Lecture Topics
• Architecture and the body
• Definitions and theoretical
approaches to concepts of space and place
• How the themes have been taken up in
artistic practice from 1960s onwards
• How the themes have been taken up in
curatorial practice and contemporary art exhibitions
The Homely
vs the ‘Unhomely’
Homely
• House
• Home
• Domestic
• Family and childhood
• Sanctuary
• Memory
• Nostalgia
• Experience
•
Lived
space
Unhomely
• (The Unheimlich or the The Uncanny- Freud)
• The haunted house
• Surreal
• Subversive
• Psychic
• Fragmented
• Distorted
• Nightmare
Why- Space,
Place and Body?
• Traditionally our understanding of
the built environment/architecture is intrinsically linked to design, form and structure.
• Simply put architecture is ‘the
complex or carefully designed structure of something’ OED.
• There is, however, a history of
architectural theory and practice that is keen to draw attention to the actual
‘lived experience’ of this space.
• For example, how we inhabit it, what
it means to us, and how our experience of the world/ built environment we live
in informs our lives.
Structure +
Form + Body
• Modernist architect Le Corbusier
defined architecture as : “the precise and monumental interplay of form
within light.”
• It is here, however, where the
formal structures of the built environment and the qualities of the world,
which we live in and experience, collide.
• In this relationship we might also
add the other key element of architecture: the inhabitant – us – who experience
it through our bodies.
Place:
• ‘Noun 1. a particular position, point, or area in space; a location’
Space:
• ‘Noun 1. continuous area or expanse which is free, available, or unoccupied:
• 2. the
dimensions of height, depth, and width within which all things exist and move:
• 3. an
interval of time’
Theory and
Philosophy: Space and Place
• Michel Foucault: Relational Space/
Social Space
‘The space in which we live, which
draws us out of ourselves, in which the erosion of our lives, our time and our
history occurs, the space that claws and gnaws at us, is also, in itself, a
heterogeneous space. In other words, we do not live in a kind of void, inside
of which we could place individuals and things. We do not live inside a void
that could be colored with diverse shades of light, we live inside a set of
relations that delineates sites which are irreducible to one another and
absolutely not superimposable on one another.’
Michel
Foucault, ‘Of Other Spaces’ (1967), Heterotopias.
• Gaston
Bachelard: Relationship between space and time
‘In its
countless alveoli space contains compressed time. This is what space is for..’
Gaston
Bachelard (1994) The Poetics of Space, Massachusetts: Beacon Press, p. 8
How have
these concepts been taken up in the visual arts?
What are
the critical perspectives and methodologies that we have available to think
through them?
Mapping
Intersections between Body and Space in Art Practice:
• Minimalism:
Body, object, space, 1960s
• Gender and Space:
The feminist critique of gendered
space, 1970s
• Postmodernism:
Changing status of space and experience:
‘non-place’, global and collective space, 1980s onwards
Minimalism
Minimalism
or ‘Minimal’ Art appeared in America in the 1960s. Artists associated with it
include Carl Andre, Dan Flavin, Robert Morris, Eva Hesse, Sol Le Witt, Donald
Judd.
It aimed to
reduce art to abstract elements, geometric forms and formal solutions.
Artworks
often used industrial processes of production and materials such as bricks,
fluorescent tubes, metal etc.
Carl Andre,
Equivalent VIII, 1966
Andre’s
work is part of a series of eight sculptures that use 120 firebricks. Each
sculpture is arranged differently but they all have the same height, mass and
volume.
The Minimalist Object:
• ‘Half or more of the best new work
in the last few years has been neither painting nor sculpture’- Donald Judd,
‘Specific Objects’, Arts Yearbook 8,1965.
• ‘Strong gestalt sensations’
and ‘Unitary Form’- Robert Morris, ‘Notes on Sculpture1-3’, Artforum,
February 1966,October 1966, Summer 1967.
• Michael Fried, ‘Art and Objecthood’,
Artforum, Spring 1967
‘It must somehow confront the
beholder — they must, one might say, be placed not just in his space but in his
way’.
‘The
object, not the beholder, must remain the center (sic) or focus of the situation;
but the situation itself belongs to the beholder — it is his
situation.’
‘And so we stare at the pit in the earth and think we both
do and don’t know what sculpture is’ -
Architectural Sculpture
Rosalind E. Krauss, Sculpture in the Expanded Field,
1978
• Site Construction
• Creation of ‘Place’
• Land Art
• Interventions in the landscape
• Utopian locations
• Escape
‘Lived’
Space
• Focus on the body’s relationship to
space.
• Focus on movement, boundaries and
experience.
• Bruce Nauman, Walking in an exaggerated
manner round the perimeter of a square, 1967/68
Phenomenology
• Oxford English Dictionary: 1. The
science of phenomena as distinct from that of the nature of being.
• 2. an approach that concentrates on
the study of consciousness and the objects of direct experience.
Phenomenology tells us that we
experience the world through our body —we are an extension of it.
It is only by having a body that
we experience the world.
It is about perception – we
perceive the world with our body through vision and movement.
Philosopher Edward Casey
proposes: ‘The places we inhabit are known by the bodies we live.’
Key Theorist:
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology
of Perception, 1945
• ‘As
far as bodily space is concerned, it is clear that there is a knowledge of
place which is reducible to a sort of co-existence with that place, and which
is not simply nothing, even though it cannot be conveyed by a description or
even by the mute reference of a gesture.’
Merleau-Ponty,
Phenomenology of Perception, p.121.
• ‘There
would be no space at all for me if I had no body.’
Merleau-Ponty,
Phenomenology of Perception, p.117.
Robert
Morris, The Present Tense of Space, 1978
’In perceiving architectural space, one’s own space is not
separate but coexistent with what is perceived….one is surrounded.’
Shepard
Fairey, Phenomenology of the City, Manifesto, 1990
‘The OBEY
sticker campaign can be explained as an experiment in Phenomenology.
The FIRST
AIM OF PHENOMENOLOGY is to reawaken a sense of wonder about one’s environment.
The OBEY sticker attempts to stimulate curiosity and bring people to question
both the sticker and their relationship with their surroundings.’
Gender and
Space: Critical Approaches
It is
possible to identify the ‘intricacy and profundity of the connection of space
and place with gender and the construction of gender relations.’
Dorreen
Massey, Space, Place and Gender, 1994, p.2
Postmodernism:
Non-places
• ‘If a place can be defined as
relational, historical and concerned with identity, then a space which cannot
be defined as relational, or historical, or concerned with identity will be a
non-place.’
• ‘…the real non-places of
supermodernity – the ones we inhabit when we are driving down the
motorway, wandering through the supermarket or sitting in an airport lounge
waiting for the next flight to London or Marseille….’
Reclaiming
Space and Place?
Mariko
Mori, Body Capsule Project, Beginning of the End: Past,
Present, Future 1995-2006
Creating
Space and Place?
• Relational
• Collective
• Nexus
• Social
Interiority:
Psychic Space/ Surreal Space
• We can also map an exploration of
the relationship between space, place and the body in the visual arts and
cultural theory that is concerned with the spaces of the mind.
• Here an occupation with the
individual’s psychic space and an experience of space which may be subversive,
surreal, disconcerting or ‘unhomely’, can be registered in Modernist and
Postmodernist art practice and architectural design.
• These phenomena and ideas have
recently been explored in two key exhibitions:
• Hayward Gallery, Walking in My Mind,
2009
• Barbican Art Gallery, The Surreal
House, 2010
Walking
in My Mind: Adventure into the Artist’s Imagination, Hayward Gallery, Southbank, 23 June-
6 September, 2009
• Mental and psychic space
• Interiority
• Experience
• Creativity
• Alternate places
• Escape
• Intersections between art and
architecture
• Imaginary spaces
• Creative space
• Construction/ Creation of
environments and structured space
"I
cannot tell you how the Island really is – I have no idea – I can state only
the facts as I perceive them. You must be satisfied with this or you must
travel there yourself sometime, and see these beings in their natural
environment, for the place is utterly subjective."
-Charles Avery, The Islanders-
Untitled, Eternity Chamber,2007
The
Surreal House, 10th
June – 12 September, 2010 Barbican Art Gallery
Curator Jane Alison suggests:
‘First and foremost the surreal house is a mirror of the
unconscious, the body as a feeling, even fractured entity. The house can also
be thought of as a special kind of object within surrealism— the container
object’
• In ‘The Surreal House’ strange
events, narratives and surreal objects take over the space of the home.
• They subvert our idea of the home as
a sanctuary and safe place.
The Unhomely
The uncanny or unheimlich, according to Freud, ‘is in
reality nothing new or alien, but something that is familiar and
old-established in the mind and which has become alienated from it only through
the process of repression.’
Anthony Vidler suggests that the uncanny or the ‘unhomely’
is ‘embodied in a feeling of alienation as a dichotomy to the security of the
home and a feeling of estrangement or homesickness’
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