Performative Documentation : Time as both a structure and an event

DID SOMEONE SAY PARTICIPATE? AN ATLAS OF SPATIAL PRACTICE.

Edited by Markus Miessen and Shumon Basar

A few notes relating to thoughts and critical theory around which I am beginning to formulate about my practice and its application as a site from which to “stage a performative discourse of exchange”. My Spatial Practice becoming more like a curatorial trans-disciplinary producer of  “on-site” exchanges and relations.

PREFACE

PARTICIPATION LASTS FOREVER Hans Ulrich Obrist

The Museum as oscillating between object and process; the “ elastic museum ” as being flexible  allowing  displays  to  be  placed  within  an  adaptable  building.  Alexander  Dorner, 

Ways Beyond Art.

Hans Ulrich Obrist notes Dorners critical remark ’’the museum as a bridge built between artists and a variety of scientific disciplines”. This observation has been taken-up by contemporary curatorial practice with the inclusion of architects, philosophers, political thinkers/theorists and visual artists into the production of exhibitions and events. The contemporary exhibition can be viewed as part of an on-going and indeed a “complex dynamic learning system” quotes Obrist.

One should renounce the closed, paralysing homogeneity of the traditional exhibition master plan. Artworks would be allowed to extend tentacles to other works- and other fields of knowledge. The curator must not stand in the way of such growth. Hans Ulrich Obrist.

Working Spaces, Sites of Inquiry and Dialogue, Spatial Practices, Canterbury 2009 

OPEN TEXTS. 

Allow readers to have multiple interpretations, they allow for the possibility of  “determinations”.

Relationality 

Gaps between connecting and disconnecting. 

Notion that categories hide and weaken our perceptions of reality. 

Fluctuating networks of existential events.

Emergent state of contingences that create materials for relationality.

For me this curatorial setting could be an interesting set of relations that might be rehearsed and re-presented within a “site” ( an intervention and interruption into our notion of place and placed relations).The notion that one could become an active agent and on-site translator amongst this “ trans- disciplinarily” would be worth investigating . The opportunity to be in the position to have dialogue with other practitioners and to negotiate and expand that dialogue between the different realities and fields made apparent by “site“ could produce new relational meanings.

My particular interest is with the production of ephemeral values and situations, free spaces and sites created from the interruption of place. Photography and installation have been used as an intervention into place. The artists Jane and Louise Wilson have successfully used it to present work around the psychology of architectural spaces. This value of psychology tied up with our psychological reality created by the motion of our own emotions as we project ourselves into space, could be presented by some analogy (working device) to theories, or rather theorising with the camera obscura.

Photographic Laboratory, roving camera and apparatuses during the arts event 10 Days in The Laundry, Winchester.

Performative work using the simple enchantment of the pinhole camera to question and explore the extrusive nature of time, performativity and site.

Proposed Title, Molecular Sieve/Photographic Apparatus/Theorising Object

Currently using a spatial practice to investigate issues around architectural influences on the placed self. Utilising the mobility and awkwardness of an appropriated object as an apparatus to both theorise and register spatial relations/phenomena. interested in using the values and traits of transparency and superimposures to describe the dimensionality of dwelling in place, how might these “on-site” recordings become registered into the possibility of a surface membrane of material metaphors of memory?

A performative documentation that makes visible the extrusive nature of time as it accumulates and is deposited on a photographic surface.

This performative investigation utilises a large pinhole chamber which is allowed mobility through the attachment of castors to its base and the use of a sack-barrow for undulating terrain. This apparatus produces through its very inclusion into the “space” a theoretical device centred around and relational to spatial values and influences. My aim is to utilise this device as a means of registering “worksite” both in the duration of the event and in its pre-per formative state. The mobility of this research device could be used to investigate, register and illustrate a constantly changing set of dynamics throughout the site and its event. The use of perhaps adjacent wall surfaces or even a “sandwich-board” could render a tangible re-presentation of spatial information for the visitor. Darkroom facilities could be arranged on-site to complement this work as a “working site” functioning within the orbits of both the other works and their prospective guests.

Contextual Issues. Urban Fallow-Sites.

Brief description about methodologies and goals. Urban Fallow, 

Solentcentre for architecture and design.

Urban Fallow aims to develop a pragmatic but fluid approach to public access, cultural intervention, use and temporary transformation of urban spaces.

Urban Fallow is interested in using vacant urban land and spaces. The project is about reanimating these sites through the use of artists, architects, performers and other professionals, all of which have an interest in engaging with the public. This could be undertaken by the use of temporary events and per formative interventions, this would also have an effect on reducing urban blight and help to reinvigorate interest in these sites for potential investment.

Other longer term legacies might include the provision of longer term public access and cultural use even the possibility of a permanent change of use for a chosen site. To help to deliver an “improved perception and identity of the space for the public together with current user groups and prospective developers.”

Winchester, Hyde Abbey Laundry.

A site of approximately 1500 square metres made up of redundant industrial buildings together with a yard. The property is close to Winchester School of Art and the town centre. The Laundry closed in 2007 and has been vacant ever since then. The building in its current state of dis-repair is unsuitable for most purposes. However it is being viewed by creative practitioners from a broad range of practices as potential studio spaces.

Other Documents,

List re, Participating artists, actors, writers, musicians and chef.

Artist Statement/Work Statement as public handouts, made available (resting on apparatus) for visitors. 10 Days at the Laundry, on flickr site with installation images.

The Apparatus/Device/Research Collage

Time as both a structure and an event, photographic image from a moving apparatus

Brief comment around my use of “apparatuses” researched and questioned through the text “The Apparatus” Vilian Flusser.

Definitions, An Apparatus would be a thing that lies in wait or in readiness for something, and a preparatus would be a thing that waits patiently for something. 

The photographic apparatus (a camera) lies in wait for photography. A camera is a tool whose intention is to produce photographs. Tools inform the materials, they “work” them.

This fact/interpretation that tools inform materials has interesting consequences. Flusser states, ’’The object( the thing the tool acts on) acquires an unnatural and improvable form, it becomes cultural. The issue is to keep the definition of “apparatus” open and refrain from referring it as a “tool in the service of photography.”

Other issues regard the “recording of something” as an image and the “registering of information” about a specific duration or experiment. Further issues of “intension” and “reading for what destination/purpose” will need to be clarified to continue. At this point I began to view the perspective of the “apparatus” as a sort of carrier and container, a sensor for some type of “isotope.” I imagined that the apparatus was just some sort of “litmus paper” something that functioned as a sort of barometer in the proximity of “site relations” the architectural. The sociological and the encountering and relational element of human curiosity. This rather spatialised concept envisaged human subjectivity as a mapping around scientific and sociological phenomena, a geography brought about by the performativity of place, time as both a structure and an event.

Francis Aly's, POLITICS OF REHEARSAL

“While everything Aly's creates has a simplicity that makes it instantly accessible, his work also offers a complexity that continues to resonate long after it has been seen”. Anne Philbin Directors Forward, Politics of Rehearsal;

Francis Aly's work has up to this point emphasized issues of place (Mexico City in particular becoming his adopted home).Aly's originally trained as an Architect and was practicing as such in Belgium. When he moved to Mexico City in the early 1990s where he began to experiment with art which reflected his own inclination to avoid definite conclusions.

In this sense he was already formulating the notion of a “rehearsal for a presentation that may or not be completed".1 The use of interventional tactics and strategies as a result of a “reaction” to Mexico City and also a way of positioning himself. It is interesting that Aly's continues to make fresh interventions into apparently completed works.

Aly's describes his work in these terms ”a sort of discursive argument composed of episodes, metaphors or parables, staging the experience of time in Latin America”.2

The Politics of Rehearsal deals with issues around the concepts of rehearsal and repetition, with its “open ended” process which allows specific details to be retained whilst also allow the possibility of others to be reviewed/worked over and possibly changed. This creates an “open site” prescribed around “key” or interlocutory relations that can then be literally presented as being a “presentation” of a process rehearsing for its re-presentation.

This sense of an evolutionary on-going situation, a working site that permit’s the interventions of other activities that pass through and beyond the register of its own narrative space.

What interests me is the notions/propositions of “the rehearsal” as a non-consecutive chronological structure, which does not have to render a specific conclusion, it only has to announce that it is over/finished or ended. It can even announce/negate that their will be “no-rehearsal” thereby paradoxically marking its proposal and place but then deigning its presence in place.

Rehearsal also offers up its space/time relation for performers to re-start, stop and begin again, it allows a multiplicity of spatial relations to be configured in segmented intervals/time slots under a durational influence which is driven by the purpose and intension of a proposal to perform. Aly"s has also utilised the use of the chronicle. 

The proposal of “to Chronicle” to record occurrences, a chronicle is always in the end a record of a series of consecutive events, of which there might be no final resolution, but what a chronicle sets out unequivocally and without adjusting the flow of events is to give a precise record/witness that one thing exists prior to the recording of the next.

This particularity is mirrored in some respects by the duration and entropic nature of the photographic surface, what it has in common with the nature of being able to chronicle is that of “times arrow” a precise directional flow, mediated by the amount of light,(too little, no visible traces remain, too much, and what had been recorded is over-written to the point of total obliteration through too much information) The surface literal becomes spent, used up by agencies and proportions of the light based durations. The chronicle remains readable because it keeps-up this the unfolding of events, whilst the photographic surface is rendered un-readable unless it bracketed into individual but sequential episodes.

The notion of episodes and chronicles both require a pre-determination from the outset to create their form, they in effect act by framing segments of “what is occurring” into a prescribed duration or form.

The photographic surface renders consecutive occurrences via a transposition of transparency which produces a superimposure as a direct unequivocal evidence of something having existed before something else.

This marking out, in scripting, overlaying of occurrences as factual specific/spatial realities become relational to themselves through the negative/positive aspect of their physicality.

What the photographic surface lacks is a definitive time-line a frame of reference in proximity to the information which has become abstractively distant.

The relations of a material or form that can register consecutive occurrences and still register the totality of an event as a surface, a transparency of episodes.

1 Russell Ferguson, Politics of Rehearsal, (Los Angeles: Hammer Museum, 2008) 

2 Interview with Russell Ferguson.