Bartlett Think-Tank » Art

Through the minds of teenagers

Thomas-Bernard Kenniff — Fri, 10 Sep 2010 10:47:50 +0000

Spiralling into Modernism

In the book Participation, Claire Bishop underlines three common aspects of participatory art: the desire to create an active/thinking subject who will be able to formulate their own social/political position from the experience of the work; asserting a socially oriented and egalitarian position for themselves by ceding part of their authorship to participants; and the restoration of a social bond in a community through the collaborative elaboration of meaning.

On a recent visit to Barking I saw “Through the planned cities fire will rage“, an exhibition of participatory art between Laura Oldfield Ford and a group of years 10 and 11 students from local schools. Given that my own research touches on the social interactions that constitute the regeneration project in the particular context of the Barking Town Centre I was interested to see how the principles outlined above applied in this specific case. Here the collaboration happens during the development process, with some of the projects (like Barking Town Square) already completed and others (like most of Barking Riverside) still under development, which gives this type of event a vital importance.

The imagination of the students is fantastic and some of the pieces offer genuine moments of reflection. For example a map of the borough with clearly marked unhappiness right of the centre and the great unknown of Dagenham further east: the recognized political divide of the London Borough of Barking and Dagenham. Another group of drawings questioning the value of change and its ‘façades’ in the town centre. There are also moments of levity: is Barking spiralling into Modernism or is it not? The darkly metaphorical Happy Birthday! comic strip. And moments of downright, well… see drawing of plane flying into One Canada Square below. Certainly, the collaboration has succeeded in engaging students with urban issues by which they are directly affected and that must be commended. The participants are indeed given a better position to formulate their own critique of their local socio-economic and political situation. The whole of the work is clearly and thankfully representative of the ‘fire’ of adolescence. (On a marginally and I’ve-listened-to-it-recently related note, let me plug Robert Harrison’s podcast on Pink Floyd.)

The following quotation is taken from the Council’s website:

Ford’s own work uses the strategy of psychogeography to coax out the hidden narratives in the city and formulate a critique of urbanism. In the case of Barking and Dagenham it is the issue of housing that forms the crux of contention. For this new work she imagines militant groups emerging and the planned uses of the new regeneration schemes radically subverted. Her work references the Blitz, 1973, 1981 and points in the future to set out alternative possibilities.

I want to pick up four elements from this description, because although the work of the students is in many ways engaging, I think the handling of the issues at hand and principles of participation need some criticism. What first struck me is how much of the artist’s own aesthetics seem to come through the students’ work. It appears evident from the artist’s own work that there is a tendency to draw on dichotomies, be it planned/unplanned or construction/destruction. This strong dialectic aspect appears to come through quite clearly in the students’ work. The arrangement is fragmented, relies heavily on contrasts (in both form and content) and is primarily oppositional. This leads to a second point: I question whether the students are exploring their own experiential perception of their city through the loose (and highly subjective) framework of psychogeography or rather through the lens of the organiser’s oppositional stance on planning and private development. This again is not to say that the work itself is without merit, but that the premises posited by the artist are not entirely congruent with the result. And certainly not all the pieces are representative of this point. But these first two points should be weighed against the ‘desire to create a thinking/acting subject’. ‘Through the planned cities fire will rage’ recalls a critique of Modernist town planning from the mid-twentieth century rather than an accurate critique of contemporary practices. Some images featuring One Canada Square, for example, raise the question of whether the intention is not off the mark. Being explicitly critical of private development and branded commercial hegemonies is excellent, but it becomes a tricky line to follow when urban planning is brought in under the same critique. The absence of government planning often goes, as was evidenced in the late 1980s at Canary Wharf, hand in hand with the market’s desire for deregulation. The last point touches on the ‘alternative possibilities’ that are explored in the work. Because the premises of the critique draw on moments of tension and crisis the ‘collaborative elaboration of meaning’ has a hard time escaping wholesale rejection to look more at positive transformation. Could the ‘radical subversion’ of the built environment be gentle?

Home?

No spirit

Change is overrated

Happy birthday!

Future!!

I love this city

Suggested reading: “Art and Answerability” by Mikhaïl Bakhtin

Thomas-Bernard Kenniff — Sun, 01 Nov 2009 16:36:51 +0000

Bakhtin, M. M. “Art and Answerability.” Art and Answerability : Early Philosophical Essays. Eds. Michael Holquist and Vadim Liapunov. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1990.

Art and Answerability, written in 1919, is Mikhail Bakhtin’s first published essay. This early text, written when the author was only 24 years old, is usually recognised as significant for two principal reasons. First because the questions it poses will continue to resonate throughout Bakhtin’s subsequent work. Second because it is part of a series of early texts that were re-discovered following the author’s death in 1975 and whose English translations have only been published between 1990 and 1993. These texts have become highly relevant in establishing the philosophical foundations for Bakhtin’s later work which had by then been absorbed outside of Russia into various disciplines, including, to a very limited extent, architecture and design.

The central thesis of the essay states that “art and life are not one, but they must become united in myself—in the unity of my answerability” (Bakhtin “Art and Answerability” 2). What is identified here by Bakhtin is the fundamental split between culture (art and science) and life as it is actually experienced, or in other words, the split between theory and practice. The only possible unification of these two, he argues, occurs in individual responsibility. One must answer to theory for what they have experienced in practice, as one must answer to practice for what they have done in theory. This is what Bakhtin calls “two-sided answerability”. Bakhtin here enters the debate on a contentious issue at the time, namely the debate on “art for art’s sake or art for life’s sake.” Bakhtin explicitly argues for art for life’s sake, saying that art for the sake of art squarely falls into the realm of “theorism” since it negates the actual and real experience of life from which it has inescapably drawn. Indeed, in Bakhtin’s Neo-Kantian critique, there is no pure vantage point within the mind of an individual from which one is able to understand and create. There is rather an “impure” vantage point that is invariably defined by the experience of being and the experience of the other (Bakhtin “Author and Hero”).

As Clark and Holquist have noted, Bakhtin will throughout his lifetime continue to address the same issues as set in his early work (Clark and Holquist “Bakhtin”). His position may vary and be refined over time, but the questions themselves remain constant. His better known concepts of dialogism, carnivalesque, and heteroglossia are all, in a way, derivatives of his early work on ethics, aesthetics, and the architectonics of the act.

Most references to Bakhtin’s thought in architectural studies have drawn mostly on the carnivalesque and also to a smaller extent on his theory of dialogism. These have been relevant in addressing social issues related to space, for example in theorising the subversive act in public spaces (Shields “Places on the Margin”) or in seeing how a construction process involving multiple designers may be negotiated through dialogue (La Marche “Surrealism’s unexplored possibilities”). Still, Bakhtinian concepts, as far as I understand it, have yet to be introduced significantly into architectural theory and practice. Reading Bakhtin’s early texts allows us to address this issue by understanding the ethical and aesthetic philosophical foundations of his later, more well known theories. This may well offer an approach to social issues in the built environment that is more familiar and more relevant to architectural discourse as it may also shed new light on current discussion on the relation between practice and theory in architectural research.

***

References:

Bakhtin, M. M. “Art and Answerability.” Art and Answerability : Early Philosophical Essays. Eds. Michael Holquist and Vadim Liapunov. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1990.

—. “Author and Hero in Aesthetic Activity.” Art and Answerability: Early Philosophical Essays. Eds. Michael Holquist and Vadim Liapunov. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1990.

Clark, Katerina, and Michael Holquist. Mikhail Bakhtin. Cambridge, Mass. ; London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1984.

La Marche, Jean. “Surrealism’s Unexplored Possibilities in Architecture.” Surrealism and Architecture. Ed. Thomas Mical. New York ; London: Routledge, 2005. 273-89.

Shields, Rob. Places on the Margin : Alternative Geographies of Modernity. International Library of Sociology. London: Routledge, 1991.

***

Construction and device

Gabriele Oropallo — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 17:17:35 +0000

The week I spent in Vienna last September was warm and brilliant. One day I was having lunch outdoors at the Kunsthalle on Karlsplatz, a coffeeshop and exhibition space carved in a piece of no planner’s land in the very centre of Vienna, where once the medieval walls stood and I was attracted by the soft-spoken colour texture of the tent cloth as this was hit by the bright sun. It reminded me of the return of figurative painting in the nineteen-twenties, after the war; painters were then trying to provide some depth to their shapes without relying on perspective, the representation technique they had managed to escape from the decade before. They would superimpose layer upon layer of paint, with a beautiful waxy effect of translucence.

Photographic composition – much like the construction of the city – is still largely based on perspective and reflects the positivist decades in which photographic technique was refined, formalized and eventually embedded in the very devices, with cameras programmed to obtain a certain type or style of image – and thus being the real authors of the photograph. Content is still paramount and prevails over form, and this opens existing perspectives for the future.

Translate

53rd Venice Art Biennale preview: Worlds in the making

Gabriele Oropallo — Fri, 12 Jun 2009 15:02:50 +0000

The Venice Biennial is today a large, intermittent institution that organizes and manages film, art, architecture and dance exhibitions. The same pre-industrial spaces are used for different the events in different times, sometimes allowing for curious, interdisciplinary cross-references. The 53rd edition of the Art Biennial, directed by Daniel Birnbaum and visited by more than 375,000 people, was the latest edition of a series originally started in 1895. It curiously engaged in a postponed dialogue with the latest architecture Biennial, by virtue of the fact that the latter had taken place in the same spaces of the Venice Arsenale a few months before. Whilst the architecture show was dominated by a logic of temporariness and elasticity, the art exhibition boasted an attention to the scenarios we’re living in, looking at current political and environmental issues. Its main concern was to create space under the theme of “Making Worlds”. Some called this mission an escapist fantasy. Apparently, as architecture increasingly turns to an esoteric cult of the logarithm and to spectacular, photography-ready roof structures, artists are left freer to explore the actual material world and voice ideas and opinions through the manipulation of space.
This Biennial also continued a recent trend in providing representations of differences and of previously underrepresented parts of the world. Wales and Catalonia had their own pavilions on the island of Giudecca, while Scotland was represented by Martin Boyce, who created a set of seventeen installations under the title of “No Reflection” at Palazzo Pisani, near the Ponte di Rialto. Boyce had originally considered other spaces for his project, but eventually settled on this fifteenth-century construction because of its eerie atmosphere of decay, a mixture of past grandeur and an irregular, apparently irrational layout of spaces. Boyce used these spaces to create a collection of variations on the theme of man’s fear of not surviving himself. Brown leaves rustle along the rooms to unify the experience of visitors as they explore the spaces. But the leaves are blatantly artificial, made of paraffin-coated crepe paper and cut in angular, unnatural shapes. The rooms feature a number of metal works, which are shaped after familiar objects, but look abandoned or unusable. for instance, there is a metal bed with a metal pillow, in which only a metal person could sleep. All in all, one could imagine the installations as a vision of man-made environments after men have disappeared, as if after an environmental Armageddon.
The Palestinian pavilion was also located on the island of Giudecca, and it required, as the Welsh and Catalonian pavilions, a short vaporetto pilgrimage through the Venetian lagoon. It presented a mix of engagement and formalism, and artists successfully eschewed the easy aestheticisms and domestications of the West Bank Separation Wall seen often over the last few years. Alessandro Petti and Sandi Hilal, the founders of the Decolonizing Architecture collective, based in Beit Sahour, Palestinian territories, presented their “Ramallah Syndrome”: an enclosed, darkened space, where one could listen to recorded oral testimonies from Palestine and physically perceive the oppression. Other artists included Emily Jacir, Khalil Rabah, Jawad Al Mahli, Shadi AbibHallah, and Taysir Batniji, who used used video and photography combined with installation to research concepts like construction/destruction, cultural erasure and marginalization. On the other hand, the debut of the African pavilion, supervised by curator Robert Storr, was very colourful, lively yet easily forgotten: the audience was given what they expected from “Africa”: myths of good savages, true colours, crude oil, human warmth, thongs, globalisation, animism, optimism, and so forth.
The national pavilions are located in the gardens of the Biennale. These spaces are also featured in their off-season blankness in a video by artist Steve McQueen (Giardini), who represented England at the event. Visiting the national pavilion, where each and every country tried to project an idealized image of itself, one was able to perceive the continuous, consistent retreat of many artists from the notion of art as the most appropriate medium to convey notions difficult or impossible to express otherwise, the sublime. This was especially true for the European artists. Figurativism and pseudorealism were the main codes used by artists who created work so involved with the contemporary world and its values, that this work is deemed to fade away with it. The transnational Danish-Nordic Pavilion was an interesting example. People diligently queued hours to enter and admire a flashy space designed as a catharsis for a culturally ambitious middle-class audience. The multi-installation, called “The Collectors”, featured works by artists of several background, including Italy’s Maurizio Cattelan.and imitated a posh house, destabilized by cute interventions such as an automaton-like chambermaid, a melted armchair, a dining table split in two and other neo-surrealist artefacts characterized by a wit that can well charm the occasional viewer, but that also, ultimately, disempowers art by presenting it as something unusual, flamboyant, or simply weird – as if leaving most space blank on a page could make any piece of prose into a poem.
Some works by Brazilian artists in the Arsenale building demonstrated a radically different approach. The language adopted by artists such as Sara Ramo or Renata Lucas was universal in its formalism and conceptualism, and successful in creating alternative times and spaces. Often, the terms used to describe their work include reduction and essence. However, cutting a board out of the wooden floor to expose the raw concrete underneath – as Renata Lucas did – is nothing essential or minimal: all the way round, it dramatically created a new space, polydimensional in its depth and bidimensional in the game of references to the very floor people set their feet on. These interventions in space and time were powerful dismissals of a geo/egocentrism still dwelling in our minds centuries after Copernicus. This was real world-making, this was baroque: a brutal reshuffling of planes that left the audience unsettled because they could feel stranded, castaway like a drifting planet brutally removed from its fixed spot at the centre of the universe. This baroque was even more convincing because it utilized the very tool that should eradicate it – the Cartesian grid – to its own advantage.
On the day of the opening a still sprightly Michelangelo Pistoletto hinted at some kind of beyond by methodically smashing several tall mirrors in his installation at the entrance of the Arsenale complex. However accustomed to similar acts, the audience’s enthusiasm was stirred by the desperate gesture. Someone noticed that the mirrors were placed in heavily decorated, golden-leaf wooden frames. This certainly was a hint at the intimidating taste of the petty bourgeoisie, which usually favours cumbersome testimonies of past grandeur. The broken mirrors, however, then stayed in the lovely frames for five months until the closing of the Biennial, providing a tragic metaphor of fate and place of much “controversial” art in society today.