SPACE, PLACE AND THE ARTWORK

- Contextualizing the Work

A fleet of hoovers floating out to sea. A metre square cage of concrete kettles on the shoreline, submerged and then revealed by the ebb and flow of the tides. Three large wiremesh arrows filled with hay and sileage, pointing resolutely along an underground walkway in Marble Arch, accompanied by the sounds of a horse chewing. A heap of black concrete toasters with a cross embossed on each – domestic appliance as religious artifact. A field of barley growing in a white room with a photograph of a car park on the wall. What do all these installations have in common? What underlying themes and motivations do they share?

If we are to talk of site-specific work which does not try to enhance its context or comment directly on it, but instead brings about a disjuncture, a sense of surprise, a double-take, laughter – the laughter arising from absurd juxtapositions – then we might seek the tap-root of this work in 20^th Century Surrealism. That industrious mining of the then newly invented Freudian unconscious, where unlikely collisions interrupted bourgeois meaning.

Post-modernism, if it looks back at all, might be unwilling to admit any such ancestry, but collage of ideas, inclusion, juxtapositions and the nihilism of irony – shopping in culture’s hypermarket, rather than hunting and gathering from society’s collective unconscious – points to an inherited paradigm here, differing only in stance and context. Topologically equivalent, perhaps.

Of course, timing is one half of everything. And context, the other half. These site-specific works have sought out the non-places in our lives. The shoreline (the littoral – a sea-shore zone between high and low tide); seven miles out into international waters; an underground walkway; the white-walled gallery space. And these non-places are not there for their neutrality, their ability to backdrop and enhance the piece, but for the dialogue they allow. Why here? Where is here? What is that familiar object doing in this nowhere kind of place?

When Mary Kelly, Victor Burgin, Marie Yates et al came to prominence in the 1970s’, one of their concerns was to write large the discourses that their work was predicated upon. Kelly’s “Post Partum Document” attempted to situate her concerns as a new mother in the post-Freudian, Lacanian discourse about the construction of the subject. Others like Burgin, Yates, Atkinson and Art and Language re-read Marx through the eyes of Althusser and Foucault and told us all about it chapter by chapter. But with the new wave of conceptualists – Damien Hirst, Mark Quinn etc. -  theorizing vanished from the surface of the work altogether – assumed unnecessary, or fully integrated, or simply bullshit. Irony replaced a sort of earnest theoretical altruism – after all psychoanalysis and Marxism were theories for the betterment of humanity, theoretically – and things were sort of what they were once more, only more cynically so (notwithstanding Hirst’s titular stabs at hidden depths.)

Post-that, globalization and new technology seems to create a new set of conditions for the artist. The marketplace is no longer local (but really trade-routes through the ages tell us it never was). More importantly, exchange can now be instant. Cultures collide and merge not via relationships developed over decades of trade, or colonialism or even war, but via electronic information. Culture is pixellated. Microsoft is the arbiter. And we could be seduced into thinking that what we receive through our screens is life, and not its appearance.  On a practical level, this can be liberating. Ownership of not only the means of production, but also the distribution networks – the entire marketplace – is at least theoretically in the hands of any artist who can afford a computer and an internet connection. In fact, any curator from that strata of taste-definers and trend-setters, can now plunder art from anywhere, juxtapose it with art from anywhere else, and create their own art, in the way that a child builds a world out of Lego. This is an individual’s art as grains of sand in the termite mound, and may be the overall effect of biennales, Saatchi-type collections, or even internet shopping. On the other hand, the notion of “relational aesthetics” where the artist develops inter-connectedness between people, between ideas, and between disciplines (often outside of art-world practice), perhaps returns a measure of control, autonomy and vision to them – a kind of community work in cyberspace. There will always however be a dynamic between entering the marketplace and looking for sustenance from it, and maintaining a critical practice which challenges whichever status quo is currently operating.[1]

Is it possible given all this to conceive of an intervention – in this case, quasi-familiar object in ambiguously-defined non-place – which, without screeds of text, without altruistic worthiness and without dismissive irony, evokes a constellation of discourses – discourses which of course, the viewer, the consumer, brings (unbeknownst to themselves) to the piece? Is it possible to surprise us into thinking? And is it possible still to care about anything, pointlessness, irony, popular culture and virtuality notwithstanding. To have an ethical, political and social stance based in discourse about global amelioration? These artworks assume a “yes” to these questions. They have a function, a covert mission behind the fact of themselves. They are the proverbial wake-up call after we’ve turned off the television. (These pieces subvert post-modern irony via surrealist absurdity, into open signifiers – and yet the range of meanings available to us still exist within the affirmative, socially-critical range.)

So how does such a site-specific intervention constitute itself within current thinking about the nature of space and place? When Simon Schama suggests that “an understanding of landscape’s past traditions was a source of illumination for the present and the future..” and that this “could redeem the hollowness of contemporary life” [2] he was not thinking of places like airports presumably, where, David Pascoe tells us,[3] “Alfred” an Iranian exile, lived for eleven years as a stateless resident and was able to avail himself of food, drink and medical services, while pursuing a series of correspondence courses. This “transit” place with which we are all familiar, stands in as an analogue for all our de-racinated experiences. We are indeed all passersby and this world is not our home. We are presented now with such a proliferation of transit camps, linked by ever more sophisticated communicating networks – airports inbetween flight paths, service stations linking motorways, websites like nodes on the net, proliferating radio and television channels conveyed to our home – that there is really no compulsion to stay  in one place. Everything we need is somewhere else, anyway. We are all refugees. We are all homeless. While the real refugees – the real homeless – act out our metaphor for us in their grim reality. Despite “fledgling movements by homeless people to protest their attempted exclusion from public space” or “because of such protests, the legal exclusion of homeless people from public space….has increased in strength during the 1990s’.” This is the “logic of a globalised economy” which “seeks to reregulate the spaces of the city so as to eliminate people quite literally made redundant by the very capital the cities now so desperately seek to attract.” [4]

To have any resonance with this, to set up a dynamic dialogue, the artist’s “site” can no longer be quite so specific. And the installation must address its own temporariness and its own process. And fast. Hoovers dispersing in international waters seems right. Barley displaced into a white space, a photograph of a car park on the wall, inverts romantic traditions of the “aesthetic” place. A cage of concrete kettles eaten at by the sea, situated on the shoreline, is neither simple environmentalism nor simple process. These are ambiguous and uncomfortable statements, palatable because of their wit. The discomfort in them points to the discourses running , unresolved, through them.

But at the same time, the pieces are physical. And their physicality is oppositional not traditional. Neither the archetypal rural chic of Andy Goldsworthy, nor the shamanistic politics of Joseph Beuys, their physicality relates to a culture which downgrades the work of the body (unless it relates to some over-logo-ed sporting ideal), and especially the intelligence of the body – development of opposable thumbs on games consoles aside. The works exist. They are concrete (often literally). They intervene. And then they are gone.

As Terry Eagleton writes “We are intimate with our bodies, but we cannot grasp them as a whole. There is always a kind of “outside” to my body which I can only ever squint at sideways.”[5].  Arguably, every art work – including a piece of writing or music – addresses just this issue. It presents back to its creator a thing both them and not-them. Like a new-born, it smells of its mother. And this thing can be seen, and can be seen to stand in for the artist, however (un) representational. The artwork as an opportunity for self-knowledge seems outmoded until we contextualize it in our network of globalised non-places (“the non-symbolized surfaces of the planet”)[6], when it reflects back to us not only who we are (who are we?) but where we are (where are we?) in an ambiguous amalgam. Are we our domestic appliances invested with religious significance, or bobbing about on uncharted waters, for example?  If we agree that “throughout the history of Western materialism, the interior space of the human brain has been posited as a territory susceptible to exploration and mapping, equivalent to exterior domains and landscapes”,[7] our virtuality, our capacity to metaphorise is hardly new. Driving this virtuality into the realm of non-place via concrete art-objects can  only delineate a new ambiguity – “non-existentialism”, perhaps.

And what of the visceral effect that these works have, in their ambiguous settings? While the true conceptual artist may be a writer-manque, a theoretician with clean hands, a talking head, these very physical, made works impact lower down the spinal column at first. What they “mean” – the sum of their conflictual meanings – comes later, a translation or interpretation of that primary experience.

The last word goes to Terry Eagleton,[8] who in a curious way, through the pitfalls and thorn bushes of theory seems to return us to something familiar – something suspiciously like common sense. That is something that these artworks – these sort of site-specific, quasi-installations – also uncovers and points to, paradoxically through their juxtaposition of irrational elements.

“Post-modernists reject the idea of progress because they are distracted by grand narratives. They assume that a belief in progress must entail that history as a whole has been steadily on the up from the outset, a view which they naturally dismiss as a delusion. If they were less taken with grand narratives they might follow their own lights, and arrive at the correct but boring conclusion that human history has improved in some respects while deteriorating in others.”