Sight/Site

Themes:

- Social space and our relationship to it. How it conditions us/how we respond to it.
- How we interact and change space.
- How we are look at, and are looked at in the world.

Henri Lefebvre – The Production of Space

‘The convention of perspective, which is unique to European art which was first established in the early Renaissance. centres everything on the eye of the beholder. It is like a beam from a light house – only instead of light travelling outwards, appearances travel in. The conventions called those appearances reality. Perspective makes the single eye the centre of the visible world. Everything converges on to the eye as to the vanishing point of infinity. The visible world is arranged for the spectator as the universe was once thought to be arranged for God.

According to the convention of perspective there is no visual reciprocity. There is no need for God to situate himself in relation to others: he is himself the situation. The inherent contradiction in perspective was that it structured all images of reality to address a single spectator who, unlike God, could only be in one place at a time.’ John Berger (1972) Ways of Seeing, Penguin, London, pp,16-18.

The single point perspective is artificial and a simplification of how we see and act with our environment, because we are constantly moving and also simply have two eyes. The process of looking is reciprocal, a dialogue of power. When looking at someone or something, you don’t fully control what you are looking at.

Stehli’s The Strip- 
Stehli starts clothed and undresses until the man sat down presses the camera shutter.  He is in control of how naked she becomes. The camera takes a photo of the man facing the viewer and the back of Stehli composed like in the above photograph.

The male is more exposed in this situation; we see the back of Stehli and the front of him. If the reverse was true, the power relations would change.

The audience’s view, the artist’s view and the subject’s view. He has power over the artist as he controls how much or little she undresses, and the artist displays her power, by setting the rules. They both however objectify themselves and each other by being in this situation. The viewer also has the power of their opinion of these people.

We (as a Western culture) make and consider ourselves the centre of events, concerning ourselves as the subject and anything else the object.
Non Western cultures there is no concept of the 'individual'- eg African or Inuit cultures.

‘Every space is already in place before the appearance in it of actors; these actors are collective as well as individual subjects inasmuch as the individuals are always members of groups or classes seeking to appropriate the space in question. This pre-existence of space conditions the subject’s presence, action and discourse,  his competence and performance; yet the subject’s presence, action and discourse, at the same time as they presuppose this space, also negate it.’ Lefebvre, H (trans 1991) The Production of Space, Oxford, p.57.

Henri Lefebvre was a French intellectual, Marxist sociologist and revolutionary theorist who writes about hidden power relationships in spaces, how they control you and how you resist. One of his theories was revolution via everyday life. This is done by understanding how  confined you are by everyday life. He was influenced by ‘The Situationists,’ in the 1950-60′s and Lefebvre himself influenced leaders in the Paris uprising 1968.

What makes a space, e.g. the seminar room:

• The people in it.
• Conventions of the space/ experiences of the space.
• It’s uses over time.
• Layout, chairs facing the projector.

TRIAD

Representations of space: Logical space, maps, plans, models and designs. Architectural, it’s designed to do this, how long, how wide, it’s this shape for this reason. This is not an accurate way of thinking about social space as people live in spaces.

Practice:Daily routine and urban reality. What do people do in the space and use it for.

Representational space: Ideals, imagination, theory and visions. Myths and stories and histories of the space, and how people try to claim it. 

Lefebvrian analysis of a space:

Political point is that we engage with the world with a narrow perspective, even thinking about the seminar room, something that seems like it would be very simple and banal, reveals our limited perspective.

‘Illusion of transparency’ – in Western societies in particular. The illusion is that understanding the world is possible. The view from above, like God’s, is flawed, we have no total picture or understanding of our lives. The illusion of knowing however makes us feel safer, supported and comforted.

Why do people live in skyscrapers?- believe themselves to be better? To escape the masses?
Skyscrapers give a birds-eye perspective of the city- creating security in this idea.

At street level there is constant interaction with others; people appropriating your social space. Skyscrapers don’t have communities in mind – where are the shop, pubs etc?

Maze prison, Belfast – dirty protest 1977-8.
Maze prison was brutal - cells were bare rooms.  Uniforms de-humanised prisoners, making them objects and the same as everybody else. These political prisoners wore no uniforms,were also force-fed when they went on hunger strike and forbidden to speak. The dirty protest was when the prisoners excreted and smeared across the wall, this was a  desperate attempt to bring humanity to the space, when all their humanity had been stripped.