Exploring Site-Specific Art: Issues of Space and Internationalism

Exploring Site-Specific Art Exploring Site-Specific Art Issues of Space and Internationalism ________________________...

Author: Judith Rugg

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Exploring Site-Specific Art

Exploring Site-Specific Art Issues of Space and Internationalism ____________________________________________________

JUDITH RUGG

Published in 2010 by I.B.Tauris & Co Ltd 6 Salem Road, London W2 4BU 175 Fifth Avenue, New York NY 10010 www.ibtauris.com Distributed in the United States and Canada Exclusively by Palgrave Macmillan 175 Fifth Avenue, New York NY 10010 Copyright © 2010 Judith Rugg The right of Judith Rugg to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by the author in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or any part thereof, may not be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. ISBN: 978 1 84885 064 4 A full CIP record for this book is available from the British Library A full CIP record is available from the Library of Congress Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: available Printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham from camera-ready copy edited and supplied by the author

CONTENTS _________________

List of Illustrations

vii

Acknowledgements

xi

Foreword

xiii

Introduction

1

Chapter 1: Psychic Spaces

7

Chapter 2: Contingent Spaces

33

Chapter 3: Performance of Space

53

Chapter 4: The Garden

71

Chapter 5: Demographic Space

91

Chapter 6: Territory and Location

115

Chapter 7: The Viewer

139

Chapter 8: The Border

157

Conclusion

177

Bibliography

179

Index

195

ILLUSTRATIONS ________________________

Chapter 1: Psychic Spaces 11. 12. 13. a4. 15.

David Ward, Nocturne, St Michael Paternoster Royal, London (2006) Photograph: Richard Davies. Carl Michael von Hausswolff, Red Night, Our Lady of Guadalupe Cemetery, Santa Fe (1999). Melanie Counsell, 110 Euston Road, London (1996): film stills. Melanie Counsell, 110 Euston Road, London (1996): exterior view of building. Photograph: Robin Klassnik Anya Gallaccio, Couverture, Basel, Switzerland (1998).

Chapter 2: Contingent Spaces a6. a7. a8. a9. 10.

Lara Almarcegui, Wastelands: a guide to the empty sites of Amsterdam (1999). Lara Almarcegui, Wastelands: a guide to the empty sites of Amsterdam (1999). Alison Marchant, Trace, Neckinger Mill, London (2005): exterior view. Image: Dean Pavitt, Loup Design. Alison Marchant, Trace, Neckinger Mill, London (2005): interior view. Image: Dean Pavitt, Loup Design. Monika Sosnowska, Dirty Fountain, Zamość, Poland (2006).

Chapter 3: Performance of Space 11. 12.

Mark Lewis, Rush Hour, Morning and Evening, Cheapside, EC2, Prudent Passage, City of London (2006). Photograph: Richard Davies. Germaine Kruip, Point of View, Independence Square, San Miguel de Tucuman, Argentina (2002).

I LLUST RAT IONS 13.

Kutlug Ataman, Kűba, Sorting Office, New Oxford Street, London (2005). Commissioned and produced by Artangel.

Chapter 4: The Garden 14. 15.

16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22.

Steven Siegel, Bale, University of Virginia, USA (2002). Marjetica Potrč, Urban Agriculture, Siena, Italy (2003). Arte all’Arte, 8 project. Courtesy the artist and Associazone Arte Contina, San Gimignano, Italy. Photograph: Ela Bialkowska. Choi Jeong Hwa, White Lotus, Venice (2005). Kathryn Miller, The Grasslands Project, Melbourne (1995–97). Kathryn Miller, The Grasslands Project, Melbourne (1995–97). Kathryn Miller, The Grasslands Project, Melbourne (1995–97). Anna Best and Paul Whitty, Vauxhall Pleasure, Vauxhall Cross, London (2004). Anna Best and Paul Whitty, Vauxhall Pleasure, Vauxhall Cross, London (2004). The Grand Walk, Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens, engraving, c.1750. Guildhall Library, City of London.

Chapter 5: Demographic Space 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28.

Wong Hoy Cheong, Minaret, Guangzhou, China (2005). Wong Hoy Cheong, Minaret, Guangzhou, China (2005). Langlands and Bell, Plunged in a Stream, Coudenberg Palace, Brussels (2005). Langlands and Bell, Plunged in a Stream, Coudenberg Palace, Brussels (2005). Wendy Ewald, Towards a Promised Land, Margate (2005). Wendy Ewald, Towards a Promised Land, Margate (2005).

Chapter 6: Territory and Location 29. 30. 31. 32.

viii

Phyllida Barlow, Untitled: Demo, Studio 1-1 Gallery, Redchurch St, London, E2 (2005). Phyllida Barlow, Untitled: Demo, Studio 1-1 Gallery, Redchurch St, London, E2 (2005). Sejla Kameriç, Crossing the Line, Nicosia (2005). Vong Phaophanit and Claire Oboussier, Bay Windows, Herne Bay (2005). Image courtesy of InSite Arts.

ILLUST RAT IONS 33. 34.

Vong Phaophanit and Claire Oboussier, Bay Windows, Herne Bay (2005). Image courtesy of InSite Arts. Layla Curtis, NewcastleGateshead, UK (2005).

Chapter 7: The Viewer 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40.

Carlotta Brunetti, Forêt Surprise, Fontenay-sur-Bois, France (2002). Jill Magid, System Azure, Police Headquarters, Amsterdam (2002). Susan Collins, Viewfinder, Minehead (2000). Installation view. Susan Collins, Viewfinder, Minehead (2000). 3D video-still. Susan Collins, Underglow, City of London (2006). Photograph: Richard Davies. Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, Park – A Plan for Escape, Documenta 11, Kassel (2002). Image courtesy of Esther Schipper, Berlin.

Chapter 8: The Border 41. 42.

43. 44. 45.

Jesus Palomino, Casa del Poble Nou, Barcelona (1998). Doris Salcedo, Untitled, Installation for the 8th International Biennial, Istanbul (2003), Copyright: the artist. Photograph: Sergio Clavijo. Image courtesy of Alexander Bonin, New York and White Cube/ Jay Jopling, London. Germaine Koh, Sleeping Rough, Canada (2003). Christina Fernandez, Arrivals and Departures, Tijuana, Mexico/US border crossing (1997): bus station. Christina Fernandez, Arrivals and Departures, Tijuana, Mexico/US border crossing (1997): telescope.

All images are reproduced by courtesy of the artists.

ix

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ___________________________________

I wish to thank the University for the Creative Arts for its support in providing a research sabbatical and a number of travel awards to research and complete this book. Thanks also to Susan Lawson for her belief and enthusiasm for the project; Catherine Elwes for her advice and encouragement and Michèle Sedgwick for her unending insight, wide-ranging scholarship and limitless patience. I thank all the artists for their generosity in supplying images of their works and especially those who gave up their time to help me in the research of their work. Thanks also go to the following: Ellen de Bruijne, Helen Carr, Indira Carr, Jason Cohen, Sarah Collicott, Barry Curtis, Paul Domela, Charlotte Edmunds, Ceri Hand, David Hawkins, Matthew Hearn, Ursula Huws, Joanna Lowry, Sarah MacDonald, Louis Nixon, Modus Operandi, Claire Pajaczkowska, Thomas Dane Gallery, Lisa Tickner, Martin Shoesmith, Maria Vassilidou, Sam Wilkinson, Wong Hoy Cheong, Rana Zincir.

FOREWORD __________________

The approach of this book is to foreground practices that evade the easy recuperability of ‘public art’ and the congealing of significance to which it is prone. Instead it focuses on the ephemeral and interventionist art of the event. The temporal and spatial ‘cut’ of short-lived artworks is capable of complex acts of dis-location and re-positioning. Judith Rugg conjures an acute awareness of the many ways in which ephemeral and timely projects can function in different contexts and with different intentions to dramatise existing conditions; draw attention to the overlooked; or suggest expressive possibilities that are latent in interactions between artists and environments. The examples drawn on are a product of a number of factors. The context of enabling art events and new strategies of disseminating information, evaluation and response has produced a new international realm of awareness of the potential of short-lived art works and their capacity to animate and linger as catalysts for memory and debate. The artworks explored here demonstrate a range of strategies and potentials that have been engaged to trouble the familiar, sedimented configurations of public spaces. In some cases they are signs, made visible, of psycho-geographical engagements. In others they are evocations of the indwelling tensions and contradictions that are inherent in scenarios of everyday life. The key function of ‘sudden’ works is to realise and release the disruptive and contradictory elements that constitute familiar landscapes. The author’s generously wide-ranging enquiry provides the reader with a rich awareness of the energies released by re-viewing instances of separation and confrontation, focusing attention on how the elements of these emotional engagements are made visible. She visits instances of loss and epiphany in contested zones, and demonstrates how unspectacular and overlooked places can be brought to states of engaging significance.

FOREWORD At a time when site-specific art is possible and capable of wide dissemination, this book provides a sensitive and systematic way of understanding its unified characteristics and vital differences. Barry Curtis

xiv

INTRODUCTION _______________________

The focus of this book is on the relationships between site-specific art and space in the context of the international and considers how an interdisciplinary spatial theory can inform the making, theorization, commissioning, display and reception of contemporary art.1 Over the last ten years research from a range of disciplines has been used to investigate the significance of globalization in an emerging ‘space consciousness’ and a changing emphasis on the significance of the spatial.2 Through a series of artworks temporarily located in a diversity of spaces outside the context of the gallery, this book probes the significance of the relationships between space and contemporary art within globalizing contexts. By drawing on urban and social theory, critical geography and feminist, postcolonial and cultural theory, it investigates the psychoanalytic, cultural, political and social dynamics at play within the international spatial contexts of sitespecific art. The broadening interdisciplinary research within spatial theory has paralleled a significant expansion in opportunities for artists to work on sitespecific projects internationally. The increase in international art biennials and commissions that offer a diversity of spaces for the reception and making of art beyond the gallery have provided new geographical and conceptual sites for art and for thinking about its relationship to space within an international framework. This book includes artworks sited in a variety of different international locations. In addition to the United States and the UK, it considers temporary site-specific artworks in: France, Barcelona, China, Argentina, Brussels, Mexico, Poland, Melbourne, Italy, Panama, Germany, Amsterdam, Switzerland, Canada and Istanbul. The chapter headings: Psychic Spaces, The Viewer, The Garden, The Performance of Space, 1

EXPLORING SITE-SPECIFIC ART

Contingent Spaces, The Border, Demographic Space and Territory and Location, provide sites of enquiry into a range of spatial issues pertinent to our times, which include the environment, experiences of displacement, migration, marginalization and exclusion, cultural identity and belonging and the effects of redevelopment, regeneration, tourism and urbanization. Final selection of the artworks for this book was informed by a series of criteria: all were temporarily sited and conceived or presented in or for particular geographic places. In a few cases, some have also been installed or performed in other geographical sites. However, this book focuses on the significance of individual artworks in particular places of presentation as it is not my intention to investigate parallel and diverging issues of presentation or reception in relation to concepts or definitions of sitespecificity.3 The fact that all these artworks were temporary – some existed for days, some months, some years – makes them detached from perceptions of permanent ‘public art’ and therefore allows room to explore the relationships between contemporary art and site, which are distinct from the debate on public space, art and architecture – issues that have been discussed elsewhere.4 The temporary nature of these works has enabled a focus on their dissonant qualities and a contestation of the certainties of the mechanisms for the constructions of place and space through the contemporary processes of modernity, which include tourism, regeneration and urbanization. As has been shown, permanent public art has a tendency to rely on its visibility to manufacture relationships of value with architecture and urban space and the focus of this book is on the nonspectacle of the transient, the short-lived and the site-specific.5 As both an artist and art theorist, I am interested in the potential of art as a site of critical engagement, fleeting intensity and intervention that reveals the relationships in play within the spatial. Temporarily sited artworks resonate with the precarious nature of space against the enforced coherences of regeneration, redevelopment, urban planning or tourism and their implicit imposition and manufacture of hierarchical values. The innovative qualities of the works in this book and their potential to function as a ‘text’ informs its underlying questions: how can site-specific contemporary art, in a range of international locations, be considered, understood and informed in ways that take into account an interdisciplinary theoretical framework and how is this imbricated within an international or globalizing context? This book proposes that we think about the relationships between contemporary artworks and space differently (as 2

INTRODUCTION

artists, viewers or curators) by considering them as informed by wider theoretical geographies that attend to a range of issues concerning the spatial and its social, economic, political and cultural implications. Chapter 1: Psychic Spaces considers the relationship between subjective, interior spaces and exterior material spaces as a site of anxiety manifested in psychic formations and projections.6 Through four site-specific installations in London, Santa Fe and Basel, it explores how space can be the focus for processes of identification where the nature of selfhood is dependent on fantasies of belonging or threatened by the fear of loss and exclusion. In the boundaries between the real and the imaginary, place becomes a site of anguish and disquiet where uncertain thresholds have their destabilizing effects on internal orientation and empowerment. This chapter considers how the instabilities of place and identity are reflections on the alienating effects of urbanization, colonialism or mental or material displacement and which are disturbed or modified through religion, cultural ritual or architecture. Chapter 2: Contingent Spaces looks at three site-specific artworks in different urban peripheral spaces in Amsterdam, London and Poland. It examines how marginalized space can be a site of dissonance and disruption against the spatial hierarchies of the city, determined by configurations of hegemonic ordering based on exclusion and denial. It investigates how, outside the terms of commodification, the concept of the contingent unsettles the constructed values of space and the spatial coherences manufactured through redevelopment and tourism. Chapter 3: Performance of Space argues that different forms of belonging and exclusion are essentially spatially performed within the contexts and frameworks of social and cultural power relations. It considers four site-specific artworks in London, Argentina, Istanbul and Panama City where the everyday is the stage for both conflict and identification regulated through social and cultural structures that are dependent on the political nature of the spatial. It discusses how the performance of space and place is determined through variations of normalized codes of behaviour in which forms of order are not only expressed and maintained but are also the site of encounter, resistance and fracture. Chapter 4: The Garden considers five site-specific artworks located in the United States, Siena, Venice, Melbourne and London. These examine the garden as a construction of idealized space and evoke it as a site that provokes consideration of the wider issues of the environment. The garden is not a form of utopia but a space of contestation where social and cultural 3


relationships are realigned. Through these artworks, forms of control, disorder and appropriation are aspects of the garden, not as an enclave distanced from the world but as an expression of a global crisis of place in ecological contexts and infrastructures. Chapter 5: Demographic Space considers three site-specific artworks in China, Brussels and Margate in relation to the historical and contemporary economic or political migrant movements of people. Through these artworks the chapter investigates how concepts of demographic space must be considered within the historical contexts of urbanization and globalization and how their social and economic effects are inscribed within the power relationships of place. It considers how the uncertainties of space, formed through demographic processes of alignments, inclusions and exclusions, lie behind the utopian project of the city and the power structures inscribed within the spatial. Chapter 6: Territory and Location proposes space as conditional on a series of factors and considers how these concepts are discursively situated and implicitly imbricated within it. Through the examination of a range of site-specific artworks in the East End of London, Nicosia, Herne Bay and Newcastle, it examines how cultural, social and political territories of ethnicity, nationalism, class and gender are framed by history, tourism and colonialism. It investigates how site-specific art can invite reflection on the conceptual and geographic territories of space as inherently provisional, contested and constructed – historically conflictive and located within the everyday. Chapter 7: The Viewer investigates how our perception of space is mediated by variable cultural, political and environmental contexts that frame the ways in which we view the world. Through close consideration of five site-specific artworks in France, Amsterdam, Minehead, London and Kassel, it centres on the overlooked and unspectacular as sites where the hierarchical discourses of tourism, finance and ecology are made visible. Chapter 8: The Border investigates the border as a material, geographic and conceptual structure situating the social and political through four sitespecific artworks in Barcelona, Turkey, Canada and Tijuana. It considers the border as a discursive site where power, conflict and transgression are located within overlapping historical and spatial contexts. It reflects on the border in relation to the exclusionary effects of urban redevelopment and regeneration, as a surrogate space for the ‘disappeared’ and the marginalized and as a threshold of regulation and aspiration. 4

INTRODUCTION Notes 1. Miwon Kwon proposed site-specificity as a critical practice framed by phenomenological, institutional and social contexts. Miwon Kwon, ‘One place after another: notes of site-specificity’, October, vol. 80, Spring 1997, pp. 84–108. The concept of ‘site’ has been transformed from a physical, fixed, grounded place to a fluid, discursive field. James Meyer, ‘The functional site; or, the transformation of site-specificity’, in Erika Suderburg (ed.) Space, Site, Intervention: Situating Installation Art (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000) pp. 23–37. 2. Arif Dirlik, ‘Place-based imagination: globalism and the politics of place’, Development, vol. 41, no. 2, June 1998, pp. 7–14. 3. For the debate on the relevance of a geographical place to other issues of sitespecificity, see in particular Harriet F. Senie and Sally Webster (eds) Critical Issues in Public Art: Content, Context and Controversy (New York: Icon Editions, 1992). 4. See for example, most recently, Jane Rendell, Art and Architecture: A Place Between (London: I.B.Tauris, 2006). 5. Malcolm Miles, Art, Space and the City: Public Art and Urban Futures (London: Routledge, 1997) has questioned the relationships between certain kinds of ‘public art’ and corporate agendas. 6. What Anthony Vidler, in Warped Space: Art, Architecture, and Anxiety in Modern Culture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000) has called the psychological disturbances of the alienated subject.

5

1. PSYCHIC SPACES _______________________

This chapter explores how relationships between internal subjective space and external material space are psychically formed and projected. An empty office block and a church in central London, the cellar of an abandoned house in Basel, Switzerland and a cemetery in Santa Fe, New Mexico, in the United States are the loci where issues concerning the relationships between the anxieties of the self and the precariousness of place are discussed. Concepts of identity and selfhood and the illusory nature of belonging are the psychic sites where the interrelationships of space are considered. Located within the terms of religion, cultural ritual, colonialism and consumption, subjectivities are aligned, constructed, fantasized and disturbed; and processes of identification are assembled and threatened. Fantasies of deprivation and longing were evoked in David Ward’s Nocturne (November 2005–January 2006), an installation at the church of St Michael Paternoster Royal at Royal and College Streets, London, EC4. A digital projection of a section of the night sky with the ‘seven sisters’ of the Pleiades constellation was projected onto the surface of the south wall of the church. The circular window of the church tower was illuminated from inside and appeared like a full moon hovering above the virtual stars. The six, stone-carved singing angels on the façade were spot-lit and became more intensely visible as darkness fell. In the adjacent Whittington Gardens, white light illuminated the bushes and the surplus light from the digital image projection spilled over onto the branches of the trees, where a sound installation of birdsong animated the gardens like a summer landscape.

7


Nocturne set up an immersive, dream-like and magical encounter where various spatial and temporal paradoxes were collapsed. The night sky, normally obliterated in the city by buildings and the reflected light pollution of office blocks, cars and streetlights, became surreally visible; whilst the sound of birds, evocative of summer woodland, resonated from the artificial daylight lighting the leafless trees and shrubs of the night-time, inner-city church garden. The viewer inhabited an enclosed, yet unbounded space: bordered on one side by the illuminated gardens and on the other by the glittering projection of a blue star-lit sky onto the church’s façade. The installation created a hallucinatory space at odds with the known architectural world of the city and evoked a space of possibilities for the imaginary.1 Sited in the city in the bleak winter cold, Nocturne conjured the irrational state of a dream, where unconscious desires and fears are situated within a series of sliding signifiers: a mysterious space where the stars come out in the day, a wondrous woodland landscape reverberates amongst a patch of dusty, grey scrub by a busy road and where summer magically emerges in the midst of winter. The cultural concept of a nocturne describes certain types of music or painting that relate to evening or night. As a musical form, the nocturne has historically fascinated composers and musicians and found expression across a breadth of musical genres from jazz to classical music. The term describes music that is suitable for playing during the evening or at night, marking the transitional period when the light fades and different sounds emerge. In several movements in Bartók’s ‘night music’, for example, the piano imitates nocturnal creatures such as frogs, birds and insects. As a musical form, the nocturne evokes an interstitial space between the twilight of evening and the darkness of night: a period between waking and sleeping and the border to a concealed world where nocturnal sounds and sights ‘perform’ normally unseen or unheard. The church of St Michael Paternoster is home to the headquarters of the Mission to Seafarers, an Anglican charity established in 1856 to support mariners and sailors. It has offices in 230 ports worldwide that provide resources and support for sailors and staff on ships to contact their families. It also offers counselling to help with the psychological effects of loneliness, fear, isolation and homesickness brought about by long periods at sea. The symbolic dimension of Ward’s installation revealed a paradoxical need for spatial orientation: whilst sailors yearn for land, city dwellers may seek to escape. 8

P S Y C H I C S PAC E S

Fig. 1. David Ward, Nocturne, St Michael Paternoster Royal, London (2006). Photograph by Richard Davies.

9


Nocturne can be perceived as a projection for a shared desire and longing for an imagined elsewhere – a tortured form of homesickness: always to be where one is not, in a place that can never be occupied. For sailors, stars have historically provided a way of navigation and orientation and the Pleiades constellation can be considered as a visualization of a yearning for a knowable, legible space within the seemingly infinite – the continually threatening, apparently limitless chaos of the city and the immense boundlessness of the sea. As such, Nocturne can be considered a visualization of the unconscious craving that manifests both the inner emptiness experienced through feelings of alienation and disorientation, and the need to belong. In the interstitial border site marked out by Ward’s installation, a disruption and collapse of time and space – seasonal, stellar, temporal and pastoral – generated a space of transience where both the ‘here’ and ‘there’ reside. The angel, emblem of the seafarer’s mission and reflected in the six stone-carved angels on the south wall of the church, has itself been proposed as a threshold figure occupying the margin where the past and future come together – a liminal form between space, time and consciousness.2 Its ‘in-between’ status was reflected in Nocturne’s evocation of indeterminate longing created by the virtual space of the stars and the summer landscape. Longing, it has been said, is a refusal of the present and inhabits the threshold of time; it is encapsulated by stasis and transcends the materiality of place.3 This borderline condition was described by the artwork’s evocation of deferred time (neither summer nor winter, day nor night) in which an interplay between the internal and external worlds took place: the site of anguish where longing can be said to be situated. Longing has been defined as a secondary emotion associated with both joy and sadness and the need for attachment and identification. Its dimensions include the directional, relational and temporal. It could be argued that sailors occupy a perpetual state of transience, where the irresolvable destination of home continually inhabits both the past and the future and the stability of which primarily resides within a fantasized sense of belonging. Longing is bound up with loss and the need for fulfilment and for feelings of completion and resolution and, as such, it can be focused externally on an object or internally on the satisfaction of an inner life.4 Ward’s installation can be considered as a projection of the unconscious, interior space associated with feelings of longing; as an expression of equivalence and the visualization of fantasies of identification and escape. In 10


Freudian terms, the night sky and the landscape associations of the work can be perceived as manifesting a form of wish fulfilment and a visualization of a projected need – an expression of the unconscious into cognitive forms.5 The incongruous slippage of sensations – of flickering stars, daylight, summer, winter, landscape, urban space and woodland – was resonant of a projection of an imaginary scene of a daydream or an unconscious phantasy in which the internal world seeks satisfaction by illusion.6 Nocturne, like its name suggested, can be considered as a focal point for a process of transition between conscious, subliminal and unconscious feelings of longing. The night sky, summer birdsong and the collapse of spatial orientation evoked contradictory sensations of proximity and distance and feelings of longing associated with the sublime. The installation conjured a temporary conflict of reason and imagination, a defining characteristic of the sublime whose psychic meanings of timeless infinity, the dissolution of boundaries and the collapse of rational space have been proposed as the expression of human needs, desires and fears.7 The sensation of awe from the position of the safety of the imagination and the transcendence of human reason over nature are the core of the experience of the sublime. Kant conceptualized the sublime as essentially about the mind, since it is in the mind where our ability to comprehend the sublime resides.8 The night sky, seen from the midst of an empty landscape or at sea can evoke ‘oceanic’ immersive feelings and, transposed onto a church located close to St Paul’s Cathedral, Ward’s installation collapsed the sublime with the spiritual, ‘filling’ the surface of the church with the ‘emptiness’ of the infinite. The sublime, it has been argued, is the main form that ‘God’ takes in the modern world and, in Freudian terms, religion – essentially a belief system that encompasses desire beyond the rational and the scientific – is a fantasy structure within whose psychic meanings, human needs, desires and conflicts are expressed.9 Longing assumes a loss within whose terms it is bound up and loss, it has been argued, is at the heart of Christianity, where the crucifixion is its vicarious mechanism.10 The Mission to Seafarers’ drop-in centres in international ports are located in the framework of colonialism and power, and operate symbolically and historically as modes for the assertion of the authority of the Anglican Church. In Trinidad, the Falkland Islands, Lagos, Cape Town, Fremantle, Singapore, Bombay, Dublin, Wellington and Gibraltar, they form points of reference in an historically defined map of empire where the 11


missionary movement, it has been argued, functioned as the agent for cultural imperialism and Western religious belief.11 The mission’s offices provide a structural network and potential ideological conduit for Christianity, where concerns about sailors’ homesickness, loneliness and isolation can be exploited by its religious and parochial sub-textual agenda. This paternal authority of the church is further revealed in the name of the Seafarers’ headquarters – Paternoster. Colonialism and religion as its ubiquitous and pervasive supplement were part of the same global symbolic order where, it is argued, the Church as an idealized ‘parent’ figure served the repressive and symbolic function of the father and the rule of law.12 Anxiety at the centre of the construction of cultural identity was at the core of Carl Michael von Hausswolff’s installation, Red Night (1999), which lit up the abandoned cemetery of Our Lady of Guadalupe, Santa Fe, New Mexico with 20,000 watts of red light during the night.13 Deploying several techniques of the horror film, the installation evoked a deeply unsettling disquiet, disturbing the boundary between reality and fiction. In Red Night the cemetery became a psychical field and a stage for a collective projected unease. Despite the cemetery not being used since the 1940s, after two nights Von Hausswolff was required to remove his installation after complaints from the members of the parish who were responsible for its upkeep. The cemetery combined with the immersive qualities of the red light and the reality effect of cinéma vérité, eroded the boundary between the real and the imaginary. Marvellous and other-worldly, Red Night was an ‘eruption of the inadmissible’ into the heart of the city – a reminder of the presence of death in life via the collapse of the real with the cinematic. The horror film, it has been argued is a cultural expression of what cannot be conceived: the proximity of death in life.14 In the abandoned cemetery, with its associations with the myth and symbol of the ‘Lady of Guadalupe’ and the Day of the Dead, Red Night illuminated an anxiety about another form of ‘death’ – that of cultural identity. For Mexicans, the cemetery is the site for performing what has come to represent a key symbol of Mexican identity – the Day of the Dead, when people ritualistically honour their dead relatives though various altar displays and events. The adornment and decoration of graves with candles and food and all-night cemetery vigils between 1 and 2 November (All Saints and All Souls Days in the Catholic calendar) take place all over Mexico and in the United States where its observance is considered a marker of Mexican-American identity.15 The Day of the Dead has been 12


Fig. 2. Carl Michael von Hausswolff, Red Night, Our Lady of Guadalupe Cemetery, Santa Fe (1999).

constructed as the site where Mexico’s cultural diversity comes together in a unique, official and authentic ‘Mexicanness’ in which indigenous Indian religious ritual is syncretized with European Roman Catholicism.16 Skulls, coffins and skeletons made from icing sugar and marzipan and shaped breads and toys on the theme of death are on sale in thousands of market stalls across Mexico during the Day of the Dead ‘festivities’. Mexican and foreign tourists are transported by bus into Mexico City and other towns especially designated by the Ministry of Tourism to witness the celebrations and the carnivalesque atmosphere.17 The Day of the Dead, with its variety and proliferation of sugar skulls, coffins and cadavers has come to be perceived as a demonstration of a specifically Mexican attitude to death and the primary cultural representation of its ‘national character and distinctiveness’.18 The celebrations are linked to and offer an opportunity for a collective expression of patriotism when Mexican ‘national qualities’ such as machismo, generosity and gaiety are promoted and performed. The Day of the Dead, like other forms of popular cultural expression reveal what Ernesto Laclau saw as the need for, and impossibility of, a universal ground on which to base enactments of identity.19 Von Hausswolff’s installation literally revealed this ‘ground’ as an empty space based on fantasy and tenuously filled with ritual and belief. 13


The Day of the Dead (1985) was the title of the third film in George A. Romero’s zombie trilogy (preceded by Night of the Living Dead and Dawn of the Dead). Von Hausswolff’s installation caused offence perhaps because it marked a site where dead (and seemingly resolved) things came alive – the issue of Mexican distinctiveness and the ongoing struggle for its coherence. The abandoned cemetery, floodlit for all to see, revealed the inherent fragility behind the unstable superstructure that supports claims to fixed concepts of national identity: tourism and popular forms of ritual and religion. The disquiet von Hausswolff’s installation created revealed the myth of a perceived, stable Mexican character perpetually haunted by the anxiety of loss. It highlighted the return of the repressed fear of social, economic, political and cultural death through marginalization and exclusion: it represented the focus points around which concepts of Mexican identity (and perhaps all forms of ‘identity’) have been formed. Santa Fe’s and New Mexico’s uncertain history as part of Mexico and then of the United States and its large Hispanic population underlines its own historically precarious situation and the importance of its national sense of belonging. In the forsaken cemetery, Red Night appeared to display the apparent public abandonment of, or even disbelief in, the quest for an enduring sense of cultural selfhood and identification by drawing attention to the neglect of a crucial site where ritualistic enactments of identity are performed, thus altering that site to one of discomforting unease. Complaints about the work brought to light the pivotal place of ritual in the perception of the self and the concept of identity. The ‘shame’ that von Hausswolff’s installation revealed was the apparently collective abandonment of faith in the rituals of cultural unity in whose repetition the recuperation from loss takes place. Our Lady of Guadalupe is a powerful Mexican national symbol relevant to indigenous Creole, Spanish and (more recently) the Latin American and Hispanic people of the United States. Like the Day of the Dead rituals, the cult of Our Lady of Guadalupe has been exploited to syncretize Catholic European and indigenous Indian cultures and is used as a vehicle through which to legitimize claims to a specific ‘Mexican’ national distinctiveness. The ‘appearance’ of the Virgin to the Indian Juan Diego in 1531, at the shrine of Tepeyac (formerly an important site associated with a preColumbian mother goddess), provided the foundation for a national identity movement in the early nineteenth century.20 ‘Mexico’, it has been asserted, was ‘born’ in 1649 after the account of the ‘miracle’ of her appear14


ance was first published and the nationalistic significance attached to it by the author, Miguel Sánchez.21 Banners depicting Our Lady of Guadalupe’s image were carried by the Spaniards during the Conquest and by Miguel Hidalgo during the Mexican Revolution of 1846–48; portraits of her can be found throughout Mexico. Her feast day, 12 December, is celebrated by Mexican-Americans in the United States, to express their sense of ‘belonging’ to Mexican-American culture. The importance of the cult of the Virgin of Guadalupe has been discussed in terms of ethnicity, trauma, loss and colonial domination.22 Place of origin as a substitute mother figure is a powerful point of identification in concepts of national identity (‘motherland’, ‘mother tongue’ and so on). The Virgin of Guadalupe has a resonance with the pre-Conquest concept of the Great Mother as dreadful and nurturing and related to both life and death.23 As a conflation of the divine mother of European and Indian religious beliefs, the Virgin of Guadalupe holds significance across Hispanic America. Her historic association with death and rebirth make her an authoritative symbol for Mexican cultural identity where, it has been proposed, her image became a symbolic way for people of Creole, Indian and mixed-race heritage to make sense of the violence of colonialism and to break from the past into a new sense of nationhood.24 After the mass genocide and destruction of the Conquest, the Virgin of Guadalupe represented hope and rebirth in the Mexican consciousness.25 The mother, as both place of origin and return, is literally reflected in the Our Lady of Guadalupe cemetery. In Santa Fe it could be argued that she functions as a metaphor to displace the effects of loss manifested in the city’s history, in the US appropriation of Hispanic land and in New Mexico as an annexed state in the nineteenth century. Thus, Mexico’s historical and geographical position as borderline and precarious is reflected in the virgin’s ambiguous symbolization as both apocalyptic and benign.26 The mother is the recipient of powerful feelings of hatred and love directed by the child in Kleinian object relations theory. The child is torn between the satisfaction, pleasure and security the mother’s attention gives, and the feelings of anger and frustration when it is withdrawn. Fantasies of violence are directed by the child to the part-objects of the ‘good breast’ and the ‘bad breast’, which are later fused into whole objects (the mother) during the Kleinian ‘paranoid-schizoid position’. Later, the child fears that his or her destructive fantasies have destroyed both the ‘good mother’ and the ‘bad mother’ and the depressive position is reached. Guilt over these 15


destructive wishes is followed by a process of reparation in the restoration of the ‘good mother’ within the child’s ego, the negotiation of which is necessary in order to become capable of loving relationships with others.27 In Klein’s view the adult process of mourning reactivates the depressive position and loss is exacerbated by the fear of the loss of the internal ‘good objects’ and the consequences of this on the potential collapse of the inner life. Von Hausswolff’s installation could be perceived to be a conflation of the mother figure, death, abandonment and horror within the site of cultural identity. As has been shown, Our Lady of Guadalupe offered a symbol of comfort and resolution to the Indian population of Mexico and was seen as a symbol of spiritual and cultural rebirth and renewal after the trauma of colonialism.28 A maternal symbol associated with death, violence and renewal, she can be perceived to be a cultural expression of Kleinian processes of aggression and reparation. The Day of the Dead celebrations represent a vernacular manifestation of a ritualistic triumph over death, which in Kleinian terms is manifested in the process of mourning as a defence against loss. It has been argued that the huge amount of all sorts of sweets for sale during the festivities sets the Day of the Dead apart as a specifically Mexican celebration, although it stems from Spanish religious rituals.29 The consumption of sweets during the Day of the Dead, like other acts of eating in death rituals, has been considered as symbolically representing the incorporation, reconstitution and re-establishment of the (dead) individual’s inner world into the body and subjective space of the living. During the Day of the Dead, ofrenda placed on the graves, including bread in the shape of bones as well as other food and alcohol, is not eaten but the sweets (in the shape of skeletons, bones, skulls) are dedicated and given as gifts to specific living people and eaten during the festivities.30 In Kleinian terms the dead person unconsciously represents a parental figure, especially the mother, and eating is a form of restoration in unconscious fantasy of the mother’s body.31 Eating manifests the psychic process of the reconstitution of the mother’s body as the primary love object, essential for the formation of the self. Sweets, unlike other food, offer particular forms of oral pleasure that involve sucking and biting and, as such, have associations with the breast. Eating the sweets therefore may be considered as a form of incorporation where oral sadism and pleasure, aggression and reparation towards the mother are enacted in a performance of unconscious processes of fantasy. Mastery of the knowledge of loss and the need to eradicate it through 16


feelings of oneness form the core of Lacan’s theory of the death drive. Identification within a symbolic, cultural order is a form of compensation for the effects of loss and separation that make up the ‘void of emptiness’ at the centre of being.32 According to Lacan, ‘being’ itself is defined via the effects of loss, which themselves are constructed around ‘fantasies of plenitude’ that offer opportunities for a fleeting sense of wholeness.33 The figure of the Lady of Guadalupe and the Day of the Dead are important points of identification in Mexican culture where ritual compensates for the loss of the primary object of the mother. We aspire to a sense of unity and fulfilment in the desire to eradicate loss, but can never fill the gap. As suggested previously, the Virgin of Guadalupe served the purpose of filling the deep sense of loss the indigenous population of Mexico felt after the violence of the Conquest. The extravagance of the Day of the Dead rituals in Mexico can be considered in Lacanian terms as compensations for the fantasies of plenitude that shut out loss in an attempt to compensate for a lack that undermines a sense of stability. According to Lacan, ritualistic performance offers a ‘hallucinated satisfaction’ of the temporary eradication of loss, which through repetition offers consistency and a way of filling up the sense of nothingness.34 Ritual as a form of repetition of the known is a way of guaranteeing sensations of jouissance and, in the face of danger, it functions as a form of cultural empowerment, the consistency of which provides protection against the threat of annihilation. Red Night perhaps offended people because it exposed the neglect of the ritual of the Day of the Dead (and, by extension, Mexican identity) where ritual represents a site of potential to re-establish moral and social order and the inner subjective world. By displaying the destitute cemetery, the floodlights of Red Night revealed that the belief in ritual as a collective defence against the death of identity had been abandoned.35 The irreverence of Red Night perhaps caused it to be perceived as a threat to the psychological structures in which the perception of the self resides. Like turning the lights on at a party, Von Hausswolff’s installation exposed the inherent fantasy of identity, which is, like the ‘vision’ of the Virgin of Guadalupe was to Juan Diego in 1531, no more than an apparition. In a site of important cultural symbolism, Red Night revealed the potential horror of realizing that the concept of cultural identity could be no more than an illusion. Anxiety, based as it is on imaginary disaster scenarios, needs no material object and is also an effective mechanism of the horror film. Red Night was a reminder that a trick of light can sustain or expose belief 17


systems. The installation radically changed the way the cemetery was perceived and played on the proximity of feelings of uncertainty in its relation to significant points of identification – another device of the horror film. The uncanny effects of the work lay in its insinuation of doubt in a concept of a shared, secure Mexican identity for a Mexican-American diaspora, which, in an age of globalization is dependent on and reducible to a few myths. ‘Mexicanness’, like other concepts of fixed national identities, is ultimately inherently dependent on unstable forms and rituals. In an articulation of ‘I know, but nevertheless’, Red Night suggested that lies and illusions drive and sustain the ‘living dead’ of national identity, which is based on archaic symbols, beliefs and forms of repetition. Like other contrivances of phantasmagoria, such as apparitions and the cinema, the installation manifested the spectre of the fear of loss – a mental image come to life of the inherent knowledge and denial about the fragility of belonging.36 Red Night and Nocturne alluded to issues of inclusion threatened by anxieties of loss and longing in the boundaries between the real and the imaginary. Spatial confusion and the intimidating presence of the void to subjective orientation were differently expressed in Melanie Counsell’s 110 Euston Road, London (May 1996). In the basement of an empty office block in the process of redevelopment in central London, the viewer was guided by torchlight held by an assistant through the semi-darkness to the centre of a vast, brick and rubble strewn floor towards a 16-millimetre film projector. After several seconds, an indeterminate black and white image was projected onto one of the derelict walls. Blurred, abstract, pale grey shapes suggested moving vehicles travelling between the white, broken lines of Euston Road, taking place at street level, suggesting that the film was made from the roof, 15 stories above. A sudden movement of sweeping, smeared greys implied a view experienced when falling, in which all perspective, order and orientation is dissolved by the engulfment of the void (in fact, the camera had been dropped). In a swirling chaos resonant of double vision, the clouded streaks of grey and black shapes of the flickering images intimated the internal and external collapse of the eroded logic of the suicide. In the semi-darkness of the basement of 110 Euston Road, where the dust hung in the chilly air, the felt presence of the building’s palpable emptiness created a form of reversed altitude sickness. The simultaneous awareness of the basement and the roofscape caused the unbearable 18


Fig. 3. Melanie Counsell, 110 Euston Road, London (1996): film stills.

19


weightiness of the knowledge of the 15 stories above to press down on the consciousness of the viewer in a condensation of the installation’s spatial contradictions. This sense of spatial excess generated threatening feelings of claustrophobic panic in which the film’s disorientating collapse became a visualization of vertigo’s compulsion toward spatial and temporal abandonment. This instability of proximity and distance evoked the anxiety at the centre of the psychic space where agoraphobia and claustrophobia meet. These spatial confusions condensed an unseen, imagined threatening presence, articulating a defining feature of the agoraphobic – the imagined possibility of the threat of external violence to the self. It has been variously proposed that agoraphobia, as a movement and psycho-spatial fear, is a symptom of environmental change and modernization. 110 Euston Road was situated in the terra infirma of the redevelopment area of King’s Cross and a block away from what was to become St Pancras International Station. During several years of construction, the vast zone around this site was levelled and all spatial orientation dissipated as the area was swept of streets and buildings. Familiar routes, landmarks and street names were eradicated in the reduction of a nineteenth-century urban landscape to a tabula rasa for a twenty-first-century utopia – the progressive elimination of time and distance. The slippery ground of urban redevelopment and the disorientation evoked by Counsell’s installation, gave way to an architectural edifice to high-speed travel. St Pancras International replaced Waterloo station as the Eurostar train terminal and brought the illusory need to be constantly moving on into the centre of the city. As the new ‘gateway to Europe’, St Pancras asserts a central, monumental architectural authority and a phantasmagoric point of departure for the imagined, fantasized utopias of European destinations. It has been suggested that agoraphobia, as a fear of the ‘open space’ of the marketplace, is the modern expression of the individual’s alienation from capitalism’s pressure for consumption.37 Urban development, supported by an infrastructure that focuses on finding ever new outlets and opportunities for consumption, has merged commercial, retail, corporate and public space. Places formerly associated with functional necessity have become sites of leisure and desire where fantasies of constructing one’s identity via the consumption on offer in restaurants, bars, fashion outlets and all kinds of shops can be played out without the distracting sense of ‘place’. Contemporary places of transit, such as railway stations, airports and ferry terminals, have long been more than the sum of their 20


Fig 4. Melanie Counsell, 110 Euston Road, London (1996): exterior view of building. Photograph by Robin Klassnik.

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functional parts. St Pancras International’s marketplace as architecture can be perceived as a projection of the alienation suffered by the environmental unconscious. Within what was formerly the site of the world’s largest internal space, the agoraphobic’s anxiety about exclusion and fear of the (social) void can now be temporarily relieved at the world’s longest champagne bar.38 Counsell’s installation, 110 Euston Road, collapsed fears of both contiguity and exclusion associated with agoraphobia whose ‘double condition’ is played out in the psychic space of St Pancras International as a primary site for a twenty-first century ‘railway phobia’. In the agoraphobic’s anxiety about rejection, the dread of both estrangement and immersion is embodied by the moving crowd, the unpredictability of which represents a threat to the perceived autonomy of the individual, for it is always going somewhere and forever past you. The commodification of time and space through high-speed train travel plays on the fear of being left behind. Touch-screen LED screens displaying European destinations and arrivals – Paris, Brussels, Lille and Disneyland – psychically paper over the abyss between ‘here’ and ‘there’ from the familiar to the fantasized other. Zygmunt Bauman has argued that conditions of continual uncertainty that can never be satisfied, for they are full of beginnings and endings and are always experienced in a state of anguish, determine the precarious ‘liquidity’ of modern life.39 Modern individuals who exist in a continual state of status anxiety in which various external systems of commodification incessantly determine or undermine the self, never achieve resolution. Unease about the potential oblivion of the self through an inability to keep up with the pressures of consumption and the loss of status this implies pose a repeating threat to identity and present a danger to the potential disappearance of the ego. The dominant rational forms of St Pancras can be seen as an architectural expression and projection of Britain’s fear of exclusion and isolation from Europe. The station’s architectural authority provides the stage for high-speed travel from the centre of the city, collapsing accessibility and distance and concealing the uncertain boundaries between feelings of belonging and not belonging. The railway station, as the front line to somewhere else is permeated with the anxiety of anticipation: a place to ‘jump’ and the terra infirma equivalent to the fantasized vertigo of falling in Counsell’s installation. In a parallel form of emptiness, St Pancras’ architectural ‘modernist void’ whose 18,000 glass-paned roof, multi-level platforms and the shiny, sleek surfaces of its high-speed trains similarly 22


evoke the awe, desire, fear and vertigo of the agoraphobic. Siegfried Kracauer has described the architecture of the railway station as a ‘gigantic hotel atrium’ and the shell of the 1970s office block where Counsell’s installation was sited eventually housed the Novotel Hotel, an equivalent socially-dissolving spatial field in which the sense of place and time slips away. An office block made empty for redevelopment, a hotel and a railway station – all articulate the instabilities of the spatial in their proximity to change. Both St Pancras and the Novotel Hotel are sites of terminus and possibility: crossroads for comings and goings, arrivals, departures and disappearances. The railway station and the hotel manifest the contemporary alienating conditions of anonymity and transience and the fantasized dimensions of limitless space, all of which reinforce the subject’s fear of non-existence.40 The site of Counsell’s installation was thus framed by an architectural reinvention of place in which the city’s own anxiety of oblivion is reflected in its contentiously ongoing renewal and redevelopment. Between 110 Euston Road and St Pancras International lie the architecturally authoritative spaces of the British Library, with its empty plaza and its multiple entry and exit points, and the looming Gothic edifice of the Midland Hotel (also in a long process of redevelopment). In addition, the King’s Cross area of London is a major transport hub that has long felt at the edge of somewhere else: a massive thoroughfare where hotels, taxi ranks, rows of bus stops and traffic-choked roads, crossroads and traffic lights are continually inhabited, vacated and reinhabited by people streaming towards or away from its three main train and tube stations. Accumulations of different kinds of traffic in transit negotiate a seemingly permanent, chaotic site of restoration, redevelopment and building projects. The labyrinthine journeys of the seething crowd, both above and below ground, and the pedestrian’s difficult navigation between hovering, bewildered recent arrivals, ensure that the shrinking perspective of the collective focus and urgency to arrive at an imagined elsewhere always obliterate the immediate horizon. King’s Cross is a place also associated with catastrophe – of terrorist attacks and fire – the memories of which still linger in the mind and which are marked by commemorative plaques inside and outside the station. As such, the area is always perceived to hover at the brink of potential danger for which the Eurostar may or may not provide a solution or an antidote of escape. If Counsell’s installation anticipated the development of St Pancras as an arrival and departure point for international travel, 23


it revealed the real fear of the agoraphobic whose desire it is to mingle with the crowd but which is compacted by overriding fears of rejection and exclusion. The fear of spatial collapse, issues of accessibility and desire and the threat of invasion of a different kind were all aspects of Anya Gallaccio’s Couverture, a ‘chocolate room’ in a rarely visited, dank, underground cellar of an abandoned house in Basel, Switzerland and sited there from March 1994 to May 1996.41 A wooden bench, placed in the centre of the cellar invited the viewer to contemplate the decay of its chocolate-coated walls in an environment of psychological unease. Initially sickly smelling, after several weeks the chocolate became subject to a process of slow disintegration. At first benign, the space became increasingly malevolent as the dampness accelerated the process of ‘blooming’, creating patches of white, orange and grey effervescent mould that bubbled under the chocolate surface, breaking open and seeping moisture. The urge to remove oneself was countered by the fascination of the incongruities inherent in the work. After four weeks, the cellar was boarded up although people still continued to visit it sporadically. Couverture was a play on opposites – luxury versus contamination, consumption versus denial, desire versus repulsion. Through associations with the abject and the uncanny, the work utilized cultural associations with the feminine to turn the frivolous into the horrific. Couverture reversed the sentimental and innocuous associations of chocolate into a horror device of the grotesque. Through a range of formal references, it set up oppositional fields of meaning that emphasized the maternal, contesting the cultural associations of chocolate in constructions of the feminine. The chocolate spread onto the walls formed a psychic border between the space of the cellar and the interior, subjective space of the viewer: not a chocoholic’s dream but a nightmare of unobtainability. Excremental in effect, the work produced a state of anxiety in its confusion between the displacement of desire and a threat of dirt and contagion.42 The fear of contamination and the possible consequences of death (or annihilation of subjectivity) illustrate the terms of the abject, which Julia Kristeva identifies as a ‘place where meaning collapses’. For Kristeva, the abject is an ambiguous border that ties the subject to what threatens it and food loathing is the most basic form of abjection when it represents a ‘border between two … territories’.43 In Couverture the viewer was caught up in an interplay of physical and sensual relationships: chocolate is associated with feelings of 24


Fig 5. Anya Gallaccio, Couverture, Basel, Switzerland (1998).

pleasure, yet the association of the work with dirt positioned it against its normal connotations. The connection of chocolate with swallowing – the ‘mouth feel’ that chocolate lovers describe because of its unique ability to melt at blood temperature – its promise of oral gratification and the many associations it has with nostalgia, security and the sensuous, all suggested a threatening intimacy with the ‘inside’. The work set up an environment of

25


conflict in evoking a desire for possession and a fear of destruction.44 Instead of incorporating the outside (the chocolate) with the inside (of the body) through eating, the viewer of Couverture was caught up with ambivalent feelings of anxiety and repulsion.45 The word ‘couverture’ (covering) contains an anagram of its opposite, ‘ouvre’ (opening) – an uncanny reference both to the mouth and to the vagina and chocolate has an implied reference to the (female) body and is significant in terms of gender within Western culture. Stereotyped cultural representations of chocolate invariably infantilize women together with the (false) assumption that women eat more of it than men. Through constructions of femininity, women’s sexual appetite is denied through the often quoted myth that many women prefer eating chocolate (that is eating sweets, an activity associated with childhood) to having sex. Chocolate manifests a complicity between a desire for security, either through its nostalgic association with childhood or its use as comfort food, and guilt about eating it, especially among women.46 Couverture contested clichéd cultural associations between chocolate and the feminine through proposing a relationship with the sinister and threatening. The cellar’s uterine-like, enclosed, dark brown space was described by Gallaccio as a ‘room at the end of a corridor: a secret, private space where anything could happen’.47 As has been shown, in the horror film the cellar can be perceived as a cultural sign where its ‘earthy dampness’ has been used as a metaphor for the ‘monstrous womb’ associated with the degenerate female and witch.48 Cave-like and dark, the cellar can be perceived as being bodily associated with the primal elements of the maternal,49 which, as Kristeva has argued, has a special relationship to the abject and is culturally related to ‘polluting’ objects (excremental and menstrual).50 For Kristeva, the maternal body is both ‘desiring and terrifying’ as the site of the abject, which emphasizes the horror and the attraction of the undifferentiated. The fear of the maternal represents the threat of the debilitating effects of dissolution – the loss of subjectivity and individuation.51 The leaking walls of Couverture suggested the secreting, grotesque body of the maternal where, for Kristeva, childbirth and its accompanying ‘traces of contamination’ represent the epitome of the feminine abject.52 The cellar as a dark and hidden place is also a well-known cultural trope where ‘dead’ things come alive and the unspeakable resurfaces.53 It is a cultural site where the cosy and intimate meanings of the homely (heimlich) 26


are threatened by the unfamiliar and disturbing elements of the unhomely (unheimlich). The cellar is associated with a place to store abandoned household and childhood objects, which lie forgotten and on rediscovery evoke a nostalgic and uncanny sense of the past. Chocolate, as a common gift to mark birthdays and anniversaries, is linked to nostalgia in the commemoration of past events as well as being connected with childhood. In Freudian terms, feelings of the uncanny manifest the repressed thoughts of certain infantile experiences, and nostalgia for a past ‘safely lost’ is a manifestation of the relief of the unconscious and impossible longing to return to the womb. Something familiar that has become alienated in the mind through repression (and is inextricably linked to childhood) forms one of Freud’s main categories for the uncanny – essentially a mental state of projection that blurs the border between the real and the unreal, provoking feelings of anxiety. Freud saw the uncanny as something that ‘should have remained hidden but which comes to light’ and the word ‘couverture’ is also part of a vocabulary of ‘covering’ terms associated with chocolate.54 Couverture was made a mere 23 years after women in Switzerland were granted the right to vote in federal elections and only four years after they were granted full enfranchisement and hence eligibility to stand for parliament.55 Until relatively recently, women were widely considered in Switzerland to be too emotional and irrational to work in government either as elected or non-elected personnel.56 In Switzerland women have been historically perceived to have a different kind of citizenship from men that assumes their relationship to the home (until recently girls had additional lessons in needlework and other ‘female’ skills and fewer lessons in maths and science).57 For those opposed to women’s suffrage, motherhood established the acceptable and normalized status of dependence and, even now, irregular school hours in Switzerland where all-day schools are only available in certain towns, make it hard for women to combine family life with work.58 The ‘paragon of clean countries’, Switzerland is associated with order. Swiss hygiene standards and strict rules governing standards of cleanliness in a home when it is vacated at the end of a lease illustrate vicarious forms of policing and controlling women. Hygiene inspectors have been known to scrutinize the inside of pipes, behind kitchen cupboards and radiators, cisterns and ventilation shafts of homes and to draw up lists of areas that need further cleaning – usually by women since women with children often 27


do not work.59 In a country where women can spend an average of two hours every day on housework – largely as a result of Swiss women’s conditions of social, political and economic dependency – Gallaccio’s installation had particular resonance. Psychic space is a way of reconsidering concepts of public and private, inside and outside. These site-specific artworks situate displacement, loss and defamiliarization as the psychic spaces in which the uncertain ground of cultural identification and the projected anguish of the threat of privation are positioned. In their allusions to fantasy, the horror film, agoraphobia and claustrophobia, the ambivalent maternal figure and the abject, they propose that space is culturally and psychically positioned. This psychic space is where the destabilizing effects and uncertain thresholds of the fear of dissolution are projected and produced and where death, contamination, loss and longing continually inhabit the periphery of the perception of the self. Notes 1. The word ‘cosmopolitan’ expressed the Ancient Greek concept of thinking about the relationship between nature and culture, where the cosmos and the polis provided a frame of meaning and offered ways to consider the implications of being human in a non-human world. Steve Pile and Nigel Thrift (eds) Patterned Ground: Entanglements of Nature and Culture (London: Reaktion, 2005). 2. See Jane Rendell who argues that the angel was a key image for Walter Benjamin (in considering Paul Klee’s painting, Angelus Novus) and a figure representing the point where the ‘has been’ and the ‘not yet’ of critical thought come together. Jane Rendell, ‘When the thinking stops, time crystallises’, in Malcom Miles and Tim Hall (eds) Urban Futures: Critical Commentaries on Shaping Cities (London: Routledge, 2003) pp. 13–26. 3. Susan Stewart, On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984). 4. Olle Holm, ‘Analysis of longing: origins, levels and dimensions’, Journal of Psychology, vol. 133, no. 6, 1999, pp. 621–30. 5. Endurance has been identified as an aspect of longing and for Freud, ‘each of us corrects an aspect of the world which is unbearable … by the construction of a wish into reality’. Phil Mollon, Ideas in Psychoanalysis: The Unconscious (Cambridge: Icon Books, 2000). 6. Freud proposed such ‘fantasies’ as episodes that the subject creates in a waking state as opposed to those that operate on an unconscious level. Jean La Planche and JeanBertrand Pontalis, The Language of Psychoanalysis, translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith (London: Karnac Books, 1996). 7. See Manya Goldman, ‘Borderline states’, in J. Rendell (ed.) Public Art Journal, vol. 1, no. 2, 1999, pp. 24–5. 8. See Kate Soper’s analysis of the sublime in Kate Soper, What is Nature? (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995). Kant proposed that the power of human reason enables us to

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9.

10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15.

16.

17.

18.

19.

experience the aesthetic of the sublime. The human imagination is more significant than the infinite space of the stars, but ‘nature’s immensity challenges us to forgo our own pettiness … and reveals to us those transcendent qualities in ourselves that make it inappropriate to bow down before it’ (Soper, What is Nature?). Forms of ‘postmodern theology’ recognize the expression of the sublime in modern life and its various forms. Clayton Crockett, Interstices of the Sublime: Theology and Psychoanalysis (New York: Fordham University Press, 2007). Neil Leach, ‘9/11’, in Mark Crinson (ed.) Urban Memory: History and Amnesia in the Modern City (London: Routledge, 2005), pp. 169–94. Peter Van Der Veer, ‘Global conversions’, in Gareth Griffiths and Jamie Scott (eds) Mixed Messages: Materiality, Textuality, Missions (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004). Laura E. Donaldson, Post Colonialism, Feminism and Religious Discourse (London: Routledge, 2002). The work was part of SITE, Santa Fe, New Mexico and was in situ for two nights. Ken Gelder, The Horror Reader (London: Routledge, 2000). In fact key elements of the celebrations on All Souls and All Saints Days are found all over the Catholic world including Europe and Latin America (making offerings to the dead, keeping vigil, and the construction of home alters). However, the name, Day of the Dead and the variety of sweets and the gaiety of the celebrations have been proposed as unique to Mexico. Stanley Brandes, ‘The day of the dead, halloween, and the quest for Mexican national identity, Journal of American Folklore, vol. 111, no. 442, 1998, pp. 359–80. See Brandes, ‘The day of the dead’, for an extensive discussion of how the Day of the Dead is perceived to collapse indigenous, Indian heritage and Roman Catholicism in a construction of Mexican cultural distinctiveness from the USA in its historical struggle for autonomy, both from the USA and Spain. In Tzintzuntun, posters, brochures, thousands of tourists and live television coverage transformed what was formally a low-key event into a large-scale annual fair. Tzintzuntun was one of 11 ‘targets for tourism’ where a Mexican cultural identity could be constructed, but which was dependent on the presence of ‘authentic indigenous ritual’. Stanley Brandes (‘The day of the dead’). For issues regarding a perceived static, ‘indigenous authenticity’ in relation to Mexican cultural identity see Louise Burkhart, The Slippery Earth (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1989). Brandes cites several historic sources that propose that the Day of the Dead celebrations demonstrate supposedly Mexican ‘inherent’ national qualities including an ‘obsession with death’ (Juan Lope Blanch, Vocabulario Mexicano Relative a la Muerte Mexico, DF: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Centro de Estudios Literarios, 1963); ‘slight regard for human life’ (Miguel Covarrubias, Mexico South: The Isthmus of Tehuantepec, New York: Knopf, 1947), ‘fondness for dying’ and ‘contempt for death’ (Octavio Paz, The Labyrinth of Solitude: Life and Thought in Mexico, translated by Lysender Kemp, New York: Grove, 1961). Stanley Brandes, ‘Sugar, colonialism and death: on the origins of Mexico’s Day of the Dead’, Journal for the Society for Comparative Study of Society and History, vol. 39, no 2, 1997, pp. 270–99. Ernesto Laclau, ‘Subject of politics, politics of the subject’, Differences, vol. 7, no. 1, 1994, cited by Neil Harvey, The Chiapas Rebellion: The Struggle for Land and Democracy (London: Duke University Press, 2005).

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EXPLORING SITE-SPECIFIC ART 20. 21.

22.

23.

24. 25.

26.

27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32.

33.

34. 35.

36.

30

Stafford Poole, Our Lady of Guadalupe: The Origins of a Mexican National Symbol: 1531– 1797 (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1995). In his account, Miguel Sánchez described the appearance of the Virgin Mary to Juan Diego, announcing that a Catholic shrine to her be built on the site. Poole argues that the publication was at a crucial time in the development of a Mexican (Creole) consciousness and an ecclesiastical religious hierarchy. See for example, Patricia Harrington, ‘Mother of death, mother of rebirth: the Mexican Virgin of Guadalupe’, Journal of American Academy of Religion, vol. 56, no. 1, 1988, pp. 25–50; Jacques Lafaye, Quetzalcoatl and Guadalupe: The Formation of Mexican National Consciousness (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1976); and Poole, Our Lady of Guadalupe. The Virgin of Guadalupe replaced the cultural and religious significance of the Aztec mother goddess Coaticue as the central symbol of the Mexican nation and of the ‘dreadful and fascinating holy in feminine form’ (Harrington, ‘Mother of death’). See, for example, Harrington, ‘Mother of death’; Lafaye, Quetzalcoatl and Guadalupe; and Poole, Our Lady of Guadalupe. The Indians lost everything – their civilization, culture, families, homes and all their points of reference and its has been proposed that the figure of Our Lady of Guadalupe was a way of subduing the trauma of loss that the indigenous population suffered (Harrington, ‘Mother of death’). The geography of New Mexico and its precise boundaries were uncertain from the time the Spanish adventurers first colonized it in the sixteenth century until it eventually became the United States of America’s fifty-seventh state. Juliet Mitchell, The Selected Melanie Klein (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986). Harrington, ‘Mother of death’. Brandes, ‘Sugar, colonialism and death’. Aztec mortuary rituals included bread shaped in human form being broken up and eaten (Brandes, ‘Sugar, colonialism and death’). Michele Stephen, ‘Consuming the dead: a Kleinian perspective on death rituals’, International Journal of Psychoanalysis, vol. 79, 1998, pp. 1174–94. Identification enables the individual to feel part of a symbolic order ‘outside of which is alienation and anxiety’. On Lacan’s concept of the death drive, see Ellie Ragland, Essays on the Pleasures of Death: From Freud to Lacan (London: Routledge, 1995). Fleeting feelings of jouissance – ‘the essence that gives life its value … constructed as an order of meaning to screen out loss and lack’. Jouissance and its ritualistic substitutions such as smoking or watching television offer forms of imagined consistency. See Ragland, Essays on the Pleasures of Death. Ragland, Essays on the Pleasures of Death. The cemetery was also cordoned off with tape, beyond which the public could not pass, marking it off and separating it as a special site, separated from the world. The eerie strangeness of von Hausswolff’s installation also suggested a form of witchcraft or other form of sorcery had befallen the place and part of the objections to the work may have been related to that. In the eighteenth century, celebrations of death were seen as a potential threat of civil disorder and the Day of the Dead subsequently became a form of resistance to colonial rule (Poole, Our Lady of Guadalupe).

P S Y C H I C S PAC E S 37. 38. 39. 40.

41.

42.

43. 44.

45.

46.

47. 48. 49.

50.

51.

Paul Carter, Repressed Spaces: The Poetics of Agoraphobia (London: Reaktion Books, 2002). Until the late nineteenth century St Pancras station housed the world’s biggest train shed. Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Life (London: Polity Press, 2005). Siegfried Kracauer, ‘Hotelhalle’, in Der Detektiv-Roman. Ein Philosophischer Trakat in Schriften 1: Soziologie als Wissenschaft, Die Angestellten (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1971) pp. 128–37, cited by Anthony Vidler, ‘Psychopathologies of urban space: metropolitan fear from agoraphobia to estrangement’, in Michael S. Roth, Rediscovering History: Culture, Politics and the Psyche (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994). The siting of Gallaccio’s work in Basel suggested associations with the clichéd meanings of place. Switzerland is associated with cleanliness and is seen as a centre for the manufacture of elite luxury goods – primarily chocolate and watches – and where rigid secrecy codes make Swiss bank accounts susceptible to money laundering. Couverture defied the order imposed within the process of the representation of food as a commodity. The marketing of food focuses on the ‘perfect present’ where the effects of time are edited out and the chaos of decay is hidden. The disorder involved in its consumption is similarly concealed: ‘mouth taboos’ such as slurping and sucking are forbidden behaviour and ‘tongue’ and ‘teeth’ are substituted by ‘palate’ and ‘taste’. M. M. Lovell, ‘Food photography and inverted narratives of desire’, Exposure, vol. 34, nos 1/2, 2001, pp. 19–24. Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay in Abjection (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982). During a gallery-based exhibition of Brown on White, another of Gallaccio’s works that used chocolate, tongue and chin marks were found on the chocolate surface. In another, Stroke, the chocolate walls had been picked away at the corners and the chocolate surface had traces of graffiti carved into it (conversation between author and Anya Gallaccio, March 2002). ‘For me what was interesting was that in that space, you thought “mmm, I want to put that in my mouth” and then your brain quickly … you knew you couldn’t because you knew the space was dirty … but there was this initial desire to put it in your mouth because the surface of it looked so beautiful’ (conversation between the author and Anya Gallaccio, March 2002). Since women are socialized to think that desire for the self is wrong in concepts of femininity, which construct women as nurturers. Susan Bordo, Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture and the Body (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1993). Anya Gallaccio in a conversation with the author about the work, March 2002. Barbara Creed, The Monstrous Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis (London: Routledge, 1993). The ‘cave of abjection’ is the site of blood, vomit and excrement associated with the maternal and expresses revulsion against the female body. Mary Russo, The Female Grotesque: Risk, Excess and Modernity (London: Routledge, 1994). Excrement, vomit and blood are considered threatening to the body and have to be expelled to the other side of an imaginary border that separates the self from the danger that threatens it (Kristeva, Powers of Horror). Maternal authority is manifested in the ‘mapping of the self’s clean and proper body’ (Kristeva, Powers of Horror). As a country that is historically proud of its political

31


52. 53.

54. 55.

56.

57.

58. 59.

32

neutrality, Switzerland could be construed as a place without borders and where the Geneva conventions on humanitarian law provide global legislative protection in war. In a relationship between the fear of women and death, which are culturally constructed as related (Creed, The Monstrous Feminine). For example, in films such as It Lies Beneath and The House that Dripped Blood. The cellar has been widely theorized as associated with alienation, fear and death. Victor Hugo used the boarded up house as a horror motif. Marx identified the cellar as a hostile environment as a symptom of class alienation and individual estrangement brought about by the rent system that made images of home an illusion. Anthony Vidler, The Architectural Uncanny: Essays in the Modern Unhomely (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992). Such as terms like ‘enrobed’ found on descriptions of chocolate bars and boxes of chocolates to make them appealing, desirable and enigmatic. Federalism delayed the complete enfranchisement of women and it was not until 1990 that full female enfranchisement in Switzerland was granted. The agricultural district of Appenzell Innerrhoden completed the process, despite years of struggle by political movements and organizations for women’s suffrage. Lee Ann Banaszak, Why Movements Succeed or Fail: Opportunity, Culture and the Struggle for Women’s Suffrage (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996). Switzerland was the last European state to announce women’s suffrage and among the first to concede universal male suffrage in 1848. Elisabetta Pagnossin Aligisaki, ‘The Current Status of Women in Political Life: Women and politics in Switzerland since 1971’, in Joy Charnley and Malcolm Pender (eds) 25 Years of Emancipation? Women in Switzerland (1971–1996) (Berne: Peter Lang, 1998) pp. 161–76. Rosemarie Simmen, ‘Women in Switzerland since 1971: major achievements – minor changes?’ in Joy Charnley and Malcolm Pender (eds) 25 Years of Emancipation? Women in Switzerland (1971–1996) (Berne: Peter Lang, 1998) pp. 13–24. Charnley and Pender, 25 Years of Emancipation? Imogen Foulkes ‘From our own correspondent’, BBC Radio 4, 5 March 2005.

2. CONTINGENT SPACES _______________________________

In The Contradictions of Culture (2001) Elizabeth Wilson cites Iris Murdoch’s Under the Net (1958), which reflects on the ‘contingent spaces’ of the city: industrial estates, rubbish tips, suburbia, railway sidings, dead ends and wastelands, as oppositional to the ‘necessary’ parts of the urban centre such as the law courts, royal parks and sophisticated shopping malls.1 This chapter will investigate a range of site-specific artworks through concepts of ‘contingent spaces’ as dialectical sites, heterotypologies and interstitial places that contest the spatial hierarchies of the ordered city. These artworks locate ‘the contingent’ as spaces of anxiety – deviant, seemingly peripheral and oppositional. Through the ephemeral, unseen, empty spaces of inner-city wastelands in Amsterdam; the repressed histories behind architectural space in Zamość in Poland; and the hidden international labour and gender issues in a leather processing factory in London, it explores how site-specific art can elicit insights into concepts of the contingent as a way to reflect on the wider meanings of space. Lara Almarcegui’s Wastelands: a guide to the empty sites of Amsterdam (1999) repositioned the participant/viewer’s relationship to architectural and urban space. The work was a publicly available, printed guide to 26 inner-city ‘wastelands’ across Amsterdam – seemingly derelict and abandoned spaces left by developers in the city centre; adjacent to domestic gardens; near the railway tracks or situated by the edge of canals or by the docks – spaces usually regarded as blights on the surface of the ordered city. A detailed map of a section of Amsterdam marked where these spaces could be found, together with textual descriptions and black and white 33


photographs of the sites. Surrounded by fences between buildings or neighbouring partly demolished houses, some were more accessible than others; one was only accessible by boat. Almarcegui’s guide invited people to visit the sites independently, ideally several times and to spend time in them, though none of them was officially ‘open’ to the public. In Almarcegui’s work, these spaces were no longer ‘wastelands’, ignored and neglected areas without form, but sites of fascination where attention was drawn to the imperceptible as opposed to the spectacular. Reoriented through its visual and performative texts, the city’s wastelands became ready-made installations. Reconceptualized through language, far from being empty, they were transformed into installations for time-based performances of the overlooked, contesting the construction of the city as spectacle primarily determined through the hegemonic ordering and regulation of architecture and planning. Some became platforms on which the buildings that once stood there had reverted back to the materials from which they had been made, reorganized and redistributed across their surfaces in the form of piles of bricks, concrete, sand and wood. Nieuwe Kerksraat 35–67, for example, radically altered the viewer’s spatial perspective of architecture as, ‘due to the practice of contractors dumping wreckage in the cellar of buildings being demolished’, ‘the whole of the house is under your feet’. The house became mixed with ‘everything that it was meant to avoid: ground, water and waste’.2 Other sites became time-based installations where entropic possibilities took place through various forms of evolutionary relationships. At Entrepotdok, close to where the zoo is being expanded, everything was being transformed by the comings and goings of machinery. At Haarlemmerstraat 106, ‘tins, bottles, tickets and all kinds of wrappings … get mixed with layers of rubble and wet sand’. At Generaal Vetterstraat 117, the viewer walks on rubble, trees, grass and dry leaves that eventually ‘get mixed and rot away’. Then, at Harbour Noord, the air ‘bouncing off the walls’ mingles with the sound of pigeons and ‘some moving pieces of concrete’, whereas at Cruquiuskade a section of missing fence allows ‘wasteland and garden to gradually blend together and resemble each other more and more’; and at Westergasfabriek ‘sounds melt – whenever a sound weakens, another gradually amplifies.’3 These ‘wastelands’, far from being excluded, empty or ‘dead’ spaces contained similar conditions as those found in the rest of the city where other, different kinds of ‘comings and goings’ take place. 34

C O N T I N G E N T S PA C E S

Fig. 6. Lara Almarcegui, Wastelands: a guide to the empty sites of Amsterdam (1999).

Urban wastelands are normally perceived as unfortunate interludes in the unending linear progress of modernity. As undeveloped space, they are considered by developers as aesthetically devoid of value or as suspended commodities since they contain no architecture. Within the encoded space of the city, unused remnants of land represent uncertain spaces of anxiety associated with deviance, illness and danger. Spaces where architecture is seen as temporarily absent gesture towards the impending chaos and disruption of the noise, dust and traffic diversions of construction.4 However, wastelands are not truces between destinations signalling the end of space but an important part of the perception and experience of the city.5 In Almarcegui’s work they became sites for the performance of a continual state of becoming, unbecoming and re-becoming, where time is palpable and where topographical elements evidenced previous actions and events. At Stads Rietlanden, sounds from the traffic in Amsterdam – trains, aircraft, ships and cars, mix with those of construction: compressors, pumps, pile drivers, cranes and bulldozers and are reminders of the ‘overwhelming pace of construction’ in the city. The sites, simultaneously suspended in time, vacillate between the edges of radical change, between architecture, demolition and construction, between nothingness and spectacle and between different forms of value – architectural, economic 35


and cultural. At Keizergracht 268, where two houses collapsed, we are informed that ‘roofs from the back buildings remained held up between the neighbouring buildings’ and now ‘hang at third floor height, as a bridge’. At Harbour Noord, the artist predicts that the wasteland will remain for an ‘indefinite period of time’, whereas at Nieuwe Kerksraat, ‘construction will start at any moment’. In Almarcegui’s guide a series of ‘provisional wastelands’ are situated at busy points in the city such as Prinsengracht, which at certain times stopped being streets, squares or pavements to become public work sites and then resume as streets, squares and pavements during the weekday. The holes and mud made by such excavations at apparently ‘motionless zones’ like Stads Rietlanden, ‘start an independent life’ after nightfall and at weekends where ‘each develops its differences. … Water accumulates and plants grow at their ease.’ At Vierwindenstraat 117, ‘the city’s pace has indefinitely stopped’, and at Harbour Noord, the place has reverted back to what it was in the 1920s when the buildings were being constructed, with its materials separated into heaps. At Westergasfabriek, time is marked by passing trains coming from different directions: ‘it is the passing train that strikes the time, followed within a few seconds by a train coming in the opposite direction.’ The guide displaces the orientation of urban wastelands as various forms of podiums waiting to be completed with some form of architectural apex (which will always, in any case be in the process of becoming obsolete), to time-bound, provisional spaces subject to forms of different contingencies. Wastelands are sites that are perceived to lie outside the manufacture of ‘placeness’ in urban environments through a continual process of design or the image constructions of tourism or ‘heritage’. Although outside the coherence of space as defined by urban planners, they can be said to exist within political, economic and social processes that determine relationships between space and value. Without architecture and outside the smoothed over space of the city, they are considered to be prohibited spaces where dirt and potential death or injury represent a fear of contamination of the precarious urban fabric and the image it presents to the world. Wastelands are dangerous places because they represent the threat of obsolescence within the terms of redevelopment where continual renewal is essential. Almarcegui’s Wastelands: a guide to the empty sites of Amsterdam was an invitation to consider the void, distinct from history and narrative and reflect on new ways of envisaging urban space through the contemplation 36


Fig. 7. Lara Almarcegui, Wastelands: a guide to the empty sites of Amsterdam (1999).

of the unseen and unacknowledged. Normally assumed illegible within the geographical framework in which the city is mapped: through its streets, grids, districts, transport hubs or cultural landmarks, such marginalized spaces were represented in Almarcegui’s work to reveal the perceptive nuances of space. Formerly places of rupture, they became potential dream spaces that offered alternative readings of the rational. These indeterminate spaces, the status of which has been reduced to that of a waiting zone for redevelopment in an arguably already over-designed urban space where consumption is increasingly manipulated and determined by architecture, were shown to be sites of possibility where processes of becoming unfold in slowed time, drawing the viewer into alternative perspectives. Gravel piles and hills of rubble become viewpoints from which one can experience different landscapes. A wasteland with a sign warning that the ground is poisoned is represented as a ‘fabulous garden … with all kinds of berries, plants and bushes’. In another, a bridge to a path leads to a place where there is a view of mountains including ‘the tallest in Amsterdam – made of clay from the bottom of the canal’. The sites become sensuous landscapes – painterly arenas whose surfaces, textures and colours are choreographed performances of chance. They are 37


not places where time has stopped but potential spaces of encounter in which materials, smells, sounds and the weather all play intensely sensual parts. At Cruquiuskade, for example, ‘air blows through a tunnel and generates a current.’ At Entrepotdok, ‘sounds from refrigerators, owls and lions merge with barks and noises from the machines.’ The wasteland at Weteringschans has been transformed into ‘accidental pools’ where the depth of water changes depending on the day or season and where one can see ‘all the earth’s layers and different colours. … The first is wet and dark … the second one greyish with pebbles.’ At Haarlemmerstraat, ‘the ground gradually softens and yields, becoming a mash that contains and shows everything’. At Entrepotdok the smell from the canal is like petroleum. At Keizergracht, the space in between two walls ‘has its own microclimate, with inside temperatures different from those of its surroundings’; and in ‘the compressed foundations’ at Nieu Kerkstraat can be found the roof tar, wood, bricks and cement. The work proposed a different set of codes through which space is viewed and where unlimited multiplicities were emphasized. Almarcegui’s Wastelands: a guide to the empty sites of Amsterdam critiqued the regulated spaces of urban environments and architecture and celebrated the indeterminacy of space, contesting that concepts of ‘place’ can be officially suspended. In the guide, the boundaries of placeness are reoriented: sites exist ‘between the shack’s fence and the rail’s fence’; ‘protected by the fence and the water’; ‘boxed between two buildings and several courtyards’; perimeters become unstable ‘where pieces of fence are missing’. Some are ‘vast, motionless zones’ with ‘vague limits’ or stretch away ‘surrounded by sheds’ where borders are frequently changing with demolition and construction and other processes of urban development. Their status is provisional yet renewable with every newly demolished building. What may otherwise have been assumed to be merely the residues of urban development, which within the concepts of modernity are perceived as dead zones, in Almarcegui’s guide they are the focus for new possibilities for the perception and meanings of space. Within the terms of redevelopment, urban wastelands are normalized as non-subjective spaces, devoid of use value. In Almarcegui’s work, the peripheral, mediocre and overlooked are made significant where new perceptual fields become possibilities that lie outside the hegemonic and controlled ordering of urban space. In her guide, such spaces have different kinds of legibility and offer new forms of encounter detached from 38


narrative, history or memory. Not empty space but an urban landscape of possibility in which viewers may orientate themselves: ‘on your right there is a transformer shed made of concrete’, or you can walk on a ‘gravel pile that stretches along the path as if it were a wall’; after ascending a ramp ‘you have a sight of Rietlanden stretching out to both sides and in the distance hear the sounds from all the traffic in Amsterdam’. Or, at Generaal Vetterstraat, ‘the wasteland is so green that, once inside you can hardly see anything’. At Cruquiuskade, on ‘a platform made of paving tiles … you may find the foundations of a prefabricated school’ and through a ‘levelled area until you reach a viaduct … you will arrive at a shack area’. At Harbour Noord ‘you will see a half-demolished building with big holes in the concrete’ and ‘far away … the booming industry of Sloterdijk’. As has been argued, waste reveals the myth of progress driven by the (supposedly) innovative power of capitalism and must be hidden.6 Against the lustre of aesthetic value and order that architecture manifests, wastelands lie outside the commodification of place manufactured through tourism, heritage and the leisure industry. As sites that are beyond consumption, they are perceived as empty and without function, significance or meaning. Almarcegui’s work reassigned these spaces and our relationship to them into alternative networks of perception and meaning and revealed that ‘wasteland’ as a concept is socially, politically, economically and culturally unstable and that it can in turn destabilize concepts of value. Architecture’s function as part of an order linked to structures of consumption and commodity is one of the implications in Alison Marchant’s Trace (2005). The work, sited at Neckinger Mill, Jamaica Road, Bermondsey, southeast London, was a photographic installation viewed from the street in a building that had once been a factory for leather production.7 An enlarged translucent, black and white, 1930s archive photograph of women leather workers working at tables processing skins was installed across five windows of one side of the nineteenth-century building, now a series of production studios. The uncannily shifting presence of the women workers of the former tannery ‘appeared’ at different times of the day and night. Almost invisible from the street during the day and after dark illuminated from within, their image materialized to those inside and outside the building according to the changing light conditions. At night, viewed from the street the women seemed both in and out of place; and during the day, for those inside the building they seemed as if frozen in time in an adjacent room.8 39


Fig. 8. Alison Marchant, Trace, Neckinger Mill, London (2005): exterior view. Image by Dean Pavitt, Loup Design.

Neckinger Leather Mill was once owned by Bevingtons & Sons and the production of leather continued there until 1981.9 Amongst the animal skins processed at Bevingtons were those of cobras, pythons, seals and crocodiles, all of which are now (in theory) protected and trade in them has to comply with the International Convention on Endangered Species.10 Environmental issues, the processes and economics of globalization, the shifting spatial divisions of labour and the imperatives of health and safety legislation all combined to contribute to the demise of Bevingtons towards the end of the twentieth century.11 After the 1980s, leather processing and tanneries elsewhere in the European Union moved to Italy, Spain and Germany. Since the early nineteenth century Bermondsey had been the centre of the leather industry. Dog excrement (collected by Bermondsey’s poorest women), human urine, offal, fish oil, sulphuric acid and other chemicals were used in the production process and the area was plagued with flies and maggots as well as the stench of these materials.12 Horns from the animals and old carcasses were sent to a glue manufacturer in Horney Lane, which ‘always smelt’.13 At the time of the photograph in Marchant’s installation 40


Fig. 9. Alison Marchant, Trace, Neckinger Mill, London (2005): interior view. Image by Dean Pavitt, Loup Design.

conditions for workers at Bevingtons were poor. The employees endured the stench of the tanning pits and the cold from broken windows replaced only by cardboard; it was ‘dirty and wet all over the place’ and dye got into the workers’ hands and clothes.14 A gendered division of labour involved women doing the preparation and finishing work, including glazing and dying, and men working in the tannery ‘dipping pits’, on cutting machines and as machinists making suitcases. Women also worked as machinists, making a variety of bags and briefcases for piecework wages.15 Bridget Clifford, whom Bevingtons employed at the time of the photograph in Marchant’s installation, spoke in a radio broadcast that formed part of the work about her experience as a finisher. The work was still ‘pretty hard … you had to have help from boys to hold them [crocodiles] up; it could break your arms!’ The heavy lifting had long term health consequences: ‘I really suffered terribly [from arthritis] from holding the leather.’16 The closing of Bevingtons at Neckinger Mill in 1981 was part of a wider, globally evolving and developing international division of labour. Transformations in the global expansion of markets, the desire to find ever cheaper sources of labour, rapid changes in technology and communications systems, the growth of the service sector and need for low-cost manufacturing have all been widely cited as contributing factors in the 41


changing international division of labour since the 1980s.17 In the postindustrial West, service industries have replaced manufacturing, which has largely been transferred to mass-production methods in developing countries. As well as making suitcases, briefcases and bags, Bevingtons supplied leather for the fashion industry, including leather for shoes and clothing. Cheaper sources of raw materials and the rise in the use of synthetic materials for these items have significantly changed the uses of leather for clothing and bags since the 1980s. Whilst luxury goods, including leather bags and other accessories, are produced in the EU, predominantly in Italy (although not necessarily by Italians), shoes and handbags for the UK mass market are likely to be made in Chinese factories. Inherent in Marchant’s practice as an artist are the historical and social contexts of urban change and in particular how these affect women.18 Viewed from below, from the street, Trace gave a glimpse of female factory workers who strangely appeared as if from a past, pre-mass-production age, frozen in time at the windows of the building in which they once worked. The installation fleetingly made visible the trace of women workers who would normally have remained hidden in the process of leather manufacture. In the wider economy women continue to work in hidden occupations such as the service industry, in call centres, catering, as cleaners or home workers or other forms of work, all of which are considered low status jobs.19 A global economy also renders invisible those workers involved in manufacturing, in particular women, who have been associated with clothing manufacture and all its diversities for centuries.20 They continue to make up a significant proportion of an industry that has traditionally used cheap sources of labour. It has been estimated that 80–85 per cent of the workforce in the international garment industry is female. The industry consistently exploits workers through low wages, long working hours and appalling working conditions.21 Clothes production and related industries such as leather manufacturing have traditionally been located in areas that can supply cheap sources of labour (such as the East End, including Bermondsey).22 Clothing and footwear manufacture (the official industrial classification), which declined over a period of decades within the UK from the 1960s onwards, transferred to other areas, initially within the UK and Ireland in rural or so-called ‘peripheral areas’ and then on to progressively cheaper ‘offshore’ sites.23 The garment industry, which has largely relocated to factories in countries such as China, Taiwan, India, Bangladesh and Mexico, employs predominantly women and migrants who 42


suffer harassment and abuse with little or no protection from labour law.24 China and Bangladesh, in particular, are well-known for low-cost garment manufacturing. Bangladesh is the cheapest place in the world in which to make clothes and the conditions in factories in China devoted to clothing production have been cited as ‘the worst in the world’.25 In the ongoing search for ever cheaper sources of labour, Western-based clothing retailers are now moving to manufacturing bases in Vietnam and Cambodia, which have even lower labour costs than China, India or Bangladesh.26 In Marchant’s installation, the interaction between the image and the architecture materializes and dematerializes the virtual historical presence of women factory workers in the leather industry. In the globalization of labour, their contemporary equivalents in the garment industry are effectively hidden in offshore factories in China, Vietnam, Cambodia and Mexico and in other places worldwide where working conditions are difficult to monitor since its strategy is continually to relocate across borders and countries, changing its sources of labour, places of production and suppliers.27 Marchant’s installation offered glimpses of workers engaged in a manufacturing process that is now obscured through labour fragmentation and geography. In an evolved ‘new economy’ workers involved in manufacturing in the current international spatialization of labour are rendered invisible. This, as has been widely argued, is a continuation of a process that has been evolving since the mid-nineteenth century and has since been continually expanding.28 Due to the expansion of markets, which has been taking place since the nineteenth century, the continual drive of capitalism and ever cheaper mass-production methods on a global scale have altered the way that products, such as those once made in factories like Bevingtons, are made. Synthetic materials, the standardization of products and the shifting usevalue of objects, including shoes and handbags, are linked to continually elaborate processes of commodification to develop new markets and new forms of consumption. Trainers, shoes and handbags have acquired different use-values and cultural meanings in the global mass market as part of capitalism’s drive to find new things to commodify for mass consumption.29 An ephemeral and global ‘weightless economy’ now prioritizes different configurations of cultural status and value. As has been demonstrated, the combined economic value of the raw materials and the labour costs that go into the manufacture of the ‘fashion shoe’ (trainers), are only a fraction of its cultural and retail value.30 Within such an economy, 43


value is differently attributed – either to product endorsement, branding, advertising, or to diverse forms of product placement that confer status to cheaply produced, commodified objects.31 Concepts of authenticity are displaced in a process of ‘mediatization’ in which the simulation of value takes place.32 The shifting, ethereal image of the women workers in Trace can be considered an anti-spectacle, itself contingent – uncertain, conditional and almost incidental, the tenuousness of which is a reminder of a pre-mass-mediatized age, evoking other issues of impermanence. Issues of a controlled, visual presence in the interests of the reconstructions of history as a form of exclusion and denial were evoked in Monika Sosnowska’s Dirty Fountain, sited in Rynek Wodney, the old water market in Zamość, Poland from June to August 2006. In a small, hidden plaza away from Zamość’s architectural Renaissance façade, a square, white, concrete basin was set on a metre-high, white concrete plinth, suggesting a modernist hybridized object, both functional and ornamental, and continually spouting black water.33 Zamość, located in the Lublin province of eastern Poland, was founded in 1580 by the humanitarian, Jan Zamoyski, whose utopian project was to create a ‘model city’ in the middle of nowhere, where business, science, culture and religious tolerance could be integrated within a strategically located trading route. The city was designed by the Italian architect Bernardo Morando on the principles of the cittá ideale and its original, fortressed ‘old town’ is now preserved as a UNESCO World Heritage Site. The design and planning of its extended ‘New Town’ reflects a later utopian architecture in its uniform layout of grids . Within its first ten years Sephardic Jews had settled in Zamość from the Ottoman Empire, Venice and the Netherlands, often fleeing persecution in those countries. Before the Second World War, 12,500 Jews lived in the city, mainly in the Old Town around the Market Square, and they represented 43 per cent of the population. After 14 September 1939, when Zamość was invaded and occupied by Germany, it was estimated that between 7000 and 8000 Jews were sent to labour camps.34 In 1941 all Jewish people living in the city were ordered to move to one of the poorest districts in its New Town where conditions were primitive. From this ghetto deportations to concentration camps and work camps took effect. In October 1942, an estimated 4000 Jews were assembled in the Market Square and marched 21 kilometres to Izbica, a ‘transit ghetto’ and gathering point for foreign and Polish Jews. Another 3000 were sent to Belzec 44


Fig. 10. Monika Sosnowska, Dirty Fountain, Zamość, Poland (2006).

concentration camp. Those remaining in the ghetto or found in hiding were murdered.35 Zamość was the principal town in one of the first districts in Poland intended to be ‘Germanized’ and between 1942 and 1943 many surrounding villages were destroyed and their inhabitants murdered.36 In November 1943, the area was declared by the Nazis to be the ‘first resettlement area’ of the Generalgouvernement (Polish territories under German military occupation). In total, during the Second World War, more than 50,000 Poles were deported to Germany for slave labour from the Zamość region and by 1947 only seven Jews remained in Zamość. The water market is one of Zamość’s three main squares situated in its ‘Old Town’. Seamlessly set into the paving and appearing as if it had always been there, Dirty Fountain unsettled expectations. From its basin, a column of black water continually spouted into a pool of its own making, spilling over and dripping down the edges and seeping into and staining the sides of the white concrete. If viewers were drawn to the splashing sounds of the water, they were initially confused and repelled by the object’s false promise of ornamentation or functionality. Undrinkable and apparently flawed in function and in form, Dirty Fountain inserted a dissonance into an environment of constructed spatial and social order: it was an imperfect object in a seemingly ‘perfect’ city.

45


Much has been written about the problems of memorials and their correlation to events in the past, their function in terms of the present and their sustainability for the needs of the future.37 Although not overtly represented or described as a memorial by the artist, in the context of Zamość, Dirty Fountain cannot be detached from its spatial historical context. Concerns about the indeterminate nature of history and memory and their possible commodification, the exploitative ways in which events can be mediatized, and questions concerning the multiplicities of interest have all been central to recent debates on the memorialization of the Holocaust. The Holocaust, in particular, has focused issues about the politics of representation and what has been argued as the inherent paradox at its centre – the need to represent the unrepresentable. The problematics of any monument pivot on the issue of the nature of representation itself and in relation to the Holocaust as an event that defies all the dimensions of ethical, philosophical and moral consciousness.38 It has been suggested that Poland is inextricably associated with the events of the Holocaust and in particular with Auschwitz, which latterly tourism has actually exacerbated.39 That tourism offers a way for the uncritical smoothing over and reinvention of place in a process of denial of its multiplicities has been widely discussed.40 In Zamość, tourism manifested via the promotion of its Renaissance architecture offers an opportunity for ideological reconstruction in which its ‘dirty history’ can be hidden and disavowed. The city itself has been represented as a utopian space in an architectural ‘performance’ of tourism rhetoric. Tourism plays a crucial part in the construction and perception of local and national identities and, in Zamość, its commodifying effects offer ways to sublimate its ‘unrepresentable’ past.41 Tourism, it can be argued, has become a primary ordering principle of cities worldwide through which space is ‘normalized’, and it offers a façade against the hidden, conflictual relationships of place. Literally and metaphorically a façade, the focus on Zamość’s architecture, provides a way of reverting to its ‘utopian’ past and erasing conflict, mass murder and repression. This simultaneous masking and revealing process is a public, cultural form of denial and ‘forgetting’ – as well as a symptom of the traumatized subject. It has been proposed that the intergenerational and transgenerational transmission of trauma affects the ways in which identity is constructed. Considered in the context of Zamość as a world heritage site, Sosnowska’s work suggests that what appears outside is always the 46


condition of what is repressed inside. The city’s Renaissance architecture has become the site of its selective public representation in which space is regulated through tourism. Dirty Fountain, sited in a hidden square, suggested a traumatic, unsettling, unstable subjective inner world behind an outward face of order and control. This separation describes one of the defining characteristics of trauma: the inability to integrate effect and representation.42 The return to the safe haven of the past through the sixteenth-century utopian ideal of Zamość via this limiting expression of architecture can be considered a condition of the unprocessed, traumatic effects of its history. Dirty Fountain explored how we perceive space through an investigation that drew on the conditions of psychological unease. Tourism per se is a form of utopia in which selective ‘remembering’ and ‘forgetting’ take place within limiting forms of the representation of place that remodel and manipulate experience and the relationships between space and time. Dirty Fountain was a contestation of the constructed relationships in Zamość and an interruption into its fixed ‘heritagized’ space in a city that has been reduced to architectural spectacle. Implying a threatening contamination of the unmarked space of history-in-denial, behind which it was literally located, Sosnowska’s work momentarily disorientated the city’s manufactured image and its attempt to construct a seamless continuity with its pre-Second World War past. Fountains have been a formal, conventional and non-specific trope for the monument within contrived public space and are associated with the celebration of an imperial past and the power of the state. Set in a hidden square, Dirty Fountain contested the power of display. Away from the outward architectural face of the city presented as ‘empty’ of conflict and memory, Dirty Fountain inserted a spatial dissonance that contested the image of order and harmony manufactured by tourism. As has been shown, in the construction of ‘heritage’, signs of the past are obliterated to present the illusion of place and space as inhabiting an eternal present.43 As a utopian discourse, ‘heritage’ denies urban decay, antagonism, human rights violations, suffering, violence and forms of political struggle, all of which are in discord with its own agenda. Tourism aligns its own utopian project at the expense of the discontinuous, fractured, multidimensional and problematic aspects of history and memory. In Zamość, this containment of the past through selective (architectural) representation is disrupted by Sosnowska’s work, which contested the contrived coherence 47


of space, suggesting the indeterminate and disturbing nature of memory, history and place. Spouting black water and threatening corruption, Dirty Fountain was a critique of tourism as a dominant ordering system of cities, a counter-site that menaced a disease. The black water, the stained and spoilt modernist form of its plinth and the fear of contamination associated with the concept of dirty water in the water market, was an insertion of horror into tourism’s (intended) stabilizing effects. The formal language of Dirty Fountain set up various forms of correspondence between concepts of ‘clean’ and ‘dirty’. Nazism was an ideology in which cleanliness and the privileging of the grand spectacle in organized space were primary terms of reference. The anti-Semitic project of Nazism was based on ‘the Jew’ as the polluting force of an ‘authentic’ Aryan nation or utopian German Volksgemeinschaft. In Nazi ideology, Mickey Mouse was a manifestation of capitalism, and was constructed as a dark, filthy carrier of (ideological) disease whose ‘blackness’ threatened to ‘negroidize’ the ‘body’ of the nation.44 The white, concrete minimalism of Dirty Fountain as a sculptural form and its reference to twentieth-century modernism, used the same formal and material elements of the utopian architecture of the Nazi architect Albert Speer. Sosnowska’s work, however, suggested that notions of ‘utopia’ are always based on metaphor, a ‘belief’ rather than a reality. Its black water and spoiled surfaces propose that utopia is an unstable term and a flawed concept, always dependent on time and place, at the core of which lie agendas of exclusion – resonant of oppression and premised on closure and hence further contestation. Dirty Fountain suggested that one of the unstable effects of history is repetition: media reports have shown that in former eastern Europe there exists the threat of a revival of antiSemitism and neo-Nazism.45 Walter Benjamin saw the city as an arena of struggle where the ‘forgotten dead’ are buried under a mythical site of harmony. Dirty Fountain’s contextual repercussions of meanings cannot be distanced from the events in Zamość during the Second World War. It is becoming widely recognized that the issues identified by Holocaust studies are increasingly relevant internationally in relation to the avowal of traumatic pasts. In Argentina, Chile, Australia, South Africa, former Yugoslavia and Ireland, for example, the importance of acknowledging and memorializing past atrocities has been a focus for recent public debate.46 One of the concerns of memorialization is that of the problematic of closure, were people continue to live with the legacy of events, either directly or indirectly. The limitations of the 48


memorial to reflect or articulate the immensity of the loss, the dangers of the monument to appear to insert trauma and conflict into some ‘natural order’ of history, as well as the impossibility of representing the unknowable and unimaginable, have been some of the issues at the centre of recent debates. Sosnowska’s Dirty Fountain – dissonant, unsettling, defamiliarizing and incongruent – can be considered to occupy the ‘non place’ at the point of language where meaning disintegrates and the ethical dimensions of historical denial are made chillingly and disturbingly evident. These site-specific artworks propose the use of contingent spaces as theatres for the unseen, unacknowledged and overlooked, as well as sites of anguish and uncertainty that unsettle forms of value where the contrived coherences of space are contained. The contingent becomes a space of contestation that reconceptualizes the city as maintained by the tenuous constructions of tourism, ‘heritage culture’, urban planning and other processes of commodification. Through the reimagined spaces of the peripheral, they reveal the hidden social and economic mechanisms of order where conflict is concealed and where procedures of normalization are perpetuated. Notes 1. Elizabeth Wilson, The Contradictions of Culture: Cities, Culture, Women (London: Sage Publications, 2001). 2. Laura Almarcegui, Wastelands: a guide to the empty sites of Amsterdam (Amsterdam: Stedelijk Museum Bureau, 1999). 3. Laura Almarcegui, Wastelands: a guide to the empty sites of Amsterdam (Amsterdam: Stedelijk Museum Bureau, 1999). 4. Perhaps the public endorsed Almarcegui’s Guide because of Amsterdam’s history of libertarian socialist values manifested in a ‘participatory spatial democracy’ and ‘regulated urban anarchism’. Edward Soja, ‘The stimulus of a little confusion: on Spuistraate, Amsterdam’, in Iain Borden, Jane Rendell and Joe Kerr (eds) Strangely Familiar: Narratives of Architecture in the City (London: Routledge, 1996) pp. 19–23. 5. Elizabeth Wilson urges a disassociation of an exploration of indeterminate spaces both from a ‘postmodern celebration of the fragmentary and from a post-Marxist rejection of planning’. Planning is necessary in an urban environment but so are the possibilities offered by the unplanned. Elizabeth Wilson, ‘Against utopia: the romance of indeterminate spaces’, in Elizabeth Wilson, The Contradictions of Culture: Cities, Culture, Women (London: Sage, 2001), pp. 145–54. 6. Suzanne Raitt, ‘Psychic waste: Freud, Fecher and the principle of constancy’, in Gay Hawkins and Stephen Muecke (eds) Culture and Waste: The Creation and Destruction of Value (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003). 7. Trace was the final work in a two-year project between Marchant and Café Gallery Projects.

49

EXPLORING SITE-SPECIFIC ART 8.

9.

10. 11. 12.

13.

14.

15. 16. 17.

18. 19. 20.

21.

50

The photograph itself is essentially a trace, namely an object left over from the disappearance of the object. Jean Baudrillard, The Perfect Crime, translated by Chris Turner (London: Verso, 1996). Tanning was one of the many industries along the Thames that closed due to the impact of globalization on its infrastructure: large container ships were too big to be accommodated by existing dock facilities and by 1984 all Thames docks had disappeared. Peter Ackroyd, Thames: Sacred River (London: Chatto & Windus, 2007). There is still a thriving illegal trade in these items. What characterizes ‘globalization’ has been emphasized differently in economics, sociology, geography and cultural theory. ‘Neckinger’ has been seen as related to the phrase ‘the devil’s neckcloth’ – nineteenthcentury slang for hanging and the building may therefore have occupied a former site of execution (Ackroyd, Thames). Bermondsey became associated with its stench until the mid-twentieth century. Working conditions at Neckinger Mill were unregulated and no planning permission was required for factories expanding further into the East End of London. In Trace, the image depicts a particular part of the production process where women worked at tables scrubbing hides with no gloves. ‘There were pigs and cows and it stunk …! We didn’t want to go out into the yard near the “dipping” pits, where it was all going bubbly bubbly with the smell and the chemicals. … It wasn’t very clean. You went in all nice and tidy but you had to change into anything you could lay your hands on. … The building was old … everything was falling apart all around you but you didn’t argue about it because it was a job. … I worked there until I was sixty-five and eight months.’ Bridget Clifford, transcript from audio transmission ‘Resonance’ 104.4 FM, 8 August 2005. Ida Wood, a former employee in a transcript of an audio transmission broadcast, Life and Living (Resonance, 104.4 FM, July–August 2005). Bridget Clifford in Calling All Pensioners, audio transmission broadcast (Resonance, 104.4 FM, September–October 2005). See for example, Wendy Harcourt and Arturo Escobar, Women and the Politics of Place (Bloomfield: Kumarian Press, 2005); Doreen Massey, Spatial Divisions of Labour: Social Structures and the Geography of Production (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1995). Val Williams, Trace catalogue (2005). Ursula Huws, The Making of a Cybertariat: Virtual Work in a Real World (London: Merlin Press, 2003). The ephemeral presence of the women in Trace evoked the (female) body as a cultural construct, the materiality itself of which is unstable. Neckinger Mill, now a series of production and design studios, is another cultural industry linked to the ‘image business’. For example, in Zhongshan, a city in Guangdong Province in southern China there are thousands of factories that make goods for Western companies, including shoes and handbags. Conditions include being locked into walled compounds, 90-hour weeks, living in accommodation 100 to a room and prohibitions on trade union membership (Independent, 16 November, 2007). Historically there are more women in the textile industry than anywhere else. Doreen Massey, Space, Place and Gender (London: Polity Press, 1994).

C O N T I N G E N T S PA C E S 22. 23. 24. 25.

26. 27. 28.

29. 30. 31.

32.

33.

34.

35. 36. 37.

38.

39.

Transience, instability and change describe the conditions for the fashion industry. Massey, Spatial Divisions of Labour. See ‘Markets, globalization and gender’, in Lourdes Benerĩa, Gender, Development and Globalization: Economics as if all People Mattered (London: Routledge, 2003) pp. 63–90. It has been estimated that there are 2.5 million garment workers in Bangladesh alone. See War on Want, Fashion Victims: The True Cost of Cheap Clothes at Primark, Asda and Tesco (War on Want Report, 2004). Dana Thomas, Deluxe: How Luxury Lost its Lustre (London: Allen Lane, 2007). Thomas, Deluxe. See, for example, Benerĩa, Gender, Development and Globalization; Doreen Massey, ‘Imagining globalisation: power-geometries of time-space’, in Mary J. Hickman, Avatar Brah and Máirtín Mac an Ghaill (eds) Global Futures: Migration, Environment and Globalization (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1999) pp. 27–44; Kenichi Ohmae, The Borderless World: Power and Strategy in the Interlinked Economy (London: Harper Collins, 1994); and Geraldine Pratt, ‘Geographies of identity and difference: marking boundaries’, in Doreen Massey, John Allen and Philip Sarre (eds) Human Geography Today (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1999), pp. 151–68. Huws, The Making of a Cybertariat. Ibid. ‘In 1993 Michael Jordan received $20m from Nike to allow his name and image to be associated with their product which was equivalent to more than the total labour cost alone for all the 19 million pairs of Nike shoes made in Indonesia’ (Huws, The Making of a Cybertariat). Objects and ‘events’, including architecture, fashion, celebrities and practices such as graffiti, are the world they illustrate, as opposed to being anything about that world. See Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, translated by Sheila Glaser (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994). Dirty Fountain was part of the exhibition ‘Ideal City/Invisible Cities’, June–August 2006, commissioned by European Art Projects. It included 12 contemporary artists from European and non-European countries. In September 1939, the Soviet Union invaded Zamość and an estimated 5000 left the city to flee to the Soviet Union. (bh.org.il/communities/archive/zamosc/pl): 15 March 2008. In the Rotunda there was the mass execution of Jewish intellectuals. The Martyrdom Museum is located in the Rotunda for the ‘8000 Poles’ murdered there. This information is drawn from the Holocaust Research Project, Zamość (holocaustresearchproject.ag/ghettos/zamosc). 9 March 2008. See, in particular, Tim Edensor, Industrial Ruins: Space, Aesthetics and Materiality (Oxford: Berg, 2005); Andreas Huyssen, Present Pasts: Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of Memory (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003); and James Young, Texture of Memory: Holocaust Memorials and Meanings (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993). Griselda Pollock, ‘Holocaust tourism: being there, looking back and the ethics of spatial memory’, in David Crouch and Nina Lübbren (eds) Visual Culture and Tourism (Oxford: Berg, 2003) pp. 175–90. In particular concerning the problem of turning Auschwitz into a tourist site, which in 1947 the Polish parliament declared to be ‘forever preserved as a memorial to the

51


40.

41. 42. 43.

44. 45. 46.

52

martyrdom of the Polish nation’. James Young, ‘The veneration of ruins’, Yale Journal of Criticism, vol. 6, no. 2, October 1993, pp. 275–90. See for example, Carolyn Cartier and Alan A. Lew (eds) Seductions of Place: Geographical Perspectives on Globalisation and Touristed Landscapes (London: Routledge, 2001); D. Medina Lasansky and Brian McLaren (eds) Architecture and Tourism: Perception, Performance and Place (Oxford: Berg, 2004); Tom Selwyn (ed.) The Tourist Image: Myth and Mythmaking in Modern Tourism (London: Wiley, 1996); and John Urry, Consuming Places (London: Routledge, 2005). For example, one tourist website celebrates the fortressed section of Zamość as having ‘never been captured by enemy troops’. (www.warsawvoice.pl/view) 15 March 2008. Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative and History (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996). See for example, Tim Edensor, ‘Performing tourism, staging tourism, (re)producing tourist space and practice’, Tourist Studies, vol. 1, no. 1, 2001, pp. 59–82; Denis R. Judd and Susan S. Fainstein (eds) The Tourist City (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999); and Claudio Minca and Timothy Oakes (eds) Tourism and the Paradox of Modernity (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002). Huyssen, Present Pasts. A strong possibility in the context of Poland where a re-emergence of the far right has occurred (see the Chapter, ‘Territory and Location’ in this volume). Huyssen, Present Pasts.

3. PERFORMANCE OF SPACE ____________________________________

Space can be regarded as a site in which forms of identification and alienation are performed and where the production of social and power relations are revealed, reproduced and maintained.1 This chapter considers concepts of the performance of space through a range of site-specific artworks. The idea of space as defining the limits in which performances of the everyday are inscribed and contained, as a point of convergence in which entanglements, divisions, ruptures and networks can take place, and as a site in which expressions of community are articulated, are investigated through consideration of a range of artworks. Through a projected video in a hidden alleyway in the City of London, performances in a public square in Argentina and in a busy street in Panama City, and, via an installation in a derelict sorting office in London, this chapter investigates the performative elements of the spatial. Mark Lewis’s video work, Rush Hour, Morning and Evening, Cheapside, EC2 (2005) revealed the performative nature of commuters in defining the alienating spaces of the city where the movements of individual bodies are unconsciously choreographed through the rhythms of everyday life. Projected onto the wall of Prudent Passage off King Street and in St Maryle-Bow Churchyard in the City of London, the work was a fixed camera view of the inverted shadows cast on the pavement by the constant stream of pedestrians – city workers passing along Cheapside, a main thoroughfare in the City of London.2 The shadows of these anonymous figures advanced and converged evoking a sense of disorientation: growing, shrinking and diminishing and flowing ever past. 53


Cheapside is part of a radial street pattern in the vicinity of Bank junction, where the Bank of England, the Royal Exchange and Mansion House are situated. The area near Bank represents the axis of power within the City, where banking, exchange markets and the offices of the lord mayor are located. Henri Lefebvre saw the urban environment as the context of everyday life where the elements of capital intersect in space in which people are in transit.3 Whilst the city is essentially a site of social exchange, Lefebvre considered some aspects of the urban material environment as embodying the soul-destroying features of modernity. Rush Hour, Morning and Evening, Cheapside, positioned the commuter’s cyclical world of commuting-work-sleep within a moment of revelation. The strangeness of the projected shadows and the inverted half-figures in the harsh light of a late spring afternoon seen in the darkness of a cold midwinter evening was startling. Through displacement, the work described a new spatialization of the ‘performance’ of the everyday in the endless streams of commuters and pedestrian traffic passing along a main street in the City. The dislocation of the displacement of the body suggested its unseen presence elsewhere, for Lefebvre, the basis on which we can find self-fulfilment and emancipation from the repetition and alienation of the everyday. Lewis’s work suggested that the world of work diminishes the self to a mere shadow, whilst our real selves exist somewhere else. Rush Hour, Morning and Evening set the fluctuating, unpredictable accumulation of humanity against that of the hard, architectural and financial infrastructure of the city. It projected a series of continual fleeting forms that endlessly overlap, recede and merge, where the shadows of the half-figures press endlessly towards and away from us. Against the repetitions of commuting and its effects of potential severance and estrangement of the individual from the city, Lewis’s work proposed an irrational space, filled with jouissance and potential encounter. It was a psycho-geographical invitation to consider a transformation of the city from the rational to the irrational as determined by social networks and human relationships in a continual dérive. Rush Hour, Morning and Evening, submitted the urgent need to consider space differently, against a backdrop of increasing societal indifference, presenting the everyday as a potential space for the recovery of the humane. Lefebvre has argued that the production of spatiality and its relationship to power rather than to history has become central to capitalist development. The City of London is a locus of control and is a synecdoche for a centre of financial, political and cultural power and a crucial space in 54

P E R F O R M A N C E O F S PAC E

Fig. 11. Mark Lewis, Rush Hour, Morning and Evening, Cheapside, EC2, Prudent Passage, City of London (2006). Photograph by Richard Davies.

defining London as a world city.4 As a major financial centre, the City deals in international loans and deposits, offshore corporate bonds and worldwide fund management. This privileged space describes urban reality as the centre of managed capital through its banks and continually reinvents itself through its architecture.5 Inscribed within the ongoing and unending process of modernization is the perpetuation of the idealization of global cities as dominant centres of power. Rush Hour, Morning and Evening, was a contestation of the homogenization of the individual within such dehumanized and alienating spaces, reasserting the body itself as space-producing. Lewis’s work presented the body as being against commercial power or capitalism as a system, according to Karl Marx, built on alienation, contempt for the body and the eradication of the person. In its conjoining, separation and rejoining of bodies, Lewis’s work underlined the importance of human networks in establishing social interconnections in determining relations of production within the city. In the subtleties of difference between these shadowy part-bodies, Rush Hour, Morning and Evening suggested the complexity of human relations against the City’s institutions of homogenizing power and the people who historically had once passed along this thoroughfare.6 55


The dislocation of space and lack of geographical contiguity described through Rush Hour, Morning and Evening recalls Manuel Castells’s view that territory is eliminated in the world of financial markets where a space of flows connects people located remotely on an international scale. A spatial electronic infrastructure connects organizational centres such as London, Tokyo and New York via networks of power that undermine the local through the logic of global capitalism. According to some, in the global scale of capitalism’s financial deterritorialized dimensions, people have become dehumanized in favour of a virtual, digitalized space.7 Lewis’s work suggested the standardization imposed by such a globalized society. As Nigel Thrift has shown, however, international banking networks are always the result of human intervention and of the resultant social structures from which social processes unfold. In Rush Hour, Morning and Evening, distinction and difference emerge where the figures merge, coalesce and redivide. They seemed to become actants in Bruno Latour’s speculation of a world of networks in which heterogeneous elements, human and nonhuman relate to each other.8 Rush Hour, Morning and Evening described a stage on which topological space is made and remade, where figures move and align, associate, locate and dislocate with one another, echoing Latour’s proposal, in which webs of connections, separations and reconnections contract, extend and produce the shape of space and time. Rush Hour, Morning and Evening suggested alternative possibilities contained within the everyday. In its uncanny evocation of the real, it displaced space. Its anonymous faceless figures were protagonists in the evocation of the multiplicities of moments in space, inviting identification with lived space against the City as a symbolic site of power. In Prudent Passage, a small alleyway off a main thoroughfare, the work asserted the humane against the international, abstract aspirations of the City, which historically has been the centre of a narrative of powerlessness.9 The everyday as a site in which social, cultural and political power relationships are performed was investigated in Germaine Kruip’s Point of View (2002) made in collaboration with La Baulera performance group. The work consisted of several scenes performed in a range of international cities including Stockholm and Amsterdam.10 In Independence Square, San Miguel de Tucuman, Argentina, performers directed by the artist played the parts of passers-by in an event that took place during one day in July and that was publicized in advance. The audience, initially assembled off-site, was informed that some of the people they would see in the square were 56


Fig. 12. Germaine Kruip, Point of View, Independence Square, San Miguel de Tucuman, Argentina (2002).

actors but they would not know who they were. The performers, instructed to behave as normal and as people in a public space, were unidentifiable: they merged with the ‘real’ passers-by in the wider population of the square, performing such roles as a woman walking her dog, a man reading a paper, a man running and a woman seemingly asleep on a bench. The public square is an important site for the visible coherence of social relations and the production and reproduction of the social order; it is also a stage on which this order has been contested. The street has a history as a site of resistance and the public plaza has functioned as a platform for social protest and a site of political struggle. In Argentina’s Plaza del Mayo, for example, the mothers of the missing continue their sustained presence in their daily demonstration, wearing white handkerchiefs as symbols of their ‘disappeared’ children.11 Demonstrations had occurred in Independence Square, San Miguel de Tucuman, during the economic crisis of the 1990s and Point of View took place towards the end of this crisis when public protests were being held in every city throughout Argentina. Within this and the wider context of the country’s recent history of military dictatorship, Kruip’s performance reflected the everyday back to its audience, questioning the nature of the everyday in an environment of 57


economic, political or social disruption and uncertainty.12 In making the audience aware of the confusion between the performers as ‘real’ or as part of the performance, Point of View implicitly showed how the everyday is both performed and perceived (and given meaning) within specific social, political and cultural contexts. Tucuman is one of the poorest provinces in Argentina; its population consists mainly of people of indigenous descent from the Quchz nation. Surrounded by government buildings, the cathedral, the tourism office, a cinema and a savings bank, Independence Square represents a powerful ideological site of meaning. Kruip saw Point of View as collaboration between the artists, the performers and the passers-by, enabling the viewer to create their own world. This mirror of self-reflection and self-awareness contested the false political, economic and social stability represented by the architecture of the buildings surrounding the square. The buildings, the architecture of which become so much ‘congealed ideology’ in times of change, also perform as monuments to power and the contrived continuity of time and place.13 By contrast, the inverted spectacle of Point of View created a situation in which the audience is transformed into its object, both active and passive. By asking the performers to behave as ‘normal’, Kruip proposed that ‘the whole urban fabric (itself) can become a kind of art’. In the choreography of the everyday, individuals were situated as both extraordinary and banal beings and, in the site of the plaza, articulated the potential of the everyday to create an underlying (yet barely perceived) disorder. It provoked reflection on the nature of normalization, and therefore the concept of a performed everydayness that endures and adapts under the shifts of changing ideological, political and economic circumstances.14 Within the context of other forms of interventional strategies, Kruip’s work reinforced the concept of space as made up of a complexity of relations of domination and subordination, solidarity and cooperation.15 It drew attention to the notion that there is no such thing as value-free space and that space is produced and performed through actions that become imbricated within it.16 Point of View proposed the formation of a self-conscious and self-reflective counter-public capable of considering the individual’s role in the creation and reproduction of the ‘everyday’ against a backdrop of political repression and economic hardship. Through the act of performance, the body takes up space and can be perceived as a symbol of society. Moreover, in Kruip’s work there 58


occurred a shift in the perception of the power relations of space: Independence Square became a container for a mere pretence of ‘the real’, indistinguishable from the authentic. In its corollary, Point of View drew attention to the idea that the plaza (or any space) is spatialized by the performers within it, and that each social actor acts out a role within a wider context. Thus, social actions have the powerful potential to change and disrupt.17 The work contested the concept of free will, implying that we are all subject to ideologically-determined patterns of behaviour in which space frames conventions of being. By forcing the audience to look at its own mirrored image, Point of View undermined the assertion of an autonomous subject and proposed that the individual is defined through actions that, however mundane, are predetermined through conventions of culture. As Foucault proposed, the subject is created within historical and ideological contexts and produced according to the values and beliefs of a particular society in which the everyday can be a site of social reproduction. Point of View showed that perceptions of reality can only exist within the discourses of perceived ‘normality’, which are continually readjusted and to which we are subjected. Kruip’s work forced its audience into a displacement of recognition of itself, evoking a shift in perspective of its own behaviour and of the terms under which it is governed. Like the traveller, the spectator develops a selfconsciousness as one whose own position is potentially part of the spectacle in which the gaze becomes its own object. In Point of View a mere shift in the ‘knowingness’ of the audience alternated its performativity from the imbricated to the detached and back again in an appropriation of space, putting into play a process of reterritorialization via performance. Through a repositioning of subject and object, the work initiated a threshold between looking out and looking in. The performers functioned as ‘stand-ins’ for the audience who were seamlessly jostled into a position of both the viewer and the viewed. Between ‘the look’ and ‘the looked back’ the audience saw itself in its precarious place in the world and acquired a sense of its own performance in conformity with normalized codes of behaviour. Point of View collapsed the performativity of place as ‘simultaneously real, imagined and symbolic’.18 It both transformed and intervened in the space of the square through its performance of the everyday, a concept essentially dependent on an undefined, yet known, ‘ensemble of circumstances’.19 The work demonstrated that the everyday is made up of a series of unspoken narratives of identification. Space is not a 59


passive container and performances of all kinds articulate it as a series of forms of different spatial narratives. In Kutlag Ataman’s video installation, Kűba (2005) sited at the abandoned post office sorting office in New Oxford Street, London, the conditions of place were the focus for the performance of belonging where individual residents of Kűba (men and women, young and old) talked about their lives in this shantytown on the outskirts of Istanbul.20 These ‘talking heads’ were screened on 40 old television sets resting on tattered pieces of furniture, situated on the vast, upper floor of the building – an enormous, expansive space whose blackened, wooden floor and broken windows created both a stage and a backdrop for the virtual performance of the collective and simultaneous chatter of Kűba’s inhabitants. A powerful sense of the struggle for community was exuded in Ataman’s installation, where the overlapping sounds of individual stories came together in a synchronous cacophony. The viewer could wander at will amongst this where 40 mini installations, each with its own individual scruffy, second-hand chair of the kind often mirrored in the videoed narratives, offered points at which one could sit and listen to the stories.21 The sub-texts of the narratives of Kűba’s inhabitants were the conflicts that exist within a tenuous sense of belonging in the face of alienation. The derelict sorting office as a refuge for the lost, marginalized and disenfranchised was a heterotopic reflection of Kűba, a shantytown where the excluded segregate. The sorting office, now frequented by squatters, drug addicts and the homeless, paralleled the spatial ‘otherness’ of Kűba, essentially an area of safe houses in Istanbul established by political dissidents in the 1960s. Whereas the Kűba of the 1960s sheltered a mainly Kurdish community, contemporary Kűba now consists of a few hundred dwellings where people of various ethnicities and religions reside. In the sorting office, the viewer negotiated the architectural labyrinth with its precarious stairwells and the virtual presence of the figures in the video installation, weaving their way through the overwhelming incoherence of the collective sound of its 40 individual voices. Kűba was a performative site in which subjective spaces became subsumed within the alienating space of the crowd. The testimonies of desire, struggle, hope, petty jealousies, fantasies, family feuds, betrayals and poverty speaking simultaneously created a critique of the meta-narrative of concepts of ‘community’.22 In this televisual ordering of chaos the individual stories of police raids and persecution, thwarted and projected plans for the future, 60


Fig. 13. Kutlug Ataman, Kűba, Sorting Office, New Oxford Street, London (2005). Commissioned and produced by Artangel.

domestic violence, drugs, love and failing relationships revealed the conflict and dislocation concealed behind perceptions of community as shared social territory. In Ataman’s installation, Kűba/Kűba became a place from which to speak the narratives of displacement situated within memory, myth and regret. Naïve hopes and dreams coalesced with despair and anger in a collective, overlapping confessional performance in the wintry ruins of the disused sorting office in which the concentration of intimate stories seemed incongruous within its warehouse-like space. Kűba is a place built apparently on individual enmity and contention; at the same time, the stories its residents told expressed an overall need to belong and identify with the settlement. Anger and fear marked the internal geography of the speakers as they spoke vehemently about antagonisms between themselves, their families, the police and the army. Their identification as ‘insiders’ and sense of belonging posed the concept of ‘community’ as a series of boundaries and bridges that close the gap between the inside and outside, the private and the public worlds.23 This affiliation with place and Kűba’s marginalization and separateness from the city and its ‘otherness’ was articulated through small divergences in the common narratives of exclusion. Many of the stories of Kűba’s inhabitants concerned issues of immigration and migration where concepts of nationhood cross geographical boundaries to relocate in other spaces.24 Kűba is a community of refugees from the Turkish state’s denial of difference, ethnic identity and cultural rights. As Doreen Massey observed, social ‘fractures’ that are performed through the particular conditions of contingency inevitably reveal the political.25 In Kűba, Muzatter talks about how he visits the coffee house and speaks ‘broken Turkish’ instead of Kurdish with the other customers who are 90 per cent unemployed Kurds, because they are afraid of raids and prohibitions. Another speaker describes how the police were called to the hospital when his daughter was born because he wanted 61


to give her a Kurdish name. He goes on to talk about his friend who ‘spent six years in court’ because he wanted to call his son ‘Azat’. Kűba’s historical origins may provide a safe area for displaced Kurds, but in a society where any expression of ethnicity is denied, Kurds throughout Turkish society, including writers, academics, journalists and publishers engage with civil disobedience on a daily basis.26 Kűba itself is an urban myth (‘no one really knows where it is’) and a site of refuge for those on the fringes of society. Its insecure existence, in the imagination and in Turkish law, has precipitated its mythical status as an ‘illegal’ settlement located somewhere on the edges of Istanbul, like the Kurdish position generally in Turkey. In effect, it is an unseen colony whose culture has been largely rendered invisible and silent.27 As a shelter for refugees from Turkey’s repressive legislation in relation to minorities, the buildings that originally formed Kűba were bulldozed in the 1980s during waves of military crackdowns, effected since the early 1970s. Such shantytowns (gecekondus) were considered ‘dangerous’ in terms of politicizing people into ‘Kurdish consciousness’, particularly after 1984 when the Turkish regime declared a state of emergency in the southeast of the country and millions of Kurds fled to the cities.28 Ataturk’s founding constitution failed to recognize and denied the existence of ethnic groups and acknowledging Kurdistan was deemed to be regressive to the modernization of Turkey. An estimated 30,000 Kurds have been killed in the country, mainly in the southeast where half the global population of Kurds reside, making up 20 per cent of the population of Turkey.29 Official figures suggest that more than 378,000 villagers in southeast Turkey have been made homeless by legislation that permits villages to be demolished if they are not perceived to cooperate with the Turkish state’s war against the PKK (the armed movement for cultural, political and economic rights of Kurds and a separate state of Kurdistan) and that that has produced an estimated two million refugees since 1984.30 According to Ataman, Kűba the place is a state of mind, both lawless and cohesive, and in the installation a performance of provisionality and instability was enacted through contiguity between the worn-out furniture, the semi-derelict space and the inefficient electric heaters. The sorting office, with its outdated rusting machinery, unsafe staircases and floors, and broken windows suggested a space of anonymous transition and a temporary resting place for the dispersed. Like Kűba, it is a place where once narratives of a different kind (in the form of letters and correspondence) 62


were in transit, potentially misplaced or lost. Kűba is a communal construction by migrants coordinated through a common sense of nonbelonging and exclusion. Forced to live in fragile conditions, its speakers were held together by the common circumstance of otherness, which was articulated through an antagonism with the conditions of Kűba’s own ‘placeness’. The second-hand chairs, the outmoded television sets and cheap tables in Ataman’s installation can be considered as a contestation of fixed concepts of ‘home’ that migratory transnationalisms evoke. Kűba is a temporary home to a range of ethnic and religious groups, where the sense of belonging is a process always in flux and is mediated by class, ethnicity, gender and age. Just as its Kurdish precedents represented the difficulties of identifying a territorial home (the ‘borders’ of Kurdistan overlap with those of Turkey, Syria, Iraq, Iran and Armenia), Kűba’s present occupants vocalize the paradoxical nature of communities. Kűba can be seen as an investigation into the concept of a particular kind of place built on contingency and articulated and performed by its occupants’ dissonance, but it also scrutinized conceptions of place and its underlying provisional nature. In places like Kűba, for the outsider (eternally excluded ethnically, politically and economically) the notions of placeness and belonging become a performance of continual reinvention. As Lefebvre proposed, all social territory is conditional on some elements of irrationality and Kűba/Kűba (both the artwork and the place), is a form of occupation of space founded on the provisory and conflictual whose inhabitants negotiate their own situatedness within the fragility of their wider, and endlessly interim, environment.31 The shared cultural context of Kűba partly defined the conditions for the performance of space in Ataman’s work. In Francis Alÿs and Rafael Ortega’s One Minute of Silence (2003), a common identification with history and a mutual sense of belonging formed the basis of a collaborative performance of silence. People in a busy street and restaurant in Panama City were encouraged to ask another person near them for silence, until they eventually achieved it for the duration of one minute.32 Thus, a collective and immaterial substance was inserted into the material environment of the city. One Minute of Silence was a circulation between the elements of presence and absence, implied by Alÿs’s statement that ‘sometimes making something leads to nothing; and sometimes making nothing leads to something.’33 By bringing everything to a temporary ‘end’, One Minute of Silence 63


momentarily hijacked a section of urban space, marking out a space for insight, reflection and surprise. Like a situationist model, it utilized the anti-spectacle to propose an alternative perception of space as subjective environment and a strategy to momentarily reclaim the city.34 In a reversal of Kűba, Alÿs and Ortega’s work, inserted into the normal cacophony of the city, was a silence moulded and created by its (normally estranged) participants, becoming a ‘hole’ in its fabric, which it metaphorically ‘filled’. Inserted into the normal state of things, a minute of silence is a space suffused with the self-conscious presence of those who create it, paradoxically both a space of self-awareness and recognition of those lost. As a strategy that relies on the community of the living, a measured, mass silence can be considered a pacifist tactic of resistance, comparable with sitting down in the road in front of tanks or in non-violent demonstrations to reclaim the streets. Making silence creates a shared knowingness that relies on the participation of the crowd. As a form of withdrawal it enables a form of perception unique to its own performative contributions and creates an acute awareness of the ever present, unheard silence of death, normally unacknowledged and continually covered over, and about which the living are always in a state of denial. The two-minute silence as a memorial event, as in Armistice Day services in the West, focuses on the palpable presence of absence, when silence is filled with an enhanced awareness of loss. Recently, a one-minute silence has been deemed sufficient as part of a memorial event ‘performed’ collectively by a mass of people; silence is a powerful signifier of the absence of the body – effectively a performance of absence.35 As a performance in Panama, One Minute of Silence can be interpreted as both a revolutionary act and as a form of remembrance in a country that has a history of repression and subjugation. By collapsing the mechanisms of the memorial within the politically historical context of Panama City, One Minute of Silence proposed a way of occupying space through a combined cartography of emotion and environment. The historical relationship between the United States and Panama dictates that the work of Alÿs and Ortega cannot be perceived as textless. The regimes of Panamanian presidents Noriega and Endara encompassed political corruption, torture, repression, arms and drugs trafficking and human rights violations and created a volatile political climate in Panama and the region for the latter part of the twentieth century.36 Military dictatorships, the continual 64


presence of authoritarian regimes and political and military intervention by the United States have also been features of Panamanian life for a large part of the twentieth century during which the United States made more than twenty military interventions into the isthmus of Panama.37 Silence as a suspension of everyday life within the city is loaded with the presence of the possibility of memory unfolding in space. Formed by groups in particular space and time, silence gives opportunities for performances of multiple and dispersed forms of the collective memory of those taking part.38 In the normally potentially opposing terrain of history and memory, the disruption in time and space created by memorial silence allows for a shared plurality of memory within the confines of the city. Alÿs and Ortega’s work articulated a fragile transient passage through time and space in its gesture of solidarity and cooperation to create an artwork that identified the street as a site for shared forms of resistance and experience. Performances of silence as commemorative events have become a popular method of dealing with the impossibilities of the monument in terms of the experience of loss and trauma and allow for an opening up of space rather than the containment defined by the monument. Within the context of a Latin American country, One Minute of Silence was an act of solidarity with the silences of the past and with those silenced by political and cultural repression, marginalization, discrimination and violence. The work was a reference to oblivion, forgetfulness and reconciliation; yet, like the memorial, it simultaneously marked the need to remember. As a collective performance it created a spontaneous and shared site of resistance as an alternative to the official site of the monument. As a partially induced impromptu collective performance, it was an intervention into urban space as a site of official public memory and an expression of the unspeakable. Its immateriality set up a spatial resistance to those monuments to nationalism erected throughout Latin America by various regimes of power in Latin American countries since the nineteenth century. The work suggested a solution to the problem of how memories associated with the experience of military dictatorships are articulated in public places.39 Silence allows for the potential possibilities of revealing that which is hidden and can propose a form of resistance to the papering over of memory within the process of investing public space with the false or compromised consensus of meaning. One Minute of Silence performed in the isthmus of Latin America registered the silences within the narratives of the past – it placed the ‘forgettings’ and 65


absences in a politically produced history. In a continent characterized by historical trauma, silence is also a pathological symptom of the traumatized. In the West, the two-minute silence has become an institutionalized and legitimate public ceremony of ‘remembering’, where, as time passes, those with primary experience of the historical events being commemorated become increasingly absent. In Latin America, it echoes the silenced stories of those who have disappeared and registers ‘the limit of what is speakable’ in terms of the past.40 In addition, the silences of the voiceless – the subaltern and the indigenous Indian population, in terms of inclusion in history and contemporary life – continue in contemporary Latin America. The recovery of these silenced stories places past absences in present readings of history in rewriting history and redefining the concepts of the public sphere. The instabilities of the spatial (financial, political, historical) are enfolded within the performativity of these artworks.41 Rush Hour, Morning and Evening, Cheapside; Point of View; One Minute of Silence and Kűba reveal the cracks and fissures in the performance of belonging. If space determines forms of identification, it also sets the boundaries for forms of exclusion. In the works of Ataman, Alÿs and Ortega space is a refuge and a site of shared or overlapping experience and history. In Kűba, voices spoke simultaneously of stories of contention and marginalization; in One Minute of Silence, a moment of communal non-speaking demonstrated a collective identification. Common histories and concepts of community are, it has been argued, imagined and sustained by modes of performance and points of recognition.42 These artworks revealed the performativity of space as a site in which these are maintained. Space is culturally shared and its histories of conflict can be contexts of performance. These artworks revealed the networks through which common experiences and struggles for empathy are spatially performed through interactions, flows and points of convergence, in which the instabilities of space determine that the contexts for belonging are always in flux. Notes 1. Nigel Thrift, Spatial Formations (London: Sage, 1996). 2. The work was part of Light up Queen Street, an annual programme of artists’ commissions in the City of London. It was filmed in 35 mm and converted to video. 3. Henri Lefebvre, The Critique of Everyday Life, translated by John Moore (London: Verso, 1991). See also Stuart Corbridge, Ron Martin and Nigel Thrift (eds) Money, Power and Space (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994).

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5. 6.

7. 8.

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10. 11.

12. 13.

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15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20.

A ‘world city’ has been defined as a place where a disproportionate amount of the world’s business is carried out. Castells sees the ‘fourth world’ as that of those who are cut off from global networks of power and wealth occupied by the organizational and informational elite. Manuel Castells, The Informational Age: Economy, Society and Culture, vol. 1, The Rise of Network Society (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996). Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, translated by N. Donaldson-Smith (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1991). From the Middle Ages Cheapside had been the centre of the city’s market: the nearby street names of Bread Street, Honey Lane and Wood Street reflect the wares that were sold locally. See Corbridge, Martin and Thrift (eds) Money, Power and Space. See Manuel Castells, ‘Materials for an exploratory theory of the network society’, British Journal of Sociology, vol. 51, no. 1, 2000, pp. 1–24; and Jonathan Murdoch, ‘The spaces of actor-network theory’, Geoforum, vol. 29, 1998, pp: 357–74. See Jane M. Jacobs, ‘The battle of Bank Junction: the contested iconography of capital’, in Stuart Corbridge, Ron Martin and Nigel Thrift (eds) Money, Power and Space (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994) pp. 356–82 for an example of how the area of Bank is structured by power and contested by various social groups and interests. In the redevelopment of Bank Junction in the 1990s, local interests were overturned in favour of those of developers. Jacobs shows that the area is made up of ‘residual power nodes’: empire, royalty and class that continue to function inter-discursively. This work was part of the exhibition, Context, supported by RAIN artists’ network. See Susana Torres, ‘Claiming the public sphere: the mothers of the Plaza del Mayo’, in Diana Agrest, Patricia Conway and Leslie Kanes Weisman (eds) The Sex of Architecture (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1996) pp. 241–250. The ‘mothers of the disappeared’ led opposition to military rule and inspired other movements in Central America. Duncan Green, Faces of Latin America (London: Latin American Bureau, 2006). Debt, rising inflation, the intervention of military governments, the dissolution of political parties and the suppression of trade unions had all happened since the 1980s. For a discussion of the relationships between architecture and power see Iain Borden, Joe Kerr and Jane Rendell with Alicia Pivaro (eds) Strangely Familiar: Narratives of Architecture in the City (London: Routledge, 1996). This is an aspect of Bourdieu’s concept of habitus, which refers to the ways individuals generate and organize practices that are regulated through social structures and norms of behaviour through their actions. Pierre Bourdieu, The Logic of Practice, translated by Richard Nice (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1990). As proposed by Doreen Massey, in Space, Place and Gender. The social relations of space as outlined by Henri Lefebvre, in The Production of Space. Chantal Mouffe (ed.) Dimensions of Radical Democracy: Pluralism, Citizenship, Community (London: Verso, 1993). Steve Pile, The Body and the City: Psychoanalysis, Subjectivity and Space (London: Routledge, 1996). Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988) first published 1984. Artangel co-commissioned the work, which was also shown in other cities, including Pittsburgh, Stuttgart and Sydney.

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24. 25. 26.

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28. 29.

30. 31.

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A false intimacy of the relationship between the speaker and the listener since the listener could get up and leave at any moment, was a reflection of how those perceived to be ‘outside’ the mainstream are marginalized by society’s indifference and ignorance. The concept of community refers to a group of people with at least one shared characteristic, including geography, values or interests. Although within sociology the term is fluid, sociologists suggest that there are three basic models of community – as locality (for example a human settlement), as a social system (a set of human relationships that take place within a locality) and as a commonality of interest. A further sociological view of ‘community’ is defined through social and political networks that define individuals, which may include kinship or social ties, shared interests, and cultural or ethnic characteristics. Individuals have their own sense of community membership, which shifts over time and is determined by their needs. See Stuart Hall, ‘Cultural identity and diaspora’, in Jana Evans Braziel and Anita Mannur (eds) Theorizing Diaspora (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003), pp. 233–46 for a discussion on the relationships between concepts of ‘community’ and dispersal and displacement. Former Kurdistan spans geographical areas in Iran, Iraq, Syria, Armenia and Turkey. Doreen Massey, For Space (London: Sage, 2005). These include such ‘prisoners of opinion’ as Leyla Zana, the first woman elected to the Turkish parliament who was sentenced to 15 years for wearing traditional Kurdish colours when she took the oath of office and adding ‘I shall struggle so that the Kurdish and Turkish people can live together peacefully in a democratic framework.’ (Chomsky’s foreword in Kerim Yildiz and Noam Chomsky, The Kurds in Turkey: EU Accession and Human Rights (London: Pluto Press, 2005). For example, until 1991 the use of the Kurdish language had been illegal and since 1982, the use of Kurdish names has been forbidden. In 2006 the Supreme Board of Radio and TV allowed two TV channels and one radio channel to broadcast in Kurdish. Michael Gunter, The Kurds in Turkey: A Political Dilemma (San Francisco: Westview Press, 1990). Yildiz and Chomsky, The Kurds in Turkey. It has been suggested that there are two distinct Turkeys – the northern area, which is more developed, and the south and east regions where ‘Third World conditions’ dominate. Henri J. Barkley and Graham Fuller, Turkey’s Kurdish Question (New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 1998). Mario Rui Martins, ‘The theory of social space in the work of Henri Lefebvre’, in Ray Forrest, Jeff Henderson and Peter Williams (eds) Urban Political Economy and Social Theory: Critical Essays in Urban Studies (Aldershot: Gower, 1983) pp. 160–85. The work was part of MultipleCity, Arte, Panama, in which numbers of international artists were invited to make work that engaged with Panama City, respond to social or cultural aspects of it, to be sited in its streets. The artists worked with various facilitators, including a group of young people and a local radio station, which publicized and supported the event. Kitty Scott, ‘Francis Alÿs: Portrait’, Parkett, vol. 69, 2003, pp. 20–33. One of the aims of situationism was to challenge the separation between audience and artist, and production and consumption. Its advocates saw it as a strategy with which


35. 36.

37.

38.

39. 40.

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to contest space and propose new perceptions of space in the face of the dominance of capitalism. Simon Sandler, The Situationist City (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998). One minute of silence was observed in London collectively on the first anniversary for the victims of the 7 July bombings in London in 2005. The 1903 Canal Treaty established a ten-mile zone around the canal under the control of the United States and from which, apart from essential workers, Panamanians were excluded. John Weeks and Phil Gunson, Panama: Made in the USA (London: Latin American Bureau, 1991). In 1987 President Noriega declared a state of emergency and constitutional rights were suspended, the opposition media were closed and repressive legislation against ‘antigovernment activities’ was introduced. Riot squads broke up demonstrations and the regime controlled the judicial system, including the courts and judges. The Endara government, which the United States installed in 1989 after the invasion, operated through detention without trial, death threats, the repression of media workers and control of universities. In 1990 there were more than 100 political prisoners and the Inter-American Human Rights Commission called for measures to resolve problems arising from human rights violations (Weeks and Gunson, Panama). M. Christine Boyer’s revision of Halbach’s contested concept of collective memory aptly fits that of ‘minutes of silence’ as memorial performative events. M. Christine Boyer (1994) The City of Collective Memory (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press). A problem Elizabeth Jelin posed in State Repression and the Struggles for Memory (London: Latin America Bureau, 2003). Silence plays an important part in coping with trauma as evidenced, for example, among Holocaust survivors who either spoke incessantly about their experiences, remained silent about them but then spoke up fifty years later, or who allowed their narratives to lapse into permanent silence (Jelin, State Repression). Military crackdowns, histories of invasion, temporary regimes, mass arrests, electoral fraud, manipulation, corruption and precarious political and financial situations all describe the unstable conditions of place where these artworks are situated. Vikki Bell, ‘Performativity and belonging’, Theory, Culture and Society, vol. 16, 1999, pp. 1–10.

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4. THE GARDEN ___________________

As opposed to an Arcadian space of refuge or idealization, the garden offers a way to contemplate issues of crisis concerning the environment. This chapter investigates how a number of site-specific artworks can be places in which to reconceptualize the garden as a focus for environmental concerns. A range of gardens – an American university campus garden, a garden on the roof terrace of an apartment in Siena Italy, the Giardini at the Venice Biennale, a garden made in a derelict and polluted space under a motorway in Melbourne, and a sound performance on the site of the Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens in London – raise environmental issues concerning processes of consumption, food production, commodification and urbanization. The individual’s relationship to the global issues of water and pollution were at the core of Steven Siegel’s Bale (10′ x 10′ x 10′) (2001–02), made of thousands of crushed plastic drinks bottles bound together with a rubber hose and sited in a courtyard in the landscaped gardens of the University of Virginia. Its minimalist cube-like form could be considered a parody of the abstract public sculpture ubiquitous in North American cities, yet it also closely resembled a real, functional object – a bundle of plastic material en route to the recycling depot. The packed bottles evoked an intensity of repressed energy held in by a corset of rubber hosing, simultaneously suggesting the consequences and the waste products of over-consumption. These bodily associations extended to the implied absent liquids once contained within the bottles, evoking a metaphor for the body in its constituency of over 50 per cent water and its dependence on it.1 The 71


shrivelled and dry skins of these plastic bottle ‘bodies’ invoked considerations of the crisis of global access to fresh water and the implications on human life of environmental damage and climate change contributed to by the same materials of which the work was made. The university campus garden is a contrived Arcadian environment, a space of refuge, separated from the city and withdrawn from the banalities of the everyday. Such gardens echo French formal garden design and their symbolic forms of order where straight avenues lead to campus buildings and managed plantings follow the predictabilities of cyclical time. The university campus strives to create an ostensibly ‘empty’ space, devoid of any evidence of individual human activity and to construct an environment apparently free of contention and conflict. The campus landscaped garden is a utopian frame for learning and abstract thought, absent of any form of narrativization or obvious occupation of place. It is a contextual tabula rasa and a place of decorum, away from the chaos, dirt and violence of the city. Within this manicured, nurtured environment, Bale was a suspension of the garden-as-paradise and a manifestation of the end of Eden. The extravagant use of water through fountains, lakes or other water features in formal garden design is normally a sign for visible ostentation, wealth and prestige, but the lack of water and the presence of its dirty discards in Siegel’s work implied a symptom of an impending dystopia. The use of water to support artificial sites of privileged leisure such as golf courses and private swimming pools is set against the crisis of global water shortages through drought and climate change. Global problems of water management, the lack of irrigation schemes, little or no access to clean water supplies and sanitation problems are an increasing reality for many agricultural, urban and rural environments worldwide. In Bale, a form of luxury consumption (drinking water from a bottle for the sake of convenience or as a conscious or unconscious expression of cultural identification) is set against the ‘un-spectacle’ of discarded plastic water bottles. The ubiquitous polluting presence of plastic bottles anywhere from the Canal Grande to the Gobi Desert ironically signifies water as its vanishing referent, in a global context where the availability of fresh water is becoming an increasing concern for many. Whilst the word ‘bale’ may be associated with the harvest, images of bucolic ‘innocence’ and a return to the soil, pollution and climate catastrophe is increasingly conditioning our dominant perception of the world. Not gathering but disposing on a mass scale, we participate within the endless cycle of global consumption and 72

THE GARDEN

Fig. 14. Steven Siegel, Bale, University of Virginia, USA (2002).

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waste. The constituency of thousands of individual bottles in Siegel’s work was consumption made visible. Forty million un-recycled plastic bottles, which did not exist 20 years ago, are now disposed of every week in the United States alone. Sited in the ordered grounds of the University of Virginia, Bale evoked absences made palpable by its imposing presence as a sculptural object and collapsed concepts of duration within a temporal frame. Its elemental parts – the crushed, empty drink bottles – suggested the representation of the aggregation of thousands of small acts and incremental accumulation of activities around drinking, lives lived and time passed, expectations, and hopes and fears realized and unrealized. The work implied a rupture of ecological and human time through the relatively incorruptibility of hard plastic and in the context of the university campus, the vulnerability and susceptibility of youth. Whilst the time taken for plastic to degrade is many times that of a human lifetime, the thousands of individual empty bottles evoked a troubling and poignant condensation of time: the small histories, micro-events, individual lives and the dreams, struggles and hopes of students continuously passing through and the inevitable loss of youth, evoking anxiety about the future of the planet. Concerns about environmental sustainability and implications for future accessibility and production of food were raised in Marjetica Potrč’s Urban Agriculture (2003). A hydroponic vegetable garden, incorporating devices to collect and recycle rainwater for the plants, was cultivated on the roof of a privately owned apartment building in Siena, Italy.2 The erosion of green space and rapid urbanization, particularly in the developing world, have created environmental problems where people search for living space and sources of water. Urban sprawl, an exploding world population and the erosion of rural land through building houses and out of town shopping malls, pose real threats to the sustainability of food production.3 New approaches to environmental problems and new ways of negotiating space are initiating reconsiderations of everyday practices and the garden is becoming a place where the individual can take responsibility for growing their own vegetables. Low-technology solutions to provide cheap food are increasingly becoming popular with the rising costs of food and have long been used by allotment holders in Britain, Europe, Sri Lanka, the Gambia, Japan and Norway.4 Urban Agriculture proposed that private space would form a significant part of our future ecological responsibility to engage at an everyday level with more functional solutions to environmental problems and issues. 74

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Fig. 15. Marjetica Potrč, Urban Agriculture, Siena, Italy (2003). Arte all’Arte, 8 project. Courtesy of the artist and Associazone Arte Contina, San Gimignano, Italy. Photograph by Ela Bialkowska.

Urban Agriculture was one solution to the impact of the city on wider ecological systems. It also suggested a way of addressing the World Bank’s recommendations to develop strategic approaches to the sustainable development of cities. Global population growth is generally predicted to be centred largely around and in urban areas; therefore, cities will be the future locations in which human activities will have most ecological impact. Current policy recommendations call for consumption and production systems that echo the cyclical eco-systems of nature and that are based at local levels. Urban Agriculture was an intervention into the constructed oppositional paradigm of the ‘global’ and ‘local’ where concepts of globalization are in danger of dissolving into a deterritorialized denial and displacement of responsibility. It identified and reconceptualized ‘the local’ as a place of individual action, innovation and creativity and presented the inner city equivalent of the backyard as the site of its focus. The processes of individual food production and the nurturing and creation of an environment that involves nature, offer a form of control over the individual’s production and consumption of food. Urban Agriculture advocated new equivalences of spatial, social and economic relationships, appropriating methods for survival that are used in non-Western practices and spaces. It endorsed the power of the individual and offered a strategy for confronting wider environmental problems. There is an urgent need for new conceptual templates with which to understand the city–nature dialectic and Potrč’s work invited differently positioned relationships that also incorporated processes of nurturing to counter the alienation that individuals are increasingly experiencing in urban environments.5 Whereas the home has been considered a primary site of consumption, Potrč’s work suggested that it is the possible locus for the preservation of life itself. The disastrous consequences for the environment of mass consumerism, 75


including global warming, the destruction of local environments and the general erosion of the quality of life were the issues addressed through the toxic implications of Choi Jeong Hwa’s White Lotus, a gigantic, two-metre high white lotus flower made of soft inflatable polystyrene located in the Giardini at the fifty-first Venice Biennale, 2005. Traditionally, gardens have been perceived as enclaves that keep nature out; White Lotus, however, suggested the disturbing encroachment of the artificial. From a distance, the work could have been a monstrous effect of hothouse processes or of genetic manipulation on the growing techniques of flowers; its grotesque efflorescence seeming to be a mutation of a plant that had got out of control. If gardens once strived to be fragments of nature, White Lotus reflected its alarming reconceptualization. The work reassured the importance of preservation in ever evolving and changing environments, yet it also suggested that perceptions of the garden in the contexts of climate change, genetics biotechnology and the experimental hybridization of plants and flowers are subject to constant displacement and review. If cultural interpretations of the garden in the past have focused on it as an illusion of the world in stasis, White Lotus suggested that the garden is now a site of inertia and disposability where non-degradable materials contribute to a wider, eroding world. Essentially, contemporary concepts of the garden are based on the cultural constructions mediated by mass culture. White Lotus was a reminder that the experience of gardens is now largely vicariously defined and mediated by the processes of consumption through gardening books, pilgrimages to garden centres and National Trust properties, the purchase of ‘bird song’ CDs or other forms of leisure. Its lightness (and frivolity) and easy portability echoed the promises of instant garden transformation as promoted by popular culture in garden ‘makeover’ programmes on television and by other forms of ‘garden consumption’.6 Whilst in eighteenthcentury garden design, the garden strove to be a deception of nature, White Lotus suggested that deception is all, implying that the garden is essentially a commodity, subject to purchase, exchange and consumption. Since prototypes of the garden are now framed and mediated by the mass media, we no longer demand that it has to be perceived as being made by natural processes but only that it be accessible, consumable and expendable. Whatever is lacking in gardening skills or available resources may be bought. The lotus flower, or the ‘Asian water lily’, grows in mud at the bottom of ponds, rising above the surface of the water to blossom. Considered a 76

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Fig. 16. Choi Jeong Hwa, White Lotus, Venice (2005).

survivor, it re-emerges from dried-up watercourses after the rains and is a symbol in Malaysia, Thailand and China of immortality and resurrection. Botanically unique in flowering and fruiting simultaneously, the plant denotes rebirth in Buddhist philosophy. The white lotus in particular, as a night blooming plant that continues to flower until midday, signifies spiritual enlightenment and is traditionally used to enhance healing.7 In Buddhism, the lotus effect is a state to be cultivated like a garden: it is an analogy of the attainment of a pure and empowered state of mind in the midst of a polluting and degrading environment.8 In Choi Jeong Hwa’s work, however, the white plastic lotus is incapable of following the Buddhist cycle of death, birth and rebirth because it exists in a state of perpetual stasis in which its incorruptibility suggests a grotesque, reimagined utopia incapable of further atrophy or change. In its indestructible presence, its inability to decay and its resistance to death, White Lotus described a new paradigm of the garden in the face of the impending and progressive decline of the natural world. Flowers, like much of the food consumed in the Western world, are increasingly the result of forced production methods that rely on growth hormones, chemical preservatives and artificial additives.9 The portability of

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Choi Jeong Hwa’s work, its easy appropriation and application made it as adaptable and painlessly consumable as packaged food. No longer spiritually enclosed spaces that enable possibilities for meditation and purity, gardens are another form of consumptive space that affords instant satisfaction; they are now part of the global chain of spaces of consumption that include theme parks, zoos and Disney World. The culture industries work to create an ideological illusion that reality is only as it is represented by the media.10 We exist inescapably within a commodified culture, subject only to the logic of the simulacrum that has replaced the real in that the hyper-real determines how we perceive things.11 Since, increasingly, signs for things are superseding the things themselves, White Lotus can be considered as a fetish object for the lost and missing real where the constituencies of the garden (for example, flowers, grasses or bushes) are rapidly being replaced by their cultural signifiers. Full of air, it may be a warning against the references for human existence itself becoming ‘unbearably light’ within the terms of consumption and commodification. Essentially an inflatable flower, Choi Jeong Hwa’s work could be mistaken for an object in a theme park or a ‘kitsch’ object like those of mass-produced garden ornaments. If, as has been proposed, kitsch is the culture of trash, the work intimated the implications of the waste products of mass consumption.12 Its cheap materials alluded to the toxicity of massscale industrial production and inferred that the only flowers we may know in the future will be moulded from plastics. The symbolism and design of eighteenth-century gardens hid the labour involved in their creation and, by association, the exploited labour on which the accumulation of wealth depended.13 Today, modern methods of mass production conceal workers’ labour by making the world appear magically self-sustaining. Part of the appeal of popular culture is the way commodity production masks (cheap) labour by foregrounding entertainment and passive consumerism. The lotus flower is culturally associated with representations of Thailand, Malaysia or China and the cheap polystyrene of White Lotus suggested Southeast Asia as also its possible site of origin, where exploited labour is used to create such objects for a mass market. Other kinds of issues of obsolescence were evoked in Kathryn Miller’s The Grasslands Project, sited under the elevated section of the Westgate Freeway in south Melbourne, Australia.14 Consisting of 6000 individual plantings of Australian native grasses, Miller described it as a garden closed off by roads. The Grasslands Project created order from disorder in a pocket 78

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Fig. 17. Kathryn Miller, The Grasslands Project, Melbourne (1995–97).

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of land under the freeway, within the detritus created by city planners, it temporarily created a space of containment within an interstitial, indeterminate space where all sense of ‘place’ had long since become obsolete. This geographical and metaphorical underside of modernity was once part of a network of open wetlands where no sense of individual ownership existed. Here, colonialism’s agenda to create order from a perceived chaos had obliterated ecologically sustainable grasslands and then later, an inner urban neighbourhood of workers’ cottages and small factories. Miller’s work reinscribed this now ‘invisible’ space as a threshold of possibility. Miller’s garden of indigenous grasses from the 70-million-year-old Graminease family resituated the temporal location of colonialism. Whilst grass is linked with ‘nature’ and the uncultivated landscape, it is also associated with the lawn, a symbol of the control and subordination of nature.15 Associated with tennis, croquet and cricket, the British turned the lawn into a lifestyle imposed throughout the ‘New World’ where it evolved from a reminder of ‘home’ into a sign of dominance.16 The ubiquitous imposition of the lawn represented a ‘naturalization’ and legitimization of the space of colonial power. In Australia, grass was an alien plant imposed by British colonists and part of the cultural and economic appropriation of the landscape. Native grasses were systematically destroyed and replaced with European grass for grazing imported sheep, eventually leading to land erosion and creating an unstable environment.17 According to Miller, only 0.5 per cent of Victoria’s native grasslands now exist due to extensive agriculture, the widespread degradation of the Australian landscape and the expansion of the built environment. Ironically, the few surviving native grasslands in Australia are currently now only to be found growing in such abandoned and interstitial spaces as the site of Miller’s installation – by roadsides and alongside railway lines, under freeways and in other neglected areas. Away from the grid-like ‘rational’ urban planning design of the inner city where objects can be located, the freeway creates the conditions for the layered spaces of its outer rim. The Grasslands Project, visible only from the windows of cars travelling at speed above it, gave the impression of stillness.18 The non-narrative space of motorway travel is epitomized, measured and experienced, not by place, but primarily by time, registered by the endless repeat of the familiar. It involves a process of exclusion from place and the elimination of difference. Marc Augé argues that the disorientating forms of the territories of supermodernity have become the 80

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established spatial norms of contemporary travel. To travel along a freeway is to become placeless, within an unfolding smooth space perforated only by the infinite succession of the linkages of non-places.19 Roads like Freeway One in Melbourne are synonymous with displacement, power and the crisis of place and Miller’s work occupied a site whose history was composed of a series of exclusionary geographies. The Grasslands Project suggests a reinstatement of a sense of place and time that was destroyed with the eroding processes of modernity and colonialism. The installation reconceptualized space – not as a field within which points are mapped, but as a plane of affects and events reinscribed within the cultural and political.20 From the perspective of multiple glimpses from car windows on the elevated freeway, the work’s relationship with the viewer was disarranged. Seen consecutively at speed from above, like so many ‘lines of flight’, the installation was situated within brief and fleeting intervals of time where the growth of the grasses was literally and historically imperceptible from the point of view of the infrastructure of modernity.21 The work inhabited a Deleuzean fold where the relativism of the perception of space allowed for a diversity of sense, collapsing the multiplicities of space, place, time and history.22 The grasses, not just common grasses accidentally growing there but planted and in abundance, 81



can be perceived to have conceptually resituated time and simultaneously relocated space itself in a kind of semi-dislocation of time and space.23 Freeway One in Melbourne was effectively a representation of the European grid imposed on the Aboriginal bush where the spatial logic of colonialism excluded Aboriginal culture and rights. The process of land reclamation carried out by Miller which involved the clearing of the site of trash including a significant amount from a McDonald’s outlet situated nearby, was part of the process of making visible the hidden, repressed and the marginalized, those who, ‘banned’ from the city, invariably live in such in-between spaces: dirty spaces, junk tips and vacant land. Miller’s transformation and exposing of the land under the freeway drew attention to the forced reality of ‘fringe-dwellers’ – the variously displaced communities and individuals of the city and the landscape.24 The impacts of expanding and alienating civic urban infrastructures and their malevolent and noxious implications were the focus of Vauxhall Pleasure (2004) by Anna Best with composer Paul Whitty. This was a performance event staged for a single day at Vauxhall Cross, London, a busy and congested traffic interchange and vast roundabout adjacent to Vauxhall Bridge, where vehicles and pedestrians have to negotiate four lanes of traffic, a series of traffic lights and several subways. The artists’ 82

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Fig. 20. Anna Best and Paul Whitty, Vauxhall Pleasure, Vauxhall Cross, London (2004).

stated intention was to emphasize a relationship between traffic, pollution and gardens.25 Vauxhall Pleasure consisted of 50 professional singers who sang rearrangements of songs by the eighteenth-century composer, Thomas Arne to passers-by – pedestrians and motorists stuck in traffic or waiting for the lights to change. Vauxhall Cross forms part of the original site of the Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens, an eighteenth-century landscaped park in which Thomas Arne had been composer-in-residence. The songs in Best and Whitty’s work had originally been performed to audiences in the pleasure gardens. In Vauxhall Pleasure the singers sang in relays in different shifts: singly, in duets or in groups of four or five, arranged to correspond with the traffic light sequences that regulate the routes to and from Vauxhall Bridge and around Vauxhall Cross. The singers were ‘conducted’ by the lights, which in turn provided the conditions for the audience – the pedestrians and motorists.26 The roundabout, it has been suggested, is an interruption into the fantasies of liberation promised by the so-called (and mythologized) pleasures of the open road.27 Historically, the road has been represented in culture as an idealization of space, but the gyratory system, essentially a

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Fig. 21. Anna Best and Paul Whitty, Vauxhall Pleasure, Vauxhall Cross, London (2004).

large-scale form of rectangular roundabout, is a way of forcing order onto the potential chaos created by the culture of the car. The world is increasingly witnessed from inside a moving vehicle and as Elizabeth Wilson has observed, the motorist has become the contemporary flâneur.28 Vauxhall Pleasure operated in the vacuum formed within a temporary limbo of immobility imposed by the lights on pedestrians and motorists (during the performance, motorists had an average of one hundred seconds to experience it or at least to come into proximity with it).29 It transformed the gyratory system as a place from which to reimagine Vauxhall Cross and invited reflection on the site’s relationship to history, as opposed to the act of driving, which, it has been suggested, is, contrary to expectations, merely another ‘spectacular form of amnesia’.30 Through Best and Whitty’s performance, Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens itself was evoked as a false memory, long since buried beneath the typography of capitalism in a site that has lost all sense of place.31 Vauxhall Cross is an empty, dehumanized zone where for the pedestrian, experiencing what has been described as an ‘evaporation of consciousness’ in such spaces, it is barely possible physically to negotiate a way around in this

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Fig. 22. The Grand Walk, Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens, engraving, c.1750. Guildhall Library, City of London.

wasteland of place whose coordinates can only be perceived from a map.32 Vauxhall Cross is essentially an environment of condensed urban anxieties and represents an example of the consequences of the modernist architectural vision of utopia as dominated by the motor vehicle.33 It is almost impossible to imagine that the area of Vauxhall Cross was once occupied by immense gardens designed for strolling, music and contemplation and that they remained in use for nearly two hundred years from 1661 until 1859. To consider and reflect on the site’s historical past is a possibility that has been all but erased by the disorienting and alienating effects of the overpasses, underpasses, concrete islands and searing din of the cars, motorcycles, buses and lorries that continually move in all directions.34 In Vauxhall Pleasure, the singers’ voices, were barely audible above the traffic, like the ‘voice’ of the pedestrian whose presence in cities across the world is increasingly being marginalized.35 In the seventeenth century, the Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens were popular with the upper echelons of society and were essentially the domain of the privileged class. As one of three pleasure gardens in London at the time, with its groves of trees, central area of gardens surrounded by rows of decorated ‘supper boxes’, architectural pavilions, lamp-lit walkways and live orchestra and other entertainments such as fireworks and balloon displays, 85


it was primarily a place of entertainment for upper-class men.36 Its expansion in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was part of the wider development of urban places of leisure in which social status was made visible through public and ostentatious expenditure.37 In The Theory of the Leisure Class (1979) Thorstein Veblen proposed that the display of ‘distinctive consumption’ (and waste) is motivated by the need to assert superiority of class and social status. The cycle of emulation and distinction, in which the upper classes seek to distance and distinguish themselves from the lower classes through various strategies of consumption, and the lower classes strive to emulate them, is what, according to Veblen, has driven consumerism from the eighteenth century onwards.38 This imitation by the subordinate group of the superordinate group (which in turn constantly adopts ways to differentiate itself from the threat of the subordinate group), is inextricably bound up with the development of consumer culture. In the contemporary world one of the primary ways this is expressed is through the car, around the construction of which are acted out meanings and strivings of emulation, imitation and distinction. The car provides the promise and opportunity of display and exclusivity in what Pierre Bourdieu shows to be important in the operation of the strategies of distinction.39 It offers ways to demonstrate subtle differences in good taste and ostentatious expense through public exhibition and driving and, invariably if not exclusively marketed as a form of leisure and power, is a mythologized, contemporary, primary site of pleasure. The demise of Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens, ultimately caused by the development of the new infrastructure of the expanding city (road and rail construction) and by industrialization (until the nineteenth century it was only accessible by barge), is merely a part of the historical process of the development of commodity capitalism and its essential underpinning, the commodification of leisure. Vauxhall Cross is an example of an alienating urban infrastructure that privileges moving vehicles and ultimately diminishes human experience. The car may offer possibilities for potential utopian moments, but is ultimately the site of public and private delusion. If the nineteenth-century Pleasure Gardens offered a dream world of desire and fulfilment, the car is the location of the contemporary dream machine. In our irrational belief in its promise of freedom and status, motivated by human drives and desires, we construct an illusion and fantasy that is, in actuality, the antithesis of freedom. Occupying the former site of the Pleasure Gardens, the 86

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geographic location of Vauxhall Pleasure also occupied a site of porosity in which, in an instability of its historic and economic boundaries, the past seeps into the present.40 What is concealed beneath and above the tarmac is not an Arcadian utopia within the city but an organization of space that represents the acting out of desire and distinction within the locus of capitalist commodity culture.41 These site-specific artworks relocate the garden, not as a contrived sanctuary but as a site in which environmental issues such as the implications of commodity culture; the impact of expanding urban infrastructures; the effects of mass production methods; and those concerning consumption and waste may all be examined. Against the cultural and historical constructions of the garden as Arcadia, they suggest that it is instead a possible locus for the consideration of global processes and concerns such as pollution, food production and the various social and material effects of expanding urbanization. Notes 1. Water as the most essential element for sustaining life and a reminder that it is widely incorporated into our bodies through plastic packaging is an indictment of our displacement from the world. For a discussion about concerns about the relationship between the private sector and water, see Bronwen Morgan, ‘Water: frontier markets and cosmopolitan activism’, Soundings: A Journal of Politics and Culture, vol. 28, Winter, 2004, pp. 10–24. 2. Urban Agriculture reflected geopolitical issues and potential conflicts. In Potrč’s view, ‘future wars will be fought over water, not oil and will be fought in cities’. Eleanor Heartney, ‘A house of parts’, Art in America, May 2004, pp. 140–3. 3. Mike Davis, Planet of Slums: Urban Involution and the Informal Proletariat (London: Verso, 2006). 4. David Crouch, The Art of Allotments: Culture and Cultivation (Nottingham: Five Leaves Publications, 2001). 5. Mike Davis, Dead Cities and Other Tales (New York: The New Press, 2004). 6. This is reinforced by other forms of ‘garden consumption’ such as the Chelsea Flower Show in London, where apparently ‘ready made’ gardens are on display. 7. Kathrine Kear, Flower Wisdom (New York: Thorsons, 2000). 8. In Buddhist mythology, the Buddha selected the lotus blossom to symbolize the effects of prayer, its leaves symbolizing the hands open in prayer. See Daisaku Ikeda, Katsuji Saito, Takanori Endo and Haruo Suda, The Wisdom of the Lotus Sutra: A Discussion (Mount Ranier: World Tribune Press, 2000). 9. Whether bought as cut flowers, purchased from garden centres or grown from seed, in terms of provenance. 10. Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments, translated by Edmund Jephcott (Stanford, Stanford University Press, 2002). 11. Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation.

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EXPLORING SITE-SPECIFIC ART 12. 13.

14. 15. 16. 17.

18.

19.

20.

21.

22.

23.

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Clement Greenberg, ‘Avant-garde and kitsch’, in Clement Greenberg (ed.) Art and Culture: Critical Essays (Boston: Beacon Press, 1961) pp. 3–21. In the construction of the rural idyll and the erasure of historical time Capability Brown concealed signs of human activity: ha-has were constructed to conceal fences and farm buildings, and sometimes whole villages were destroyed or screened from view to give the impression of an expansive landscape. Charles Quest-Ritson, The English Garden: A Social History (London: Viking, 2001). The work was there for two years, from 1995 to 1997. Mark Francis and Randolf Hestor (eds) The Meaning of Gardens (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990). Robert Fulford, ‘The lawn: North America’s magnificent obsession’, Azure, July– August 1998. In societies where the status of the lawn is measured in proportion to the scarcity of water, the ‘perfect lawn’ has serious environmental and social implications. In the USA, lawns occupy more land than any other crop and the toxic chemicals used by its industry represent a significant proportion of groundwater contamination. Miller once demonstrated that in southern California, a minimum of 220 gallons (830 litres) of water are needed to keep a five-foot by one-foot patch of lawn green for one year. As in aircraft travel, where all is done by the air stewards to give the impression of normality and that nothing is happening outside the window (Wilson, The Contradictions of Culture). ‘Space … stems from a double movement: the traveller’s movement, of course, but also the parallel movement of the landscapes on which he catches only partial glimpses, a series of snapshots piled hurriedly into his memory and recomposed in the accounts he gives of them. … Travel … constructs a fictional account between gaze and landscape. … There are spaces in which the individual feels himself to be a spectator without paying much attention to the spectacle.’ Marc Augé, Non-places: An Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity (London: Verso, 1992) p. 86. In Deleuzean terms, a way of thinking that mediates between chance and its continually changing outcomes and order. Adrian Parr (ed.) The Deleuze Dictionary (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2005). The installation can be considered as an event – becoming, transformative, unfolding and immanent: a space of encounter, rather than a spectacle encased by limitations. See Giles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, translated by B. Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987) first published 1980. It has been argued that we live in a world no longer based on geographical expanse but on temporal distance. The territorial infrastructure, which includes road networks, privileges movement over space and physical distance becomes a function of the speed at which space can be overcome. John Armitage (ed.) Virilio Live: Selected Interviews (London: Sage, 2001); and Paul Virilio, The Lost Dimension, translated by Daniel Moshenberg (New York: Semiotext(e), 1991). The work, sited within the political and cultural context of land and land rights in Australia perhaps only can be considered in a poststructuralist sense through concepts of folds, becomings, events, dislocation, being, difference and repetition.

THE GARDEN 24.

25. 26.

27. 28.

29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34.

35. 36.

37.

38. 39. 40.

41.

Aboriginal land rights within cities have historically been largely unacknowledged. Jane M. Jacobs, Edge of Empire: Postcolonialism and the City (London: Routledge, 1996). The clearing of the land can be considered a form of archaeology – what Benjamin called the (Westernized) myth of history as ‘triumphant procession’ and continuous improvement described and articulated within a sequence of ‘glorious events’ (see for example, Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, translated by Harry Zohn (London: Fontana, 1973). Artists’ statement, Anna Best and Paul Whitty. A research team from Imperial College, London measured the air pollution of the site using a specially adapted bicycle. Two 30-minute performances consisted of a recording of some of the singing at the site (with its traffic noise) accompanied by a live chamber ensemble playing the transformation of Arne’s ‘The Morning’ at Tate Modern, London in the same evening. Marc Augé, ‘Roundabouts and yellow lines’, in Joe Kerr and Peter Wollen (eds) Autopia: Cars and Culture (London: Reaktion Books, 2002) pp. 293–5. In London, a typical vehicle spends about a third of its time stationary. Ian Parker, ‘Traffic’, in Joe Kerr and Peter Wollen (eds) Autopia: Cars and Culture (London: Reaktion Books, 2002) pp. 296–306. The average time in London of a normal traffic light sequence. Ian Parker, ‘Traffic’. Wilson, The Contradictions of Culture. Baudrillard cited by David Pascoe, ‘Vanishing points’, in Joe Kerr and Peter Wollen (eds) Autopia: Cars and Culture (London: Reaktion Books, 2002) pp. 75–82. Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1961). As perceived, proposed and created by Robert Moses. See Le Corbusier, The City of Tomorrow and its Planning (Dover Publications, 2000) first published 1929. Fast, urban roads mean dirt, danger, noise and the complete absence of street life. Sandy McCreery, ‘Come together’, in Joe Kerr and Peter Wollen (eds) Autopia: Cars and Culture (London: Reaktion Books, 2002), pp. 307–11. There exists an organized pedestrian lobby in the form of the Pedestrian Society. Brothels sprang up around the area of Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens and some of the walks had to be closed during its history because of the harassment of women (Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens website). The 1822 Vagrancy Act, which controlled the movements of women in streets and other ‘public’ sites, restricted their use of public space. The Act defined the public realm as ‘any place of public resort’ where, at night, women had to give a satisfactory account of themselves. Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens was a commercial enterprise. In 1817, for example, the admission fee was three shillings and sixpence and its supper menu included a ‘minute’ portion of ham and two small chickens, which cost 11 shillings. Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1979). Pierre Bourdieu, A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste (London: Routledge, 1984). Walter Benjamin saw modernity as a persistent ‘going nowhere’ and warned against perceiving history as a linear progression. Thus, it is possible to be caught up within the four-lane, rectangular labyrinth of Vauxhall interchange and endlessly circulate without an exit. Vauxhall Gardens was ostensibly a stage whose users saw themselves as actors and spectators. Forms of conspicuously performed ‘hospitality’ were played out in its avenues and amphitheatres where people paraded. Its theatrical possibilities provided

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EXPLORING SITE-SPECIFIC ART its users with the illusion of being part of a prosperous, landed country property where people played at being in the country. The theatricality of places like the Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens depended on the complicity of participants since its country atmosphere had to be contrived through simulations of scenic effects (for example, ‘cascades’ made from tin and Gothic painted backdrops). Essentially it was a representation of ‘gardenhood’, which assumed participation of certain kinds. Author’s notes from John Dixon Hunt, ‘Theatres of hospitality’ at a conference entitled Vauxhall Revisited: Pleasure Gardens and their Publics held at the Tate Britain in July 2008.

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5. DEMOGRAPHIC SPACE _______________________________

The impacts of globalization and the international movement of people as part of contemporary economic or political diasporas have been significant in recent thinking about space.1 Changes in the demographic make-up of cities have been linked to worldwide migratory patterns of people in relation to the needs and effects of urban expansion, economic growth and conflict. Such features of globalization have impacted on issues of representation. This chapter considers a range of site-specific artworks that address questions of displacement, migration, inclusivity and identity. These artworks – a sculptural ‘mosque’ in China’s economic zone, an interactive digital installation in an underground architectural labyrinth in Brussels and photographic banners hung in various public spaces in an English seaside town – each address the juxtapositions of demographic space and the power relationships of place and their international contexts. Wong Hoy Cheong’s Minaret, Guangzhou, China (2006) was part of the second Guangzhou Triennial, which focused on the massive urbanization in the area of the Pearl River Delta in south China and the regional consequences of globalization.2 Built on the tower of the Guangzhou Museum of Art on the bank of the Pearl River with bamboo scaffolding and green construction netting, the work could have been mistaken for a mosque under construction. Illuminated from within by floodlights, Minaret emanated a dreamlike, translucent, green glow during the fading light of day, which became more intense at night. A pre-recorded Azan (call to prayer) was played five times during the day as part of the work. Minaret was located near the original site of the ancient Huai Sheng

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mosque in Guanghzou, built during the Tang dynasty (AD 1000) and considered to be the oldest in China. Its minaret ‘Guang Da’ functioned as a lighthouse for ships sailing into the Pearl River.3 Chinese Muslims, said to be descendants of Muslim merchants from the seventh to the fourteenth centuries were at the 2000 census estimated as numbering 9.82 million. Although other estimations of the number of Muslims in China vary between 10 and 100 million, according to recent Chinese government figures there were 20 million in 2007, or 1.4 per cent of the population representing ten ethnic groups. In a population of 1.3 billion, there are currently 56 ethnic groups officially recognized by the People’s Republic of China of which the largest is Han Chinese (or 91.6 per cent of the population of mainland China).4 The proportion of China’s remaining (minority) groups represents 8.4 per cent of the population (more than 106 million people) which include Manchus, Mongolians, Huis and Tibetans.5 Such ethnic minorities as Tartars, Uygurs, Uzbeks, Hasaks and Taziks belong to the larger group of ethnic Hui Chinese.6 As a non-Muslim Chinese living in Malaysia, Wong’s interest in the position of Muslims in China was based on his identification with a minority ethnic group. As a visiting artist in China, he experienced parallel, but different issues of ethnicity, disenfranchisement and conflicts of ‘belonging’.7 Islam, the official religion of Malaysia, is represented by 60.4 per cent of the Malaysian population, where Muslims are mainly Malays. In 1949 the newly established People’s Republic of China, in an attempt to acculturate all ethnic groups to the dominant Han Chinese group, sought to eliminate all faiths. During the 1966–76 Cultural Revolution, Muslims were marginalized, Islamic schools and mosques were closed or destroyed and there was a call for the abolition of Islamic religious practices.8 Although after Mao Zedong’s death in 1976 religious freedom was declared in 1978 and mosques were mostly reinstated by the 1980s, in some areas of China Muslim activities remained restricted. The perceived threat of fundamentalism, demands from separatists and the fear of radical Islamist thinking infiltrating China from Central Asia, are amongst the reasons cited for the continued repression of Muslim activities in parts of China.9 Associated with a history of rebellion during the nineteenth century, Muslims in China have historically been held in suspicion and contempt and associated with racial stereotypes such as heartlessness, aggression and greed. Historically, Muslims along with other minority groups in China have been considered as living ‘outside culture’ and to be ‘outside’ Confucianism was viewed 92

D E M O G R A P H I C S PAC E

Fig. 23. Wong Hoy Cheong, Minaret, Guangzhou, China (2005).

historically as the equivalent of living outside civilization itself.10 The disparaging term for Islam in China is ‘jie jiao’ (‘the faith apart’) as Muslims have historically been the object of anti-Muslim sentiments and perceived to have no commitment to the country (and only to Islam and Arabia).11 Guangdong Province and the Pearl River are part of a growing economic 93


region and with the financial and service economy of Hong Kong, an emerging economic gateway for attracting foreign capital throughout mainland China. The Pearl River Delta economic zone, an area of more than 41,000 square miles, which includes Guangdong and five other cities, was, prior to the 1970s, predominantly made up of small rural farms. It is now the fastest growing part of one of the world’s fastest growing economies.12 After post-Maoist economic reform in the late 1970s, foreign investment prepared the way for the area to become a major manufacturing base for electronics, toys, clothes and plastics for export, accounting for up to one-third of China’s entire trade value. There is little dispute about the economic relationship between urban development and contemporary art and Minaret’s location on the tower of Guangzhou’s Museum of Contemporary Art, and seemingly therefore being ‘supported’ by it, insinuates an economic and cultural correlation between modern art and the infrastructures of capitalism. In Minaret, however, the museum was not the plinth for the artwork but the reverse: the work suggested an architectural embodiment of the disenfranchised and invisible labour of migrant workers on whom China’s economic growth depends. The Hui Chinese is a common term used to describe Muslims in China, but it is also used to refer in general to all ethnic and ‘non-Chinese’ by whose labour the urbanization of Guangdong, the Pearl River Delta region and China as a whole has largely been built.13 Hui Chinese, historically considered ‘outsiders’, are part of a community whose position in China’s economic development is largely fleeting, tenuous and transient. Minaret, effectively made up of a series of lines of bamboo scaffolding and transparent green construction netting, shimmered like a threedimensional drawing – insubstantial, illusory and indefinite. Surrounded by corporate buildings and new high-rise apartment blocks, it was made of the same materials on which the construction of its concrete neighbours also depended. Like an armature revealing the apparently tenuous material origins and construction methods of corporate signature buildings, exclusive apartment blocks and mosques alike, Wong’s work showed that the city is determined, not by the material and tangible elements of some economic utopia, but by its social, economic and cultural constituents. It inferred that what lies behind and supports the urban and economic development of newly industrialized countries such as China, India and South Korea are the armies of peripheral workers, a large number of whom 94


Fig. 24. Wong Hoy Cheong, Minaret, Guangzhou, China (2005).

are considered ‘outsiders’ with no rights, who make up the human infrastructure that supports urban growth and the global economy. Seemingly a construction site during the day and a glowing green spectacle at night, Minaret appeared in architectural dissension with its formal context. Impertinently being built right on top of the perfect 95


modernist white form of the museum (a sign of cultural power and privileged disinterest), it provoked and disturbed. The artwork’s apparently incongruous position presented an audacious ‘spoiling’ of Guangzhou’s skyline of contemporary abstract buildings – essentially the stage from which the city projects its cultural and economic aspirations, success and global importance. Dissonant with this architectural performance of power, the installation reasserted (and reinserted) Islam into its historical place within Guangzhou, considered by many as the ‘birthplace’ of Islam in China.14 Whilst scaffolding and green netting may be part of normal construction materials and methods, their use perhaps in the erection of a mosque challenged perceptions of Islam as being embedded only in historically archaic architectural forms. Minaret was a reminder that Guangzhou, like all cites, is determined, formed, made and remade, not by its ‘spatial prescriptions’ but by a series of interconnecting social, cultural and political processes.15 Guangzhou, formerly known as Canton, was the largest and only port in China that was open to foreign trade from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century. Romanticized eighteenth and nineteenth-century representations of Canton through diaries, published articles, drawings, paintings, accounts of everyday life and photographs by Europeans and Americans formed the perceptions of China as a whole for the West.16 The gardens of Canton, for example, were the model for Willow Pattern chinaware. Ivory, tea, fans, sandalwood, figurines and embroidered silk, exported from Canton to Britain, fuelled a fascination with so-called ‘chinoiserie’. The landed gentry had special rooms devoted to all things ‘Chinese’ and Brighton Pavilion, built in 1787 is a monument to the ‘Oriental’ style.17 This reduction of an ancient and complex civilization to limited generic forms was part of the commodification of place in which representations of China reinscribed it as part of ‘the Orient’, a cultural and geographical ‘territory’ claimed by Europeans.18 Journals, fiction, drawings, historical accounts of Canton written by Europeans for the West were all part of a process of psychic mapping through which ‘the Orient’ became an integral and surrogate part of European material civilization and culture. Romanticized scenes, exotic beings and haunting landscapes were all Western techniques of representation that made ‘the Orient’ visible. It was essentially a Western style, in which the West could dominate and restructure the ‘non-Western’ parts of the world (‘the East’) and against which the West perceived itself in terms of the ‘other’.19 These representations of China were part of a discourse 96


produced and managed politically, ideologically and culturally and from which representations of Islam in China have been largely absent or invisible. Minaret was a reminder of the historical and contingent cultural configurations that have excluded Chinese Muslims, raising issues about the representation of Islam in a post-9/11 world, Islamophobia and the ostracism of Muslims.20 Minaret, a magical object, intriguing, compelling and mesmerizing, was a beacon for the historical presence of Islam in China and the ideological fragility of concepts of the other.21 Historical migrations and the utopian project of the global city were issues inherent in Langlands and Bell’s, Plunged in a Stream, an interactive digital installation located in the archaeological remains (now underground) of the old structures and rooms of the original building of the Coudenberg Palace, Brussels in April 2005.22 Like Minaret, the installation evoked consideration of the hidden labour behind urban growth and the global economic and political power of the city and its demographic aspects. A digital reconstruction of the underground passageways of the medieval palace was projected against the walls of its niches, cellars and vaults and virtually reproduced the labyrinthine spaces of the eleventhcentury castle, which are all that remains of the Coudenberg Palace. Badly damaged by fire in 1731, it was pulled down and the site levelled off for the construction of a new royal district. A series of archaeological digs between 1995 and 2000 carried out in the area revealed a series of lower rooms: cellars, cesspits, lower chambers, the lower level of a banqueting room with vaulted ceilings, a chapel, kitchens, warehouses supported by octagonal pillars and arches, stairways and corridors and a section of a medieval street.23 Through Langlands and Bell’s installation, several viewers simultaneously could virtually navigate their way through the ancient brick corridors of the palace in an uncanny reflection of the real medieval architectural space. The buried River Senne, which once flowed through the city, was effectively reconstituted into the corridors of Langlands and Bell’s work, where it could be seen flowing and shimmering under metal grids in the floor; reflecting flickering shadows and light; splashing in shining veils of water or heard dripping down walls. ‘Talking heads’ of 16 Brussels residents recited in Flemish and French the names of the city’s streets, under some of which the River Senne once flowed. These heads eerily floated ghost-like in their virtual world, suddenly appearing and disappearing, alarmingly in the distance, streaming past or in close up – sometimes lifelike, sometimes 97


transparent, sometimes drained of colour – whilst the blue name plaques of the streets hovered momentarily against the walls or hung suspended in space, before dissolving.24 The silent underground passageways of the former Coudenberg Palace were filled with the sounds from this parallel world of rushing water and the continual chatter and whisperings in French and Flemish of the Brussels’ street names. The community of ‘Broekzele’ (‘village of the marsh’) was established beside the River Senne in the sixth century and the river was historically the main waterway of Brussels industry, supporting dye shops, mills, tanneries, breweries, factories and domestic homes. Covering the river were buildings and roads, erected as part of a late nineteenth-century urban renewal programme to transform the densely populated lower part of the city into a centre for business and commerce. In the bricking over and diverting of the river, Brussels’ small-scale manufacturing industries were gradually replaced by those of finance, retail, banking and publishing. Sections of the lower city were expropriated, forcing significant numbers of the disenfranchised population into the suburbs.25 Numerous alleys and dead ends were eliminated in favour of wide, straight boulevards where parallel underground tunnels and drainage pipes were constructed to accommodate the heavily polluted river. Former docks and quays were eliminated and the workingclass area of Marolles was decimated by further nineteenth- and twentiethcentury building, slum clearance and urban relocation programmes.26 Patterns of immigration to Brussels have changed radically since the nineteenth century when mostly skilled workers came from the Netherlands, France, Britain and Germany: more recent immigration has been from Africa, Poland and Russia. The ‘Lower Town’ has historically had a high concentration of immigrants including Polish Jews in the 1930s. An economic boom of the 1950s brought an influx of Italian, Spanish and Portuguese immigrants to the area and from the 1960s onwards, people from the former Belgium territories of Rwanda, Congo and Burundi migrated to Brussels.27 Government agreements with former Yugoslavia, Morocco and Turkey supplied labour to support the urban expansion. The 2001 census showed that 21 per cent of the population of Brussels was classified as Polish. It has been suggested that Polish immigrants make up the largest element of the illegal workforce.28 In addition, the city’s official population is comprised of significant numbers of people from outside Belgium, namely from other European and non-European countries. The European Commission, the European Parliament and NATO also 98


Fig. 25. Langlands and Bell, Plunged in a Stream, Coudenberg Palace, Brussels (2005).

employ large numbers of people from across Europe: about 400 new personnel are required in Brussels for each new member state and over 21,000 employees of the administrative organs of the European Union are based in Brussels.29 In addition, the historical Flemish/French language divide in Belgium, created largely along class and economic lines, which drew a frontier from west to east across the country in 1962, effectively created three segregated regions – the Flemish-speaking north; the Walloon, French-speaking south; and bilingual Brussels.30 The use of language is heavily regulated: all written forms, including street names, government documents and speeches in parliament must be in both French and Flemish; government press conferences must have questions and answers repeated in both languages. Originally a fort, the palace in the eighteenth century was the headquarters of the central institutions of the Low Countries and housed the Council of State, the Privy Council and the Council of Finance. These employed large numbers of people: members of the nobility, finance experts and secretaries, ushers and clerks. Reflecting Walter Benjamin’s concept of the archaeology of the city, Langlands and Bell’s installation

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proposed relationships between the archaic and the modern and the social and historic convolutions of the past with urban space. Plunged in a Stream was an interplay of the ‘texts’ of the city through a series of fragments that included migration, conflict, colonialism and displacement. Walter Benjamin saw the city itself as a labyrinth of social and personal histories in which the fluidity of the everyday life of ordinary people was dispersed and enacted.31 A contemporary mapping of the River Senne above and below ground in Brussels would show circular and looping connections, disconnections and reconnections, some of which are the redirected flows of its many tributaries. Plunged in a Stream reverberated Benjamin’s archaeology as unconfined, incomplete and unstable. For him, the labyrinth was a critique of the myth of progress and Plunged in a Stream illustrated the circuitous processes and socio-economic networks, the comings and goings and convoluted interrelationships behind the global city. It alluded to the multiple conflicts behind modernity, including those lived out on a daily basis in the absurdities of the regulated, bilingual Brussels in its street names, phone books and forms of government bureaucracy. The work, as a series of sensations, proposed the maze-like implications behind the urban ‘utopian impulse’ of Brussels as the perceived centre of governance of a network of (at the time) 25 European states and as a city historically built on immigrant labour. Like the reader of Benjamin’s Passagenwerk (Arcades Project) the viewer of the interactive Plunged in a Stream meandered through its texts, negotiating their way through, and being amazed by, montages of street names, sounds and spaces that gave fleeting moments of recognition. Unnerving and disquieting, the installation drew the viewer through an unsettling parallel world in which whispering avatars appeared and disappeared, constantly and randomly changing.32 Like a fairground ghost train that uses the elements of surprise, the faces suggested the past that continually haunts the present, imbuing the space with the semi-tangible presence of the city’s historic cultural and political communities. In Plunged in a Stream, a series of interconnections and spaces were brought together and drawn apart in temporary alignments, exclusions and inclusions, inviting reflection on the communal and social diversities and connectivities of Brussels and on the issues behind the economic and cultural restructuring of world cities generally. In the 1960s, as a result of the establishment in Brussels of the headquarters of the European Common Market, the city was reinvented as an 100


Fig. 26. Langlands and Bell, Plunged in a Stream, Coudenberg Palace, Brussels (2005).

international city.33 Since then, its position has moved from being a largely provincial place to a global centre of governance and administration and a site of influence within a series of international networks and interconnections. In Brussels, like other globalized cites, the increasingly precarious situation of large groups of people is reflected in the growth of homelessness and in unstable and exploitable forms of employment.34 The burying of the River Senne and the subsequent demise of manufacturing to make way for a city of business and commerce and a world centre for banks, administration and government led to a parallel growth in Brussels’ service industries. The increase in the number of hotels, restaurants and bars inevitably results in more low-wage jobs and less unionization, and more forms of instability for the city’s temporary workers in the service sector. The talking heads of Plunged in a Stream can be considered to represent those behind what Benjamin described as the ‘wish images’ of urban utopia and the making and unmaking of networks, flows and relationships. As de facto capital of the European Union, Brussels arguably represents the hub of the European Union’s stated aims to protect and develop the economic and 101


social rights of people and to promote social progress. European policy on human rights concerns issues such as migration and discrimination and the formal and conceptual folds and networks within Langlands and Bell’s work suggested a series of underlying communal conflicts: of language, increasing ethnic ghettoization and the often precarious situation of many of Brussels’ residents, many of whom may be economic migrants. If Plunged in a Stream was about finding a way of representing people to each other, it also provoked reflection on the contemporary European city where social and economic networks are increasingly dependent on the dispersal and flows of international labour. Issues of migration and belonging and concepts of ‘community’ were raised in Wendy Ewald’s work, Towards a Promised Land, sited in Margate in 2005.35 The project involved 22 children and young people who had arrived in Margate from various places across the world including Egypt, Angola, Belarus and the Sudan and other countries affected by war or political upheaval, or who had come to Margate as a place of refuge from domestic crisis or disruption from other places within the United Kingdom. Ewald’s black and white photographic portraits of the children were hung as large-scale banners and installed in various public places across the town. Photographic banners of selected valued objects that the children had brought with them to the UK were displayed at the same scale adjacent to their portraits. There were also photographs of the back of the children’s heads with (Ewald’s) hand-written texts drawn from extracts spoken by them, superimposed and sometimes placed alongside the portraits or shown separately. In 2005, 15 portraits were initially hung along the sea wall, then later in a range of other locations throughout Margate, including the old Dreamland funfair, the exterior of a cinema, a fish and chip shop and a public library. Over a period of 18 months, Ewald photographed the young people and interviewed them about their experiences and taught them to take their own photographs. In researching the project, in the process of deciding its direction and with whom to work, she visited schools, mosques and other institutions. The possibilities she said, were ‘overwhelming’, for she identified more than ten different possible groups of young people. She finally decided that the focus of the project would be to concentrate on the concept of ‘what it is for kids to start their lives over’.36 Ewald identified four groups of children who defined this matrix from four institutional sites: a primary school and secondary school (where pupil turnover was 50 102


Fig. 27. Wendy Ewald, Towards a Promised Land, Margate (2005).

per cent per year) and two centres that housed people seeking asylum in Britain and others subject to immigration control, one of which was for unaccompanied minors.37 All the children and young people had arrived in Margate weeks, months or even more than two years earlier, all having escaped (and it may be assumed, still experiencing) different forms of crisis. 103


The majority were living in temporary accommodation centres awaiting the results of asylum applications and, in some cases, had been there for up to two years.38 To enable visibility to the marginalized, to articulate presence for those who have no voice, to give value to those devalued by racism and prejudice, to raise issues of asylum, dislocation and belonging, are the utopian subtexts of Ewald’s project. In its attempt to resolve issues of exclusion by installing the banners in sites perceived to be publically visible across town such as the gable-ends of houses, the exterior of the funfair, above the bingo hall and the sea wall, Towards a Promised Land failed to take into account the complexities of the experiences of forced migration and the power relationships of place. ‘Making visible’ as a strategy of inclusion presupposes a perceived polarity of ‘us’ and ‘them’ and has implications of ‘othering’ based on assumed concepts of ‘community’ as a notion of fixity, sameness and belonging.39 The construction of ‘otherness’ connotes a fixed order, in place and in what is already known.40 Towards a Promised Land inferred assumptions about defining aspects of ‘community’, placing issues of displacement and locatedness as two opposing terms articulated by the ‘community’ of Margate and those ‘outside’ it. It came dangerously close to (if not actually instilling) reinforcing stereotypes and re-entrenching fear and hatred. The parameters of Towards a Promised Land (as part of a wider Artangel project, The Margate Exodus) had been mapped out by Ewald and Michael Morris, the director of Artangel in New York in 2003. Margate had been perceived as ‘a place of refugees’ and Ewald had envisioned working with uprooted children through ‘their common emotional experiences’.41 This was a project, however, that contested its own defining parameters. Although Ewald describes four different ‘groups’, the children fell largely into two constructed categories – ‘asylum seekers’ and children from the UK whose arrival in Margate arose from some form of domestic upheaval. Towards a Promised Land attempted to establish a commonality between these two groups whose key defining features were displacement and loss, but in the process it also created false categories based on the construction of a binary paradigm of ‘British kids’ (from the schools) and ‘asylumseeking kids’ (Ewald) from the removal centres, betraying a need to not contest but to taxonomize ‘otherness’. Grouping together ‘asylum-seeking’ kids (assumed ‘non-white’) with kids from within the UK (assumed ‘white’), may have been a strategy to confront perceptions of ‘us’ and ‘them’; however, it was based on 104


simulations of ‘difference’ as well as perceived fixed, defining and preconceived categories of ‘community’. Towards a Promised Land located the children in already recognized situations of ‘unbelonging’, based on discourses of ‘community’ and presumed, related concepts of boundedness. It adopted conjectures about the ‘migrant’ as an excluded ‘other’ existing ‘outside’ the borders of a mythical, stable community of place (where ‘we’ live). Yet, conversely in the process, it exposed this fragile and spurious concept as one that is continually reconstructed through racism, misogyny and violence in a town that had been associated with economic decline and urban decay and where perceived ‘outsiders’ are seen to represent a threat to notions of national identity and fantasies of cultural unity and where there have been reported racist attacks. Thus, Towards a Promised Land reestablished ‘otherness’ by implication, reinforcing oppositional concepts and boundaries of exclusion as well as the constructions of marginalization. It is evident that Towards a Promised Land saw issues of ‘difference’ as collapsed in terms of polarizing concepts of inclusion and exclusion, distance and proximity. The work’s strategy of integration was assumed as spatial and was literally and simplistically played out by displaying the photographic banners in various places throughout the town. Based on the assumption that the ‘you’ is produced and separated from the ‘we’, what lay behind the work was an implied acceptance and reinforcement that the ‘outsider’ is figurable and identifiable through various modes of recognition through which he or she strives to gain acceptance to imagined forms of ‘belonging’.42 Towards a Promised Land’s mode of representation in fact reproduced visual signs of ‘otherness’ and entered a pre-existing culture of open resentment in a town that still has annual National Front marches and in a county that attempted to ban civil partnerships within its borders.43 The term, ‘asylum seeker’ has long been associated with a way of defining and categorizing a ‘social problem’, with areas in the UK becoming linked to what has been called ‘asylophobic disorder’.44 As a place of recognized economic decline and social deprivation, the residing population of Margate’s is, perhaps, one of those that sees its already perceived fragile status subject to further erosion, fuelled by popular perceptions of ‘asylum seekers’ (the ‘lowest of the low’) being granted what may widely be perceived as preferential access to housing and commodities. Towards a Promised Land failed to recognize that representations of the body are always inscribed within relationships of power. Abdulrazak Gurnah, in the catalogue to the work, described the violence of repeated 105


attacks to which some of the images were subjected, all of which were of young women. In its myopic agenda to ‘make visible’, Towards a Promised Land subjected its participants, as objects, to the misogynist and racist gaze of the street in another form of displacement. For example, apparently without regard to data protection law the subjects were referred to by name in the catalogue. ‘Z’s’ portrait and a banner showing some of her treasured possessions, including a book on the basic principles of Islam, were firebombed after the 7 July bombings in London. ‘G’s’ portrait was paint bombed with red paint and ‘R’s’ was chalk bombed. Although restored several times and re-erected, their images were repeatedly, similarly erased and as individuals they were subjected to the experience of vicarious violence and repression (from which they were originally fleeing) within a new geography of conflict. The violence done to these three images (and by implication to the individuals concerned and beyond), demonstrated the perceived ‘threat’ posed by the despised ‘stranger’ and their access to perceived structures of power. In the case of ‘G’, for example, this ‘access’ was through language and visibility – the superimposed text placed on her photograph by Ewald asserted: ‘I just talk and talk for England.’ The ‘recognition’ given to her and to the others via their monumental portraits provoked a subsequent ‘need’ for them to be silenced. Issues of exclusion involve the concept of who is permitted a voice and who is not, which Ewald’s superimposed texts on all the portraits perhaps attempted to address. According to Jacques Lacan, ‘woman’ establishes the boundary of what can be tolerated and is ‘kept at bay’ through various processes of exclusion.45 In Lacanian terms, ‘Woman’ is always outside the frame of the symbolic, ‘outside language’ (and therefore power) and part of those denied a ‘voice’.46 Towards a Promised Land highlighted issues of positionality – who is speaking about what and for whom and from what perspective? Whilst Ewald’s stated approach was to identify common experiences she hoped ‘might cut across the divisions of race, faith, politics and circumstance’, this strategy denied the complexity, diversity and heterogeneity of the many experiences of migration.47 Ewald’s strategy, in denying the complexities of the forces at play in terms of migratory experience, issues of representation and the power relationships of place, failed to address the problems it posed. Migrants inhabit a complex ‘diasporic space’, defined and conceptualized by Avtah Brah as a confluence of economic, political and cultural processes that cannot be reduced to universal elements.48 By collapsing experiences 106


Fig. 28. Wendy Ewald, Towards a Promised Land, Margate (2005).

and through its naïve and simplistic agenda to find common ground, Towards a Promised Land, in the attempt to explode one category, created another essentializing one of difference and exclusion. The work, in its stated desire to ‘cut across divisions’, created a separately polarized, homogenous ‘group’ that shared a false set of defining characteristics. The 107


work therefore failed to acknowledge that these ‘features’ could not be represented in an unproblematic way. Far from eliminating divisions of religion and politics, Towards a Promised Land reinforced them. For example, in the photographic portrait of a boy from Northern Ireland, one banner displayed, billboard-size, a photograph of a glove printed with the words, ‘the Red Hand of Ulster’, which was hung on the walls of the old funfair, under the sign ‘Dreamland Welcomes You’. An enlarged photograph of the face of its owner next to another banner photograph of the back of his head had the superimposed text, ‘My Dad said that he was wanting to leave because it was trouble over there. Fighting, windy bricking, all sorts.’49 In the context of an uncritical methodology (perhaps in the interest of ‘objectivity’), this could be perceived as a reinforcement or even an endorsement of sectarianism in Northern Ireland. An image of the ‘Red Hand of Ulster’, far from being a child’s innocent toy and a value-free image, occupies a sinister signifying category of violence, discrimination and religious bigotry. Towards a Promised Land chose to disregard the complexities of the issues of migration, belonging and identity it raised because it was based on uncontested concepts of social exclusion and ‘community cohesion’. This approach betrayed an over-determination in establishing categories of difference. In siting large-scale photographic banners of ‘portraits’ of young people in public places, it applied a preconceived strategy that had been used in the past in other locations to ‘deal with’ questions of exclusion.50 In a large-scale cut and paste exercise, the work seemingly took no account of its particular issues of representation – for example, the demonization of refugees by the tabloid press as scroungers or would-be terrorists.51 Towards the Promised Land appears not to have considered the power relations inherent in systems of representation with regard to constructed categories of ‘otherness’, and the impact this may have on real lives.52 To some extent, it reinforced the way a migrant is positioned as an outsider to an imagined community and the violent response subsequently directed to some of its images is evidence of how the work demonstrated a presupposed threat of the ‘other’. Irene Gedalof argues that the very term ‘asylum seeker’ denotes a ‘mythical subject’ – a ‘sign of dangerous difference’ and a threat to a perceived national identity and a drain on public services – all of which find purchase in socially and economically deprived areas such as Margate.53 Towards a Promised Land failed to acknowledge the other sites in which it was situated and which constitute ‘axes of differentiation’ – the social relations 108


of racism, class and gender through which its images were perceived.54 It neglected to take into account its location within certain discourses and modes of representation that constantly locate the ‘other’ as an outsider, underlined by sets of social relations of power. The images of the objects belonging to the young people in the portraits – the South African flag, religious icons, football memorabilia, ‘designer label’ plastic bags, and so on, intended somehow to be ‘signifiers’ of identification, also occupied other signifying systems that needed to be considered in the conditions of their display. In asking its subjects to choose objects that would be shown banner-size in public places across town, Towards a Promised Land assumed coherent narratives of the self that could be unproblematically represented and that had only partially anticipated results.55 Its simplistic message – that these are real kids who just want to belong, failed to consider the complexities of the issues it skirted.56 Recent research on forced migration and refugees warns against defining representative samples of ‘asylum seekers’, as their experiences, the fluctuating rules of entry, the changes in immigration legislation and the conditions and circumstances of their own migration are so diverse.57 Social theorists have called for a multi-voiced concept of ‘the migrant’ that addresses diversity and contests its essentializing categories. Recent work has called for reconsiderations of the spatial and its modes of proximity such as globalization, migration and multiculturalism, all of which produce and reproduce the ‘outsider’ in different ways.58 In the light of new migrant flows and new forms of global exclusion and inequality, social theorists have also critiqued concepts of social membership and identity and shown that conflicting logics between that of identity and equivalence are manifested within calls for assimilation and integration.59 As has been raised elsewhere, the role of the artist in such projects as Towards a Promised Land is highly problematic.60 Without a critical theoretical framework informed by other relevant disciplines, artists working in such arenas work within a restricted field, but one that raises significant ethical issues and implications, including the use of the personal data of vulnerable young people.61 Towards a Promised Land actually reinforced paradigms of exclusion by polarizing constructed categories of ‘refugee kids’ and ‘British kids’, setting up a false distinction in order to then create a common ground – its preconceived objective. Someone asks ‘is this another grim image of Margate?’ as the black and white portraits of the young people stare out 109


from their various semi-derelict locations in Margate. Their expressions of fearful anxiety embodying what Edward Said described as the experience of the migrant: ‘the crippling sorrow of estrangement’ at the core of which is a deep sense of loss.62 The sites across Margate where the portraits were hung are themselves marginalized and manifest deprivation and disappointed desire – the run-down bingo hall and library, the neglected fun fair, the disused cinema and pub, all places of false hopes and fleeting escapism, now abandoned. The recent emergence of refugee studies in sociological enquiry reflects the radical changes in the nature of migration over the last 15 years – the experience of the migrant, their relation to place and in the constructions of ‘personhood’.63 Towards a Promised Land was, if anything, an opportunity to examine the issues and problematics of constructed narratives about the self and perceptions of place for those fleeing conflict, instead of a way to reinscribe and represent preconceived concepts of identity or struggles for inclusiveness. The subject of Towards a Promised Land, however, was not to explore or contest categories of inclusion and exclusion, or their issues of representation, but had a wider agenda known perhaps only to Ewald and Artangel. These site-specific artworks raise questions about relationships between representation and space in the context of global migration and the changing nature of ‘demographic space’. The historical and contemporary movement of people and the impact of space on power relations are the issues on which the artworks considered here are based and about which they provoke debate. They suggest that demographic spaces can be spaces of anxiety and conflict in which experiences of displacement, dissonance and dislocation are embedded within the historical and contemporary contexts of urbanization, globalization and culture. Notes 1. See for example, Avtah Brah, Cartographies of Diaspora (London: Routledge, 1996); James Clifford, Doreen Massey, John Allen and Philip Sarre (eds) Human Geography Today (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1999); Steve Pile and Nigel Thrift (eds) Mapping the Subject: Geographies of Cultural Transformation (London: Routledge, 1995). 2. As part of China’s ‘special economic zone’ and one of four areas in which capitalism is being developed, the Pearl River Delta has more than 100,000 factories. Naomi Klein, ‘Police state 2.0’, Guardian, 3 June 2008. 3. ‘Guang Da’ – ‘light minaret’ or ‘Tower of Light’, it had a beacon as a navigation marker for incoming ships. Valery M. Garrett, Heaven is High, the Emperor Far Away (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002).

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D E M O G R A P H I C S PAC E 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10.

11.

12.

13.

14. 15.

16.

17. 18. 19.

20.

Aliya Ma Lynn, Muslims in China, translated by Phyliis Lan Lin and Cheng Fang (Minneapolis: University of Indianapolis Press, 2004). Xiaowei Zang, Ethnicity and Urban Life in China: Routledge Studies on China in Transition (London: Routledge, 2007). Ma Lynn, Muslims in China. Artist’s statement for the Guangzhou Triennial, 2005. BBC website, 2008. In 2001 the China Islamic Association was set up by the government to oppose religious extremism (BBC website, 2008). The idea that ‘socio-political and religious-ethical tenets that bind the Chinese together do not apply to Muslims’ has been prevalent in China for generations. Raphael Israeli, Islam in China: Religion, Ethnicity, Culture and Politics (Maryland: Lexington Books, 2002). Confucian lore such as filial piety, which included that towards the emperor, was not part of Islamic belief and therefore Muslims were considered as potentially unruly (Israeli, Islam in China). Rural workers migrating to cities, massive foreign investment and economic reform have all contributed to China’s rapid urban growth over the last 20 years – in 1978 there were 191 cities and in 1999 there were 667. Aimin Chen, Gordon G. Lin and Kevin H Zhang (eds) Urban Transformation in China (London: Routledge, 2004). Although Hui Chinese is the term by which Muslims in China are popularly known, it is also not applied exclusively to Muslims, but also to Christians and Jews. Effectively Hui refers to ‘non-Chinese’ (Israeli, Islam in China). As it is situated on the banks of the Pearl River Delta where Muslim traders sailed into the city almost 1500 years ago. As has been shown, ‘The same shining towers can be seen as monuments to corporate utopia, or signs of marginalization and a whole range of things in between.’ Malcolm Miles, Urban Avant-Gardes: Art, Architecture and Change (London: Routledge, 2004). From the 1830s accounts of daily life from traders and Protestant ministers settled in Canton were published in periodicals. The chief superintendent of British trade, John Francis Davis, wrote The Chinese: A General Description of China and its Inhabitants (London: Charles Knights, 1836) and British soldiers, consular officials, ministers of religion and doctors also wrote personal accounts that were published in the West. See Garrett, Heaven is High. Garrett, Heaven is High. Edward Said, Orientalism: Western Concepts of the Orient (New York: Random House, 1978). Orientalism is a sign of European power over ‘non-Western’ geographies and a ‘will to manipulate what is different’. The Western imagination about the Orient is based on a ‘sovereign Western consciousness out of whose unchallenged centrality on an oriental world emerged … according to desires, repressions and projections’ (Said, Orientalism). ‘Neither the concept of the West or the Orient has any ontological stability.’ ‘Concepts of “The West” and “Islam” invent collective identities for large numbers of people who are actually quite diverse’ (Said, Orientalism) ‘a book about culture, ideas, history and power’ (Said, Orientalism, Preface to the 2003 edition). Wong Hoy Cheong, Minaret press release, April 2006.

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22.

23.

24. 25. 26.

27. 28. 29. 30.

31. 32. 33. 34. 35.

36. 37.

38.

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Processes of inscribing history and culture onto an ‘empty’ society are described in the ‘Orientalization’ of China in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, which parallel that of post-invasion Iraq, aggressively perceived by some Western governments as lacking democracy and inhabited by ‘the Muslim menace’. Plunged in a Stream was developed in collaboration with BT as part of BT Connected World Art, a series of site-specific new media art installations in Brussels and Madrid curated by the arts agency, Futurecity. A range of objects – fragments of sculpture and tiles, pottery, clasps, chamber pots, fish bones, seeds, shells, coins and books, animal bones, jugs, majolica, glassware and kitchen utensils – were found during the excavations. ‘Under the Royal District: another Palace. Tour of the archaeological site of the Old Palace of Brussels at Coudenberg.’ Guidebook to the Coudenberg Palace. The heads included those of ‘a Chinese shopkeeper, a Moroccan … those who have made Brussels what it is today’. Langlands and Bell, theEYE, (Illuminations, 2006) DVD. Since those displaced did not have the right to vote and did not pay taxes. Such programmes and strategies were part of the wider, progressive globalization of cites. Saskia Sasson, ‘Analytical borderlines’, in Anthony D. King (ed.) Re-presenting the City: Ethnicity, Capital and Culture in the 21st Century Metropolis (London: Macmillan, 1995) pp. 23–42. Belgium left the Congo in 1960 and Rwanda and Burundi in 1962. André de Vries, Brussels: A Cultural and Literary History (Oxford: Signal Books, 2003). Paul Kubicek, (ed.) The European Union and Democratization: Reluctant States (London: Routledge, 2003). The aristocracy in nineteenth-century Belgium was predominantly French speaking and it created a state in 1930 in which French was the official language. Francophile domination influenced the way the economy developed. There are French-speaking villages and towns in Flemish areas and vice versa and schools, political parties and culture are segregated along linguistic lines. Suzy Sumner and Loїk Molin, The Rough Guide to Brussels (London: Rough Guide Publications, 2006). See Walter Benjamin, One Way Street and Other Writings (London: New Left Books, 1979). In Benjamin’s writing (such as in the Arcades Project and other works), the reader is permitted moments of recognition but is largely left to his or her own devices. De Vries, Brussels. Saskia Sasson, Cities in a World Economy (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2006) first published 1995. The work, commissioned by Artangel with Creative Partnerships was a prologue to the event, The Margate Exodus whose themes were ‘struggles, expectation, disappointment and fulfilment’. Michael Morris, ‘Prologue’, in Michael Morris and Wendy Ewald, Towards a Promised Land: Exhibition Catalogue (London: Artangel, 2005). Wendy Ewald, Towards a Promised Land: Exhibition Catalogue (London: Steidl/Artangel, 2005). Immigration centres have evolved into varying terminologies and although not detention sites they operate as a means of controlling the movement of migrants seeking asylum. The Orchard Centre and the Nayland Rock Hotel.

D E M O G R A P H I C S PAC E 39.

40.

41. 42.

43. 44. 45.

46. 47. 48. 49. 50.

51.

52. 53.

54.

55. 56.

Ewald describes as a ‘strategy’ an approach she used in Richmond, Virginia (‘the capital of Confederacy during the Civil War’) in 2003–4, which involved displaying four-by-four millimetre photographic portraits of African-American students on ‘local buildings’. ‘The photographs marked the boundary between two communities’ and ‘stayed up without incident for over a year’ (Ewald, Towards a Promised Land). Despite the fact that the premise of the Artangel project, The Margate Exodus is of Margate as historically ‘a magnet for different kinds of migration by people from a … range of places both near and far’ (Michael Morris, quoted in Ewald, Towards a Promised Land ). Ewald, Towards a Promised Land. The ‘stranger’ represents danger and occupies ‘an ontological position outside received understandings of identity’ external to modernity’s belief in order and sameness. Sara Ahmed, Strange Encounters: Embodied Others in Postcoloniality (London: Routledge, 2000). Kent County Council tried to exempt civil partnerships taking place in Kent and the Bishop of Rochester has spoken publicly against civil partnerships and gay adoption. Derek McGee, ‘Getting “host” communities on board’, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, vol. 32, no. 5, July 2006, pp. 111–27. Woman is placed on the imaginary frontier between the rational and irrational: ‘a frontier marking off the Symbolic from what is outside it.’ Jacques-Alain Miller (ed.) Jacques Lacan: The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (New York: Norton, 1978). Stephen Frosh, ‘Time, space, otherness’ in Steve Pile and Nigel Thrift (eds) Mapping the Subject: Geographies of Cultural Transformation (London: Routledge, 1995) pp. 289–308. Ewald, Towards a Promised Land. Brah, Cartographies of Diaspora. Ewald, Towards a Promised Land. Ewald had worked on a project in Richmond, Virginia in 2003–04 with young people in ‘an African-American neighbourhood on the edge of a large predominantly white university’ and was ‘interested in … making my African-American students visible to the whole community around them. … I made huge portraits of them … and installed them on local buildings’ (Ewald, Towards a Promised Land, see note 39.) Alan Gilbert and Khalid Koren, ‘Coming to the UK: what do asylum-seekers know about the UK before arrival?’ Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, vol. 32, no. 7, Summer, 2006, pp. 1209–25. Gilbert and Koren, ‘Coming to the UK’. Irene Gedalof, ‘Unhomely homes: women, migration and belonging in discourses of migration and asylum’, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, vol. 33, no. 1, January 2007, pp. 77–94. Avtah Brah, ‘Thinking through the concept of diaspora’, in Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin (eds) The Postcolonial Studies Reader (London: Routledge, 1995, 2006) pp. 443–6. Ewald (Towards a Promised Land) stated that the reason the work was put up in stages was because ‘we didn’t know what would happen.’ Concepts of ‘home’ and ‘belonging’ are themselves constructed through narratives to create a cognitive space about self-identity and psychological social representations. The items on display in Ewald’s work are more about ‘how people construct meaning out of the past in the light of the present and expectations of the future’. War and

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57. 58.

59. 60.

61. 62. 63.

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violence are a particular ‘intertext’ for people’s life stories. Katherin Bek-Pendersen and Edith Montgomery, ‘Narratives of the past and present: young refugee’s constructions of a family identity in exile’, Journal of Refugee Studies, vol. 19, no. 1, 2006, pp. 94–112. This has been addressed in recent fiction, see in particular, Marina Lewycka, Two Caravans (London: Penguin, 2008). See, for example, Sara Ahmed and Claudia Castañeda (eds) Uprootings/Regroundings: Questions of Home and Migration (Oxford: Berg, 2003); Keya Ganguly, ‘Migrant identities: personal memory and the construction of selfhood’, Cultural Studies, vol. 6, no. 1, 1992, pp. 27–49; Gedalof, ‘Unhomely homes’; and Chantal Mouffe, ‘For a politics of nomadic identity’, in George Robinson, Melinda Mash, Lisa Tickner, Jon Bird, Barry Curtis and Tim Putnam (eds) Travellers’ Tales: Narratives of Home and Identity (London: Routledge, 1994) pp. 105–13. See for example, papers from the conference, ‘Multiculturalism, conflict and belonging’, Mansfield College, Oxford, 2007. See, for example, Trinh T. Minh-ha, ‘Not you/like you: postcolonial women and the interlocking questions of identity and difference’, in Karen A. Foss, Sonja K. Foss and Cindy L. Griffin (eds) Readings in Feminist Rhetorical Theory (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2004). This was in fact demonstrated by the attacks on the images, which had, it can be assumed, real and significant effects on the individuals involved. Edward Said, ‘The mind of winter: reflections on the life of exile’, Harpers Magazine, September 1984. Bridget Hayden, ‘What’s in a name? The nature of the individual in refugee studies’, Journal of Refugee Studies, vol. 19, no. 4, 2006.

6. TERRITORY AND LOCATION _______________________________________

Concepts of ‘territory’ and ‘location’ as ways of structuring conceptions of space are political, cultural, social and economic as well as geographical. This chapter reflects on a number of site-specific artworks in which territory and location are discursive sites framed by history, tourism or colonialism. Through a range of site-specific artworks in the East End of London; in a run-down English seaside resort; in the border zone of Nicosia; and in Newcastle, England, it considers the social and political territories of ethnicity, nationalism and gender in which forms of identification and aspirational desire are conflictually located. Concepts of locatedness such as ‘place and planning’, ‘near and far’ and ‘away, here … there’ have been ongoing interests in the work of Phyllida Barlow; in fact, her site-specific installation, Untitled: Demo (2005) in Studio 1–1 Gallery in Redchurch Street, east London may be one of her most overtly referential installations. The gallery consists of a number of small, linked rooms. In Untitled: Demo the first room was almost fully occupied by a series of sculptural objects resembling disproportionately oversized, highbacked wooden chairs painted yellow, black or red arranged back to back. Through a narrow passageway, the viewer descended two or three steps passing flat, painted wooden objects, apparently makeshift placards, leaning stacked against the wall as if hastily left there by their carriers; their red, viscously painted surfaces dripped down their handles. Reminiscent of filmic genres of science fiction or film noir in which the protagonist is taken into a concealed sanctum or control centre, curiosity led the viewer towards an enclosed, inner gallery space where two red painted, round, wooden table115


Fig. 29. Phyllida Barlow, Untitled: Demo, Studio 1-1 Gallery, Redchurch St, London, E2 (2005).

like objects seemed to be piled on top of each other. An outsized, unwieldy, paint-daubed, cupboard-cum-wardrobe leant precariously into a corner, its open ‘doors’ revealing an empty, dark interior. Mysterious (or monstrous) irregular, organic-shaped objects suggesting screwed up paper or something more sinister, rested on a high shelf, out of reach, close to the ceiling. Public demonstration is one of the most potent manifestations of social protest, synonymous with political struggle. To demonstrate is to make visible the interests of marginalized groups or issues, or to register resistance. The act of demonstrating reveals positionality about place and power and the assembling of large groups has been historically variously subject to legislative control.1 Studio 1–1 Gallery is situated within the boundary of London’s East End, between Shoreditch and Bethnal Green, north of Spitalfields and west of Cable Street. An area of multinational settlement, it is a cultural and social ‘point of confluence’.2 Historically, the East End has been framed in terms of Jewish, Irish and Bangladeshi immigration and fascist and racist activity.3 The concept of ‘territory’ and the importance of the struggle of belonging has historically been a focal point of political radicalism there.

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Fig. 30. Phyllida Barlow, Untitled: Demo, Studio 1-1 Gallery, Redchurch St, London, E2 (2005).

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The area has also been mythologized in terms of social reform, class struggle and anti-fascist solidarity and has an historical association with conflict and resistance, in particular the streets in the vicinity of Cable Street and Brick Lane. The 1936 ‘Battle of Cable Street’, which is widely perceived to be located within the politics of Jewish history and antifascism in the East End, was seen during the 1930s as part of the wider anti-fascist struggle in France, Germany and Spain.4 October 1996 marked the sixtieth anniversary of the confrontation between Mosleyites, antifascists and police in Cable Street where the organized Left, including Jewish organizations, refused to allow the passage of the British Union of Fascists into the East End.5 The Battle of Cable Street and the series of confrontations during the late 1970s around Brick Lane between the National Front and the Bangladeshi Youth Movement and anti-racism organizations locate the area within historically significant political crisis points.6 The political history of the East End as a site of conflict and consensus was suggested in Barlow’s Untitled: Demo in its play on order and chaos. As sculpture, the objects in the various rooms of the gallery appeared to be both carefully placed and violently or randomly discarded. The installation evoked feelings of the suspended moment in its sense of absent embodiment. In a tension of a post-apocalyptic quietude or the threatened emergence of further events, Untitled: Demo presented a mise-en-scène whereby the viewer had a feeling of privileged encounter. The rows of back to back ‘chairs’ (oversized and brightly painted) suggested both the absence and impending presence of their occupiers; the seemingly overturned ‘tables’ (if they were tables) could have been either stowed or hastily abandoned; the (apparently) empty cupboard/wardrobe implied the result of urgently gathered (or ransacked), incriminating files or papers. Behind the installation’s sub-textual narratives was a controlled choreography reflecting the disciplined organization and planning of political resistance movements and demonstrations.7 In Untitled: Demo the viewer’s gaze was directed like the filmic device of a tracking shot, collapsing the phenomenological with: the cinematic each space sequentially concealing, framing and revealing the objects it contained.8 The rows of ordered, chair-like objects in the first room countered the sense of frenzied abandonment evoked by the overturned ‘tables’ and stacked ‘placards’, unseen, but yet to be revealed in the next. Whilst these possibilities of revelation applied the methods of time-based 118


cultural forms such as film or theatre, they also evoked a Brechtian device of theatrical estrangement. As part of what he saw as the role of theatre as a potential weapon against fascism, Brecht developed a series of formal strategies to challenge concepts of reality where epic theatre removed the illusion of the stage to create a sense of estrangement in the audience.9 The apparent suspension of time that pervaded Untitled: Demo evoked the Brechtian distinction between the (epic) portraying actions (events that took place in the past) and the depiction of illusionistic events (those taking place in the present). By using various strategies of surprise and alienation, including the lack of naturalistic sets and the use of hard, white lighting and placards, through theatre Brecht implored his audiences to reject the rise of Nazism in Germany.10 In Mann ist Mann (1921), for example, simple chairs and trestle tables (and no stage) enabled Brecht to assert new ways for the audience to consider the relationship between the cultural and political environment.11 In Barlow’s installation, the containment of the ‘scenes’ set by the separate gallery spaces, the controlled passage of the viewer, and the implied suspended narrative all echoed strategies of Brechtian political theatre. Ironically, Brecht wanted his work to resemble an artist’s studio.12 Membership of the British Union of Fascists increased substantially after events in Cable Street in 1936.13 During the immediate postwar years, scores of street battles took place in east London including Hackney, Bethnal Green and Whitechapel, which included attacks and the defence of synagogues and Jewish property. The 43 Group, formed in 1945 by Jewish ex-servicemen and women ran a five-year long highly organized campaign to sabotage Mosleyite activity in London.14 Its members heckled the British League of Fascist meetings and overturned its speakers’ platforms as part of a planned strategy of general disruption.15 Since the 1930s, however, London’s East End has been located within the wider postwar international context of racism, neo-Nazism and the rise of the extreme right. It has been asserted that the rise of a ‘European New Right’ during the cold war provided the political climate for Thatcherism in Britain for 1979.16 In Europe, particularly in France, Germany and Austria, electoral support for radical and extreme right-wing political parties increased during the 1990s, reflecting the rise of ultra-right politics and infiltration by the new right into the democratic processes of Europe.17 According to some commentators, as ethnic conflict, anti-Semitism, right-wing extremism and new nationalist movements have continued to expand throughout Europe during the last 20 years, the extreme right has become an integral part of modern 119


European politics. In former eastern European countries such as Hungary, Latvia and Romania and other eastern European successor states there has been an advance of the radical right, where ongoing contested geographical frontiers and territorial boundaries afford opportunities for the promotion of its political rhetoric.18 The formal possibilities in Barlow’s work were reflected in the viewer’s uneasy encounter with Untitled: Demo. Her interest in the correspondence between implied or physical violence and the edges of things through cutting, slicing, sawing, breaking, mending and wrecking, was played out in the viewer’s experience of the installation in the evocation of anxiety and foreboding. Positioned on the periphery of apparent action, the viewer was invited to consider that to participate in demonstrations and acts of political resistance is often to risk life and freedom, to be potentially gunned down, blown up, slashed, coshed, knifed, trampled, arrested or imprisoned. The historical location of Untitled: Demo lay on the threshold between the antifascist past and the future and the threat of future terrorizing events. Far from occupying some historical hinterland, Barlow’s installation had, through an interplay of associations, significant contemporary resonances about concepts of territory and location. Yet, the rise of radical right movements has not been confined to Europe. It has been argued that globalization, ethnic divisions, new nationalist movements and the rise of fundamentalism have increased the potential for global instability and conflict over the last ten years. Within Europe, however, contested geographical territories remain the sites of significant areas of conflict. For example, in both the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus (‘Northern Cyprus’) and in the (‘Southern’) Republic of Cyprus, ‘lines’ have been established and perpetuated by those who dominate marginalized groups to their disadvantage. Leaps of Faith, a sitespecific exhibition in various places throughout Nicosia during 2005, was concerned with creating opportunities to discuss political, cultural and social issues in Cyprus and sought to focus on territories that had been marginalized through the dominance of nationalist diatribes there. Various artworks in the exhibition addressed issues such as gender and class, the ill effects of tourism, unregulated urban expansion, concepts of ‘development’ and the economic and sexual exploitation of immigrants. In Sejla Kameriç’s Crossing the Line, the artist painted a pink line at different points on each side of the United Nations controlled militarized ‘buffer’ zone that separates north and south Cyprus. The so-called ‘Green 120


Fig. 31. Sejla Kameriç, Crossing the Line, Nicosia (2005).

Line’ that cuts across Cyprus, including Nicosia, is a ‘no-man’s land’ of old tyres, oil drums and concrete blocks: an in-between space formed from the two parallel fences separating northern from southern Cyprus. The United Nations offices and the barracks of the UN Peacekeeping Force are permanently stationed there and have guarded and maintained it since 1964. For 29 years there were only two crossing points across the border, which is controlled by northern Cyprus and for entry into which permission had to be granted. On 21 May 2003, prior to Cyprus’s accession to the European Union in May 2004 and subsequent to demands from the Cyprus-based ‘EU Movement’, the checkpoints were opened by the northern Cyprus authorities. Queues formed and it took eight to ten hours to cross as people from both communities flocked to do so. In the first three weeks of it being opened, there were more than 350,000 crossings.19 Cyprus is situated within a triumvirate of geographies: within the legacy of its colonial relationship with Britain, between ‘Greek Cyprus’ and ‘Turkish Cyprus’, and subject to the interactions of patriarchy, nationalism and militarism, all of which marginalize women in different ways. Strategically located geographically, it has been invaded by foreign powers

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and its population subjected to repression and abuse.20 The ‘Green Line’ or ‘Dead Zone’ signifies a conceptual gap between various oppositional binaries where Cyprus’s gendered order is situated within various political and ethnic territorialisms that maintain the divisions between north and south.21 In the language of tourism, Cyprus represents itself through an idealized image of womanhood, yet the so-called ‘island of Aphrodite, goddess of love’ systematically silences women through its oppressive economic and social structures.22 Cyprus has been described as a land in which women live under continual threat of violence and potential ethnic conflict, where they have little control; these factors have characterized the majority of women’s lives in Cyprus for millennia.23 Images of Kameriç’s performance show her painting her line across the shadowy interior spaces of derelict buildings, where official signs announce the area as a forbidden zone. Painted along streets, through and across the ceilings and roofs of abandoned houses, up along and over walls and across overgrown gardens, Kameriç’s pink line drew attention to the fact that for the majority of women in Cyprus, the ‘gender line’, which subordinates women’s interests and day-to-day lives, runs through every institution, street, building and social interaction.24 Crossing the Line highlighted women’s subordinate position within Cypriot society as its other, hidden conflict. The fact that it was erased after a short time when it was discovered by the authorities (though traces remained for some time in different parts of Nicosia) says much about the current position of women in Cyprus. Some women’s lives in Cyprus may be moving from being defined by traditional to modernization, but the majority are still defined in relation to men and the masculinist structures of business, the military and the state.25 Men remain women’s reference points in a society structured through the family, motherhood and ‘compulsory heterosexuality’.26 In a country where there is no feminist activity that focuses solely on gender issues and where there is no social or political debate on abortion or rape, women rarely challenge the patriarchal discourse that pervades social and political life.27 There are no gender studies programmes at university level and no gender awareness programmes in teacher training.28 Given the absence of any organized feminism in an environment in which those women’s organizations that do exist are essentializing and reactionary, to ‘tell people you are a feminist – it’s almost like saying a swear word’.29 Contracted 122


marriages still pervade, women’s sexuality is denied and lesbianism is unthinkable.30 Kameriç’s pink line can be considered to reference the hidden, suppressed and unspeakable issues of sexuality in Cyprus. Any discussion on sexuality, eating disorders, AIDS and domestic violence is considered taboo, even between women, for such topics lie outside the cultural norms of acceptable behaviour.31 Crossing the Line marked out an imaginary space for the consideration of gender discrimination hidden within and obscured by the ‘Cyprus problem’, which, since the 1950s, has been defined within the terrain of ethnicity, nationalism and identity.32 Women’s organizations that do exist in Cyprus are invariably affiliated with conservative or communist groups that focus primarily on the issue of partition. Although the (southern) Republic of Cyprus has been part of the European Union since 2004 (the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus, established in 1983, is not internationally recognized), there has been almost no research on women’s lives in the south and very little is known about women in the north where the majority of the population live in isolation and poverty.33 Women’s day-to-day lives are located within the collective territories and social divisions created by religion, class, ethnicity, gender and language. The ‘Cyprus problem’ is perceived as a series of politically irresolvable differences in which the Greek Orthodox Church and Islam further enforce separation, rendering women invisible.34 If the Green Line is a metaphor for a divided society, Kameriç’s work was a plea for the recognition of women’s isolation and estrangement and the need for a feminist perspective. In Cyprus women are further subordinated within the contested domains of ethnic rivalry and division. Crossing the Line accentuated how they are situated within a confluence of socio-political and geographical territories that are inherently and historically gendered. The work marked out a space between gender and sexuality on the one hand and the conflict between national identities on the other. As a signifying order, it proposed a mediating space between the various territories of gender, nationalism and ethnicity. The space created by Kameriç’s line was a potential opening and threshold for change – an antagonistic space and transferable boundary in which order is ruptured and where the potential feminist subject is emergent. To be in it was to be literally and metaphorically crossing a line between spaces of resistance. Kameriç’s work situated a new area in its symbolic contestation of an existing ordered field of meaning that perpetuates the marginalization and the 123


invisibility of women. It marked out a dissident ground for what has been hidden and denied and negated – women’s experience within a territory of conflict. Concepts of location framed by tourism invariably resituate place as benign and free of conflict. Tourism as a form of ‘place reframing’ repositions perceptions of place as located in desire. Bay Windows by Vong Phaophanit and Claire Oboussier, which took place in Herne Bay, a seaside town in the southeast of England during the winter of 2006,35 ‘contained’ place within the terms of tourist commodity. Some 19 flashing and pulsing coloured neon works – the scaled-up reproductions of residents’ handwritten ‘dream holiday destinations’ such as ‘Hawaii’, ‘Fiji’, ‘Zanzibar’, ‘Tokyo’, ‘Cancun’, ‘Hokitika’, ‘Ecuador’ and ‘Interlaken’ were installed across the town in the windows of houses, on the walls of schools, at the bus and rail stations, in side alleys, in the windows of disused shops and on buildings on the seafront. Neon has been claimed as the vernacular of the seaside town: a kitsch signifier of desire and consumption and part of the promotional culture of advertising. The neon names in Bay Windows applied the technologies of place marketing used by advertising and tourism. The creation of the fantasy spaces of public amusements have been historically linked with electric lighting and neon lighting is a ubiquitous method of cultural signification and commercial seduction. It has been argued that tourism has reappropriated and transformed place into commodity so efficiently that names of places alone are enough to mark an alignment with desire circumscribed within the terms of tourist consumption.36 In a seaside resort the coloured neon signs of ‘Zanzibar’ (set in a side street), ‘Shangri-La’ (displayed in a private house) or ‘Ostra’ (in the window of a shop) could easily have been mistaken for the names of clubs, bars or cheap bed and breakfast accommodation, whose allure has been delimited to sites of consumption. In Herne Bay, however, a place once defined by the clichéd rituals of leisure but no longer a site of fantasy and fulfilment, the neon-lit names of ‘Hawaii’, ‘Cancun’ or ‘Hokitika’ and ‘Las Vegas’ displayed in the rain-slicked windows of a bleak community hall, an abandoned gift shop, a desolate bus station and a drab Victorian school reinforced the absence of bars, clubs or restaurants. In the context of the marketing strategies of international tourism and its implications of placemaking, the neon names of far-off countries scattered about the town effectively constituted a mapping of symbolized place and desire over the grim, rundown surface of an English seaside resort. Herne Bay, once a 124


Fig. 32. Vong Phaophanit and Claire Oboussier, Bay Windows, Herne Bay (2005). Image courtesy of InSite Arts.

‘dream destination’ but long since abandoned to the periphery, now shows signs of disintegration, which in Bay Windows was emphasized in the interstitial spaces where the work was installed. Bay Windows, in a little visited English seaside resort resonant with ennui in the middle of winter, evoked a process of poignant reflection – of time passing and the disintegration of ‘placeness’ in which the neon reinforced a sense of the increasing provisionality of place. Hawaii, a pink neon set into the window of a dreary 1970s community hall next to a poster advertising the ‘Barron Knights’ first farewell tour’, Equador sited in a disused Victorian chapel (now a storage depot for electrical supplies) and Fiji, mounted in the blank window of an empty first-aid room on the deserted pier, were a reminder that space is conditional and contingent on a range of unstable factors. Once a resort, Herne Bay is now a ‘has-been’ place, abandoned by the processes and technologies of tourism. In neglected, recommissioned buildings, the non-spectacle of Bay Windows emphasized the rupture between fantasy and reality, highlighting the false fronts and staged authenticity employed by the tourist industry. Simulating the fake space of ‘somewhere else’, the work projected a collective sense of exclusion from the desire-field of contemporary tourism and its systems of belief in which

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places like Herne Bay are located outside the ‘authentic’ as a tourist destination and its commercial production of place.37 Herne Bay, now abandoned by the more sophisticated tastes of contemporary tourism, finds itself heavy with time in a vacuum of distanciation. In its melancholy suburban environment, Bay Windows positioned the demise and disillusionment of the English seaside resort against the new idealizations of ‘international’ places. Such ‘imagined spaces’ are, however, often constituted from simplistic perceptions of place, segregated and distanced from real space. Essentially, they are symbolic sites in which realities are determined purely through representation.38 In Bay Windows the place names were literally ‘signs’ that marked out territories of vicarious experience and desire, signifying the aspirations projected by their writers. Hokitika, Barbados, Fiji, Tokyo and the rest were forms of what has been termed ‘status display’ in which place is reterritorialized into dreamworlds of desire.39 The intimacy of the handwriting reinforced the names as individual fantasized pleasure zones of fetishized ‘otherness’. As has been argued, naming one’s ‘dream destination’ is an expression of a claim to a territory of privilege, a way of ‘owning’ aspirational desire through naming, suggesting a requisition of access to the consumption of global cultures and places.40 In a world where space is continually compressed, accessibility to places further and further away from home (culturally and geographically) is a sign of the privilege of attainability, real or imagined. Tourism itself offers a field of possibility for opportunities to express economic and cultural status and the articulation of identity via consumption, situated within a wider international cultural landscape. In mythologizing the places they named as sites of fantasy, the neon signs revealed a process of exotic othering from the perspective of the suburbs.41 A significant proportion of the Herne Bay residents’ ‘dream destinations’ demonstrated tourism as a cultural form that is based on past colonial structural relationships.42 It has been argued that in Hawaii, for example, tourism is a direct legacy of colonialism with its service-based economy and inflated land and house prices.43 Early brochures, idealizing both Fiji and Hawaii to encourage settlement and tourism for the United States, Britain, New Zealand and Australia, described them in terms of the familiar, in language evoking the English coastline and landscape.44 Both Fiji and Hawaii are similarly situated in the imaginative, political and geographical spaces that have been determined by the contingencies of US or British foreign policy.45 In the nineteenth century, the USA’s colonial policy of annexation in the 126


Fig. 33. Vong Phaophanit and Claire Oboussier, Bay Windows, Herne Bay (2005). Image courtesy of InSite Arts.

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Pacific (which included the Philippines, Puerto Rico and Cuba), viewed Hawaii as strategically located in relation to China and Southeast Asia. Although geographically located 2000 miles west of the United States and 4000 miles east of Japan, through films such as From Here to Eternity and Blue Hawaii, its cultural proximity to the mainland has been reinscribed in the American imagination as a paradise accessible to all Americans.46 Although geographically located in Asia, Hawaii’s designation as an American state was the result of a process of cognitive mapping that resituated it as an appendage of the United States based on concepts of location that determined where it ‘belonged’ politically, culturally and racially.47 The incorporation of Hawaii as the USA’s fiftieth state in 1959 and its construction as a destination for tourism in the 1960s, formed central parts of the same process of the expansion of US territory that included access to international markets and political influence in Asia.48 United States’ postwar dominance as a superpower was determined by its creation of economic markets that are territorially unbounded rather than by the European model of territory-based colonialism. Bay Windows vacillated between being subsumed within tourism’s merchandizing of place and as a critique of those processes. Tourism marketing conceives of place as ‘consumption spaces’ of desire, replacing real space and events. It has been argued that place demarcated as tourist site renders it as ‘depthless’ and superficial where there is nothing beyond appearance.49 Mike Crang has argued that the fragmentation of the world by the mass media has deterritorialized space, which is now perceived as a series of scenes for which the practices of tourism are partly responsible.50 The images of tourism permeated via the mass media – television, advertising, film, newspapers, magazines, brochures and their interaction with other elements – are essentially texts that both conjure up and refigure site and structure experience. In Bay Windows, the neon signs functioned as textual fragments echoing this constructed, mimetic language of place. The manufacture of place through tourism and the strategy of placenaming as part of a colonial process of domination and authority over territory were features of Layla Curtis’s NewcastleGateshead (2005). A multiple in the form of a commercially printed folded map, 30,000 were distributed at various tourist sites and centres in Gateshead and across the UK.51 NewcastleGateshead was partly funded by resources remaining from Newcastle’s unsuccessful bid to be the United Kingdom’s capital of culture. Through the bid its regional identity was constituted as a ‘centre of culture’ 128


and the neologism of ‘NewcastleGateshead’ was created. Curtis’s work interrupted this construction of place by collaging sections of other maps onto that of the area apparently around the northeast of the UK. Rivers, counties, states, boundaries, towns, coastal territories and roads were variously graphically represented, suggesting different forms of space and territory. In NewcastleGateshead’s reconceptualization of space, ‘Northumberland Strait’ becomes a stretch of water between ‘Ohio’, ‘Hick’s Cove’, ‘Linewood Bay’ and ‘Skirmish Point’. ‘Protection Island’, ‘Northumberland Islands’ and the ‘Percy Isles’ appear as if break-away colonies in which places called Middlesboro, Whitby and Darlington, as well as marine parks and nature reserves, are located. The largest, ‘Gateshead Island’, lies apparently several miles to the east. In Curtis’s ‘map’, there are at least fifteen different kinds of places called ‘Newcastle’, including New Castle and North, South and East Newcastle and Newcastlewest, which are the names of large and small towns, counties, railway stations and airports. There are also several Heatons, Sunningsides, Shields, Hexhams, Durhams and Dudleys (as well as Dudleyville and Dudleytown) and places called Coal, Coal City, Coal Hill, Coal Creek and Coalmont. In NewcastleGateshead Newcastle replaces a spot where North Shields may have once stood, to the north of which lies Karlantijpa North. Sunderland and Washington are large swathes of apparently uninhabited green space and satellite towns straddle the Mississipi River, a geographical feature reminiscent of the Tees. This (re)organization of cartographic space as well as the appearance of a road from Alice Springs to Darwin (‘under construction’) and places called Fisher Hill, Kelley Stand, Sioux County and James Ridge Road suggest a remapped, hybridized spatialization of the UK, Australia and the United States. The other side of NewcastleGateshead shows another map and images of Newcastle, New South Wales. Situated 70 miles north of Sydney and founded in 1804 on the Hunter River as a penal colony, the area was exploited for coal and timber and is now Australia’s sixth most populated city and the world’s largest coal exporting port.52 In Curtis’s work, a colour photograph of a snow-covered wooden barn, ‘one of the few still standing in Newcastle’ is below that of Nobby’s Beach, the location, we are informed, of an alternative surf culture. The image of Nobby’s Beach ‘and Lighthouse’ is accompanied by a caption indifferently outlining its cultural amenities, as well as the distractions offered by ‘Nobby’s Breakwater’, a structure that convict gangs spent months dragging rocks underwater to 129


Fig. 34. Layla Curtis, NewcastleGateshead, UK (2005).

build.53 A list of regional highlights, festivals and events features Washington and New Castle as well as map references to Bogey Hole, the Kooragong Wetlands, Queen’s Wharf and Hunter Street Mall. An alphabetical index lists collaged-together place names in their original, diverse typefaces, including ‘Baltic Corners’ (one listing), ‘New Castle’ (29 listings) and ‘Wickham’ (nine listings) and their non-existent map coordinates. In the style of the ‘mythic geography’ perpetuated by tourist maps, the listings relate to points of interest, including ‘Rickshaws on the Foreshore’ at Newcastle, the ‘Newcastle Port National Maritime Museum’ and the exhibition, ‘This is Not Art’ at Newcastle. The practice of naming places in the colonized space after the colonizer was part of a process of orienting proximity between the colonized and the dominant power and a way to deny indigenous significance of place. The ‘old world’, associated with industrial placeness, and the ‘New World’ with the tabula rasa of empty space, fulfilled the geographic imagination of European idealism.54 As has been shown, the appropriation of place through naming reconceptualized space established the authority of the colonial power where place was regulated.55 Naming places was essentially a way to legitimize the processes of colonialism and to establish ideological and 130


cultural relationships and alignments.56 It was a form of place framing as well as a strategy of hegemonic ordering involving the erasure of space to reinvent the world from the point of view of the colonial power.57 The duplication of place names in the ‘New World’ also constructed a sense of universal history, suggesting a fixed origin centring on the colonial power as the organizing principle and where maps themselves were ways to sanction conquest and empire.58 This process reinforced spatial hierarchies of which maps were an integral part from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries. In Curtis’s map, the ‘presence’ of at least fifteen Newcastles and a number of different Heatons, Sunningsides, Shields, Hexhams, Durhams and Dudleys is an echo that suggests a compensation for the silences created by the territorial dominance of colonialism. As has been shown, maps are essentially ‘cartographies of power’ that expose cultural, ideological and political positions.59 Curtis’s map is a proposal of space, not as a fixed way of orienting ourselves, but as a way to consider a series of interlinking power relations.60 Although the front part of Curtis’s ‘map’ is an open deceit in showing a revamped coastline along which several ‘Newcastles’ are situated, tourist offices in Newcastle reported incidents of anger and irritation from people who attempted to use it as a map. NewcastleGateshead proffered a different process of cultural orientation, one that critiqued the relationship between tourist as ‘outsider’ and space as knowable, defined and an object of consumption. As an invitation to ‘think outside what we know’, it presented the map as a discursive text in whose margins we should read. NewcastleGateshead offered a way of criticizing space in its submission that perceptions of space be read as being linked to international power networks that are historically defined, implying that place is located within the territory of colonialism.61 There are places named ‘Newcastle’ in Western Australia, Ontario, New Zealand, South Africa, the UK, Northern Ireland, California, Seattle, New Hampshire, Delaware, Kentucky, Pennsylvania and Alberta, all of which have a postcolonial relationship to Britain. Newcastle, County Down, Northern Ireland, for example, is a seaside resort named after a castle belonging to the McGinnis family whose decline is attributed to pollution from sewage. In June 1973, Alphonso Cunningham and Pauline Kane, both members of the Provisional IRA, were killed in a premature bomb explosion while travelling in a car across the town. Such events foreground the conflictual colonial relationship between Britain and Ireland. 131


South Africa’s Newcastle is a small industrial, steel-producing town named after the British colonial secretary, the Duke of Newcastle in 1864. It was used as a depot by the British Army during the First and Second World Wars. Newcastle, near Seattle, Oregon was a coal mining centre in the late nineteenth century where the population of 7737 is now made up of 73.7 per cent white and 26.3 per cent Chinese, Japanese, Hispanic, Vietnamese, Korean, Asian Indian, Filipino and American Indian. Newcastle, Ontario (population 10,000) is situated 80 kilometres east of Toronto. It is located in the part of Upper Canada that existed until 1849 and that was formed in 1798 from the counties of Durham and Northumberland. Space, as Doreen Massey has shown, is where a heterogeneity of practices is situated within unfinished processes of interconnection.62 NewcastleGateshead contests the concept of the map as a stable signifier of space and locates what Homi Bhabha described as a ‘third space’ – a paradoxical geographic space that asserts an alternative heterotypography.63 Curtis’s work dislocated ontological concepts of fixed geographic place, revealing the potential for multiple sites of connectiveness, which, in turn, unfolded new possibilities. It exposed the pretence of coherence that maps propose in an assumed stability of space and uncovered the map as essentially a conceptual object. The apparent incoherence of Curtis’s map showed that space is made up of multiplicities of viewpoints, intersections, histories and alternative propositions. At once alarming and familiar, the names in Curtis’s map formed a juxtaposition of apparent order with disorder, showing that ‘games of truth’ are inherent in all discourses.64 The work showed that the map itself is a discourse of space and power where hierarchies of space are legitimized by systems and orders. They are essentially ‘topographies of knowledge’ linked with power and its organizing principles that deny any heterogeneous simultaneity. Mapping, as partly a process of linking social structures with buildings, landscape, towns and cities, denies the existence of alternative indigenous networks and spatial configurations.65 In NewcastleGateshead, ‘Karlantijpa North’ appears to the northwest of Newcastle. Karlantijpa, in northern central Australia is an area that is mapped in terms of its aridity, wind, sand formations and humidity.66 From a Western cultural perspective, the area appears boundless, empty, disconnected and placeless, only made sense of through a structure of grids that identify its history of geological surveys. Western concepts of space are continuously overwriting indigenous 132


people’s relationships to the land, despite more recent public acknowledgment of the colonial appropriation of place by reinscribing indigenous place names (albeit temporarily). In NewcastleGateshead conceptions of place were proposed as incomplete, variously situated and mutable against the authoritative fixing of the dominant, panoptic, ‘aerial’ gaze assumed by the map. The work presented relational space as a critical way of evaluating the spatial ordering assumed by ‘official’ maps. NewcastleGateshead suggested that maps are merely propositions to structure space based on a series of palimpsests that continually cover over alternative perspectives. The user of Curtis’s map realizes that there is no inherent stability in the world, despite the fixity of meanings constructed through the discourses of tourism. The ordering and structuring typographies of tourist maps and brochures deny conflict, contestation and discord in their smoothing over and rescribing of fractured space. Curtis’s map proposed that concepts of location and territory are marked by gaps, cracks and ruptures defined through processes of assimilation, domination and marginalization. The work invited a spatial rethinking that engages with processes of estrangement and severance as opposed to tourism as a process of affirmation.67 Whilst ‘getting lost’ through global travel has become an increasingly expensive and elusive commodity, Curtis’s work offered a different kind of disorientation of space where different forms of coherences can take place that are conceptually disruptive, contestable, transformative and radical.68 These artworks invite considerations of territory and location as a potential typography where the meanings of space can be considered. They resituate concepts of territory as political, historic and cultural, and issues of class, race, gender, difference and belonging are located within the various hegemonic narratives of the everyday. These works show that in the contexts of history and the invidious effects of tourism and development, geographical place can define divisive social, cultural and ethnic territories in which the hierarchies of space may be perpetuated, contested and challenged. Notes 1. During the miners’ strike in Britain in 1984 the Thatcher administration introduced legislation designed to stop secondary picketing and effectively banned the right of groups of more than six people to assemble. 2. The specific geographic area as has been defined by Geoff Dench, Kate Gavron and Michael Young (eds) The New East End: Kinship, Race and Conflict (London: Profile Books, 2006).

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4. 5. 6.

7.

8.

9.

10. 11.

12. 13.

14. 15.

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Historically, the East End of London has been a site of multi-locationality. In the nineteenth century the area contained a large population of Irish workers. Between the First and Second World Wars an Afro-Caribbean population grew around the dock area of East London. Tony Kushner, Nadia Valman (eds) Remembering Cable Street: Fascism and Anti-Fascism in British Society (London: Vallentine Mitchell, 2000). The ‘Battle of Cable Street’, which took place on 4 October 1936, is considered within the wider context of anti-fascism (Kushner and Valman, Remembering Cable Street ). Anti-fascist organizations included the Jewish Labour Council, the Jewish People’s Council and the Communist Party (Kushner and Valman, Remembering Cable Street ). After Cable Street, the Public Order Act of December 1936 increased the powers of the state and police powers and reduced civil liberties. When documents from the Greater London Council, which purported to promise housing to the Bangladeshi community, were leaked in 1978 an acrimonious public meeting took place in June. Several demonstrations followed in the streets around Brick Lane, perceived as Bangladeshi ‘territory’, after racist attacks on the local population. In August 1978 a National Front demonstration along Brick Lane resulted in what has been viewed as a scaled-down version of the violent events in Cable Street. Both of these events led to legislation that granted more power to the state and its representatives. Accounts of Cable Street reveal both, for example, the Communist Party’s level of organization on the day, which included the establishment of first aid posts and lines of communication and the impetuous involvement of local residents in opposing the British Union of Fascists. Simon Blumenfeld’s 1987 play (a ‘piece of agit prop theatre’) presented the battle as an orchestrated military operation (Kushner and Valman, Remembering Cable Street). For a discussion of the viewer’s cinematic experience as an alternative to the perception of sculpture as self-contained stable objects, see Alex Potts, ‘Installation and sculpture’, Oxford Art Journal, vol. 24, no. 2, 2001, pp. 5–23. Erwin Piscator considered theatre a powerful tool for political awareness. His ‘proletarian theatre’ of the 1920s took theatre to the people, literally – pieces of scenery and spotlights were taken by handcart into the Berlin slums where plays were performed. Michael Patterson, The Revolution in German Theatre, 1900–1933 (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981). Brecht’s Verfremdung or ‘making strange’ (Patterson, The Revolution in German Theatre). The Brechtian legacy in British theatre includes performances in which the audience is invited to consider issues raised by the play through discussion after the performance. This legacy includes agitprop theatre, which was part of the movement for social and political change during the 1970s and 1980s. Dominic Shellard, British Theatre since the War (New Haven, Yale University Press, 1999). Brecht was also interested in boxing, in which ‘scenes’ are broken up and the viewer distanced. British Union of Fascists files, records and account books were taken to a bomb-proof hideout in Hackney to be recovered after the war (Kushner, and Valman, Remembering Cable Street). Morris Beckman, The 43 Group (London: Centerprise Publications, 1993). The 43 Group was organized into five operational centres with commanders in each sector. They were supported by administrators who collected data on fascist activity,


16. 17.

18. 19. 20. 21.

22. 23. 24. 25. 26.

27.

28. 29.

30. 31. 32.

controlled communications and wrote reports on actions for later analysis by the group’s intelligence (Beckman, The 43 Group). Geoffrey Harris, The Dark Side of Europe: The Extreme Right Today (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1994). The second European Parliamentary Committee of Inquiry into the Growth of Racism and Xenophobia in Europe called for more legal protection for different nationals within the territory of the member states. The social chapter attempted to guarantee minimum health and safety, rates of pay and working hours and include illegal immigrant works (Harris, The Dark Side of Europe). Robert O. Paxton, The Anatomy of Fascism (London: Penguin Books, 2004). Cynthia Cockburn, The Line: Women, Partition and the Gender Order in Cyprus (London: Zed Books, 2004). Myria Vassiliadou, ‘“Herstory”: the missing women of Cyprus’, Cyprus Review, vol. 9, no. 1, 1997, pp. 95–120, pp. 95–120. See Yiannis Papadakis, Nicos Peristianis and Gisela Welz, ‘Modernity, history and conflict in divided Cyprus’, in Yiannis Papadakis, N. Peristianis and G. Welz (eds) Divided Cyprus: Modernity, History, and an Island in Conflict (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2006), pp. 1–29. Denise Robinson, ‘NeMe: leaps of faith’, Camera Austria, no. 91, 2005. See Vassiliadou (‘Herstory’) for a thorough account of the historical position of women in Cyprus. Cockburn (The Line). Cockburn (The Line). The older generation of ‘Greek Cypriot’ women regard not finding a husband and getting pregnant soon after marriage as a disaster, and many younger women have internalized that view. In addition, the Greek Orthodox Church and its hierarchical structures in the south reinforce the family’s stronghold in Cyprus (Cockburn, The Line). Myria Vassiliadou, ‘Questioning nationalism: the patriarchal and national struggles of Cypriot women within a European context’, European Journal of Women, vol. 9, 2002, pp. 459–82. Maria Hadjipavlou, ‘The self embedded in the communal text: unveiling Cypriot women’s experiences’, Leaps of Faith (exhibition catalogue, Nicosia, 2005), pp. 48–61. Women’s organizations focus on the mothers of the missing, or are affiliated to NGOs, the conservative or communist parties, or the Church, and centre on unification rather than gender issues (Cockburn, The Line). Only male homosexuals have rights in Cyprus and the European Court of Justice had to overturn strong resistance to it (Cockburn, The Line). Cockburn, The Line. The nationalist movement from 1955 to 1959 was essentially a struggle against British colonial rule. Greek Cypriots saw unification with Greece as an opportunity for independence, while Turkish Cypriots, who feared potential marginalization as a minority, favoured a continuation of British rule and, later, partition (Vassiliadou, ‘Herstory’). Violent interethnic confrontations between EOKA (the Greek Cypriot National Organization of Cypriot Fighters) and TMT (the Turkish Resistance Organization) followed. The Independent Republic of Cyprus was created in 1960, but ethnic violence continued until 1967 and Turkish Cypriots were displaced or set up

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33. 34.

35.

36.

37.

38. 39.

40. 41.

42. 43. 44. 45.

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enclaves. The Green Line, which marked a separation of the south from the north, created its own political and social structure. Following the military junta in Greece in 1974, which attempted to take control of Cyprus, the Turkish invasion of Cyprus took control of 40 per cent of the country. Greek Cypriots fled en masse to the south and Turkish Cypriots moved to the north (Papadakis, Peristianis and Welz, ‘Modernity, history and conflict’). See Vassiliadou, ‘Questioning nationalism’. There is a paucity of academic publications on women in Cyprus and feminist scholarship is only slowly emerging. Vassiliadou (‘Questioning nationalism’) notes that women in Cyprus have become so accustomed to imperialist and patriarchal authority in social and political institutions, including the family, that historically they have felt unable to participate in any form of change that focuses on gender as an issue without some form of social control. In addition, communal identity is stressed over any sense of the identity of the individual woman (Hadjipavlou, ‘The self embedded in the communal text’). Bay Windows was part of Sparks, three temporary light-based artworks that Canterbury City Council commissioned with art consultants InSite Arts as part of the cultural programme, Make it Real. The artists asked residents (via a postcard distributed in cafés, the library and local businesses) to submit their ‘hand-written dream destinations’ that were then selected in terms of their particular graphic or evocative qualities (Sparks exhibition catalogue, InSite Arts, 2006). The names illuminated as fake ‘handwriting’ suggest logos or brands whose signs identify them as objects of consumption. This is another example of where the power of the sign shifts from the object (place) itself to its circulation in representations where desire is produced. See Marc Augé ‘From Places to Non-places’ in Non-places: An Introduction to Supermodernity (London: Verso, 1992). Dean MacCannell has suggested that tourism is ‘ripe with alienation’. As the world’s largest industry, it has become a global solution to economic and other ills, including land loss. Dean MacCannell, The Tourist: A New Theory of the Leisure Class (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1999) first published 1976. Lasansky and McLaren, Architecture and Tourism. Forms of ‘status display’ include showing holiday snapshots to neighbours and exhibiting souvenirs. Simon Coleman and Mike Crang (eds) Between Place and Performance (New York: Berghahn Books, 2002). Urry, Consuming Places. The names in themselves suggest making ‘tourist bubbles’ – the literal and conceptual construction of a safe environment dislocated from the real (Lasansky and McLaren, Architecture and Tourism). See for example, Fiji, in which constructions of fantasized place mask military coups, ethnic divisions and tensions. Colin Michael Hall and Hazel Tucker (eds) Tourism and Postcolonialism: Contested Discourses, Identities and Representations (London: Routledge, 2004). Viet Thanh Nguyen, Race and Resistance: Literature and Politics in Asian America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002). Kerry R. Howe, Nature, Culture and History: The ‘Knowing’ of Oceania (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2000). The idealized image of Fiji formed part of the British colonial project in the southern hemisphere, which included Australia and New Zealand. Annexed by Britain in 1874,


46. 47. 48.

49. 50.

51. 52. 53.

54.

55. 56.

57. 58.

59.

Fiji was expelled from the British Commonwealth after a series of military coups in 1987 and 2000 and only readmitted after the inauguration of a new constitution. Tourism (mainly from the USA, UK, Australia and New Zealand) accounts for 12 per cent of its GDP, against a backdrop of poor healthcare and an ongoing threat of social unrest. Consisting of 332 islands, 110 of which are inhabited, the British brought Indian labour to Fiji and there is an ongoing conflict between the Indian and Fijian population (Fiji Profile: 2006, Walden Press, 2006). Both Fiji and Hawaii’s military presence represents one of the legacies of colonialism (Nguyen, Race and Resistance). Christina Klein, Cold War Orientalism: Asia in the Middlebrow Imagination (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2003). William F. Miles, Bridging Mental Boundaries in a Postcolonial Microcosm: Identity and Development in Vanuatu (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1998). Hawaii, like Puerto Rico, was denied the right of self-governance, despite Hawaiian resistance to US annexation in the early twentieth century when the USA destroyed indigenous land rights. See Marie Battiste, Reclaiming Indigenous Voices and Vision (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2000). Urry, Consuming Places. Mike Crang, ‘Knowing, tourism and practices of vision’, in David Crouch (ed.) Leisure/Tourism Geographies: Practices and Geographical Knowledge (London: Routledge, 1999) pp. 238–56. Locus + commissioned the work to coincide with the British Art Show of 2005. Margo Daly, Anne Dehne, David Leffman and Chris Scott, The Rough Guide to Australia (London: Rough Guides, 2005). Newcastle, Australia was developed by convicts who had secondary convictions while in Australia. Convict diggers, wearing leg irons, worked 10–12 hours a day mining below sea level under Nobby’s Head at the entrance of Hunter River. Robert Hughes, The Fatal Shore (London: Vintage Press, 2003). The colonizer’s assumptions of an uninscribed earth. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, ‘The Ranii of Samur’, in Francis Barker, Peter Hulme, Margaret Iverson and Diana Loxley (eds) Europe and its Others: Proceedings of the Essex Conference on the Sociology of Literature (Colchester: University of Essex Press, 1985), pp. 128–51. José Rabasa, Inventing America: Spanish Historiograhy and the Formation of Eurocentricism (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1993). Sixteenth-century Europeans initially began naming remote places, first in the Americas and then in Australia, Asia and Africa as ‘new’ versions of the ‘old’ places (as in ‘New York and ‘New Zealand’). Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983). Rabasa, Inventing America. The history of the map is linked to that of the nation-state. The state was the main funder of cartographic activities in many European countries in the seventeenth century. J. Brian Harley, ‘Maps, knowledge, power’, in Denis Cosgrove and Stephen Daniels (eds) The Iconography of Landscape: Essays on the Symbolic Representation, Design, and Use of Past Environments (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988) pp. 277–312. It is generally recognized that the critical literature of mapping has developed since poststructuralism entered critical theories of space. See, for example, Elizabeth Ferrier, ‘Mapping power: cartography and contemporary cultural theory’, Antithesis,

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60.

61. 62.

63. 64.

65.

66.

67.

68.

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vol. 4, no. 1, 1990, pp. 35–49; Derek Gregory, Geographical Imaginations (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994); Harley, ‘Maps, knowledge, power’; John Pickles, A History of Spaces: Cartographic Reasons, Mappings and the Geocoded World (London: Routledge, 2005); and Rabasa, Inventing America. On a wider discussion on the relationships between power and maps and mapping, see, for example, Jeremy Black, Maps and Politics (London: Reaktion Books, 1997); Graham Huggan, ‘Decolonizing the map: post-colonialism, post-structural and the cartographic connection’, Ariel, vol. 20, no. 4, 1989, pp. 115–31; and Massey, For Space. Maps assume a detachment of space as objective; ‘real’, conventional maps assume a spatial continuum that suppresses difference and discontinuity (Ferrier, ‘Mapping power’). Massey proposes space as ‘a dynamic simultaneity, constantly disconnected by new things and always waiting to be determined and undetermined by the construction of new relations’ (Massey, For Space). Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994). Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (London: Routledge, 2002) showed that ‘the logic’ of representation is embedded in discourses that prescribe meaning. Coherent representations of objects, places and concepts are determined by the power relationships surrounding them. For example, the Mauri people of Western Sahara give different names to different movements of the land and consider that the land is a living being oriented in four directions that define the horizon: ‘geble’, ‘tell’, ‘sahel’, ‘sarg’. Franco La Cecia, ‘Getting lost and the localized mind’, translated by Stuart Wylen in Alan Read (ed.) Architecturally Speaking: Practices in Art, Architecture and the Everyday (London: Routledge, 2000) pp. 31– 48. In 1995, under the Aboriginal Land Rights Act (1976), the Walmanpa, Warlpiri, Mudbura and Warumunga people won a land claim settlement for 2350 square kilometres of land in the far northern reaches of the Tanami Desert, a claim originally lodged in 1978. However, successful claims to land are repeatedly eroded by the incorporation of access rights in relation to mining, in the process of which people are continually relocated and displaced. www.clc.org.au (23 April 2007). Barry Curtis and Claire Pajaczkowska, ‘“Getting there”: travel, time and narrative’, in Jon Bird, Barruy Curtis, Tim Putnam, George Robertson and Lisa Tickner (eds) Travellers’ Tales: Narratives of Home and Displacement (London: Routledge, 1994) pp. 199– 215. ‘To reverse the tapestry of the map would reveal all the tangled threads which constitute the well-heeled image it presents to the world.’ J. B. Harley, ‘Deconstructing the map’, in Trevor J. Barnes and James Duncan (eds) Writing Worlds: Discourse, Text and Metaphor in the Representation of Landscape (London: Routledge, 1992) pp. 231–47.

7. THE VIEWER __________________

This chapter explores how perception is determined by the shifting conditions of environmental, ecological and cultural contexts. It investigates how site-specific art can draw our attention to the processes of viewing, focusing on the overlooked, the everyday and the unspectacular as sites of estrangement and fascination. The changing perceptions of ‘nature’ through its representations, the visual technologies of control, the power relationships in the visual narratives of tourism and the visual as an intertextual field that offers possibilities for spatial meaning are addressed through a range of artworks in France, Amsterdam, London and Kassel. It has been argued that different perceptions of nature reveal it as essentially a cultural construct dependent on its representations.1 In Carlotta Brunetti’s Forêt Surprise (2002), Fontenay-sur-Bois, near Paris, France, over an area of 7000 square metres in a park situated in front of the town hall, the artist painted the trunks of 80 maple trees the colour of burnt sienna. The natural grey-green of the trees was covered with the reddish brown of the pigment then left to disintegrate and wash away with the weather. Brunetti’s aim was to change completely the perception of the park and the resultant effect was that the trees assumed artificial-like qualities. In the shifting, reflecting light, they evoked the qualities of a pastel drawing. The three-dimensionality of the bark appeared smooth and flat and their painted surfaces changed from light to dark reds, orange and pinks depending on the angle of light, the weather and the time of day. In addition, the enhanced verticals of the trees suggested an organic architectural space, the altered presence of which was heightened by the complementary greens of the park’s lawn and the trees’ canopy.

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Forêt Surprise proposed a transmuted perception of ‘nature’, shifting the cultural context of the park from the familiar to the strange in the form of an imagined, ominous and prophetic landscape. The installation evoked a double simulation of the real within the contained and managed space of the park which shifted the viewer’s perception and consciousness of trees from signs that represent ‘nature’ to an unstable concept that could imply either the toxic or the benign. The colours of the trees, both ominous and playful, suggested the simplicity of a child’s drawing, evoking an innocent idealization of nature and also a menacing vision provoking a sense of estrangement. ‘Nature’ is increasingly determined by environmental apocalyptic narratives: through data and information on global climate catastrophe, pollution, threats to biodiversity and of deforestation (where technical monitoring methods measure variations of toxicity in the environment).2 The contemporary view of nature is increasingly becoming mediated through this information communicated via the mass media. Forêt Surprise could have been seen and experienced as an environmental phenomenon induced by pollution or genetic engineering. The partially coloured trees (up to 6.5 metres high) suggested a creeping toxicity and an impending proximity of a threatening pathological environment. They hinted at what might be experienced should the viewer be in a position to perceive (both literally and conceptually) unseen environmental pollutants and their effects in the same way that night vision glasses or heat-sensitive cameras enhance things incapable of normally being perceived by the human eye. Forêt Surprise thus provided a glimpse of the world through certain conceptual ‘spectacles’ that enabled the viewer to ‘see’ the extraordinary within the everyday. At the same time, it articulated the visual equivalent of the state of anxiety that is fostered through ‘pollution-as-spectacle’ manipulations by the mass media, which may or may not bear any resemblance to environmental reality.3 Forêt Surprise thus demonstrated the difficulty to ‘see’ nature objectively and showed that changes in its representations (whether cultural, political or economic) can alter our ‘view’ and understanding of it. Through the controlling images of the mass media and as a discourse, our perception of nature is subject to constant manipulation and adjustment and the idea of ‘nature’, as a visual construct through television, film and tourism, serves particular ideological purposes. Moreover, the search for a more ‘authentic experience’ of nature, with its increasingly redundant image, is becoming more and more based on simulation. Concepts of 140

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Fig. 35. Carlotta Brunetti, Forêt Surprise, Fontenay-sur-Bois, France (2002).

‘nature’ are increasingly dependent on a proliferation of signs (including those of impending ecocide), which are permeated and reproduced through a system of simulacra. All that is left is the image, as Jean Baudrillard argued, where the hyper-real as mediated through popular and mass culture, has become a substitute for the real – the real world as conveyed through images.4 Brunetti’s installation questioned a seamless simulation between the real world and its representations. Félix Guattari expresses the urgency with which we should view the world through the interchangeable lenses of the ‘three ecologies’ of the environment, social relations and subjectivity.5 The globalization of the market place; the growth of urban centres worldwide; the international rise of racism and segregation; the infiltration of a mass consumer-focused consciousness; and the infantilization of ‘opinion TV’, which offers ‘pseudo-participation’ in debate purely on the basis of consumption, all have their cumulative, pernicious effects on individual experience and subjectivity. Guattari maintains that international class consciousness, for example, has been replaced by a vague sense of belonging induced by the mass media and consumerism. For Guattari, nature cannot be separated from culture and it is only by thinking transversally – by linking toxic environmental pollution with that of the pollution of the consciousness by 141


the ‘degenerate images’ of the mass media – that we will be able to confront the erosion of our physical and psychic environments, which have been accelerated by capitalist power.6 For Guattari, capitalism’s extended influence over the social, environmental and cultural life of the whole planet is infiltrating people’s attitudes and minds worldwide. His notion of ‘ecologyas-ecosophy’ relates to the need to identify resistance to environmental and subjective degradation through individual and collective international dissent. Guattari proposes a global urgency to consider the reinvention of ways of living in relation to new environmental, cultural and historic contexts and to find antidotes to the standardizations created through the mass media. Forêt Surprise can be perceived as a projection of the environmental anxiety outlined by Guattari. By a process of ‘making strange’, Brunetti’s installation revealed the volatile, shifting contexts through which the concept of nature is increasingly constructed. The work seemed to suggest that we can only experience ‘nature’ second-hand through its mediations, narratives and constructions, proposing that it will forever remain essentially an idea, culturally positioned and vulnerable to fluctuation and change.7 By colouring the trunks of the trees up to half way in different shades of brown and red, Brunetti seems to propose that the determination of nature is essentially based on provisional ways of seeing and framing, conditioned by different cultural, political and ecological contexts. The shifting perception of things and the methods by which one ‘sees’ are manipulated and constructed was explored by Jill Magid in System Azure (2003) – a series of four security cameras mounted on and around the police headquarters in Amsterdam that the artist had transformed by covering with rhinestones. Her proposal to cover the cameras with ‘jewels’, at her first meeting with the police at their Amsterdam headquarters, was refused as she presented the project as art and herself as an artist. Some months later, she approached them again, but this time as ‘head of Azure’, ‘a company that ornaments security equipment’, implying that such companies and their activities were part of an accepted ‘norm’, thus affecting the police’s perception of her and her proposal. As a ‘security ornamentation professional’, Magid engaged the police in a dialogue about the advantages and disadvantages of the overt visibility versus the unassuming presence of surveillance cameras. Months of negotiations between the artist and the Amsterdam police took place over whether to decorate the cameras by covering them with reflective jewels, or to leave 142

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Fig. 36. Jill Magid, System Azure, Police Headquarters, Amsterdam (2002).

them as (under)stated objects of authority. After a series of discussions, the police subsequently decided that they did want the cameras to be seen and further meetings with Magid focused on the aesthetics of her proposal. In the final work the decorated cameras could be perceived as becoming distanced from their regulated appearance and made unintelligible as objects of power. On the other hand, drawing attention to the cameras attached to the police headquarters by covering them with fake gems possibly transformed them into seemingly benign objects with which the ‘innocent’ passer-by colludes. A significant part of our lives is subject to the controlling gaze of modern surveillance methods. Their ubiquitous global presence and use has been considered an expression of the unreturned gaze of ideological, economic and political power and social control, and a part of the wider ‘visual sadism’ of modern culture generally.8 Internet monitoring that tracks patterns of consumption and CCTV cameras policing and regulating our behaviour, movements and minor transgressions, that are linked to other forms of surveillance, have become an accepted presence within the everyday.9 Cameras mounted on buildings, lampposts, the backs of buses, carriages in trains, supermarkets, banks, hospitals and roads are a fundamental part of the experience of the contemporary world, alongside 143


the screening of telephone calls, e-traffic, travel, faxes, credit card transactions, GPS monitoring and web searches. It has been argued that ‘reality TV’, webcam culture and surveillance-as-narrative devices in contemporary forms of fiction condition people to accept and adapt to surveillance technologies in the real world.10 Concern is now not so much about the visual, overt manifestations of social control; rather, it is with the covert introduction of identity surveillance, the global trade in information and always evolving ways of ‘seeing’ through ‘dataveillance’. The relationship between this repressive or potentially repressive power and the capability of transforming surveillance data instantaneously across a global frame is of increasing concern to human rights organizations. Whereas cultural activity in the West is dominated by the visual, the social mechanics of actual power are relatively invisible. The bodily embellishments of the surveillance cameras in System Azure enhanced their presence, suggesting that of another person and the experience of the ‘felt gaze’ of another. Encrusted with rhinestones, they adopted a method employed by performers to enhance their stage presence and revealed that which must be partly hidden – their omnipresence within the regulated (and policed) social and public sphere. By irreverently changing the surface of the cameras their position of anonymous authority within social and urban space was made ambivalent and therefore more sinister. Issues of perception were addressed very differently in Susan Collins’s Viewfinder (2000) situated in an amusement arcade on the seafront in Minehead and on the platform of West Somerset railway station. At the railway station, the glass window of the booking office was temporarily replaced with a wooded screen in which were inserted stereo eyepieces, which the artist described as ‘viewfinders’. In the amusement arcade, these were inserted into the side of a claw vending machine in which a metal pincer is manipulated in an attempt to grab ‘prizes’ from a pile of fluffy toys and other objects. By looking through the eyepieces, the viewer saw a sequence of three-dimensional videos that they controlled by pushing a button (actually a mouse click) inserted into the sides of the machine. Moving sequences taken from fixed camera viewpoints framed a series of mises en scène that the artist had encountered in and around Minehead and West Somerset. These included scenarios of colourful garden gnomes and other ornaments carefully arranged in front gardens; landscape views of a fast running river; night scenes of partially illuminated trees swaying in 144

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Fig. 37. Susan Collins, Viewfinder, Minehead (2000). Installation view.

wind-blown, darkened landscapes; green-tinted, rain-slicked cobbled streets; cottages in the orange glow of streetlamps after dark; the interior of a café on the seafront with a seated figure reading a newspaper; a stationary lorry on a stretch of ‘A’ road against a backdrop of moving cars; and a figure hovering on the threshold of an eerily-lit and deep-shadowed building. Definitions of viewfinders include: devices on still cameras that enable the framing and composition of an image, a monitor on a video camera that displays the picture the camera generates, and a toy fantasy device that creates an alternative ‘world’. Some viewfinders on cameras do not always give a ‘true view’ due to parallax and focus errors. The three-dimensional aspect and content of Viewfinder suggested a version of the magnified parallax vision of narrative film in cinema that affirms the position of the viewer and invites an identification with the protagonists.11 In Collins’s work, the filmed three-dimensional scenarios enabled potential suture and interruption through the viewer’s ability to sequence the scenes. As opposed to the subjective positioning of cinema, which enables the viewer to ‘occupy’ two places simultaneously through processes of narrative and identification, Viewfinder invited a reconsideration of relational viewpoints in the unexpected content of the sequences and the viewer’s ability to manipulate their order. This was compounded by a sense of dislocation and disappointment from the usual, conventional and familiar tourist imagery associated with English seaside towns, such as two-dimensional still images 145


of wide-angle shots of beaches in summer, views of rolling hills, or ‘heritage’ buildings. Viewfinder relocated the banal and the everyday in super-perspectival space, inviting us to reconsider the ‘now’ within the act of viewing that was enhanced by its three-dimensional effects. It has been argued that the attention demanded by the three-dimensional view creates a sensation of disembodied intensity since the space occupied by the viewer’s body becomes ‘detached’ from the perspectival space of the three-dimensional image.12 In Viewfinder the sense of a displaced, ‘real’ time in the lapsed time images created a dream-like strangeness and an alternative, parallel space to that of the expected tourist imagery where the familiar is reenacted.13 Contemporary methods of commodification of place via the mechanized construction of ‘the real’ via the technologies of the visual form a fundamental part of international tourism. Collins’s work, Viewfinder, suggested a critique of the consumption and representation of place within the discourse of tourism and of how meanings of place are manipulated and determined within the leisure industry.14 Apparently ‘harmless fun’ contemporary versions of ‘vision machines’ have been appropriated into contemporary forms by the tourism industry and imbricated within processes of normalization in the production and consumption of place. The spectacle of place, appropriated and mediated through film, computergenerated projections, slide shows and so on, are part of the reauthenticated experience of ‘place’ from architectural sites to natural phenomena. Collins’s work was an insertion into these relations of power, which have become inherent between the viewer and the viewed. By substituting the unexpected and overlooked with the prepackaged, predetermined ‘tourist’ view, Collins’s work posed questions about the authenticity of the experience of place that tourism also mythologizes as a perpetual quest.15 There was an ironic significance in the transformation of scenes from the everyday (front gardens, roads, village streets). Whereas the everyday is located as central to notions of the authentic in international ‘travel tourism’, at home its ‘lack of exoticism’ places it outside the processes of consumption the tourism industry creates. There was something unsettling for the viewer in the encounter created by Viewfinder. Like the rhetoric of tourism, it presented a possibility of inhabiting a virtual space in which the banal is rendered extraordinary and strange through a three-dimensional hyper-reality. The video sequences 146

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Fig. 38. Susan Collins, Viewfinder, Minehead (2000). 3D video-still.

suggested discarded ‘takes’ from some other larger (unknown) simulation of reality. At odds with the mechanisms of the commodification of place of tourism’s ‘normalizing’ discourse, which familiarizes the unfamiliar through its own visual culture of guidebooks, television, brochures and other forms of mass media, Collins’s work de-familiarizes the familiar. The feelings of estrangement it created were enhanced by its three-dimensional effects and the use of lapsed time, which caused movement to appear slowed down and mechanical. The viewer saw neither a film nor a still image, neither a narrative nor an advertisement, but images that were ‘strangely familiar’. It offered an alternative form of sightseeing tour through its slewed presentation of the everyday, inviting a consideration of the nature of the spectacular as a determining factor in the creation of the significance of site as articulated and mediated through the tourism. The intimacy created between the viewer and the image in Viewfinder was suggestive of a ‘peep show’ in which the viewer occupied a privileged position and was invited to participate in an inward, subjective journey to examine his or her expectations. Barely moving, three-dimensionallyenhanced scenes from the banal (a figure in a café reading a newspaper),

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the bizarre (arrangements of garden gnomes; a river running red) and the extraordinary (green light shining on a cobbled street; the slowed wind in trees), invited a reflection on the overlooked. Viewfinder suggested that the tourist inhabits a parallel world suspended from the everyday.16 Its distancing effects and its invocation of surprise through the use of the unexpected were reminders that the tourist invariably only experiences the surface of things, framed purely on the visual. The position of the viewer in the illusory constructions of spatial meanings, the potential of parallel, normally unseen realities and the integration of the real and virtual in presenting possibilities of perception and understandings of space were evoked in Susan Collins’s Underglow (2006) in which a series of drains and gullies situated in streets in and around Queen Street in the City of London were internally illuminated with LED lights. Red fading to violet and blue fading to green and back again lit up the inside of the drains and glowed on the surface at street level, creating a kind of enigmatic phatic aura that compelled the viewer’s curiosity, disgust and fascination.17 Underglow provoked a shift in the way we perceive space by inviting a focus of attention on normally unconsidered spaces that exist beneath the surface of the street, intervening into the field of the unknown through chance encounters with the unexpected. As a reversal of the spectacle of the architectural visual dominance of the city, Underglow was a displacement of the usual visual order of things. The drain cavity is a provisional space and transit zone where water collects before disappearing into a network of underground sewers. The City (London’s financial district), as both a conceptual and geographical space, is situated between the material and immaterial worlds on an international scale. In Underglow, the interiors of the (empty) drains were eerily transformed through a process of idealized visualization – as if the viewer were looking at something underwater or at a sinister night-filmed aerial view of an unknown location or country. Cigarette ends, sweet wrappers, scraps of litter and the congealed remains of discarded ice-cream cones that had found their way down into the drains’ cavities, became rearranged into an extraordinary, parallel ‘landscape of estrangement’ in which the debris from the street became ‘so many untameable states of matter’.18 Illuminated, the drains seemed paradoxically like miniature landscapes: the unknowability of their exact material qualities made them appear simultaneously ungraspable, distant, alienating and fascinating. Underglow collapsed within a series of surreal, imaginary spaces concepts of inside and outside, interior and exterior. 148

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Fig. 39. Susan Collins, Underglow, City of London (2006). Photograph by Richard Davies.

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Located in the proximity of the stock exchange and within the parameters of the Guildhall (the City’s town hall) Underglow provoked a form of topographical disassociation that questioned our faith in perception and the nature of material reality. Emitting light like a computer screen and resonant of a film still, an ultrasound scan or the aerial view of the earth’s surface imaged from scud missiles transmitted via satellite television, Underglow evoked a conceptual spatio-temporal collapse. Through this annihilation of place it suggested the undefined surfaces of strange, virtual worlds and of the reimagined, dematerialized spaces of telecommunications and cyberspace, thereby evoking new media or military technologies.19 In the context of the financial district of the City of London, it drew attention to the ways in which information technologies, abstract concepts of time and distance, and global communications systems transform concepts of space and change the ways in which space is perceived. One part situated adjacent to the City of London branch of the Hong Kong Bank, which was displaying current international exchange rates and share prices in vertical, red LED columns, suggested that the multi-spatial coordinates of the world of international finance and its abstract language have implications in real time, place and human relations.20 The illuminated numbers, letters and figures in the bank’s window drew a relationship with those inscribed on the surface of the nineteenth-century iron grids of the drain under which the work was situated. The excesses of monopoly global capitalism include the potential surpluses and wastes that are the known consequences of unpredictable markets, the unstable value of commodities and of soaring interest rates. Like the abstract language of money, Underglow allowed a glimpse into an unreachable parallel world where the emergence of reconfigured, indefinate spaces, such as those created by the financial world, represent the real as an entirely conceptual space. In a contestation of concepts of spatial reality, Underglow suggested a consideration of a space that, in stable financial environments, usually exists as unnoticed. By providing a portal to another space, Underglow invited us to consider how we perceive certain aspects of the world from which we are distanced or excluded or to which we are indifferent. Disorienting like the virtual reality of cyberspace, it suggested that we are as remote from the material space of the pavement and sewers beneath our feet as we are from the financial infrastructures that dominate unseen, both the banalities and crucialities of our lives. Conversely, we feel a close connection and orientation with the abstract, ‘synthetic vision’ of 150

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global digital systems, satellite technologies and international telephone networks.21 Such orientation devices can tell us at any time exactly where we are in the world in the midst of virtual reality, whilst we remain simultaneously distanced from social or geographic space.22 Underglow was a de-realization of reality and an interruption of space in a world where we must increasingly draw on our own mental images to make ongoing sense of things.23 The ways in which experience of the world is mediated through visual culture and the collapse of real and immaterial space via the visual were issues in Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster’s Park – A Plan for Escape, Kassel (2002), an open-air installation for Karlsaue Park, an eighteenth-century manor garden.24 The installation reconsidered the nature of reality presented through a montage of interrelationships between its intertextual segments. The process of piecing elements together was at the core of Gonzalez-Foerster’s installation: it was, in effect, an interplay of ideas between objects and surfaces, fragments of film narratives, images, architecture and literature. A range of architectural objects retrieved from parks around the world were set into a demarcated space, which was defined by the placing of these objects. A large piece of volcanic lava rock from Mexico, a palm tree, a flat blue oval pool, a succulent, a spherical blue telephone booth from Copacabana, a modernist concrete pavilion, a lamppost, a folding chair, a series of flat concrete squares set into the grass, a line of stones partly demarcating the boundary of the work, and a rose bush from Chadigarh in India were all set within the installation’s defined space, which created its own island of displaced objects from around the world. The pavilion had a light box on one side with a screen onto which a film was projected from inside and which could only be seen at night or at dusk. As an architectural feature, the pavilion itself has been seen as an inbetween concept, more of an idea than a functional building; it is impermanent and contained, and a form of ‘blind’ architecture. In GonzalezFoerster’s installation it functioned as both projection booth and screen onto the surface of which viewers projected their own meanings for the work. Depending on the time of day, the film shifted between the visible and the invisible. It consisted of a montage of images of the installation itself and of edited sequences from films that included settings from parks, landscapes or modernist architecture such as Antonioni’s La Notte, L’Eclisse and Blow Up, Rosselini’s neo-realist Stromboli, Tsai Ming-Liang’s Vive 151


L’Amour, and Kiarostami’s Through the Olive Trees.25 The installation, Park – A Plan for Escape was a form of sculpture garden by day and an outdoor cinema at night whose objects initiated a series of micro events by setting in motion an intertextuality between film, literature and visual art. Its various sculptural, cinematic and architectural elements invited a visual, experiential and emotional negotiation of virtual and material spaces where its horizontal surface and vertical screen became platforms for imagined and projected journeys. Park – A Plan for Escape posed the potential to shift perceptions of space in its location within the architecture of the park, as well as in relation to the inner city and the representational and meditative space of the work and its cinematic elements. Like the cinema, the park is a form of surrogate space, a space for contemplation and escape from reality, an artificial, parallel world, neither a landscape nor a city and a potential space between the subjective and objective.26 Parks offer a place of respite from the city and, as such, as Gonzalez-Foerster asserted, are caught up with the act of travelling; they can be islands of interruption that function to separate the user from the city and the space where ‘architecture begins’.27 Park – A Plan for Escape examined how our perception of space is mediated in different ways, transposing frameworks for space by the displacement of its various elements. The installation became a stage on which spatial concepts such as proximity, contiguity, projection, interiority and externalization were ways to reconsider different spatial paradigms.28 The shifting concepts of space were also evoked in the projected film sequences in which the perception of space changed according to the presence or absence of light. In La Notte, for example, a park is represented as a desolate space, lit by a slowly fading artificial light that moves toward total darkness. In L’Eclisse, the Acapulco street lights are ‘artificial stars’. Becoming and leaving, as determined via the visual, is a situation brought about and made real by the presence or absence of daylight or night. The idea of transitional space as potential becoming and potential leaving was contained in the film fragment from Vive L’Amour in which a girl sits on a red bench in a park under construction. In Blow Up, a film that highlights dependence on the visual and where fantasy, illusion and reality are blurred, concepts of emptiness and the seen and the apparent contradictions in the relationships between them were suggested in the images of a deserted park in which the photographer reveals the hidden whilst voyeuristically photographing a meeting between a middle-aged man and woman. The 152

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Fig. 40. Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, Park – A Plan for Escape, Documenta 11, Kassel (2002). Image courtesy of Esther Schipper, Berlin.

final scene shows the protagonist alone on a tennis court. In La Notte the characters are shown on opposite sides of the screen, thereby suggesting their alienation from each other and from their surroundings, or as being alone in a large, empty space.29 These site-specific artworks draw attention to the potential meanings of place and how tourism, ecology, power, concepts of nature, the mass media, financial and political infrastructures and cultural forms, construct and frame the ways in which space is viewed and perceived. Such discourses are both permeated by and permeate ways of seeing where meanings of space are mediated by visual, cultural and commodification narratives. Notes 1. See for example, Paul Alpers, What is Pastoral? (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1996); and Alexander Wilson, The Culture of Nature (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991). 2. Organizations such as Worldwatch closely monitor shifts in the habitats and habits of the world’s various species. Greg Garard, Ecocriticism: The New Critical Idiom (London: Routledge, 2004). 3. Garard, Ecocriticism.

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EXPLORING SITE-SPECIFIC ART 4. 5. 6. 7.

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Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation. Félix Guattari, The Three Ecologies, translated by Ian Pindar and Paul Sutton (New York: Continuum, 1989). Guattari, The Three Ecologies. For a discussion on the cultural constructions of nature, see Kate Soper, ‘Privileged gazes and ordinary affections: reflections on the politics of landscape and the scope of the nature aesthetic’, in Mark Dorrain and Gillian Rose (eds) Deterritorialisations: Revisioning Landscapes and Politics (London: Black Dog Publishing, 2003), pp. 338–48. Foucault saw ‘scopic regimes of “malveillance” everywhere’, Martin Jay, Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth Century French Thought (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1993). In China, facial and digital voice recognition technologies linked to identity cards can hold huge amounts of personal data and are being employed as part of the surveillance and censorship programme ‘Golden Shield’. A photo-base currently being developed will hold an image of every person in China and will be capable of cross-referencing with other forms of surveillance. The average person in Shenzhen is under surveillance in five or six different ways. The city has had 200,000 surveillance cameras installed within the last two years, which are being connected to a single, national network. Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2008). The ‘panoptic’ – ‘seeing everywhere’ – embodied in Jeremy Bentham’s design for the modern prison as an Enlightenment ideal, or in the surveillance technologies of the contemporary world. Modern-day London is often cited as the model for global forms of surveillance. Laura Mulvey, Visual and Other Pleasures (London: Macmillan Press, 1979). For a discussion of nineteenth-century stereoscopes, see Rosalyn Krauss, ‘Photography’s discursive spaces: landscape/view’, Art Journal, vol. 42, no. 4, winter 1982, pp. 311–19. Early visual and viewing technologies constructed and dictated how we learn to ‘see’. Viewfinder was a reminder of the part played in the production of contemporary mass culture by the ‘vision machines’ of the nineteenth century, a period that represented a significant evolutionary stage in the act of looking as a form of mass consumption. The version in the amusement arcade echoed the nineteenth-century stereoscopic viewing device of the Kaiserpanorama – a large, circular wooden box that enabled up to 25 people simultaneously to view colour-tinted, three-dimensional glass slides. Scenes of world ‘events’ – exhibitions, disasters, expeditions and other global spectacles – were lit by gas lamps to enhance their illusory effect. It has been argued that nineteenth-century viewing devices like the Kaiserpanorama were part of the development of scopic entertainment as visual mechanisms of power that manipulated the viewer into a place of dominance. To maintain a constant interest at funfairs and other public places of entertainment, the inventor of the Kaiserpanorama, August Furmann employed photographers to collect contemporary images across the world, which included the Great Wall of China, ships in the Gulf of Naples, views of the Alps and scenes from polar expeditions. Devices like it were a variation and part of the colonization of space through the spectacularization of the ‘other’ (the colonized subject), determined through techniques of the visual and the ‘possessive gaze’. The

THE VIEWER

14.

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16. 17.

18.

19.

20. 21. 22. 23.

24. 25.

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Kaiserpanorama’s invention coincided with the period of Germany’s colonization of South West and East Africa and the Pacific and the name itself suggests hierarchies of power relations and visual subjugation. Jonathan Crary, Suspensions of Perception: Attention, Spectacle and Modern Culture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001). Walter Benjamin saw arcades, botanical gardens, railway stations and casinos as ‘dreamspaces’. Susan Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989). The gambling arcade in which Viewfinder was situated had a series of oil paintings of landscapes made by amateur landscape painters. Viewfinder interrupted the perception of place mediated by tourism since the viewer did not see the frame of the image, suggesting a self-reflexive ‘referential illusion’ or ‘reality effect’. Chris Roject and John Urry (eds) Touring Cultures: Transformations of Travel and Theory (London: Routledge, 1997). Underglow was one of a number of temporary site-specific works by four artists in the City of London in ‘Light Up Queen Street’ commissioned by the Corporation of London and curated by Modus Operandi Art Consultants. It was the first of an annual programme of lighting, sound and video commissions located in the City of London. Lyotard claims that estrangement is the precondition of landscape – the mind must be transported but able to relate to different forms of space. To lose a feeling of place is to have a feeling for landscape: landscape is ‘an excess of presence’ in which ‘a glimpse into the inhuman, and/or of an unclean non-world’ is perhaps another form of order. Jean-Francois Lyotard, ‘Scapeland’, in Andrew Benjamin (ed.) The Lyotard Reader (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989) pp. 212–19. Virilio argues that technology separates us directly from the events of real space and time. Paul Virilio, A Landscape of Events, translated by Julie Rose (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001) first published 1996. The significance in everyday life of the abstract terms of financial language such as ‘liquidity’, ‘derivatives’ or ‘TER’, which affect us all, have recently become apparent. To which a walk in the City of London will testify, for most people there have mobile phones, personal stereos or Blackberrys clamped to their ears. Virilio, A Landscape of Events. Paul Virilio maps this process historically as the age of ‘formal logic’ of painting and engraving, the age of ‘dialectic logic’ of photography and film and the age of ‘paradoxical logic’, which still cannot be comprehended fully. Paul Virilio, The Vision Machine, translated by Julie Rose (London: BFI Publishing, 1994) first published 1988. Part of Documenta 11. It has been observed that Gonzalez-Foerster’s own films are ‘attempts to discover how images are created on the boundaries of the visual world around the turmoil of signs and symbols’; and that their images are ‘momentary, annoying, reflective, painterly, irregular and structural.’ Alexis Vaillant, ‘The multifaceted cinema of Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster’, Afterall, vol. 8 (Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design and California Institute of the Arts, 2003) pp. 53–60. Winnicott’s concept of provisional space as an intermediate space in which the subject comes to terms with the transition between the inner world and external reality, was a source that informed the work. Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, ‘Park, a plan for

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28.

29.

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escape’, Documenta 11–Platform 5: Exhibition Catalogue (Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz Publishers, 2002) p. 562. Gonzalez-Foerster’s installation explored the potential passage from one space to the next, from a contemplative space to an ‘outer’ world of objective reality represented by the objects in the installation, its graphic map and the park. The theme of escape, also a manifestation of the shifting parameters between the inner and outer worlds and dependent on the spatial, was projected by the film in various ways. In Rosselini’s Stromboli, for example, a woman is trapped by a mismatched marriage on an Italian island. The volcanic landscape is evoked as threatening, desolate and barren, reflecting the claustrophobia and desperation felt by the female protagonist who tries various ways of escape. Other ‘spatial’ concepts such as themes of desolation and abandonment or absence, are variously suggested through the relationship between parts of the work. For example, L’Eclisse shows images of a deserted city and the breakdown of a relationship between the two main characters. Stromboli is set on an island previously abandoned by the majority of its inhabitants. Literal and metaphorical ways of linking its parts are implied by the path in the installation as a path of stones, containing, yet relating to one another; and the image of a path or track from the point of view of the driver in Kiarostami’s Through the Olive Trees as it manoeuvres between villages in an Iranian landscape. The film is about a film crew making a film (a metaphorical ‘island’). Through the Olive Trees ‘contains’ the story of a bricklayer who is cast as the newly-wed husband of the woman he adores in real life. There is a play on the simulacra or parallel worlds/‘islands’ of reality and on concepts of proximity and distance in the film and its relationship to Gonzalez-Foerster’s installation of which it is a part. The sense of impending desolation and the atmosphere of melancholy inherent in Park – A Plan for Escape was continued through its allusions to alienation through the cinematic fragments and the texts by Casares. La Notte, about one night in the life of the protagonists in Milan, which they spend in clubs and at parties, examines feelings of alienation from the modern world. It includes abstract shots of skyscrapers and abandoned cityscapes from which the main characters seek solace in isolation; in other words, they create an island for themselves within the city.

8. THE BORDER ___________________

Within the topographies of globalization, concepts of the border locate it as a multi-site and a place of discourse. As both a material and conceptualizing space, the border is a locus that maps power relations and control; it is a place of conflict and transgression and a site of anxiety. As a discursive site, the border marks forms of dissension that define the limits of disempowerment as well as the threshold of potential intervention. Issues of preclusion, prohibition and displacement demarcate borders of instability in different kinds of international contexts in which the homeless, migrant, politically ‘disappeared’ and dispossessed are situated. This chapter investigates a number of site-specific artworks located within the terms of the border as a form of cultural positioning and a site where international social, historical and political boundaries converge and where hegemonies are perpetuated. The artworks discussed are: an architectural sculpture in an area of Barcelona marked for redevelopment; an installation between two buildings in the centre of Istanbul; a performance at an art fair in Toronto; and a mixed media installation in Tijuana, Mexico. Displacement and issues of urban development were significant in Jesus Palomino’s Casa del Poble Nou (1998) in Poble Nou, Barcelona, a brightly coloured ‘shack’ constructed out of seemingly discarded materials, situated on a derelict plot of land within close proximity of a half-demolished apartment building. The shack/hovel/hut/shanty, made out of apparently found materials of plastic, wood and cardboard, situated itself on a spatial and social boundary that was precarious, provisional and fragile, oscillating on the border between a real (art) object and a fictional house. Because the 157


area of Poble Nou in Barcelona had been a traditional resting place and settlement for gypsies from Catalunya, people thought that the work was actually a functional house; paradoxically, therefore, it continued to exist as an artwork in the site for more than two weeks. In its proximity to the side of the half-derelict apartment building to which it apparently clung, Casa Poble Nou marked a boundary within a noman’s-land, created by the destruction and displacement made by processes of urban regeneration. Previously, Poble Nou had been a working-class area characterized by low rents and artists’ studios. Palomino’s work was part of an artist-run, public art project designed to draw attention to the economic and social effects of redevelopment in Barcelona in the 1990s and the destruction of neighbourhoods that were part of the city’s programme of urban transformation. Casa Poble Nou highlighted the ways in which regeneration projects are inherently inclusionary and exclusionary, raising issues of belonging and identification. For years, El Raval, an equivalent area of Barcelona that was undergoing regeneration as Barcelona’s cultural quarter during that period, was referred to by its residents as a ‘bombarded place’ reminiscent of a war zone, with its gutted houses and derelict streets. It has been argued that in the agenda of urban regeneration, the eradication of any visible marginality is performed via the creation of commodified sites through standardized aesthetic strategies and ‘designer urban environments’.1 Traditionally in Barcelona, balconies on the outside of apartment buildings have functioned as transitional spaces – boundaries between public and private space where people engaged in spontaneous encounters with their neighbours, grew flowers or hung out their washing. Urban regeneration replaced these spaces with the blank, sealed and immobile fascia of postmodern architecture. Palomino’s structure, insinuating itself against a partly demolished building on an empty lot cleared for redevelopment, appeared as an act of defiance and transgression. It occupied the space between dereliction and the impending architectural order of the postmodern architectural strategies of Barcelona’s 1990s redevelopment programme. As an act of subordination and optimism, Casa Poble Nou was an assertion of social space within the abstract space of urban ‘renewal’. Casa del Poble Nou in bright green, yellow and blue, claimed the right to the city by the marginalized to occupy and control space. Within the context of Barcelona, the work described a space of impending absence in its fragility, yet it was also an intrusive presence in its declaration of its right to 158

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Fig. 41. Jesus Palomino, Casa del Poble Nou, Barcelona (1998).

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space. As a site of resistance, it threatened insubordination to the architectural, economic and social domination of redevelopment. Its collapse of interior and exterior spaces (it was possible to enter the work), inference of narrative possibilities and the movement of the blue plastic roof caught by the wind, were all in defiance of the ideological imperviousness articulated by the fake marble and impenetrable cladding of the postmodernist architecture destined for the site. In its hazardous and vulnerable position on the edge of a vacant lot and in its construction of apparently found materials, Casa del Poble Nou seemed situated on the border between the ‘First World’ and the ‘Third World’. Agitating at the edge of possession and dispossession, occupation and abandonment, Casa del Poble Nou existed in a suspended space of intervention, improvisation and intention. It made visible the normally unseen space occupied by the ‘outsider’ – the marginalized and the dispossessed. What normally is situated on the edge was brought into the centre through the positioning of the structure’s brightly coloured materials and its physical proximity to an existing apartment building in the city. Casa del Poble Nou highlighted how the occupiers and inhabitants of such spaces as shantytowns, such as migrants or refugees, are only able to cross boundaries on a temporary basis, if at all. As such, the work evoked the condition of the marginalized as one of being perpetually outside the main body of architectural space and of society where inclusion was always temporary and provisional and always involved a return to the margins – ‘to cross the tracks, to the shacks and abandoned houses on the edge of town’.2 Casa del Poble Nou drew attention to international processes of economic dominance and subordination of space. In occupying a space of contestation, ambiguity and discontinuity, the work was a provocation to those city planners who seek to control space through processes of definition, regulation and categorization. In its border zone of conflict it described the boundary between refugee and resident and the potential of displacement for one to become the other in a different space and time.3 The work evoked a liminal place of counter-narratives from where the minority, the urban marginalized and exiled, may speak. Casa del Poble Nou interrupted the periphery of the derelict plot of land on which it was sited, and marked the limit of a new boundary of the marginalized – those slum and shanty dwellers whose numbers are increasing through the over-urbanization of cities worldwide.4 The increasing prevalence of urban shantytowns has become a worldwide implication of urban growth. As the hidden, 160

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suppressed and forgotten of global cities, shantytowns and slums are developing an accumulative presence and ‘subaltern insistence’ into the more regulated spaces of the city.5 The cities of the future, it has been proposed, will not be made out of glass and steel but out of crude straw and recycled plastic.6 Casa del Poble Nou seemed to represent those perceived to be surplus to the city and condemned to its margins. It was a sign for those displaced as a consequence of impending urban redevelopment in Barcelona and a surrogate for those absent. Apparently part of but also exterior to the apartment building to which it was ostensibly tenuously attached, the work highlighted concerns about the lack of provision of housing in the city. Yet, it also specified, and was located within, the empty space on which it simultaneously defined an edge, suggesting the peripheralization of people excluded from the inner city and of their access to basic means of subsistence. Casa del Poble Nou occupied a borderline site of intensity and a conflict of space in its position both inside the derelict lot and outside the partly demolished apartment building. Positioned on the borderline between the perceptual and the conceptual, it provoked a spatial ‘doubletake’, seemingly strange and displaced, yet appropriate and ‘in place’, defamiliarizing the familiar and creating new relations of encounter. City dwellers the world over witness the demolition and disruption of parts of the city to make way for the global spaces of modernity and the controlling effects of redevelopment. The eradication of historic apartment buildings and local shops are part of a general erosion of ‘neighbourhoods’ that are rapidly becoming obsolete in new architectural infrastructures. The repressive economic and political effects of the abstract spatialization of the city, where diversity and possibilities of instability are eradicated, include the erasure of the body.7 In Doris Salcedo’s Untitled (2003), 1600 chairs were apparently crammed into a gap left by a demolished building in a row of shops and apartments in a busy, commercial side street in the centre of Istanbul.8 The chairs can be considered a synecdoche for those anonymous (and long absent) residents of such poignantly exposed domestic spaces revealed in partly demolished apartment buildings. Fragments of wallpaper, fireplaces or bookshelves exposed to the public gaze of the street serve as reminders of the transitory nature of life, despite our attempts at denial. These semi-destroyed buildings can be a screen for the projection of the fear of loss of the self and of personal history, and evoke the viewer’s speculation on the nature of the fragility of existence. In the city, they 161


reveal the unstable borders where the vulnerability and fragility of the palimpsests of private narratives can be subject to public exposure. On one level, Untitled suggested a memorial to lost domestic spaces and their missing occupants. In the home, our carefully constructed illusions of security are exposed, and Salcedo’s work invalidated the routines we use to paper over the ever-present threat of the inevitability of change, the relentless passing of time and the ultimate implication of death. The focus of Untitled was on what is in the process of vanishing, on the conceptual border between presence and absence. The spatial vacuum filled by the chairs created a psychologically ambivalent border where the viewer stalled between feelings of proximity and displacement – simultaneously through identifying with the objects as a metonymy of the body and through the disturbance and confusion caused by their incongruity. The tightly crammed chairs created an interface with the street, establishing a physically impenetrable space that could only be entered into through the viewer’s imagination. The situation of the victims of violence informs Salcedo’s work, which is concerned with the politics of representation, the problems of marginality, the subject of the ‘outsider’ and those who are disempowered through violence.9 Her use of domestic objects (chairs – familiar yet unnerving) exposed in an empty public space between two buildings, created a sense of propinquity and distance through the viewer’s identification and estrangement, empathy and abhorrence. The term ‘the disappeared’ exists on the verge of the signified and can only be expressed in language of absence. Turkey’s coup d’état by the armed forces on 12 September 1980 resulted in the enforcement of martial law, the abolition of parliament, the suspension of the constitution and the banning of political parties and trade unions. An estimated quarter of a million people were arrested and tortured and, ten years after the 1981 military junta, half a million people were being detained on political grounds. The so-called ‘dirty war’ that followed claimed an estimated 37,000 victims through extremism and through the repression of Kurdish nationalism.10 Untitled evoked the violence and loss at the centre of the unspeakable. It marked a symbolic space of absence for the tortured, displaced and disempowered, that is the victims of political disruption and repression who have ‘disappeared’ from history. The apparently frantic shoving of the chairs was countered by the work’s ordered boundary with the street. The seemingly chaotic disorder of the packed chairs and their containment against the 162

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Fig. 42. Doris Salcedo, Untitled, Installation for the 8th International Biennial, Istanbul (2003), Copyright: the artist. Photograph by Sergio Clavijo. Image courtesy of Alexander Bonin, New York and White Cube/Jay Jopling, London.

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street marked a border along which the residual presences of the remnants of the lost narratives of unlived lives, severed from the past, were traced. Salcedo’s work charted the limitations in conceiving, understanding and absorbing the violence of the past in its reflection in the present and whose fullness of comprehension is permanently obscured. The installation presented an impenetrable space whose surface described a type of spatial blockage, namely the guilt that is imbricated invisibly in each of our lives as everyday ‘survivors’. Untitled was a performance suspended in the space between the banality of the everyday and the profound unimaginability of death. The tendency of history to erase and smooth out the surface of events was suggested through the installation’s halted surface defining its border to the street that held back what lay behind: the bodies erased by violence. In the context of Istanbul, the chaotically piled up domestic objects suggested the fragility of private life and the violation and its abuse through the disturbance and intrusion of acts of state repression. The chairs can be considered as residues of inhabitancy in the excess and absence of the lost stories of those denied presence. In the cavity where a building should have stood, Untitled traced the brutality of the hidden and unspoken that lie behind history, implying how the individual is implicated in the border between its public and private accounts. The work mapped a threshold between personal experience and that which is subsumed within history, marking a dichotomy of identification between an internalized fear of violence to the self and an externalized empathy for others. At its interface lay a sense of the viewer’s own moral responsibility, both for the present and for the past. For Emmanuel Levinas the ethical and legal dimensions of proximity relate to those to whom we have a duty of care, but in Salcedo’s work, the proximity to death is the rationale of the denouncer. Untitled pronounced a discord with so many chairs rammed within an impossible space, objects that normally would have been there but that were grotesquely and violently multiplied. The overwhelming number of chairs out in the open and wedged within the fractured space between two buildings evoked a discovery of objects stuffed behind furniture, revealed when the occupants move home and suggesting a sense of secrecy or shame. In the context of Salcedo’s work, it is the shame of history that haunts the present and encumbers Turkey’s process of modernization, where international pressure is being placed on the Turkish government to comply with Western European standards of human rights. 164

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Untitled, situated on the frontier of memory, agitated the border between public and private history and implied a menacing reappearance of disavowed events. Germaine Koh’s Sleeping Rough (2003) gave presence to those negated in a different way. The work consisted of two performances where the artist slept in a sleeping bag at a nightclub party for C Magazine at the Gladstone Hotel, Toronto and at the Toronto International Art Fair. Through the materialization of those considered non-existent and ‘absent’, Sleeping Rough occupied the interstice between regulation and the perceived threat of chaos manifested by the homeless – that of the ‘other’ invading the contained space of order with its accepted norms of behaviour. Stepped over and ignored whilst people around her sipped drinks, chatted about art or engaged in social networking, Koh was eventually told to leave. The artist’s intention to appear as if transposed from the street outside (namely as a homeless person), collapsed various paradoxes of a view of the homeless that have become imbibed within cities. A private and intimate activity (sleep) taking place within the public and exposed space of the street was ‘normalized’ through paradigmatic assumptions of a fixed category of being (‘homelessness’). By reproducing the ‘signs’ of a homeless person, merely by sleeping in a sleeping bag within a semi-public space (the Art Fair and party), Sleeping Rough evoked a collision between concepts of inside and outside, exclusion and inclusion and the rational and irrational. As Rosalyn Deutsche has shown, social, political and cultural spaces are structured by exclusions that must be maintained to be perceived as a unity that exists without conflict.11 People without homes, merely by their presence, appear to introduce into public space the potential threat of antagonism. Art galleries assume a separation from the everyday, but urban gentrification is often initiated by the appropriation of derelict and disused social and economic spaces as galleries, artists’ studios and nightclubs within run-down areas of the city. This process can aestheticize the city and increase polarity into areas of affluence and deprivation.12 Sleeping Rough collapsed elements of the processes and consequences of redevelopment within cities in which corporate culture represents a space of authority and where spaces of ‘the other’ are devalued. Displacement and relocation (from slum clearance to privatization) are part of recognized processes of globalization in which cities are strategic places of production and consumption and where people with low incomes are invariably displaced to make way for gentrification.13 The redevelopment of cities over the last 25 years has taken place in the global contexts of the internationalization of 165


capital, the international division of labour and of economic migrancy.14 The homeless are outsiders to any formal architectural, social or economic considerations of space in both planning and use. Essentially invisible within industrialized cities, they nevertheless make up significant numbers of people. Sleeping Rough audaciously contravened social borders constructed by the cultural and economic networks that are spatialized within such sites as the Toronto International Art Fair. As has been shown, transgressive acts can reveal the inherent nature of places, thus Sleeping Rough temporarily interfered with the constructed relations between space and socio-cultural power.15 Koh’s performance made visible the border between the self and ‘the other’ that delineates cultural and social boundaries and created a space of social anxiety by insertion into the art fair. If Salcedo’s work exposed the proximity that the present has to the violence of recent history, Koh’s performance made evident the violence of indifference that reinforces the borders of exclusion in everyday situations. In the social erasure of those marginalized, it drew attention to the ways in which social and economic boundaries are constructed, exposing them as essentially inherently morally fragile, and which need to be renewed continually. Sleeping Rough contested the border between categories of people through which the marginalized (refugees, migrants and the homeless) are unable to cross. The work functioned as a form of discursive heterotopia by making visible particular cultural and social spaces as spaces of regulation and exclusion, questioning notions of publicness and the nature of democratic space. The Toronto International Art Fair, as a space of public cultural consumption, houses an activity denied to the homeless. Part of the way in which homeless people are made invisible is that they are perceived to be neither producers nor consumers, for they are denied access to the sites of consumption and spaces of human interaction. Forever ‘outsiders’, they are subject to the processes of deterritorialization that enforce their invisibility. Koh’s work, in adopting and appropriating the terms of invisibility, revealed some of the concealed cultural power relationships of space. As David Sibley has shown, moral boundaries are used to reinforce spatial boundaries, and Koh’s work questioned the ‘naturalness’ of the boundaries of certain conventions of behaviour. The invisibility imposed on the homeless is an articulation of what has been termed a ‘boundary consciousness’ of closed groups whose concern is with order, conformity and social homogeneity.16 Rendering homeless people invisible is a way to expel them 166

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Fig. 43. Germaine Koh, Sleeping Rough, Canada (2003).

as discrepant and thereby reinforcing the hegemonic values of the group. Sleeping Rough made visible the threat imposed by difference on the sanctioned borders of cultural conformity. In its subversion of boundaries of behaviour the work revealed the social topographies of power that are inherent in any space and that are inscribed within everyday life. The piece emphasized the point that in those parameters of space that are defined by domination and subordination, homeless people are denied the rights of citizenship and access to democratic processes. As Peter Marcuse has highlighted, the experience of ‘the homeless’ by other city dwellers is mediated by the pre-existing representations of them, inter alia through naming.17 As Deutsche shows, in the act of constituting ‘the homeless’ as a concept, positions are constructed within the social relations of space. Merely by reproducing the fundamental signs of a ‘homeless person’ (lying on the ground, asleep in a sleeping bag), Koh created a discursive space that addressed the myth of politically uncontested spaces. Culturally, art galleries are presented as neutral spaces, but Koh’s performance emphasized that all space is produced and maintained through cultural and economic practices.18 Sleeping Rough

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disrupted the apparent coherence of space that is acted out within such spaces as art fairs and galleries and highlighted that spaces of culture are essentially sites of social and political processes. Through her passive (and horizontal) performance, Koh exposed collective attitudes to difference and made visible the societal tendency to universalize categories of difference, including ‘homeless’ people who are classified as those without status, identity or subjecthood. Rather than a form of submissiveness, the work emphatically emphasized the dominance of the controlling group in determining the power relations of place. Through the insertion of the presence of a ‘homeless person’, it described and confirmed the social boundaries of cultural spaces and revealed how such spaces are part of a wider hegemonic field of power. The sleeping bag and the displaced, supine, desexualized figure asleep amid the jostling of the cultural everyday, constituted a series of what Judith Butler emphasized as citational signs through which regimes of regulation contour the materiality of bodies.19 In Sleeping Rough these signs were transformed into semiological acts that ‘name’ the ‘homeless person’. The work highlighted how ‘homelessness’ becomes normalized within the language where the discursively-constituted body is enacted. Within the discourse of homelessness, named through performance as well as through the reactions of passers-by (namely the viewer), identity is denoted on the basis of certain attributes upon which the work draws. As Butler showed, the body is located and defined within social contexts and Koh’s performance highlighted what have become universal ‘norms’ of behaviour towards the homeless and their personification. Sleeping Rough revealed the social boundaries of societal relationships to homeless people by means of a regulatory regime of behaviour operating in the production of meaning. By inference, the work also implied the borders of representation of ‘the homeless’ within the West – as nondescript, even non-human, bundles asleep in the discarded spaces of the city such as pedestrian subways or shop doorways at night, as squat figures asking for change. Sleeping Rough accentuated how bodies are both categorized and manipulated within space. It showed how the perceived condition of homelessness alienates the individual subject from the authorizing contexts of social interaction and their systems of signification. The site of Sleeping Rough is the constructed concept of the ‘homeless person’ through the response of its audience. To be homeless in a Western, urban, industrialized context is to be passive, immobile and in a state of stasis, devoid of history 168

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or narrative, isolated: a deviant, ‘outsider’ figure, unsituated and universalized, deprived of being seen or heard by others. The homeless are part of that population of the ‘outside’ who are continually perceived to threaten disorder from the edge. Koh’s work revealed both the endurance and instability of the boundaries of social inclusion and exclusion and exposed the hegemonic social and political values that define the limits of spaces. In Christina Fernandez’s Arrivals and Departures (1997), sited on the border between San Diego in California and Tijuana in Mexico, issues of economic exclusion through experiences of migration were highlighted within the context of international geographical borders. Arrivals and Departures could be viewed in two locations – at the San Ysidro Greyhound bus station on the United States ‘side’ and at Colonia Libertad, a short distance to the south of the border station in Tijuana, Mexico.20 At the bus station, just to the north of the official international border crossing in the United States, a monitor played a video work in which five voices each recounted a journey of migration to the United States, either their own or that of a family member. The narratives of speakers from Guatemala, Mexico, El Salvador, New Mexico and Wyoming were recited in Spanish and English, and voiced-over images tracing journeys depicted through descriptions of roads, fields and hotels. Images of desert-like treeless rural landscapes peopled with migrant agricultural workers, endless roads stretching into the horizon and the view from inside moving vehicles or of the lobbies of cheap hotels, played on the video work. On the ceiling in the bus station, the light fixtures were transformed into light boxes, illuminating hand-drawn maps that traced the journeys of the five speakers from various places in the United States, Mexico and Central America. Colonia Libertad, just south of the United States–Mexican border, is situated along the border fence where, from the Mexican side, people regularly try to enter the United States illegally, often unsuccessfully. Fernandez installed a high-powered, modern reproduction of a nineteenth-century seaman’s brass telescope, mounted adjacent to a stretch of the international boundary fence where many undocumented journeys take place from Mexico to the United States. Both sites are where people of modest or desperate means are en route to somewhere else and, hence, are associated with a sense of suspension and anxiety: it is where people wait for the bus or for the right moment to venture across the border. 169


Fig. 44. Christina Fernandez, Arrivals and Departures, Tijuana, Mexico/US border crossing (1997): bus station.

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The Tijuana border region is a place of demarcation that maintains relations of power and forms of domination. As a transnational border, it is a hegemonic space and a site of exclusion and inclusion. A 2000-mile long ‘fence’ stretching from the Gulf of Mexico to San Diego is, however, essentially an idea, a ‘figment’ of the United States’ public imagination, which is reassured by its presence.21 For the United States, the border with Mexico is a space in which to assert the power of the ‘centre’ over the ‘margin’ and a space in which to articulate the cultural, social, economic and political hierarchical relationships between the United States and its ‘others’. Differences are mapped and fixed by the discourses of power articulated and enforced by the geographical border between the United States and Mexico and which bring the excluded into its cultural, political and economic sphere of influence.22 Every day, thousands of workers, tourists, residents, weekend trippers, government officials and truck drivers cross over between the United States and Mexico. The area that links Tijuana and San Diego is thus a cross-border metropolis, a site of economic necessity, of interactions, reciprocations and transpositions. As a liminal space, it maps a region of continuous movement and interchange. As a threshold, it marks a space of contestation where there may never be a ‘beyond’ since it designates a relational interdependency: for US farmers depend on migrant labour to realize their crops (and it is therefore an essential part of the US economy) and for those workers on the minimal wages they receive and on which they support their families.23 In Fernandez’s video the artist presents tales of displacement and dislocation. There is a story about a grandmother who is ‘rescued’ from the threat of violence by her family from her birthplace, a village in El Salvador, and who yearns, after two years to return. There is another about enforced rural nomadism in which a father has to take his daughter to work with him in the fields because he is constantly on the move in search of work. These stories form the soundtrack to images of the routes taken by the five participants drawn on a map. The routes cross and recross, double back and circle around Guatemala, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Mexico City, Tijuana and San Diego and its adjacent towns and cities in California, thereby creating a network of flows, repetitions and crossings in a series of interrelational movements. Arrivals and Departures shows the repeating and transitory parallel connections of the people behind the five voices whose paths are drawn and overlap on the map of Central America and southern California around San Diego. It proposes a series of connected points as 171


the narratives and the ‘video drawing’ gradually suggest a network of relational and connected migratory experiences. These multiple positions and interconnections propose no singular migration experience, but submit a decentred milieu where any part can be connected to any other part. The cross-border metropolis that links Tijuana and San Diego is a place where absence and presence, life and death, past and present, transgression, incursion, representation and reality collapse together. For the 50,000 workers who cross from Mexico to the United States each day, the border is a conduit of power and a potential place of conflict. Subject to timeconsuming daily border checks and security scrutiny, the workers lose income from these demonstrations of control by the US border patrols. Colonia Libertad, where Fernandez’s telescope was installed, is close to an area where people regularly assemble in preparation for illegal and dangerous night-time crossings into US territory, but points north. The US customs and border patrol’s use of infrared imaging devices to identify these undocumented crossings is shown in Fernandez’s video in a disturbing sequence of images of people squatting on the ground, surrounded by the uniformed presence of the US border patrol. Those apprehended seem caught in the unseen headlights of infrared technology that uncannily illuminates as ice-blue the dark of the foliage and dirt tracks, people’s clothes and eyes. Whilst Fernandez’s telescope allows any passing viewer to survey the ‘zone of density’, which is the barrier between the United States and Mexico, from the US side from here, Mexico is under constant surveillance by the US authorities. This imperial gaze determines and confirms a system of power relations that is acted out along the line between Mexico and the United States within the situated space of the border. Fernandez’s telescope is an attempt to confer power onto the powerless and transpose visibility to the other side, formally the recipient site of the gaze of authority. Arrivals and Departures proposed two conceptualizations of the border. Fernandez’s installation in the bus station gave voice to the border as a site where narratives of loss, opportunity, desire and pragmatic economic imperative are played out within the constant flows and counter-flows of movement and exchange. Here, the border is a fugitive space that expands beyond the linear concept of a dividing territory, into extended spatial and somatic arenas where everyday necessity is enacted through a movement between thresholds of aspiration and need. Arrivals and Departures was sited within the concept of the border and constructed around concepts of 172

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Fig. 45. Christina Fernandez, Arrivals and Departures, Tijuana, Mexico/US border crossing (1997): telescope.

173


empowerment and disempowerment. It is a reminder of the border as an instrument of control that articulates hierarchies of dominance and structures of power. The work investigated the border as essentially a way to establish and maintain a centre/margin relationship in which the imperialistic mission of bringing the ‘margin’ into the sphere of influence of the ‘centre’ is enacted. In Fernandez’s video the narratives describe the microsites within the daily experience where, for those marginalized, the border permeates the everyday as an ever-present site of the enunciation of power. As David Avalos has observed, the ‘official’, geographic border between the United States and Mexico is essentially a metaphorical site for exclusion, control and dominance: the real ‘border’ exists at the core of United States society where it is enacted every day in ‘every office, shop, restaurant, field and place of business in every city and every locality in the USA’.24 The border can be perceived as a series of interstitial spaces where relations of control are described. Considered through issues concerning the processes of urbanization and the instabilities of space; the conflicts and violence of history in the boundaries between memory and denial; how social relations of space produce modes of exclusion and inclusion; and where the geographical border operates as a site for the regulation and distribution of power, these site-specific artworks show that all kinds of borders exist. As disturbances of space they are interventions that reveal the boundaries inscribed within the everyday where the homeless, the migrant, the politically repressed and the poor are situated differently. Notes 1. Monica Degen, ‘Regenerating public life: a sensory analysis of regenerated public places in El Raval, Barcelona’, in Judith Rugg and Daniel Hinchcliffe (eds) Advances in Art and Urban Futures: Recoveries and Reclamations (Bristol: Intellect Books, 2002) pp. 19–36. 2. bel hooks, ‘Marginality as a site of resistance’, in Russell Fergusen, Martha Gever, Trinh T. Minh-ha and Cornel West (eds) Out There: Marginalization and Contemporary Cultures (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990) pp. 341–3. 3. Henri Lefebvre considers the ‘differential space’ of social experience and existence, the features of which are about difference and diversity. Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space. 4. In Mexico City, for example, it has been estimated that 60 per cent of the city’s growth is the result of people building their own dwellings on peripheral land without services. ‘Urbanization’ and ‘favelization’ have become synonymous in cities such as São Paulo and Amazon, where the growth of shanty towns accounts for up to 80 per cent of city growth (Davis, Planet of Slums). 5. In Ethiopia, slum dwellers make up 99 per cent of the urban population and in Mumbai there are between ten and twelve million squatters and tenement dwellers; in

174

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6. 7. 8. 9.

10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18.

19. 20.

21. 22. 23.

24.

Mexico City, Dhaka, Lagos, Karachi and Shanghai there are between six and ten million in each city (Davis, Planet of Slums). In particular, cities in India, Africa, China, Latin America and Southeast Asia (Davis, Planet of Slums). Lefebvre, The Production of Space. The work was part of the Istanbul Biennale, 2003. For Salcedo, the spatial is crucial. ‘To place the invisible experience of marginal people in space is to find a place for them in our mind.’ Nancy Princenthal, Paul Celan and Emmanuel Levinas, Doris Salcedo (London: Phaidon Press, 2000). Amnesty International’s estimate. Rosalyn Deutsche, Evictions: Art and Spatial Politics (Cambridge, MA:, MIT Press, 1998). Sharon Zukin, Loft Living: Culture and Capital in Urban Change (New York: Rutgers University Press, 1989). Sasson, ‘Analytical borderlines’, pp. 23–42. Deutsche, Evictions. Tim Cresswell, In Place, Out of Place: Geography, Ideology and Transgression (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996). David Sibley, Geographies of Exclusion: Society and Difference in the West (London: Routledge, 1995). Peter Marcuse, ‘Neutralising homelessness’, Socialist Review, vol. 18, no. 1, January– March 1988. As Rosalyn Deutsche (Evictions) has described, the relationship between urban development and homelessness in New York had been articulated through public art programmes within the 1980s and 1990s, which suppressed conflict inherent in redevelopment. During the mid-1980s, homelessness in New York was a symptom of the ‘uneven development’ of the restructuring of global capitalism. Judith Butler, Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of ‘Sex’ (New York: Routledge, 1993). Part of inSITE, 1997, an ongoing Biennale of artists’ residences and engagements throughout the San Diego/Tijuana ‘corridor’ between Mexico and the USA. The Biennale invites artists primarily from Latin America and the United States to develop artworks that focus on the area as a site of critical analysis. David Avalos, ‘Response to the philosophical brothel’, in John Welchman (ed.) Rethinking Borders (London: Macmillan Academic Press, 1996), pp. 187–99. Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin (eds) Post-Colonial Studies: The Key Concepts (London: Routledge, 2000). Recently there has been another form of migration – from agriculture to the construction and leisure industries where pay and conditions are better, causing agricultural labour shortages and loss of significant harvests (Guardian, 4 February 2006, p. 23). Avalos, ‘Response to the philosophical brothel’.

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CONCLUSION ___________________

As Rosalyn Deutsche has argued, space is maintained through discursive relationships produced by conflict. Contemporary utopias such as tourism and urban regeneration construct and idealize space as empty of contention, imposing enforced coherences and concealing difference. As forms of legitimization that commodify space, they continually realign their own hierarchical values, erasing and repressing historical, political and social contentions. These modulating forms, like colonialism, redevelopment or ‘heritage’, construct a spatial order as knowable and defined where exclusionary agendas legitimize processes of commodification and dominance. As sites of contestation, site-specific art can offer an incongruence and antagonism to this fabricated space and show its inherent instabilities, rent by processes of estrangement, alienation and loss. This book has investigated how a critical exploration of ‘site’ in relation to contemporary art can contest various forms of appropriation of space. By situating the investigation within an international frame, I have argued that theorizations of contemporary art in relation to the spatial must acknowledge wider interdisciplinary debates. Close consideration of these artworks show that they cannot be detached from their spatial contexts – materially, culturally, politically or theoretically. The potential of contemporary site-specific art to disrupt the certainties governing the consumption of space manufactured by its regulating discourses reveal the power relations and exclusions within the hegemonic terms of constructed utopias. Homelessness, marginalization, migration, ethnicity, human rights, class, gender and various forms of ‘otherness’ are part of the ways in which space is socially produced but denied in the homogenizing discourses of modernity. In the fissures between various forms of spatial ordering, 177


relationships between art and space can introduce ambivalence where the hidden, suppressed, forgotten and the surrogate are made visible. In the context of global concerns and the pernicious effects of more and more configurations of regulating structures, forms of contemporary art can dislocate the manufactured stabilities of space, revealing its instabilities in an inherently unstable world.

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194

INDEX _________

9/11, 97 110 Euston Road, 18– 23 Aboriginal, 82 Acapulco, 152 Africa, 98 agoraphobia, 20, 28 Alberta, 131 Almarcegui, Lara, 33–9 Alÿs, Francis, 63–6 Amsterdam, 1, 3–4, 33, 35–9, 56, 139, 142 Anglican Church, 11 Angola, 102 anti-fascism, 118 anti-Semitism, 48, 119 Antonioni, Michelangelo, 151 Arabia, 93 architecture, 2–3, 22–3, 34–9, 43–4, 46, 48, 55, 151–2, 158, 160 Argentina, 1, 3, 48, 53, 56–8 Armenia, 63 Arne, Thomas, 83 Arrivals and Departures, 169, 171, 172 Artangel, 104, 110 asylum seeker/seekers, 104, 105, 108 Ataman, Kutlag, 60–3, 66 Ataturk, 62

Augé, Marc, 80 Auschwitz, 46 Australia, 48, 78, 80, 126, 129, 132 Austria, 119 Avalos, David, 174 Bale, 71–4 Bangladesh, 42 Bank of England, 54 Barbados, 126 Barcelona, 1, 4, 157–9, 161 Barlow, Phyllida, 115–20 Bartók, Béla, 8 Basel, 3, 7, 24–5 Baudrillard, Jean, 141 Bauman, Zygmunt, 22 Bay Windows, 124–8 Belarus, 102 Bell, Nikki, 97–102 Belzec, 44 Benjamin, Walter, 48, 99, 101 Bermondsey, 39–40, 42 Best, Anna, 82–4 Bethnal Green, 116, 119 Bevingtons & Sons, 40–1, 43 Bhabha, Homi, 132 Blow Up, 151–2 Bombay, 11

195

EXPLORING SITE-SPECIFIC ART Bourdieu, Pierre, 86 Brecht, Bertolt, 119 Brechtian, 119 Brick Lane, 118 Brighton, 96 Britain, 22, 74, 96, 98, 103, 119, 121, 126, 131; see also United Kingdom (UK) British League of Fascists, 119 British Library, 23 British Union of Fascists, 118–19 Broekzele, 98 Brunetti, Carlotta, 139–42 Brussels, 1, 4, 22, 91, 97–101 Burundi, 98 Butler, Judith, 168 C Magazine, 165 Cable Street, 116, 118–19 California, 131, 169, 171 Cambodia, 43 Canada, 1, 4, 132, 167 Canal Grande, 72 Cancun, 124 Canton, see Guangzhou Cape Town, 11 capitalism, 20, 39, 43, 48, 55–6, 84, 86, 94, 142, 150 Casa del Poble Nou, 157–61 Castells, Manuel, 56 Catalunya, 158 Central America, 169, 171; see also Latin America Cheapside, 53–4, 66 Chile, 48 China, 1, 4, 42–3, 77–8, 91–6, 128 Choi Jeong Hwa, 76–8 Christianity, 11–12 City of London, 148, 150 class, 4, 63, 85, 99, 109, 118, 120, 123, 133, 141, 177

196

Collins, Susan, 144–9 Colonia Libertad, 169, 172 colonialism, 3–4, 7, 11, 15–16, 80–2, 100, 115, 126, 130–1, 177 commodification, 3, 22, 39, 43, 46, 49, 71, 78, 86, 96, 177 concentration camps, 44 Confucianism, 92 Congo, 98 Conquest (of Mexico), 15, 17 consumerism, 75, 78, 141 consumption, 7, 16, 20, 22, 24, 39, 43, 71–2, 74–6, 78, 86–7, 124, 126, 128, 131, 141, 143, 146, 165–6, 177 Coudenberg, 97–8, 101 Coudenberg Palace, 97–9, 101 Counsell, Melanie, 18–23 County Down, 131 Couverture, 24–7 Crang, Mike, 128 Crossing the Line, 120–3 Cruquiuskade, 34, 38–9 Cuba, 128 Cultural Revolution, 92 Cunningham, Alphonso, 131 Curtis, Layla, 128–3 Cyprus, 120–3 Day of the Dead, 12, 14, 16–17 Delaware, 131 Deleuzean, 81 Deutsche, Rosalyn, 165, 167, 177 diasporas, 91 Diego, Juan, 14, 17 Dirty Fountain, 44–8 Disney World, 78 Disneyland, 22 displacement, 2–3, 24, 28, 54, 59, 61, 75–6, 81, 91, 100, 104, 106, 110, 148, 152, 157–8, 160, 162, 171

INDEX Dublin, 11 Durham, 132 East End, 42, 115–16, 118–19 ecology, 4, 142, 153 Ecuador, 124 Egypt, 102 El Raval, 158 El Salvador, 169, 171 Endara, Guillermo, 64 England, 106, 115, 124 Entrepotdok, 34, 38 epic theatre, 119 Equador, 125 ethnicity, 4, 15, 62–3, 92, 115, 123, 177 Europe, 20, 22, 48, 74, 99, 119, 120 European Commission, 98 European Parliament, 98 European Union (EU), 40, 42, 99, 101, 121, 123 Eurostar, 20, 23 Ewald, Wendy, 102–7, 110 exclusion, 2–3, 14, 22, 24, 44, 48, 61, 63, 66, 80, 104–9, 125, 165–6, 169, 171, 174 Falkland Islands, 11 fascism, 119 Fernandez, Christina, 169–73 Fiji, 124–6 First World War, 132 Fontenay sur Bois, 139, 141 food production, 71, 74–5, 87 Forêt Surprise, 139–42 former Yugoslavia, 48, 98 Foucault, Michel, 59 France, 1, 4, 98, 118–19, 139, 141 Fremantle, 11 Freud, Sigmund, 27; Freudian, 11, 27

fundamentalism, 92, 120 Gallaccio, Anya, 24–8 Gambia, 74 Gateshead, 128 Gedalof, Irene, 108 gender, 26, 33, 63, 109, 115, 120, 122–3, 133, 177 Generaal Vetterstraat, 34, 39 Generalgouvernement, 45 Germany, 1, 40, 44, 98, 118–19 Giardini, 71, 76 Gibraltar, 11 Gladstone Hotel, 165 global warming, 76 globalization, 1, 4, 18, 40, 43, 75, 91, 109–10, 120, 141, 157, 165 Gobi Desert, 72 Gonzalez-Foerster, Dominique, 151–3 Greek Orthodox Church, 123 Green Line, 121–3 Guangdong, 93–4 Guangzhou, 91, 93–6 Guatemala, 169, 171 Guattari, Felix, 141–2 Guildhall, 150 Gulf of Mexico, 171 Gurnah, Abdulrazak, 105 Haarlemmerstraat, 34, 38, 106 Hackney, 119 Han, 92 Harbour Noord, 34, 36, 39 Hasaks, 92 Hawaii, 124–6 heritage, 15, 36, 39, 46–7, 49, 146, 177 Herne Bay, 4, 124–7 Hidalgo, Miguel, 15 Hokitika, 124, 126

197

EXPLORING SITE-SPECIFIC ART Holocaust, 46, 48 homeless, 60, 62, 157, 165–8, 174; homelessness, 101, 165, 168 Hong Kong, 94 Hong Kong Bank, 150 Hui, 92, 94 Hungary, 120 identity, 2–3, 7, 12, 14–17, 20, 22, 46, 61, 91, 105, 108–10, 123, 126, 128, 144, 168 inclusivity, 91 India, 42, 94, 151 Interlaken, 124 Iran, 63 Iraq, 63 Ireland, 42, 48, 131 Islam, 92, 96, 97, 106, 123 Islamophobia, 97 Istanbul, 1, 3, 60, 62, 157, 161, 163, 164 Italy, 1, 40, 42, 71, 74–5 Izbica, 44 Japan, 74, 128 Jews, 44, 98 jouissance, 17, 54 Kameriç, Sejla, 120–3 Kane, Pauline, 131 Kant, Immanuel, 11 Karlantijpa, 129, 132 Karlsaue Park, 151 Kassel, 4, 151, 153 Keizergracht, 36, 38, 268 Kentucky, 131 Kiarostami, Abbas, 152 King’s Cross, 20, 23 Klein, Melanie, 16; Kleinian, 15–16 Koh, Germaine, 165–9 Kracauer, Siegfried, 23

198

Kristeva, Julia, 24, 26 Kruip, Germaine, 56–9 Kűba, 60–6 Kurdistan, 62–3 Kurds, 61–2 L’Eclisse, 151–2 La Notte, 151–2 Lacan, Jacques, 17, 106; Lacanian, 17, 106 Laclau, Ernesto, 13 Lagos, 11 Langlands, Ben, 97, 99, 101–2 Latin America, 65; see also Central America; Latin American, 14, 65 Latour, Bruno, 56 Latvia, 120 Leaps of Faith, 120 Lefebvre, Henri, 54, 63 Levinas, Emmanuel, 164 Lewis, Mark, 53–6 Lille, 22 London, 3–4, 7, 9, 18–19, 21, 23, 33, 39–41, 53, 55–6, 60–1, 71, 82–3, 85, 106, 115–16, 119, 139, 148–9; City of, 53–4 longing, 7, 10–11, 18, 27–8 loss, 3, 10–12, 14–16, 18, 22, 26, 28, 49, 64–5, 74, 104, 110, 161–2, 172, 177 lotus, 76, 78 Lublin, 44 McDonald’s, 82 McGinnis family, 131 Magid, Jill, 142 Malaysia, 77–8, 92 Manchus, 92 Mansion House, 54 Mao Zedong, 92; Maoist, 94

INDEX Marchant, Alison, 39–43 Marcuse, Peter, 167 Margate, 4, 102–5, 107–9 marginalization, 2, 14, 61, 65–6, 105, 123, 133, 177 Marolles, 98 Marx, Karl, 55 Massey, Doreen, 61, 132 Melbourne, 1, 3, 71, 78, 81, 82 Mexican Revolution, 15 Mexico, 1, 12, 14, 16–17, 42–3, 151, 157, 169–70, 172–4 Mexico City, 13, 171 Mickey Mouse, 48 migration, 2, 61, 91, 100, 102, 104, 106, 108–10, 169, 172; migrant workers, 94; migrants, 42, 63, 102, 160, 166 Miller, Kathryn, 78, 80–2 Minaret, 91–7 Minehead, 4, 144–5, 147 misogyny, 105 Mission to Seafarers, 8, 11 modernity, 2, 35, 38, 54, 80–1, 100, 161, 177 Mongolians, 92 Morando, Bernardo, 44 Morocco, 98 Morris, Michael, 104 Mosleyite, 119 multiculturalism, 109 Murdoch, Iris, 33 Muslims, 92, 94, 97 Muzatter, 61 National Front, 105, 118 National Trust, 76 nationalism, 4, 65, 115, 121, 123, 162 NATO, 98 Nazism, 48, 119; Nazis, 45 Neckinger mill, 39–41

Netherlands, 44, 98 New Hampshire, 131 New Mexico, 7, 14–15, 169 New South Wales, 129 New York, 56, 104, 163 New Zealand, 126, 131 Newcastle, 4, 115, 128–32 NewcastleGateshead, 128–33 Nicaragua, 171 Nicosia, 4, 115, 120–2 Nieu Kerkstraat, 38 Nocturne, 7–11, 18 nomadism, 171 Noriega, Manuel Antonio, 64 Northern Ireland, 108, 131 Northumberland, 129, 132 Norway, 74 Novotel Hotel, 23 Oboussier, Claire, 124–7 One Minute of Silence, 63–6 Ontario, 131 Orient, 96 Ortega, Rafael, 63–6 Ottoman Empire, 44 Our Lady of Guadalupe, 12, 14–16 Palomino, Jesus, 157–9 Panama, 1, 64 Panama City, 3, 53, 63–4 Paris, 22, 139 Park – A Plan for Escape, 151–3 Passagenwerk, 100 Pearl River, 91–3; Pearl River Delta, 91, 94 Pennsylvania, 131 Phaophanit, Vong, 124–5, 127 Philippines, 128 PKK, 62 Plaza del Mayo, 57 Plunged in a Stream, 97–101

199

EXPLORING SITE-SPECIFIC ART Poble Nou, 157–8, 160–1 Point of View, 56–9, 66 Poland, 1, 3, 33, 44–6, 98 pollution, 8, 71–2, 83, 87, 131, 140, 141 popular culture, 76, 78 Potrč, Marjetica, 74–5 Prinsengracht, 36 Provisional IRA, 131 Prudent Passage, 53, 55–6 Puerto Rico, 128 racism, 104–5, 109, 118–19, 141 Red Night, 12–18 refugees, 61–2, 104, 108, 109, 160, 166 religion, 3, 7, 11–12, 14, 92, 108, 123 Renaissance, 44, 46 Rietlanden, 39 Romania, 120 Romero, George A., 14 Rosselini, Roberto, 151 Royal Exchange, 54 Rush Hour, Morning and Evening, Cheapside, 53–6, 66 Russia, 98 Rwanda, 98 Rynek Wodney, 44 Said, Edward, 110 St Michael Paternoster, 7–8 St Pancras International, 20, 22–3 Salcedo, Doris, 161–4, 166 San Diego, 169, 171–2 San Miguel de Tucuman, 56–7 Sánchez, Miguel, 15 Santa Fe, 3, 7, 12, 14–15 Seattle, 131 Second World War, 44, 47–8, 132

200

Senne, River, 97–8, 100–1 Shoreditch, 116 Sibley, David, 166 Siegel, Steven, 71–2, 74 Siena, 3, 71, 74–5 Singapore, 11 Sleeping Rough, 165–8 Sloterdijk, 39 Sosnowska, Monika, 44–9 South Africa, 48, 131–2 South Korea, 94 Southeast Asia, 78, 128 Spain, 40, 118 Speer, Albert, 48 Spitalfields, 116 Sri Lanka, 74 Stads Rietlanden, 35–6 Stockholm, 56 Sudan, 102 Switzerland, 1, 7, 24–5, 27 Sydney, 129 Syria, 63 System Azure, 142–4 Taiwan, 42 Tang dynasty, 92 Tartars, 92 Taziks, 92 Tepeyac, shrine of, 14 Thailand, 77–8 Thatcherism, 119 The 43 Group, 119 The Grasslands Project, 78, 80–2 The Margate Exodus, 104 Thrift, Nigel, 56 Tibetans, 92 Tijuana, 4, 157, 169–73 Tokyo, 56, 124, 126 Toronto, 132, 157, 165 Toronto International Art Fair, 165–6

INDEX tourism, 2–4, 14, 36, 39, 46–7, 49, 115, 120, 122, 124–6, 128, 133, 139–40, 146, 153, 177 Towards a Promised Land, 102–7 Trace, 39–44 trauma, 15–16, 46, 49, 65–6 Trinidad, 11 Tsai Ming-Liang, 151 Turkey, 4, 62–3, 98, 162, 164 Ulster, 108 Underglow, 148–50 UNESCO World Heritage Site, 44 United Kingdom (UK), 1, 25, 42, 102, 104–5, 128–130, 131; see also Britain United Nations, 120 United States, 1, 3, 7, 12, 14, 64–5, 74, 126, 128–9, 169, 171, 172, 174 Untitled, 161–5 Untitled: Demo, 115–20 Urban Agriculture, 74–5 urban planning, 2, 49, 80 urbanization, 2–4, 71, 74, 87, 91, 94, 110, 160, 174 utopia, 3, 20, 47–8, 77, 85, 87, 94, 101 Uygurs, 92 Uzbeks, 92 Vauxhall, 71, 83–5 Vauxhall Bridge, 82–3 Vauxhall Cross, 82–4, 86 Vauxhall Pleasure, 82–7

Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens, 83, 86 Veblen, Thorstein, 86 Venice, 3, 44, 77 Venice Biennale, 71, 76 Victoria, 80 Vierwindenstraat, 117, 36 Vietnam, 43 Viewfinder, 144–7 Virginia, University of, 71, 74 Vive L’Amour, 152 von Hausswolff, Carl Michael, 12–14, 16–17 Walloon, 99 Ward, David, 7–11 Wastelands: a guide to the empty spaces of Amsterdam, 33–9 Waterloo, 20 Wellington, 11 West Somerset, 144 Westergasfabriek, 34, 36 Western Australia, 131 Weteringschans, 38 White Lotus, 76–8 Whitty, Paul, 82–4 Wilson, Elizabeth, 33, 84 Wong, 95 Wong Hoy Cheong, 91–5 World Bank, 75 Wyoming, 169 Zamość, 33, 44–8 Zamoyski, Jan, 44 Zanzibar, 124

201

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