Gabrielle Hoad:

Artist who represents space and the phenomenon of bird flight paths, they draw/we draw: inside/outside

'What we observe is not nature itself, but nature
exposed to our method of questioning.'
Werner Heisenberg, Physics and Philosophy 1963

I address the gap between the world and our representations of it, often making use of methods that promise objectivity but ultimately highlight the human presence.

Martha Rosler: Semiotics of the Kitchen

Gosh! ... really wish I'd found this in time for the lecture on Phenomenology and Semiotics of the House...oh, well...maybe next year...



Martha Rosler's Semiotics of the Kitchen - 1975

From A to Z, Rosler "shows and tells" the ingredients of the housewife's day, giving us a tour that names and mimics the ordinary with movements more samurai than suburban. Rosler's slashing gesture as she forms the letters of the alphabet in the air with a knife and fork, is a rebel gesture, punching through the "system of harnessed subjectivity" from the inside out.  "I was concerned with something like the notion of Ôlanguage speaking the subject,' and with the transformation of the woman herself into a sign in a system of signs that represent a system of food production, a system of harnessed subjectivity."

—Martha Rosler

...and Semiotics of the Art Student



'This film is a new twist on the classic pice of video art, "Semiotics of the Kitchen" by Martha Rosler. This film pokes fun at life as an art student, and all that is expected from us.'

[This and other videos that are not specifically related to my place/space seminars can be found on my new Youtube Channel Fathomspace.  I set this up so that I could 'store' other videos for various lectures to other groups.]

Firekites Video

Firekites - AUTUMN STORY - chalk animation from Lucinda Schreiber on Vimeo.

Moment: Yukihiro Taguchi

Performing Space:  Floor becomes wall becomes obstacle becomes seating becomes art object becomes function..... Taguchi spontaneously shifts and documents the contexts of space over time.  There is an accompanying text if you follow the link.

More on Unwalling

Source: Boiteaoutils
Baptiste Debombourg

"In this installation series, the wall seems to come into the room, to attack the observer. The deformation of the surface is creating a tension between the solid and the void, and it blurs the limit of the the inner space envelope. The broken surface gives a very strong materiality to the traditional clean walls of the "white cube" and the pieces of wood appearing under the white coating are like scars."

More On Unwalling

Source: Boiteaoutils
Erika Hock: http://www.erikahock.de/Seiten/Earb06.html

More On Unwalling

Source: Boiteaoutils
Posting this as the blog seems to be thematically interested in the idea of walls and their un/walling which is a nice tie-in with house theme.  However, some of these examples exist within the context of the gallery [as opposed to domestic context] and exists partly as a critique of the 'white cube' ideology.

More On Matta Clark and Walls

Source: Boiteaoutils

Yeah...couldn't have said it better myself....

"By undoing a building there are many aspects of the social conditions against which I am gesturing: first, to open a state of enclosure which had been preconditioned not only by physical necessity but by the industry that profligates suburban and urban boxes as a context for insuring a passive, isolated consumer-a virtually captive audience. The fact that some of the buildings I have dealt with are in Black ghettos reinforces some of this thinking, although I would not make a total distinction between the imprisonment of the poor and the remarkably subtle self-containerization of higher socio-economic neighborhoods. The question is a reaction to an ever less viable state of privacy, private property, and isolation."

Gordon Matta Clark. Interview by Donald Wall for Arts Magazine. May 1976

As I have been observing before on boiteaoutils, a wall is at first nothing more than a line drawn on a piece of paper. This line then acquires a materiality and thus own a violence that prevents bodies a freedom of movement (the climax of this violence is obviously achieved in prisons where four walls surround the body). A wall here is not necessarily to be understood only as a vertical panel but also every kind of built surface that prevents the body from a freedom of movement (floors, walls, fences etc.) Any process of “unwallization” is therefore a resistance to this violence. It is difficult to find architecture that succeeds in applying these kinds of processes; nevertheless, several artists did work on that issue and produced various propositions in that regard. Gordon Matta Clark’s work is both the precursor and the quintessence of them, piercing, sawing, digging, rending, rotating, splitting, tearing apart, Matta Clark mistreats the wall as much as he can and the latter almost loses the totality of its violence in this way.

The wall is a separation device but not necessarily as a surface needing more energy to be penetrated than a human owns, can also be seen in the example of rows of sheets on clothes lines. The wall thus looses its violent status while conserving most of its other characteristics.

All the following pictures come from the book. Gordon Matta Clark. Phaidon 2003.

[Please note:  I have two copies of Matta-Clark's books if anyone would like to look at them - Sally]

J. Morgan Puett

Another link from the lecture, as I don't think I put them in the presentation docs.

Richard Wilson: Turning The Place Over, 2008

Turning the Place Over consists of an 8 metres diameter ovoid cut from the façade of a building in Liverpool city centre and made to oscillate in three dimensions. The revolving façade rests on a specially designed giant rotator, usually used in the shipping and nuclear industries, and acts as a huge opening and closing 'window', offering recurrent glimpses of the interior during its constant cycle during daylight hours.



Media responses are here:

http://icliverpool.icnetwork.co.uk/0100news/0100regionalnews/tm_headline=city--8217-s-new-room-with-a-view----but-is-it-art-&method=full&objectid=19259774&siteid=50061-name_page.html

Matt Colishaw at the Freud Museum

This short film was what I intended for the lecture... hope it works this time!

Google Book Links for Fine Art/Spatial Practices

Space Invaders:  Race, Gender, and Bodies Out of Place

Book overview:  Women and minorities are increasingly entering fields where white male power is firmly entrenched. The spaces they come to occupy are not empty or neutral, but are imbued with history and meaning. This groundbreaking book interrogates the pernicious, subtle but nonetheless widely held view that certain bodies are naturally entitled to certain spaces, while others are not. How are positions of authority racialized and gendered? How do people manage their femininity and/or blackness while in a predominantly white male context? How do spaces become naturalized or normalized, and what does it mean when they are disrupted? Engaging with a range of material from a variety of institutions, Space Invaders is a timely contribution to wide-reaching debates on race, gender and space. It is the first book to articulate the full complexity of diversity in organizations.

Country Life Vs City Life

Looking at spaces, I decided to express my feelings about my home town in comparison to Plymouth. In Dartmouth, nothing much changes, the scenery is wonderful and it’s full of life and magic. There is so much space which is representative of history, so the people who live there want to keep Dartmouth simple and elegant, and this is what brings the tourists in the summer.

In comparison, Plymouth’s buildings and scenery seem to change all the time, the history of the place is basically invisible now. Plymouth is very packed and the buildings very close together which people either like or dislike. What I’m trying to say is that although Plymouth is a much larger place than Dartmouth, it looks quite small because development is rapidly eating up all the empty lots of space around the city while, at the same time, obscuring sites of cultural interest and collective memory.

Posted by Fiona Dayment

Thomas Demand

This is a link about a Fine Art Photographer whose work is considered to touch on some of the ideas discussed in yesterday's lecture: Baudrillard's Simulation/Simulacra.  Demand's life-size models construct simulations of real-life spaces derived from popular culture or mass media and, in particular, focus on sensational news media 'sites'.  Think of the media shots of Josef Fritzl's house/bunker, the Oval Office etc. which are somehow ingrained into our memories through saturation broadcasts by the media.  His work 'suggests a tension between the fabricated and the real' and in doing so questions the veracity of the medium of photography itself and the camera, as an instrument historically relied upon to convey the 'truth', is thrown into doubt.

Thomas Demand, Klause/Tavern 2, 2006,

Further information is available at:

http://www.cmoa.org/international/html/art/demand.htm

Time/Place.

When I was a small girl I was lucky enough to be brought up on a farm in Somerset, open fields were my own personal time and place. I used to go field walking with my Jack Russel Kandy, and we walk for what seemed miles looking for bits and pieces on the ground you could find all sorts of things for example, once I found a rusty pair of round victorian glasses with the glass still in, and this would send me off into another world because I would wonder what kind of person wore these. The open field can be like a time capsule in itself, and for me would be a valuable learning tool through my findings as an educational experience.

The Car Incident

Recently I did a project on situations, regarding a minor car incident I had recently. The meaning of `situation` refers to one's place and direction, relative to one's surrounding bearing location, orientation, position, the place where the thing is located, site, geography and the location of the phenomena such as other towns etc, the objective and set of conditions to which a person reacts.

I researched various types of Google maps that include ariel views showing the exact spot where the accident occurred. Then researched into a general form of geographical map that shows towns and villages with relation to the site itself.

Janet Cardiff - The Missing Voice (1999)

Janet Cardiff uses maps of London to create her own tours which are a narrative through time and space. Maps are not used just for getting to a final destination but we use maps to navigate through spaces we are not familiar with. What happens in our mind while we are navigating through that space?

Janet Cardiff tries to relate to the listener a stream of consciousness scenarios that she invents in her mind while she walks through the streets. Starting at Whitechapel Library, visitors were given a Discman. You would leave the building and find yourself transported in time. What was that sound? Who is speaking to you? Where does reality end, and what’s imagined begin…?

ALSO CHECK OUT:

Richard Wentworth An area of outstanding unnatural beauty (2002)

AND:

Scanner (aka Robin Rimbauld) Surface noise (1998) - He lay the sheet music to 'London Bridge is falling down' over a map of the city. At the points where notes from the music fell across the map, Scanner took photos with a digital camera and recorded the sound that was happening at that point too, creating a 'soundtrack to a living city'.

PCAD 500 Course Content: Session 6 (Click Here)

Sited Art/Sculpted Space: The final session in the series revisits land art; public art; commissioned art for the public realm and the oeuvre of non-galleried, situated artwork.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2007/may/15/art1

Antony Gormley: Event Horizon, 2007
Sited art discourse is murky territory in that it questions a particular artwork's connectedness to site, that is to say, it is often intangible and irrelevant. What are these spaces, then, if not art 'zones' or, critically, 'zoos' for art; the designated, government funded and sanctioned spaces set aside for creative output having neither connection to or empathy with their respective settings. Do we now view the legacy of land/public art as a rethinking of land/'scapes', temporary or permanent, or are they now looked on as mythological places that can neither be visited or experienced unless we embark on pilgrimages to such inaccessible and distant sites? Read Gormley's comments in the Independent and think on...

The Deserted Urban Sites and Forgotten Cities

Whilst looking at examples of Utopia and Dystopia, I found the following web link; Seven examples of abandoned cities and other deserted urban wonders from around the world. The places themselves look surreal, something out of a science fiction film. Empty, forgotten places.


Verona, New Jersey
http://weburbanist.com/2007/08/30/urban-abandonments-part-two-7-more-deserted-wonders-of-the-modern-world/

Utopia ideals that can often lead to Dystopian Reality

Web link is definitely worth a look; artists featured in Utopian Mirage: Social Metaphors in Contemporary Photography and Film. The artists are predominantly looking at how our utopian ideals have been overtaken by the realities of urban decay, corruption, loss of innocence, disregard for natural resources and nature’s chaotic cycles. This link is useful as it also gives a list of artists and a short description of their work.

J. Bennett Fitts, Salton Sea, 2003-05
http://collegerelations.vassar.edu/2007/2404/