland. The group started its activities around 1996 until its founding members Ryan Leary and Sarah O’ Brien, entered into a dispute concerning the curatorial direction of the project in 2005. During its lifespan Eight Seconds provided support for young artists, housed many artists studios and also organized nearly 20 contemporary exhibitions challenging the traditional white cube method of exhibition making. It was also a project that was deeply imbedded in the community however it was not a ‘community project.’ C Practice:

140

The cities where he worked are no longer there

The Ballymun Flats and Seven Tower blocks were built in the 1960’s to accommodate Ireland’s rising population, and particularly to accommodate former residents of inner-city areas, which were being cleared in the process of the 1960’s ‘urban slum clearances.’ Whilst suffering from a lack of sufficient public amenities, several schools served the area, as well as a medical center and a purpose built shopping center. The area suffered from many social problems such as drugs with rampant crime. The causes of these issues and the subsequent discrimination faced by many people with Ballymun addresses when seeking employment outside the suburb, have been disputed, but Ballymun generally paralleled the experience of many working-class people in the 1960’s and 1970’s when placed in high-rise locations.7 Despite the negative perceptions of many non-residents of Ballymun, there existed, and exists today, a strong sense of pride and community in the area, as evidenced by the fact that many former residents of the flats have accepted new social housing in the district. [They didn’t really have a choice considering their flats were being demolished.] Eight seconds 8 —a reference to the time that takes for a concrete tower to be demolished by controlled implosion—has been working in this area of the city since its inception in 1996 7

CRAIG, Edward Gordon, Toward a new theatre; forty designs for stage scenes, 1909 Performance of Space

Edward Gordon Craig (16 January 1872 – 29 July 1966) was an English modern theatre practitioner. He worked as an actor, director and scenic designer. He published a substantial body of theoretical writings on theatre and set design as well as even the reviews of his own plays, written by himself, using pseudonyms. Craig was the illegitimate son of the architect Edward Godwin and the actress Ellen Terry.

141

The cities where he worked are no longer there

8

Eight, Octaves, and New Beginnings, The Eighth Day is the first day of the new week, precisely as the Octave is the Eighth Note that begins the musical cycle a new on a higher level. Eight represents regeneration, continuation, repetition, and cycles.

and asked the Dublin City Council if they would support an innovative project that would re-use the neglected but empty spaces in the eight and fifteen stories flats. After sometime and many discussions, the City Council agreed to hand over some of the flats to Eight Seconds on temporary basis until their demolition. In this time there were also some residents living in the flats, waiting to be re-housed, and they supported the project throughout. It took several months to clean these old residential units to make them secure and provide them with electricity. The flats became functional working units; artists, music groups and theatre troupes from the wider Dublin area were invited to use the space to create new pieces and challenge their own practice onsite. In 2003, two years before the approved demolition of the McDonough 9 Tower, the second tower to go up in 1966 in the Ballymun district in Dublin, the keys of the top flats of the building were handed to Stephen Kane10 under the agreement

9

Thomas MACDONOUGH, executed by firing squad in 1916. The MACDONOUGH tower, demolished by controlled implosion in 2005

C Practice:

142

The MacDonough Tower was named after Thomas Mac Donough, a prominent figure in the Dublin literary world and one of the seven leaders of the 1916 rising in Ireland; Patrick Pearse, Thomas Mac Donough, Sean MacDermott, Eamonn Ceannt, Thomas Clarke, James Connolly, and Joseph Plunkett.

The cities where he worked are no longer there

10 Stephen Dedalus, Kane’s alter ego, is in fact James Joyce’s literary alter ego, appearing as the protagonist and antihero of his first, semi-autobiographical novel of artistic existence A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and an important character in Joyce’s Ulysses. Mirroring his mythological namesake, Daedalus (the architect of the Labyrinth in Greek mythology), is described in Ovid’s Metamorphoses (VIII: 183 – 235) as being imprisoned in a tower to prevent his knowledge of the labyrinth from spreading to the public. Stephen Dedalus is also introduced in Ulysses taking breakfast in the Sandy cove Martello tower in Dublin on the morning of 16 June 1904.

that he would construct the final artwork11 to be made within the space. The form and content of this work was not disclosed at the time of the commission and has not been revealed until now. Eight Seconds had trusted that Kane would undertake and execute his task. The enactment of a procedure based entirely on faith was the catalyst for the work that Kane is believed to have assembled on site. It was also agreed that an indeterminate amount of time and effort would go into the execution of this process. It should be mentioned that at the time this is being read, the completion of the work may or may not have occurred. I believe that it was in April 2005, just two months before the demolition of the MacDonough tower, that Stephen Kane, if it was he, was last seen on the occasion of the series of lectures held at the Dublin University College. Around this time, the 11 Stephen Dedalus is the prototype of the classic artist, who’s impetuous, passionate and rebellious nature, as well as his defiance of formal aesthetic and social conventions, may ultimately prove to be self-destructive. “a winged form flying above the waves [...] a hawk-like man flying sunward above the sea, a prophecy of the end he had been born to serve.” (Stephen Dedalus, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man). One’s realization of possibly creating his last artwork consists in mocking or possibly respecting the inevitability of a real death. The artist invokes a form of making that is incomplete, immaterial and distinctly ephemeral. He makes a fiction of reality with all the uncertainty, irresolution, and subjectivism that this term implies, liberating his practice from spatiotemporal coordinates. Performance of Space

143

The cities where he worked are no longer there

Ballymun flats and Tower removal process created an upheaval within the community. This drew attention from the media and in turn several organizations formed petitions to save the towers from being demolished.12 In a folder held by the municipal archives comprising information concerning the development process the area underwent from the 60’s to the present, was an open letter in favor of the demolition signed by Kane himself.13 12 The Irish Times, Saturday, January 7, 2012. “Completion of the €2 billion regeneration of Ballymun in north Dublin has moved a step closer with the start of demolition of one of the last remaining blocks of council flats. The eight-story flats at Sillogue will be the 29th block demolished since the regeneration of Ballymun began more than a decade ago. Just seven blocks of flats will remain once the demolition is completed later this month. The demolition of the Sillogue block will be followed in March by the demolition of the final block in Coultry. Later this year, and possibly stretching into the beginning of 2013, the last two remaining blocks in Sillogue and final block on Shangan Road will be knocked. The final three blocks, which include two eight-story blocks at Balbutcher Lane and the last 15-storey tower, Joseph Plunkett Tower, are due for demolition at the end of 2013 and beginning of 2014. Joseph Plunkett Tower will be the last demolition as part of the regeneration scheme, which began in 1997. More than 1,600 new social houses and apartments have so far been built to accommodate the residents of the 2,600 prefabricated flats built from 1965 to 1969. About 250 families remain in six blocks. Three housing schemes due for completion this year will rehouse 215 families from the flat blocks, with the remaining tenants, most of whom will be living in Joseph Plunkett Tower, due to be transferred next year. The final cost of the regeneration scheme is expected to come in at just under €2 billion, half of which will be public money, with the rest accounted for by private funding. More than 1,400 private homes have been built as part of the regeneration. When the scheme is complete there will be more than 4,600 new homes, about half of which will be public housing.” 13 Unlike his closest friend Paul Quirke, a frustrated writer who moved to Los Angeles from Dublin with the hopes of being cast in a major Hollywood production, Kane on the other hand, saw no relevance to recognition. The city that he lived in exerted a defining influence on Stephen and the way he perceived the world. Never putting an emphasis on showing his work commercially, his art was intended for few selected friends, or, at least, the work C Practice:

144

The cities where he worked are no longer there

often used inaccessibility and ephemerality as part of its overall conception. Kane realized and then buried his first major installation piece in Astro Park, down near his home in Ballymun — no more than two people were witnesses.

**

Stephen Kane was born and raised in Beaumont Woods, a suburb in the northwest of Dublin city center. Before completing high school, he attended evening painting classes at the Brushstrokes Art School and subsequently he was enrolled in the National College of Art and Design but failed to graduate. In his early years, he was the soul member of the electronic music group Bloomsday. He attended an Autechre concert at Temple Bar on October 27th of 2000, and the following year, he spent three months traveling by train around Ireland. By 2005, he was 35 – 37 years old and had led an interesting life, having been consistently involved in or at the center of some of the more exciting cultural moments of the previous 15 years in Dublin.○

Performance of Space

145

Curatorial Mediation of Space

D Section

Pages 147 – 185

Curators and cultural mediators dealing with spatial representation and ways of exhibiting spatial practice form Mediation of Space’s focus, incorporating complex issues of evaluation and examination of modes of production.

Mediation of Space

147

Carson Chan

Pages 148 – 163

Measures of an Exhibition: Space, Not Art, Is the Curator’s Primary Material “May this prize be won by the multitudes recently congregated, and may the promise be fulfilled— Wisdom and knowledge shall be the stability of thy times, and the strength of thy salvation.” [Rev. George Clayton, Sermons on the Great Exhibition, 1851] 1

To know is to experience, without which one can only believe. When the other disciples told St. Thomas that Jesus had been resurrected, he doubted them, making it clear that only by inserting his finger “into the place of the nails” and his hand into the open wounds would he believe their claim.2 Only through physically prodding Jesus’s unhealed wounds for himself would he know. Knowledge, its formation and attainment, has been a source of philosophical fascination since antiquity, and through technology, we have learned to aid ourselves in its acquisition. Knowing one’s purview also increases one’s hunger to know beyond it, and in the nineteenth century, propelled by technological advances in communication, trade, and transportation, this growing desire to know gave rise to a new outlet to meet it, a spectacular type of public enlightenment: the large-scale international exhibition. In 1851, the Great Exhibition of the 1 Rev George Clayton, Sermons on the Great Exhibition. Preached in York St Chapel, Walworth (London: Benjamin L. Green, 1851), p. 36. 2 John 20:25. D Curatorial:

148

Measures of an Exhibition …

Works of Industry of All Nations in London showcased the latest developments in commercial and industrial products from around the world, allowing those in or able to get to London firsthand access to information of an unprecedented scope. By the time the exhibition had closed, more than six million visitors had seen the fair’s 100,000 exhibits.3 Though the Great Exhibition did not present any fine art, every international exposition thereafter did, establishing a model for the international art exhibitions that would soon pervade Europe. Before the world expositions, art exhibitions in Europe were mostly fashioned after the French Salon, which displayed paintings as surfaces that covered entire walls. Evolving directly out of the World’s Fair, the large-scale art exhibition became popular as a type of presentation where art signified more than its individual creator and became representative of a national style, a declaration of national identity and strength.4 The first of these government-sponsored art exhibitions was hosted in Munich’s Glaspalast by the Bavarian state in 1869; the most esteemed and enduring of this type is the Venice Biennale, which was inaugurated in 1895.5 Today, both the world expo and the large-scale exhibition’s roles as central institutions for the dissemination of new artistic ideas, positions, and discourse in general are largely usurped by more technological forms of communication, including commercial print, television, and, most pervasive today, the Internet. The large-scale exhibition, still extant and once seen as an efficient means to physically communicate new knowledge through display, is now ineffectual compared

Anna Jackson, Expo: International Expositions 1851 – 2010 (London: V &  A Publishing, 2008), p. 10. 4 Bruce Altshuler, Salon to Biennial: Exhibitions That Made Art History (London: Phaidon, 2008), pp. 12 – 13. 5 Ibid., p. 13.

3

Mediation of Space

149

Measures of an Exhibition …

to the nearinstantaneous broadcast of image, text, sound, and video over the Internet. The biennial exhibition’s mission as a measure of artistic zeitgeist — its social networking functions notwithstanding — is rendered redundant when the latest output of information can be accessed online. In recent years, Web sites, blogs, and e-mail messages from museums, galleries, art publications, and, indeed, artists themselves have been driven into a flurry of communiqués. This economy of information traded by arts professionals is energized by a Faustian desire to keep current, in exchange for, or even perhaps at the expense of, the firsthand experience of art. As the Internet becomes the primary medium with which most art practitioners learn about new artworks and exhibitions, the subsequent in situ viewing of artwork constitutes a doubling of the art experience. (This doubling condition is even more apparent with architecture exhibitions, its main component being printed images of buildings that are easily viewable online.) Contrary to St. Thomas’s incredulity, we seem to have confused the thing with its representation, knowledge with hearsay. This doubling phenomenon delivers a new imperative to curators to make exhibitions that provide spatial contexts where artworks, new or familiar, are presented in a way that would require visitors’ physical presence for their full apprehension. Large-scale exhibitions, like biennials, are now predominantly administered by committee and organized by teams to illustrate an agreed-upon thesis.6 They are never singularly authored, despite often being attributed to a single curator. Products of consensus, the resulting shows offer up work from the latest rotation of artists and, unsurprisingly, betray a general sense of interchangeability. The 6 Nathalie Heinich and Michael Pollak, ‘From Museum Curator to Exhibition Auteur,’ in Thinking About Exhibitions, Bruce W. Ferguson, Reesa Greenberg, and Sandy Nairne [eds.] (New York: Routledge, 1996), p. 242. D Curatorial:

150

Measures of an Exhibition …

contemporary art show has a recognizable look. In truth, the glut of uniform, routine, and platitudinous exhibition experiences highlights a dimension of exhibition-making that is still quite absent in much of the more rigorous discussions on curating — that space, not art, is the curator’s primary material. The ascendance of the curator as auteur occurred parallel to the increasing popularity of the international art exhibition. Starting in the 1960s, when independent European exhibition makers like Harald Szeemann utilized exhibitions as opportunities to enact sociopolitical ideas through the temporary display of art, the role of the curator began its transition from overseer of museum collections 7 into free authority and trusted foreseer into the development of contemporary art. Operating as an intermittent collaborator with art institutions, the independent curator needed to connect and mediate disparate discussions about artist selection, budget, display, and thematic concerns that were previously divided amongst museum staff. Their access to artists as well as administrators gave them a unique position and a critical distance from institutional traditions that licensed them to instigate change and question established practices in exhibition making. Szeemann’s benchmark exhibition, When Attitudes Become Form (1969), at the Kunsthalle Bern, was more of a venue for the curator to stage his ideas about the potential powers inherent to the “inner bearing of the artist” 8 and how these forces are unleashed in free and wanton attitudes toward material than it was a month-long opportunity 7

For a thorough account of the changing role of the curator, see Robert Fleck, ‘Teaching Curatorship?’ in MJ – Manifesta Journal: Journal of Contemporary Curatorship (Milan: Silvana Editoriale, 2004, 2008), p. 25. 8 Harald Szeemann, ‘When Attitudes Become Form (Works, Concepts, Processes, Situations, Information)’ (London: ICA, 1969), reprinted in Harald Szeemann: with by through because towards despite (Zurich: Edition Voldemeer, 2007), p. 225. Mediation of Space

151

Measures of an Exhibition …

to exhibit works of the 69 individual artists involved. Though Szeemann called the exhibition a “compendium of stories told in the first person singular,” it became obvious that the “first person singular” voice he referred to was actually his own, as compiler of disparate practices, media, and styles. The exhibition, not the artwork, became the independent curator’s autonomous object of study, and, as artist and writer Liam Gillick has pointed out, by the 1990s, when art critics started forging more alliances with the commercial world, they effectively abdicated their critical role, which curators inherited. By the 2000s, when the establishment of a large-scale iterative art exhibition came to stand for a city’s cultural maturity and the curator in both the professional art context and the public’s eye grew in celebrity,9 curators were being hired to produce at such an excessive rate that, to keep up with demand, exhibitions were reconceived as formulaic commodities, consumable through a press release and accompanying images. To provide content for these exhibitions, cosmetically, lectures, and discussions were habitually employed as stand-ins until in the 1990s, when these auxiliary programs became normative and even constitutive of exhibition making. Catherine David’s edition of documenta X in 1997 included an insurmountable program of lectures, film screenings, discussions, and poetry readings, called 100 Days — 100 Guests, alongside the art displayed. David found the exhibition of visual art unequal to 9

At least within the European context, the curator’s growing popularity amongst the general public was articulated in early 2006 by Zitty magazine, a German weekly. The cover story of the March 16 issue, by Birgit Rieger, was titled ‘Kunst ist Pop.’ It likened the space of the gallery opening to a nightclub; both are where people find a semi-public venue for meeting up under the guise of consumption. The cover of this issue asked in bold letters: Are Curators the new DJs? See Birgit Rieger, ‘Kunst ist Pop,’ Zitty (March 16, 2006), pp. 16 – 19.

D Curatorial:

152

Measures of an Exhibition …

these other formats in representing global contemporary art production. Damningly, she called the art exhibition “merely the support and the vector” of the other forms.10 At museums, the recent favoring of the lectern within the exhibition context has been called New Institutionalism, and critics have observed that its exponents are probably less interested in education as a mode of knowledge production than they are of the sheer quantity of material generated from a “simulation of discourse and a parody of intellectual exchange.”11 Already in 1972 at documenta 5, curated by Szeemann — who once had trust in the public’s reception of ideas through exhibitions — a winter school was set up ostensibly to introduce coherence to the work of the 622 participating artists. Documenta11 (2002) was supported by recurring “platform” seminars, and the leitmotif of documenta 12 (2007) was education itself. Repositioning exhibitions as a corollary or parallel to lectures changed the way they were perceived and consequently produced. Large exhibitions are now often places for the display of artworks that confirm external claims, rather than events that are themselves generators of knowledge. What was meant to reinstate the intellectual function of the form — harmonizing exhibitions with lectures — in fact rendered it void and expressionless in the absence of its pedagogical crutches of textual and oral discourse. Where curators claim intellectual positions in texts and lectures, the attending displays of artwork simply provide illustration. Though unrealized, Manifesta 6, the European Biennial

10 Elena Filipovic, ‘The Global White Cube,’ in The Manifesta Decade: Debates on Contemporary Art Exhibitions and Biennials in Post-Wall Europe, Barbara Vanderlinden and Elena Filipovic [eds.] (Brussels: Roomade and Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 2005), p. 73. 11 Sven Lutticken, ‘Once More on Publicness: A Postscript to Secret Publicity,’ Fillip no. 12 (Fall 2010), pp. 86 – 91. Mediation of Space

153

Measures of an Exhibition …

of Contemporary Art 2006, was conceived of as a school — a gesture of revision that traded the expressive potentials of the exhibition form for an extra-institutionally validated organ of intellectual production. What binds these examples is their emptying of the exhibition’s role as an interface between new artistic ideas and the public; a plighted situation fueled by their distrust in the exhibition as a place for the production and dissemination of knowledge, a syndrome that has recently been termed curating’s “educational turn.”12 It is clear that the physical encounter with objects, particularly artwork, is singular and non-reproducible, but to what degree can this distinctness be challenged through technological mediation? If representation can never replace its original referent, what constitutes the aforementioned doubling when viewers experience art both online and in physical reality? As for the production of subjectivity — within late capitalism — both object and image are things that are simply other than the self.13 For Jonathan Crary, this subjectivity was shaped in the late-nineteenth century alongside technological forms of spectacle, display, projection, attraction, and recording.14 Central to Crary’s thesis is that through the processes of modernization and rationalization, vision has changed from being a mode of optical perception to an effect of the forces of modernity. The features of vision in the twentieth century onwards — its 12 Andrea Phillips goes as far as to say that locating both art and education in [?] sites like biennials where they’re aestheticized as disciplines in fact negates the authority of both. See Andrea Phillips, ‘Education Aesthetics,’ in Curating and the Educational Turn, Paul O’Neill and Mick Wilson [eds.] (London: Open Editions 2010). 13 Virginia Blum and Heidi Nast, ‘Jacques Lacan’s Two-Dimensional Subjectivity,’ in Thinking Space, Mike Crang and Nigel Thrift [eds.] (London: Routledge, 2000), p. 183. 14 Jonathan Crary, Suspensions of Perception: Attention, Spectacle, and Modern Culture (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 2001). D Curatorial:

154

Measures of an Exhibition …

qualities varying in respect to what is being viewed —are that it has no features. “Rather,” Crary states, “it is embedded in a pattern of adaptability to new technological relations, social configurations, and economic imperatives.” 15 Crary cites a conversation between Fredric Jameson and Anders Stephanson in which they speculate that as the socioeconomic logic of capitalism perpetuates itself, we’ll be required to accept as natural the condition of switching our attention rapidly from one thing to another. What we see, whether online or in physical reality, is reconfigured into what we pay attention to and for how long. Attention, as it were, is what we can term the various ways of seeing that have become fused by the powers of modernization into an institutionally constructed subjectivity. Inflicted bodily, modernization has made our attention become “both a simulation of and compensation for a chimerical ‘real’ experience.”16 The direct experience is thus outmoded. For the large-scale exhibition that seeks to present new work, our attention to it would most likely be caught first online. Although the Internet is fast becoming a venue and medium for artwork, art online is relayed mostly through texts, images, and videos. Focusing mainly on installation art, Boris Groys has made a case for reconsidering the classical distinctions between the object and its representation in his essay “Art in the Age of Biopolitics” (2002). Proceeding from his observation that documentation of art has been making its way into art spaces in recent decades, Groys, like Crary, situates our culture within the late capitalist system, but he foregrounds the biopolitical dimension in our lifeworld, where objects and their representation are both produced through a technically supported understanding of life. In a characterization of a post-industrial, 15 Ibid., p. 13. 16 Ibid., p. 361. Mediation of Space

155

Measures of an Exhibition …

biopolitically technological world that finds lineage in the thinking of Giorgio Agamben and Anthony Giddens as well as Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt, Groys elides life and art as being traditionally constituted as pure activity. Art was inaccessible without the production of end results or artwork that signified life. Life, and thus art, as reconfigured through biopolitical technologies like planning, decrees, statistics, and technical documentation, now occurs in time. Life became lifespan, a category inflected by politics, and so art also became automatically political. Groys claims that art made under the regime of biopolitics — art that signifies a lifespan — is by definition artificial, as lifespan is itself artificially wrought through biopolitical technologies. Within this rationalization, the “difference between the living and the artificial is, then, exclusively a narrative difference.”17 Narration, rendered through documentation, “evokes the unrepeatability of living time.” Documentation is able to narrate a history, a fictional ontology that injects the artificial with life. “Art documentation,” Groys concludes, “is thus the art of making living things out of artificial ones, a living activity out of technical practices: it is a bio art that is simultaneously biopolitical.” (“Artificial” here refers to art produced within the age of biopolitics.) Groys continues by updating Walter Benjamin’s well-known assessment of the art original and its loss of aura after it was technically reproduced. For Groys, the real difference between the original and the copy is its proximity to the viewer/consumer. “If we make our way to the artwork, then it is an original,” he says. To with: individually motivated action defines the status of the object’s authenticity. What Groys calls “make our way to,” Crary would term “pay attention to,” and 17 Boris Groys, ‘Art in the Age of Biopolitics: From Artwork to Art Documentation,’ Documenta11, trans. Steven Lindberg (Ostfildern-Ruit: Hatje Cantz, 2002), pp. 108 – 14. D Curatorial:

156

Measures of an Exhibition …

in both of their ideas we see the directed will of simultaneously mediated and mediating subjects intending their experience such that the experience is produced by the intention. In other words, if art since Duchamp was what the artist willed as art, subjective agency now harbors the ability to will art, at least as a category of perception, from anything. Artwork, or any other trappings of late capitalist culture, alone can never hold down the storm of shifting signifiers, never ensure a consistency of their signification. Even speculatively, this conjecture claims that classical definitions of art and perception are, or will one day be, unrelated to the way we experience and find meaning in artwork. Perhaps more germane to the comparison between art digitally communicated and art presented at large-scale international exhibitions are art’s immaterial properties, its material and disciplinary solubility within the flow of binary codes. Through a discussion of the evolution of information in maps — from Renaissance portraits of cities and Enlightenment geometries to today’s global positioning systems — Antoine Picon posits that today’s digital maps are “occurrences, events and situations, rather than objects, arrangements, and organizations.”18 Maps and art making are both forms of cultural production, and their correlation within the context of digital media lies in the peculiar nature of information. Taking information as an occurrence rather than a thing, Picon parallels the thousands of events that structure our lives in cities with the thousands of events that constitute our interaction with digital media such as the Internet. In this way, the once-distinct categories of object and representation, physical and virtual, are conjoined as both

18 Antoine Picon, Digital Culture in Architecture (Basel: Birkhäuser, 2010), p. 193. Mediation of Space

157

Measures of an Exhibition …

become moments that “happen.”19 Picon also notes that the rate at which computation has exponentially increased constitutes a monumental shift in our relationship to it. What was once computable was also foreseeable—say, grain shortage— yet today, “we have become accustomed to a world in which the most unpredictable phenomena [for example, financial markets] are often based on computable processes.”20 In other words, the digital systems we have constructed are gaining steer over physical reality as they grow in verisimilitude, in complexity and in uncertainty. Though still true today, the notion that art materially encountered expresses more than its online representation will soon shift; its online cognate will not show less, it will show differently. Without entering into a discussion of the socio-spatial potentials in augmented reality technologies, particularly in mobile telephony, I will point out that the main difference between the apprehension of information-events online and in physical reality is that it is incomparably faster online — hours of travel are atomized to milliseconds of pingtime. Particularly in the art context, information portals like e-flux and e-artnow send out e-mail announcements to hundreds of thousands of recipients each day, notifying a worldwide community of curators, artists, directors, and critics of exhibition openings around the globe. Artists, galleries, and museums are represented by Web sites from which their output can be remotely accessed and consumed in the form of texts, images, videos, and sound recordings. The career of young American artists Daniel Keller and Nik Kosmas, collectively known as Aids3D, took off online before they were recognized in reality, so to speak. After exhibiting their now-famous OMG Obelisk (2007) 19 Ibid., p. 195. 20 Ibid., p. 197. D Curatorial:

158

Measures of an Exhibition …

in a student exhibition at Berlin’s Universität der Künste —  a large black rectilinear column with the letters “OMG” spelled out in electroluminescent wires, flanked on both sides by altar flames — the artists put an animated .gif file on their Web site, the flicker of the flames set in motion by the switch between the .gif’s frames. The transformation of the piece’s physical state into a digital file allowed for its immediate and simple delivery, resulting in its appearance on computer screens around the world. The piece and the artists gained popularity online, and by 2009, the work was materially reconstructed and exhibited at the New Museum, New York, in a group exhibition called The Generational: Younger Than Jesus. By the artists’ own account, both the piece’s online appearance and physical installation are to be seen as a single gesture conceived in toto.21 In this way, OMG Obelisk does not exist in multiples in the traditional sense, but rather in spatial and formal plurality. Even though Webbased art was already institutionally legitimated by its inclusion in documenta X in 1997, it was presented as static and offline, and only now are we seeing an actualization of digital space as ontologically viable and operable for art and its dissemination. 22 Already in 1969, artist, critic, and theorist Jack Burnham created a systems theory of art in his article “Real Time Systems,” published in Artforum.23 By transposing the art system into an information system — he called galleries, museums,

21 Alex Gartenfeld, ‘Aids-3D in Real Life,’ Interview (September 2009), http://www.interviewmagazine.com/blogs/art/2009-02-09/aids-3d-newmuseumgenerational/ (accessed June 30, 2010). 22 Sarah Cook, ‘Immateriality and Its Discontents: An Overview of Main Models and Issues for Curating New Media,’ in New Media in the White Cube and Beyond, Christine Paul [ed.] (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008), p. 29. 23 Jack Burnham, ‘Real Time Systems,’ Artforum 8, no. 1 (September 1969), pp. 49 – 55. Mediation of Space

159

Measures of an Exhibition …

and art historians “long-term information processing structures” — Burnham separated art from its material incarnation by likening art concepts to software. The “art object is, in effect, an information ‘trigger’ for mobilizing the information cycle.”24 Burnham created a new framework for addressing art without returning to pre-technological categories and definitions. Like software, we can understand art uploaded into various material and non-material hosts. This reconception approaches the shift from art as “material” to “substance” and from “physical” to “mental” processes. As thematized in Jean-François Lyotard’s exhibition Les Immatériaux (1985), it is a shift that seems all the more active today, evinced by the growing number of practices devoted to concepts, performance, atmosphere, and, of course, the Internet.25 So, finally, how is the art experience doubled? How can the curator help reconstitute the first-hand experience, particularly in large-scale exhibitions, from the arbitrating pressures of the late capitalist world? Crary’s reconfiguration of perception into attention, which allows us to compare online and physical experiences of art, together with Groys’s merging of art with its documentation permits a further discussion of alternatives to established practices in exhibition making. Previously, I outlined how large-scale exhibitions have become emptied of their function as an effective survey of the latest artistic ideas, how digital communication has supplanted the 24 Charlie Gere, Art, Time and Technology (Oxford: Berg, 2006), p. 127. 25 Jean-François Lyotard, ‘Les Immatériaux,’ in Thinking About Exhibitions, pp. 162  –  6 5. Furthermore, tracing beyond Jack Burnham’s milieu, from which Conceptual Art began, Robert Zimmer has detailed how all art springs forth from concept and that the perception of it constitutes the primary strategy for interpreting and recreating the world. See Robert Zimmer, ‘Abstraction in Art with Implications for Perception,’ Philosophical Transactions: Biological Sciences 358, no. 1435 (July 2003), p. 1288. D Curatorial:

160

Measures of an Exhibition …

large-scale exhibition in this role, and, furthermore, how the Internet is becoming a site in which art is not only represented but actualized and validated. For exhibition makers and curators, this condition presents both a need and opportunity to reposition space, rather than artwork, as the primary material in exhibition making. If art can be apprehended, if not experienced, apart from materiality, the physical exhibition’s raison d’être must be conceived of as an experience structured around the exigencies of tangible space. Particularly for group exhibitions, where artwork by different artists is exhibited within the same space, the matrix of influences and relationships spatially manifested between the works, which forms the context, is always foregrounded, rather than individual artistic statements. The exhibition space, more than a place in which art is displayed, is also the carrier of the combined aims of the artists, curator, and the supporting institutions. As such, the artists’ autonomy, their unique practices, become incorporated into the curator’s motives for the exhibition — the exhibition’s author is the curator, not the sum of the various artistic desires. Curators, beyond selecting exhibitors and administering the logistics of display, are the mediators between the artwork and its audience. If artists are composers, then curators are their musicians; their purpose is to give voice to the artists’ work, their creations, in a way that is intelligible to viewers. The curators’ instrument, the material they shape to deliver the various artistic voices, is the exhibition space. Art installed incorrectly is easily distorted in its intentions. The curator considers the exhibition space’s dimensions, sociohistorical context, expected audience, and infrastructure (e.g., lighting) in making decisions about how and where to locate artwork to generate and mold the parameters of the exhibition experience — the aesthetic and intellectual scope, or purview, of the space. Mediation of Space

161

Measures of an Exhibition …

El Lissizky’s Abstract Cabinet (1927), first shown at the Landesmuseum in Hanover, has often been cited as an early example of activating the exhibition space itself to express ideas. Creating the small chamber in which paintings were shown, Lissitzky mounted his works along with ones made by other artists on sliding panels that visitors were allowed to move in order to determine the works’ visibility and juxtapositions. The panels were installed on vertical slats affixed onto a grey wall; painted white on one side, and black on the other, the room appeared to be a different colour depending on where one stood. Though Lissitzky called for spectators at exhibitions to become active participants rather than passive viewers, the underlying idea was that the design of the displays—spatially manifested as an extension of the art object—would be instrumentalized for the task.26 Employing the exhibition space as the medium of expression does not necessitate the performativity of its surfaces. Instead, the way space is sensually perceived by visitors already provides a store of potential manipulations in which to produce an environment that can express, or at the very least direct, an experience that conveys the intentions of the exhibition. Ultimately, the call for a concerted use of space as a material is a critique of the status quo in exhibition making today. Like images of exhibitions from almost a century ago, the majority of exhibitions today remain devoted to a modernist toolkit of white walls, ceiling mounted lights, paintings hung at eye-level, and “neutrally” placed sculptures that has become the de facto solution for exhibition making. Space is the vehicle for the exhibition’s meaning. How the exhibition space is lit, how the visitor enters, how the artworks are sequentially introduced and encountered, the footfall, the temperature, and the echo

26 Judith Barry, ‘Dissenting Spaces,’ in Thinking About Exhibitions, p. 308. D Curatorial:

162

Measures of an Exhibition …

are all embodied by the visitor and readily assailable as vocabulary in the burgeoning grammar of curatorial expression. Giving space to a particular realm between the private institution and the public sphere, exhibitions allow for cultural values to be inscribed collectively, while the way they are experienced forms a subjective position within each visitor.27 The knowledge produced by the exhibition experience, beyond the particular facts imparted, comes from the non-replicable, firsthand sensations specific to the self-directed way each visitor moves about and takes in the exhibition. The exhibition experience, impossible to fully predetermine, can nevertheless be scripted and choreographed by the curator in a way that best conveys both the exhibition’s and the artists’ intentions. Late capitalism mediates our daily life in such a way that the causes of its effects are vague and untraceable; to this condition, the curated exhibition provides contrast. In deliberately shaping the particulars of the exhibition space for the purpose of cultural dissemination, the curator provides a space where the concepts, themes, and ideas—the exhibition’s expression—are directed at the viewers expressly for their acknowledgment. To the degree that a curator can accomplish this within a given time will determine the size of the exhibition. Relieved of its role of uncovering the newest artwork, perhaps the biennial exhibition will decrease in size to focus its resources on the intensity of the visitor’s experience rather than the quantity of displays.○ This essay was first published in Fillip, Issue No. 13, Spring 2011 (Vancouver: Fillip) pp. 28 – 37

27 Charlotte Klonk, Spaces of Experience: Art Gallery Interiors from 1800 to 2000 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009). Mediation of Space

163

Markus Miessen

Pages 164 – 173

Critical Spatial Practice and the role of the Crossbencher What am I doing here? In the following, I will frame some of my recent thoughts and work in an attempt to document an ongoing investigation targeting the question of how, on the one hand, one can speak from and about one’s own work, and, on the other hand, relate to a more general discussion about “practice(s),” and how the concept of “praxis” can be explored as a mode of questioning existing disciplinary paradigms. While every field has its own limitations and urgencies, there exists such phenomenon as a meta-narrative, a kind of dissensual cultural glue that holds “things” together and in place. Since 2007, I have been in close contact with political theorist and philosopher Chantal Mouffe, in order to establish a working relationship that has been explored through the format of recorded conversations. In those discussions, we have tried to get closer to the question and problematic of consensus versus dissensus and / or an agonistic approach to the subject of what one might refer to as “cultures of assembly.” With my Berlinbased architectural practice, Studio Miessen, we have just finished a series of projects, which attempted to address the question of assembly and modes of dissensus through spatial design. This is also something that is being explored under the umbrella of the post-graduate specialization Critical Spatial Practice that I set up at the Städelschule in Frankfurt in 2011. D Curatorial:

164

Critical Spatial Practice and the role of the Crossbencher

Witte de With – Consensus Bar; commissioned by Defne Ayas; Spatial Design by Studio Miessen Photography by Bob Goedewaagen

The most recent project of Studio Miessen in this regard was a re-interpretation of the spaces of the Dutch art institution Witte de With in Rotterdam. One of the components of the overall scheme that we developed is a space that we called the “Consensus Bar.” It directly addresses the question of consensual/dissensual practices in institutions, especially in the very particular context of Witte de With, which is an institution that shares the building with another institution (TENT), which, quite often, produces conflicts — but not necessarily the kind of conflicts that turn out to be productive. This is particularly relevant in a context such as the Netherlands since the country is conceptually and philosophically based on a consensual apparatus called the “Polder Model.” Especially in the Dutch context, which after Norway is the most consensus-ridden country in Europe, the question and problematic of consensus has Mediation of Space

165

Critical Spatial Practice and the role of the Crossbencher

become a sedative tool used forcefully and to an absurd degree by the political class. In Scandinavia, consensus is an un-outspoken rule, in the United Kingdom the concept of state-prescribed consensus was particularly explored by New Labour under Tony Blair, and in Holland the so-called Polder Model is a historic rule to keep the country in sync and united. This is something that I explored in one of my previous books, The Nightmare of Participation. Our approach to one of the spaces at Witte de With, the Consensus Bar, was to exacerbate this conflict between the two institutions that share the building rather than to hide it. We used a leftover space between the two administrative sections of the institutions in order to create a space in which, by rule, the administrative member of these institutions would have to meet frequently and get drunk together: a space of enforced conversation, sandwiched between the two core zones of decision-making in the building. When activated in this way, the space is experiencing the slow dropping of a smoke-cloud once every 30 minutes. I am using this bar as an informal and somewhat everyday example to illustrate how something rather serious, such as Chantal Mouffe’s notion and concept of agonism (the process of realizing and acknowledging that we agree to disagree), can be translated into space in a playful yet productive manner. While tremendously admiring Mouffe’s approach, I am also attempting to point out its limits, in other words: the question of (applicable) approach. I am and have continually been interested in exploring how such culture of hermeticism can be dismantled, how one can devise an inclusive model while maintaining certain exclusivity. In this regard, issues such as social context, formal and informal forms of politics and/or economies would need to be addressed in such model. What seems increasingly important is that one needs to clarify the urgency that today one can no D Curatorial:

166

Critical Spatial Practice and the role of the Crossbencher

Witte de With – School as School; commissioned by Defne Ayas; Spatial Design by Studio Miessen Photography by Bob Goedewaagen

longer practice without taking a position. In the context of the conference and this publication, what seems particularly relevant is to point out the necessity for the breaking up of the (often) hermetic nature of disciplinary discourses. This is not to argue for something as blunt as an ‘inter’-disciplinary or ‘trans’disciplinary approach, but to insist on the existence and relevance of discussions that take place outside one’s own horizon, understanding, and definition of practice. My personal interest in this debate is the development of a particular role, which – in many ways – can be understood as an ‘a’-disciplinary role, one, which I have previously labeled The Crossbencher. As a platform for an alternative praxis, this role attempts to bridge what (usually) tends to be limited in scope: the relationship between one’s own agenda and, say, ethical ambitions, and the possibility to force oneself into discourses, contexts or situations that one is not part of or invited to participate in. Mediation of Space

167

Critical Spatial Practice and the role of the Crossbencher

The Nightmare of Participation 2.0 — an afterthought Markus Miessen & Hannes Grassegger [translated from the German by April Lamm]

From Cairo to Berlin to Occupy Wall Street. Participation is the new opium of the people. When everyone takes part in everything, everything will be fine, or so says the holy doctrine of participation. But sometimes what’s better is exactly the opposite. Everyone should be able to take part! The call to participation is the red thread of the history of political thought of our time, linking the protests on Wall Street to Cairo to the ballot boxes captured by the Pirates of Germany. But “participation” is a concept in need of urgent repair. Sometimes, such forms of democracy, in which everyone has a right to say in the matter, should be avoided at all costs. Not everyone should be invited to take part in decision-making processes. We propose that one should look at participation from the other way around: as an autocratic model. In fact, the time has come to take a chance on more autocracy. In Germany, at least, participation is wildly romanticized. The middle seems to be lost as soon as one calls out “join us!” on Facebook. And we’re not talking about massive binge drinking. For the past decade or so, we have been experiencing an almost fundamentalist endorsement of civic participation under the mantle of “participation.” This enthusiasm is accompanied by a grotesque harmlessness in creating the structures and basic conditions for so-called participation at both the national and local levels, for example, as with Stuttgart21, or with newspapers such as Freitag (bursting with specious D Curatorial:

168

Critical Spatial Practice and the role of the Crossbencher

participatory ideas), or with the flood of participatory projects in the art world, et cetera. It’s as if participation itself has taken on a value all on its own. The disciples of this holy vision of participation are Germany’s Pirate Party. For the time being they appear to have ushered in our gentle deutscher arabischer Frühling (German Arab Spring), as Heinrich Wefing described in one of Germany’s leading newspapers, Die Zeit. In reality, they are radical without even knowing why. For voting they use their laptops, mostly through the voting platform Adhocracy. It offers up the possibility of voting in real time just like a representative of parliament. The Pirates stipulated “liquid democracy” is meant to replace representative democracy (a half-democratic compromise, in the eyes of the Pirates) in favour of “real participation” with power. All access, uncompromised, here-and-now democracy — for every question a popular vote: this is the participatory dogma of the Pirates. These “orange activists” see participation as voting via menu, with the least possible personal effort or consequences. A feeble push of a button, an anonymous log-in. This is Slacktivism, the vision of an all-inclusive democracy inspired by the collaborative model Web 2.0, from Facebook to Wikipedia, where content is generated or edited by anyone at anytime. In theory, it sounds wonderful. In reality, it is dreadful. The Pirates have liquidized one of the foundational pillars of democracy: personal responsibility. Both on the level of the voter, who acts as an advocate for something with his real person, and on the level of the representative, who shows his face with every decision. What the Pirates have neglected to see is that even in the Holy Grail of all Participation idolatry —  Wikipedia — the participatory illusion has quietly and furtively disappeared. That is, Wikipedia has contracted a disease through the contagion of participation. Useless for scholarship due to its liquid contents, Mediation of Space

169

Critical Spatial Practice and the role of the Crossbencher

Gwangju Biennial, On Site, a community Hub for content production, 2011 A project by nOffice (Miessen Pflugfelder Nilsson). Photography by JomgOh Kim

Witte de With – School as School; commissioned by Defne Ayas; Spatial Design by Studio Miessen Photography by Bob Goedewaagen

D Curatorial:

170

Critical Spatial Practice and the role of the Crossbencher

in any case, this web-encyclopedia is also becoming eventually useless to the normal user. Studies complain about the evermore endless entries, ever-more incomprehensible terminology. The community of enthusiasts is diminishing. In fact, since 2007, the swell of Wikipedia entries has been shrinking. The era of total participation is over. In the meanwhile, Wikipedia has been under attack by an entire arsenal of undemocratic decision-making processes for critical situations. As socalled “administrators” have the power to completely negate editorial additions to entries of controversial politician profiles on Wikipedia — if only to prevent Edit Wars that render the site useless — content can be changed by the minute. Important “admins” are known by name. And sometimes Jimmy Wales, the head of Wikipedia, has the last word. For example, when he deleted details from his own resume, going against the encyclopaedia’s set rules. Or when media-czar John Seigenthaler used his influence to change the rules of Wikipedia, pressuring them to delete an entry about him containing defamatory content. Participation alone doesn’t work. The best proof of this are those in the realm of politics who held fast to participatory dogma and then came nowhere near close to holding power. In Egypt, the Muslim Brotherhood and the military have taken the reins; Occupy Wall Street sunk in embarrassing roundtable allinclusive discussions held on the island of Mallorca; and while the Pirates lack concrete suggestions, they are rife with internal organizational quibbles and a continually changing leadership. What should the participatory vision lead to? Imagine what an Edit War would mean to a participatory Pirate Utopia. An editorial war in which our constitutional laws would be changed by the minute. Or the regulations on access to weapons. It is nearly impossible to imagine how dangerous total democracy could be. It is a nightmare. In the best case, one that never comes true. Mediation of Space

171

Critical Spatial Practice and the role of the Crossbencher

We believe that such a holy vision — the idea that radically participative open models guarantee the optimal solution for all problems — is dangerous. Participation must be viewed without romanticism. Participation is neither a quality nor a solution but rather an organizational model. Real democracy demands much more than just voting. In parliament, ideas are created and heads are chopped off. Real participation is not innocent. In other words: participation is war. Like the political theorist Chantal Mouffe says, we should agree that we disagree. And learn to productively live and deal with this situation. The basis for the worldwide call to participation lies in real conflicts. We demand a conflict-orientated praxis that dissents from the fashionable cyber-democratic mediation-mania and accepts the fact that sometimes one person must take responsibility for a solution. Not because we doubt democracy, but because we don’t want to end up in Harmonistan, a pseudoparticipatory superficial democracy, in which politicians shove all responsibility onto the online-voting community. We have to turn the idea of participation on its head. Democracy is a continual process of democratization on the personal level. For this, everyone must (sometimes) grant power to an autocrat. Instead of viewing participation as an opening of the decision-making process that is dictated from above, one should see participation as an individual entrance strategy to power from down below; as a post-consensus method of getting in the door. Our join-in era of participation needs a new understanding of itself: do-it-yourself instead of picking from a menu. Even if it seems that we are standing on the other side of the door of power, uninvited: we are still a part of the party. ○ →p. 172 Architecture & Critical Spatial Practice (ACSP): Parliamentary Chambers; a study of global parliamentary settings and their spatial conditions; a project by Ana Filipovic (Prof. Markus Miessen), Städelschule Frankfurt, 2011 D Curatorial:

172

Critical Spatial Practice and the role of the Crossbencher

01 This is a lower house of the parliament, famous for its large glass dome available for visitors. The members of the parliament, seated underneath the dome, can constantly be reminded people are the ones they represent.

05 The palament of this country is seated in the former Royal Palace. The origins of this cradle of democracy couldn’t have been less democratic: it was built in 1842 as the Royal Palace, as suitable grand home for the new royal family.

09 The General Assembly seated in this chamber represents transnational body constituing of one representative of each member country. The interpreters operating from the booth, aided with earpieces and microphones, play a vital role in the meetings.

02 This is an upper house of the parliament that represents sixteen federal states equaly distributed into sixteen rows.

06 The lower house of a parliament is famous for its rectangular shape where two major parties have been faced in conflictual manner.The speaker is standing on one side of the table in a close proximity from his opponent, sitting on the other side of the table. Red line on the carpet in front of the benches should not be crossed during the debate.

10 The House of Representatives is a lower house of parliament showing the hybrid version of two dominant spatial types—rectamgular and hemicycle. The parliament is specific for unusually small number of representatives in comparison to the county’s population.

03

Parliament chamber of this country once seated federal government. The federation fell apart in the beginning of the 1990’s and the government of the singly country moved in. Paradoxically the number of seats increased and two rows behind the speaker were added.

07

Members of the upper house of this parliament are appointed and not chosen by the people. Between the two opposing parties are crossbenches for independant members. In the centre also lies judge’s woolsack—a wool stuffed cushion or seat covered with red cloth, thas has neither back nor arms

11

The Supreme People’s Assembly is the primary legislative body of the country, that ordinarily delegates authority to the smaller and more powerful Presidium. 87% of the members belong to the single party.

04

The National Assembly of this country is famous for the frequent physical encounters between the members of the parliament, who are showing their disagreement with shoving, pushing, stacking, and unstacking furniture, barricading doors, occupying podiums, yelling, singing, hair-pulling, and so on.

08

This is a official seat of a transnational parliament which serves for twelve four-day plenary sessions per year. However, there is another chamber in neighbouring country, bigger and better known as a symbol of the institution it represents.

12

The Deputies Chamber, a lower house of parliament, was built within the grand project for the National Congress in newly established capital in 1960’s. The project represents a masterpiece of modern architecture.

173

Mediation of Space

Lilli Hollein

Pages 174 – 180

All Kinds of Spaces “Perhaps the most tyrannical element in our architecture now is space. Space has been contrived by architects and deified by critics” [Venturi, Scott Brown, Learning from Las Vegas (1972)]

Space, its effects and utilisation, is where the various branches of my work intersect: as a writer and curator for architecture and design, as director of an annual festival in Vienna and as jury chairwoman of the Committee for Kunst im öffentlichen Raum (Art in Public Space), also in Vienna. Space is a word that can be read and interpreted in different ways. And as richly various as these meanings are the situations in which we speak of space when it concerns communicating contents and considerations, when it concerns curating. Invited by Lukas Feireiss at Space Matters to talk about “Curating space,” I have tried to relate my considerations on inside and outside (in interpretations of “space” that are just as various) and on the task of curating to works that have materialized in recent years. In doing so I have taken into account a context, a layer of meaning formed at present by specific (exhibition) spaces and by work specifically focused on the potential and given circumstances of a space. Hence I shall describe a few aspects and various approaches by looking at practical examples.

D Curatorial:

174

All Kinds of Spaces

Exhibiting space in space Curating exhibitions with architectural content is always influenced by the contextualization of the object and the exhibition space. It is staging space in the space surrounding. Thinking about an exhibition — and presuming I am not bound to a museum or a comparable institution and its facilities — the space — also public space — can to an even greater degree be an integral part of the curatorial concept and also of the artistic work. I can choose the place and assign the work to be done; or, on the other hand, I know the exhibits already and can add further significance or level of perception through the context of the location. Or I have to watch that this very thing doesn’t happen. Alongside the dialogue ensuing between intervention and surroundings, the dialogue with the public is essential. The choice of space enables me to target a public who are educated, arts-oriented and principally interested. Or I can seek a confrontation in the public space with a broad-based public, who might even participate on occasion. Nevertheless, it is of course naïve to assume that the public space is principally a space that is open-minded, that comprehends free expression of opinion and democratic usage. As curator of a festival, I have the opportunity of selecting locations that are to be subject to thematic treatment and used as an arena of action. Creating such temporary exhibition venues in the public space bears with it the possibility for me of approaching people who were previously not prepared to come to terms with a work of art. To me, curating is a discourse made visible and it also can be a way of making content accessible to a wider audience.

Mediation of Space

175

All Kinds of Spaces

Dialogue and knowledge transfer My curatorial role is more and more frequently also that of a moderator; initiating a dialogue between two sides and urging knowledge transfer arising from this and resulting from a project. The potential of the dialogue for art projects in the urban context in the interaction of multiple authors is illustrated as well for instance by Grant Kester in his Conversation Pieces. My colleagues Tulga Beyerle, Thomas Geisler, and myself were able to test what dialogue, dynamics and space can achieve when the Vienna University of Applied Arts commissioned me to organize a design conference; in collaboration with my colleagues I was able to put its concept into practice. Dialogues ran parallel in three rooms; each of the sessions lasted about 50 minutes, the entire event one and a half days. The cast included great names from theory and practice, interspersed with personalities who are the driving forces of interdisciplinary interaction. The public had to book their places in the rooms beforehand, a guarantee that they had acquired information on all speakers and issues, and had deliberately chosen their particular events. This was successful not only in generating completely different expectations in the run-up to the two conferences (2006 “Die Zeit” [Time] and 2007 “Die Mitte” [The Middle]), but also each session knitted together its program according to focal topics, and on the evening of the second conference day everyone in the audience was able to report on its own event. In addition, having been informed of the issue that was to be discussed during the 50 minutes with the relevant other party, the speakers were invited to step onto the platform — with the sum total of their knowledge and therefore in a very personal act. No prepared lectures, no illustrations to accentuate topics — and yet impressive images still linger in our minds D Curatorial:

176

PARTICULARLY IN RICH CITIES […] WE SEE A PASSIVITY SETTING IN AMONG THE RESIDENTS IN THEIR EXPERIENCE AND EXPLOITATION, AND, IN THEIR RECLAMATION MEdiation of SpacE

177

All Kinds of Spaces

today, encounters with people during these two days whom we were able to experience in very diverse roles and qualities, also on account of their dialogue partners.

The city is a state of mind The city is a state of mind, a body of customs and traditions, and of organized attitudes and sentiments that inhere in this tradition. The city is not, in other words, merely a physical mechanism and an artificial construction. It is involved in the vital processes of the people who compose it, it is a product of nature and particularly of human nature. [Robert E. Park, in The City: Suggestions for the Investigation of Human Behaviour in the Urban Environment,University of Chicago Press 1925]

Particularly in rich cities with a thorough-going, organized infrastructure and a corresponding and generally maintained set of rules, we see a passivity setting in among the residents in their experience and exploitation, and, even more, in their reclamation of the public space. Like people who need a warning on the coffee beaker that the contents might be hot, the comfort zoning of the residents of some cities forces them into a kind of passivity. It never occurs to anyone anymore to make demands, to place their stakes or occupy a space — or to exhaust the possibilities while following all the rules and laws. But even where it’s purely a matter of consumption and personal everyday life, we forget to exploit the opportunity: everything perhaps available only in another urban district and not in the supermarket round the corner is purchased in a mega-shopping expedition on the outskirts of the city; very few D Curatorial:

178

All Kinds of Spaces

people still go to the local cobbler for their shoe repairs. The urbanists are now mobilizing themselves and revving up; the “right to city life” is experiencing a renaissance, the “state of mind” is being scrutinized. Many of the Vienna Design Week projects launch out from here as well. An explicitly international festival, from the very beginning it was nevertheless a concept of making the City of Vienna, with its assets and special characteristics, into one of the leading protagonists of these annual ten days, and of highlighting the different facets of this city. For instance, the “Passionswege,” a format that is curated by us directors of the festival, are initiating an intensive exchange between manufacturing firms and designers under special background conditions. On average, the collaboration lasts three months and as its objective has the free creation of a project, but not necessarily a product. The seven years of operation have thus produced a great variety of results, with the cooperation partners involved in processes promoting innovation, consultations for and with firms, and product development. Firms learn to work with designers, designers come in contact with a special and often very rare product and handicraft culture and learn through knowledge transfer; the public get to know a city — sometimes their own — from other points of view, inhibitions are dismantled and districts supported and strengthened. The format “Stadtarbeit” is devoted to more explicitly chosen urban districts. This program is preceded by a call for projects in which the jury chooses contributions dealing with “social design,” which are then realised as part of the festival. Using the public space for interventions in this kind of environment is done with different means and objectives than in similar projects in the mega-cities of this world, which have to fight poverty and a lack of infrastructure. Mediation of Space

179

All Kinds of Spaces

Change life! Change society! Lefebvre’s call reverberates loudly in the ears of later generations. The development of our cities and society has again led in recent years to an intensification in thought processes and movements, with new roles, tools and targets on the part of planners. The opportunity of exhibiting performative and participatory projects by a young, international group of architects in a genuine mega-city was given to me as commissar of the Austrian contribution to the 2007 São Paolo Architecture Biennale. Such processes involving participation, that enter into dialogue inspiring the development of projects which do not necessarily end up as built space — to document this and process these records in the form of an exhibition never does justice to the dynamics of the approach. Nor did I merely want to tell a story — that of the projects of feld72 — but wished to express their position in a communicable form. The exhibition contribution aims to reveal immediately at first sight that a different approach to architecture is being propagated here, rather than joining the queue with a contribution parading the achievements of the most beautiful buildings on the international scene. The architectural theorist Kari Jormakka — who so unexpectedly recently died — wrote in his catalogue text on this exhibition: “A felicitous performative statement produces a social transformation in a situation which is co-constituted with the understanding of the conventional meanings of the statement.” (in “Urbanism — for sale feld72,” catalogue for the Austrian contribution to the 2007 Sao Paulo Biennale) This applied in its essentials also to the joint preparation of the show on the Biennale complex, but in addition by D Curatorial:

180

All Kinds of Spaces

means of the swarm effect this generated through participation in utterly different locations. The armada of shop window dummies was perhaps not the most aesthetic contribution, but we managed to activate the visitors and arouse their interest in the contents, and — already at first sight — tell a small part of the story at the same time. And this is what curating space means to me, in short: to tell stories, about space, with the aid of space, with an eye on the space.○

Mediation of Space

181

Rani al Rajji

Pages 182  – 185

Fifty percent “Hello I’m your guide for today and I’d like to start by telling you that fifty percent of the tour’s stories are blunt lies… Wait, let me rephrase that, they’re drawn from a reality that I perceive as true and thus they are verisimilar…” The greenline tour, the assassination tour, the intramuros tour and others are a series of urban street performances designed and implemented to give an insight on the complex strata of the city of Beirut to a curious first time visitor. How can one navigate a city where the streets have no names and where the speed of change is causing a complete urban makeover every few years? On top of that Lebanon has a very special constitution mixing the religious and the civic in a fragile system that patches together eighteen different communities that live next to each other without really living together. This creates a city with multiple facets where the social scenery can change dramatically within minutes from Parisian style Mediterranean city to conservative Arab hinterland metropolis while passing through fields of ruins that stand witnesses of how madness can manifest itself when it gets unleashed. The tour concept emerged from the ruins of the aftermath of the July 2006 war to propose a whole new way of navigating spaces in the city. The Idea was simple, public space is common ground and the only valid platform for all the social and religious communities of Lebanon to meet and have open dialogues leading to stability. This is made possible by operating below the radar, guiding people in the streets and organizing spontaneous actions like the “public space invaders” and the “raiders of the D Curatorial:

182

Fifty percent

lost room” where people are guided by incongruous narratives proposed by one or more guides that shed light on the contemporary history of Beirut in a way to provoke people and raise curiosity and awareness. The city is a space for everyone but in a fractured society special measures are sometimes necessary to open it up. Different narratives and games are the tools to probe the invisible walls that the various dwellers and communities living in Beirut use as barricades. Urban games like the “twisted twister” where the classic twister board’s color dots are replaced by religious and ideological symbols to project a different reality where people get closer to each other and open dialogue paths by stepping on each other’s taboos. Another tool is the idea of exploring spaces and redefining them through narratives, it comes from the old tradition of the Arabic storyteller who traditionally used to sit in a café and tell stories from the old times of the Abbassids and the Mamelouks to an eclectic crowd gazing at him in awe. The contemporary version is a guide who takes you to all the places you never thought you’d see and tells you stories that range from the old lady who kept on living at the frontline with her forty four cats to the man who made a ceasefire to save his three hundred and thirteen race horses from the Beirut Hippodrome back in 1982. These stories may seem very banal but what they actually create are rabbit holes for the contemporary Alices to get through. It’s only by accepting the fairytale part of it that you can actually perceive, comprehend and navigate space in a city that always presents itself as a sweet insult to everything we know about normal urban fabric and density. The layered cake that is Beirut has verticals, horizontals and even obliques and this creates spaces where the abnormal becomes trivial. These are the spaces to look for and to curate by narratives because the “first impression visitors,” who fall for the Beirut syndrome Mediation of Space

183

Fifty percent

that makes them come back and back again without ever having the chance to put their fingers on the itch, may find a way to solve the riddle by getting insights on how it started and how it came to be like this. The same goes for the Beirut dwellers who have a “mal de vivre” from living in a permanent bustling experiment and who suddenly have a breach or a window on a whole different perspective. Extensive knowledge of the city allows the guide to warp its spaces and to project perspectives on its insides. In a way the tour is a loosely planned performance and it can only get inspiring if a certain synergy develops between guide and visitor. Hazard or providence as the Lebanese call it plays an important role in defining the course of each tour, thus creating a unique spatial experience every time. The novelty of the approach lies in the lack of factual information. Instead the experience mixes storytelling and history to chart hidden layers and reflect the spatial essence, creating leeway for a deeper exploration. Space matters most where it’s scarce and hard to define. Curating Beirut through storytelling and narratives is a way that allows many people to have a fuller view and a sense of belonging.○

D Curatorial:

184

Fifty percent

Photography: Libalel Webdoc August 13, 2011 in Beirut, Bayrut, LB

Mediation of Space

185

Appendix

The symposium and publication Space Matters. Exploring Spatial Theory and Practice Today has been curated and edited by Lukas Feireiss for the Bachelor and Master program space&designstrategies at the University of Art and Design Linz, Austria. The concept of this bachelor and master programme was developed and is directed by Professor Elsa Prochazka as an interdisciplinary field of inquiry and production, space&designstrategies engages in the investigation of the interface of art, architecture, design, and digital media. It teaches fundamental knowledge and skills in space-related design ranging from art, interventions in space to complex space-related concepts, realizations in space, virtual space systems as well as in-depth materials science and implementation techniques. Students are challenged to analyse, define and materialise phenomena in both real and virtual space.The programme aims to lead students to a high level of individual flexibility in developing solution strategies for a rapidly changing art and architecture and creative scene while at the same time imparting profound knowledge of materials science and process techniques. Another central aim of the program is to establish interfaces with both young and internationally renowned artists by organising lecture series, excursions, workshops and projects. Extensive co-operation ventures with the public sector and business community enable students to apply the full range of techniques imparted as a sort of trial run while still in training. ○ Mission statement Elsa Prochazka http://www.strategies.ufg.ac.at/ueber-uns_about-us

Exploring Spatial Theory and Practice Today

187

Biographies

Luis Berríos-Negrón C3 Puerto Rican artist Luis Berríos-Negrón focuses on visual arts, material economies, and mass customization through the lens of architecture. Luis holds a Master of Architecture from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Parsons the New School for Design. He recently founded The Anxious Prop, Paramodular, and is researcher at the Architecture Faculty of the Technische Universität Braunschweig. In 2012, he is core collaborator exhibiting in Paul Ryan’s Threeing project at Documenta13, and in Ute Meta Bauer’s Future Archive at the Neuer Berliner Kunstverein.

nische Hochschule, ETH) Zürich in Switzerland.

currently visiting professor at space&designstrategies at the University of Art and D1 Design Linz, Austria.

Carson Chan Architecture writer and curator Carson Chan is the founding member and head curator of Program, a nonprofit exhibition space for art and architecture in Berlin. Chan received a Bachelor of Architecture from Cornell University, and a Masters in Design Studies in the History and Theory of Architecture from Harvard University. He regularly writes for various art and cultural magazines such as 032c where he is also a contributing editor, and advises cultural institutions in Denmark and Italy. Along with Nadim Samman, Carson Chan was appointed curator for the 4th edition Alfredo Brillembourg A2 of the Marrakech Biennial Alfredo Brillembourg was in 2012. born in New York, where he received his Bachelor of Lukas Feireiss [ed.] Art and Architecture and Lukas Feireiss runs the his Master of Science in interdisciplinary creative Architectural Design in 1986 practice Studio Lukas from Columbia University. In Feireiss, focused on the 1992, he received a second discussion and mediation of architecture degree from architecture, art and visual the Central University of culture in the urban realm. Venezuela and began his in- In his artistic, curatorial, dependent practice in archi- editorial and consultive work tecture. In 1993 he founded he aims at the critical cut-up Urban-Think Tank (U-TT) in and playful re-evaluation Caracas, Venezuela. Since of creative and spatial May 2010, Brillembourg has production modes and their held the chair for Architecdiverse socio-cultural and ture and Urban Design at the medial conditions. Lukas Swiss Institute of TechnolFeireiss teaches at various ogy (Eidgenössische Techuniversities worldwide and is Exploring Spatial Theory and Practice Today

189

Lilli Hollein D3 Lilli Hollein works as a freelance journalist, architecture and design critic. She has been published widely in daily newspapers and magazines at home and abroad and acted as a curator of the Austrian contribution for Sao Paulo Architecture Biennial 2007. Together with T. Beyerle and T. Geisler as Neigungsgruppe Design she is curating a series of international design conferences at the University of Applied Arts Vienna. Lilli is also responsible for the “Vienna Design Weeks” that took place for the first time October 2007 and were also organized by Neigungsgruppe Design. Since 2010 she acts as jury president of KÖR Art in Public Spaces, Vienna. A2 Hubert Klumpner Hubert Klumpner was born in Salzburg, Austria. He graduated from the University of Applied Arts in Vienna and later received a Master of Science in Architecture and Urban Design from Columbia University. In 1998 Klumpner joined Alfredo Brillembourg as Director of Urban-Think Tank (U‑TT) in Caracas. Since May 2010, Klumpner has held the

Biographies

chair for Architecture and Urban Design at the Swiss Institute of Technology (Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule, ETH) in Zürich, Switzerland. Bruno Latour B4 Bruno Latour was trained first as a philosopher and then as an anthropologist. From 1982 to 2006, he has been professor at the Centre de sociologie de l’Innovation at the Ecole nationale supérieure des mines in Paris and, for various periods, visiting professor at UCSD, at the London School of Economics and in the history of science department of Harvard University. He is now professor at Sciences Po Paris. Thomas Macho B3 Thomas Macho is a cultural scientist and philosopher from Vienna, where he studied philosophy, musicology and pedagogy at the University of Vienna. He is Director of the Institute for Cultural Theory and History at Humboldt-University where he is professor since 1993, and co-founder of the Hermann von Helmholtz-Centre for Cultural Techniques at the Humboldt-University, Berlin. Macho held various Guest Professorships at the University of Klagenfurt, University of Art and Design, Linz and the Institute for Interdisciplinary Research and Studies, Vienna.

Space Matters

Markus Miessen D2 Markus Miessen is an architect, consultant, and writer. The initiator of the Participation Quadrilogy, he has published around the question of critical spatial practice, institution building, and spatial politics. In 2008, he founded the Winter School Middle East. Academic positions include AA (2004 – 08), Berlage Institute (2009 – 10) and HfG Karlsruhe (2010 – 11). Miessen is now a professor for Critical Spatial Practice at the Städelschule, Frankfurt, and guest professor at HEAD Geneva as well as USC Los Angeles.

at the University of Art and Design Linz, Austria.

C1 Marjetica Potr Marjetica Potr is an artist and architect based in Ljubljana, Slovenia and Berlin, Germany. Her interdisciplinary practice includes on-site projects, research, architectural case studies, and drawings. Her work documents and interprets contemporary architectural practices with particular regard to energy infrastructure and water use and the ways people live together. Potr ’s work has been exhibited extensively throughout Europe and the Americas, including the São Paulo Biennial and the VenC2 ice Biennial. Potr is ProfesMichael Obrist sor in Design for the Living Michael Obrist is part of World at the Hochschule für feld72 (Anne Catherine Fleith, Michael Obrist, Mario Bildende Künste Hamburg. Paintner, Richard Scheich, Elsa Prochazka A1 Peter Zoderer), a collective Elsa Prochazka is an exploring the intersecAustrian architect and after tion between architecture, teaching as a professor for applied urbanism and art. architectural design in urban The office based in Vienna realized numerous buildings, context in Germany, she urban interventions in public developed a concept for a new kind of crossover studspace, masterplans and ies: space&designstrategies researches in an internaat the University of Art and tional context. The work Industrial Design in Linz, of feld72 has been exhibwhich she is directing since ited in numerous Biennales 2001. Prochazka founded worldwide. Besides having her own architectural firm won numerous awards, in vienna _austria, which feld72 was selected by the focuses on residential and jury of the latest Lakhovurban development, public Chernikhov-Award as one buildings, offices, and inof the 10 most innovative dustrial buildings, corporate young practices worldwide. architecture, and museums From 2003-2011 Michael and exhibition design. She is Obrist was also teaching a member of different boards at space&designstrategies

190

Biographies

for architecture and urban design.

Conceptual Practices in Architecture at Columbia University. Her work as an Rani al Rajji D4 architectural historian and Beirut-born architect and theorist focuses on articulaturban storyteller Rani al ing genealogies of political Rajji is one of the founders and theoretical engagement of Studio Beirut. As a place with questions of technologifor artists, activists and arcal transformation. She is a chitects, Studio Beirut seeks founding co-editor of Grey to re-script public spheres in Room, a quarterly journal of Beirut so that they become art, architecture, art, media, accessible for people from and politics published quarall walks of life to meet and terly by MIT Press. interact. Started in 2007 following the July war, they’ve Martha Thorne A3 now hosted numerous Martha Thorne has been events, and workshops. He is Executive Director of the co-editors of the book BeyPritzker Architecture Prize routes. A Guide to Beirut, a since 2005. Currently she is field manual for 21st century Associate Dean for External urban explorer. Relations at IE School of Architecture in Madrid, Spain. Jane Rendell B1 She served as Associate Professor Jane Rendell is Curator of the Department Director of Architectural Re- of Architecture at The Art search at the Bartlett, UCL. Institute of Chicago from An architectural designer 1996 to 2005. She is also the and historian, art critic editor of several books. and writer, she is author of numerous books. Amongst C4 Iris Touliatou her most recent publications The work of Paris-based are Site-Writing (2010), Art artist Iris Touliatou refers and Architecture (2006), The both to a physical, urban Pursuit of Pleasure (2002). landscape and to a visionary Her work over the past ten or fictional one. It borrows years has explored various elements from Modernist deinterdisciplinary intersecsign history, from archetypes tions: feminist theory and of certain periods that evoke architectural history, fine an idea of architectural and art and architectural design, democratic utopia, examines autobiographical writing and failing social structures and criticism. contemporary urban pathologies. It questions notions of B2 urban planning by focusFelicity D. Scott Felicity D. Scott is assistant ing on places that eschew professor of architecture predetermined definitions of and director of the program what a city or architecture is. in Critical, Curatorial, and Exploring Spatial Theory and Practice Today

191

A4 Annett Zinsmeister Berlin-based artist, architect and writer Annett Zinsmeister is professor for experimental design at the State Academy of Art and Design Stuttgart. Her spatial and architectural work combines diverse disciplines such as architecture, art, science and design, and is distinguished by the creative interaction with different media. She is the author of numerous interdisciplinary books that merge both, artistic practice and theoretical discourse.

Edited by Prof. Mag. Art. Lukas Feireiss for space&designstrategies / University of Art and Design Linz This work is subject to copyright. All rights are reserved, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically those of translation, reprinting, re-use of illustrations, broadcasting, reproduction by photocopying machines or similar means, and storage in data banks. © 2013 AMBRA | V AMBRA | V is part of Medecco Holding GmbH, Vienna Printed in Austria Product Liability: The publisher can give no guarantee for the information contained in this book. The use of registered names, trademarks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and are therefore free for general use. The publisher and editor kindly wish to inform you that in some cases, despite efforts to do so, the obtaining of copyright permissions and usage of excerpts of text is not always successful. Layout and Cover Design: Floyd E. Schulze Proofreading: Rixt Woudstra Printing and binding: Holzhausen Druck GmbH, A-Vienna Printed on acid-free and chlorine-free bleached paper ISBN 978-3-99043-563-2 AMBRA | V Special Thanks to Prof. Elsa Prochazka, Prof. Reinhard Kannonier, Dr. Christine Windsteiger, and Katharian Kloibhofer for making this possible.