Sara Grisewood

Unit 2 Contextual Studies essay 

 

 

Green wall 2

 

 

6thSeptember 2018

 

A sunny, warm, autumn day, a fine reproduction of our heatwave rippled summer. I was  enticed to walk  the periphery of the entire site (North street industrial estate, Lewes), taking photos of every border, intersection, materials, landscape, how all the work places fit in, how they are placed, their topography by the riverside, and how the concrete mass of the Phoenix Causeway (built 1971) intersects the site. And all the trees, the plants, the seeds, the flowers,insects, birds, and the river, the extraordinary endless living ness of it all. The criss crossingness of it all.  

                                    

                                  

 

                                                            Phoenix Causeway September 2018

 

Why am I still drawn to these spaces, and to feelings (bodily sensations) within these spaces and the ghosts (a being-in-the-world, phenemononoly of Merleau-Ponty).  I am still wandering around a particular brownfield site in Lewes, surrounded by chalk hills (a landscape always on the move in the words of geographer Massey (26. 2005)) and still asking are these derelict spaces, ruins, an allegory for personal feelings of loss. How important is a practice of preserving  ruins and developing reuse to create new types of spaces,  maybe temporary, but cared for; spaces which artists have always been drawn to for their liminality and alterity. How can I better understand notions of place and space, and at the same time the responses of an art of happenings, site -specific and situational, with the artist engaged as fieldworker, ethnographer, anthropologist, working with architects, urban planners, geographers,  to invest meanings and work out ways to insert a multitude of palimpsests into urban (and rural) spaces, into a time-space compression[1].  How can we account for the “long history curled up here”  (Virilio 1975,2008 p. 12)

 

It seems that space and place, and temporality,  need to be understood as part of continually shifting relationships; Jane Rendell in Art and Architecture talks about the writings of Yi – Tu Tuan and Bachelard as having an “invaluable humane imaginative and sensual understanding of place” however  their  focus on a sense of place in architecture in particular has, in her opinion,  had “essentialising tendencies…” while more recent geographers such as “Harvey and Massey… stress the importance of understanding specifics of particular sites and places but only in relational terms as part of larger networks, systems and processes”. (Rendell 2006 p. 25.)  

 

Massey is key for me in articulating “a sense of place and space as more about the people and communities, spaces in between, combined with our ever present need for a global sense of the local, a global sense of place” (Massey 1994 p13) where place constitutes a  “constellation of social relations, meeting and weaving together at a particular locus.” Massey references how issues of both colonialization and gender locate within her theories of space. She references E. Said :“to show how the group is not a natural or god-given entity but is “constructed, manufactured..” and continues “these lines of debate over … space and place are also tied up with gender, with the radical polarization into two genders which is typically hegemonic in western societies today…”(Massey 1994 p6)  Rendell again, quotes Rosalyn Deutsche as “pointing out that it was not enough to add gender as one of the categories of social relations, but that gender difference is a specific kind of difference, and as such, produces and is produced by very particular kinds of space.” (Rendell 2006 p35) and encourages our understanding of space, in relation to art and architecture, to encompass “new ways of knowing and being” … “discussed in spatial terms – ‘mapping’, ‘locating’, ‘situating’, ‘positioning’ and ‘boundaries’. Employed as critical tools, spatial metaphors constitute powerful political devices for examining the relationship between identitiy and place, subjectivity and positionality. Where I am makes a difference to what I can know and who I can be”, (Rendell, 2006 p37)

 

 

 

 

 Rendell introduced the term ‘critical spatial practice’, as a label to supersede the description ‘public art’, alongside an interesting history of Land art beginning with Smithsons definitions of site and non-site, which was “intended as a critique of the gallery system and the role of art as a commoditiy…” though, most examples of Land art exist are only accessible for most people as commodified photographs, and  “many works of land art would not exist without the funding of private patrons”. (Rendell 2006 p43) 

 She references  the ruins of Benjamin’s Arcades Project “As synthesis, the arcade is a dialectical image – an image of dialectics at a standstill- a moment where the past is recognized in the present as a ruin that was once desired” .She  proposes a “focus on decay less of a mourning as trying to imagine a better future and learning from the past with a “strong critique of historical acts inviting the misuse of power” (Rendell  2006 p101)

 

Rendell, brings ‘the city’ into her understandings of public art, of critical spatial practices, deriving notions of ‘spatial theory’ and references from Lefebvre and de Certeau, and geographer Soja and his grouping of the “spatial, the temporal and the social” in Postmodern Geographies, 1989. “Geographers such as Soja, David Harvey and Doreen Massey argued for the importance of space in producing social relationships and in so doing turned to the work of Lefebvre… and de Certeau”. She describes “critical spatial practices… both everyday activities and creative practices which seek to resist the dominant social order of global corporate capitalism”. (Rendell, p. 157) and cites commissioning agency Artangel set up in early 1990s, artwork including Michael Landy’s Breakdown 2001 set in empty department store. And artworks that engage us performatively such as the sound recordings of Janet Cardiff which I recently listened to  outside the Whitechapel gallery and subsequently got lost very quickly in a maze of building sites and changed streets, spooked by the scary directions and a sensation of being followed. (Janet Cardiff 1999 The missing voice).  

 

 

Alice Mah, emphasises the importance of community and individuals lives as part of ongoing processes of deindustrialisation. “we need to rethink concepts of ruination…not all cities can be creative or competitive”… despite efforts to plan gentrification  processes in stigmatized areas such as the former working-class shipbuilding community Walker in Newcastle upon Tyne (Mah 2012), in her opinion “gentrification tends to work ‘best’ organically, in other words, the artists, musicians, and poets who flocked into the rat-infested warehouses of 1980s SoHo, attracted by cheaper rents, are difficult to manufacture or replicate.” She references the essay Loft living, S.Zukin 1982, which comments on a broad process of social change and governmental intervention in the gentrification process in New York of the late 60s/70s.

Mah argues further that in the UK “planned gentrification is the key, underlying strategy of recent UK housing-led regeneration strategies targeted at areas of deprivation”.

 

In Columbia, Karen E. Till looks at how  Mapa Teatro worked with a displaced community in Bogota (2003 and 2004) to create “a literal and metaphorical “footstep in the ruins” of a city neighbourhood, project Prometeo resulted in acts of witnessing, not so much of so-called ‘slum clearance’ but of remembering life in an otherwise previously marginalised community in the city. As Aberhalden Cortes (2006) of Mapa Teatra testified : “the communities stories were a substantive part of the architecture of the neighbourhoods memory. A form or resistantce in the face of oblivion, a potential footprint among the ruins’. Residents worked collaboratively with the artistic group Mapa Teatro Laboratory of Artists on projet Prometeo over a number of years. Rather than treat the audience as spectators, they called upon guests and residents to attend to their city as an inhabited place by considering how the unfolding and open-ended pathways of memory might offer possiblilities of shared belongings” Till  calls for a responsibility for the blatant destruction of homes and suggests we need to develop ethics of caring for places “By considering cities as ‘wounded’, urban space cannot be understood as property only.” (Till Wounded cities : Memory -work and a place-based ethics of care 2011, Journal of Political Geography 31 (2012) 3-14).  Her writing references E. Casey on memory..”Places not only are, they happen..” and reminds that “The past is never ‘set in stone’ …. Just as the narratives associated with remembering and forgetting the past may change through time, so too do the spatial contexts of memory. When space-times shift unexpectedly, new social discussions about the significance of the past in the present may emerge” (K.E. Till, 2011. Gandy ed. p167)

 

                            

 

                                                                               Mapa Teatro, Bogota, 2003

 

 

August 23rd

                                                  

I passed a familiar figure sitting drinking in the cool shade of a Mirabelle tree by the riverbank, seeing that he too uses the  shortcut under the bridge… how present and past collide on this desire path footnote, which will be lost when the demolition and building work starts. My activity of walking around the margins of this site, picking up bits, taking more photos, making  drawings, has created an archive of sorts. I met the owner of the Soap factory, clearing out the old factory, known as the soap factory, and he said Green Wall was actually the bank between the back of the factory and footpath, part of the medieval town ditch where people did their washing.                         

 

 

                            

 

 

 

Path under Phoenix Causeway, September 2018                  Green wall and old soap factory, September 2018

 

 

 

                              

 

“By exploring ongoing changing spaces of encounter between people, objects and places, walking can play an important role in creating new kinds of relationships between subjects and objects…” (Rendell p. 158 and “the kind of thinking engendered through walking is important for emancipatory politics”. Feminist philosopher Rosi Braidotti’s interest in nomadism does not so much describe the nomadic subject as the person who moves from place to place; rather, she is inspired by nomadism as a way of knowing that refuses to be pinned down by existing conditions” (Rendell,p188.)

 

The development of riverside areas in Lewes, as in many other towns, is a form of gentrification as it pushes house prices up, leaves no room for small independent business , and in effect provides no new  affordable, and definitely no new social, housing, meaning local people have to move away because they cannot afford to live here.  New apartments by the river in another part of Lewes are marketed as ‘loft living’ spaces, a nod to the bohemian lofts of New York.

 

                          

  

                                                                 Phoenix Way September 2018

 

12thOctober 2018

 

 Further along the riverbank, a semiwild garden by Pop up studios,  inhabited by fewer caravans and customised vans than it was, together with a crumbling pizza oven used for summer festivals, remnants of a DIY micro brewery using all recycled equipment and repurposed containers, plastic, to grow things in , all rather in ruins now, but somehow retaining the bountiful air of a wastelands aesthetic in the autumn sun, with ample rhubarb, selfseeded fennel, etc. 

 

                     

 

             

 

                                                               Pop up studios, lewes. September 2018

 

The future of alternative spaces created by artists may be in developing non-venues, which are mobile and travel to people,  as places are lost to developers. In the light of many pop-up temporary spaces K. Till argues that they simply “continue to reify a capitalist framework of development… that valorises exchange values and permanance” she suggests using the term interim spaces, with hidden benefits of healthy place-making, using ruins, empty spaces, as interim spaces for artists.

Irene Tsatsos, in relation to alternative spaces (Rand p.37), describes the Mirrored Gardens of Hu Fang and his belief that  “artists will be more engaged in life – no longer as a solidified reality with an original single meaning, but as a continuous flowing process… a truly diverse new species of space – that will inspire a new space for life.” “grounded in a sense of contemporary existence, this space called Mirrored Gardens attempts to construct a “field” where contemporary art, daily life, and farming-oriented life practices can merge and flow together. .. It investigates how art can become an active medium that facilitates the transformation of different ideas, material forms, and dimensions of space-time..”(Hu Fang 2015 E-flux)

 

 

 

 

 

                                  

 

       

                           Mirrored gardens, outskirts of Guangzhou, China. 2015. Sou Fujimoto

 

Can Architects  be more involved with creating places and spaces, rather than just buildings, intertwined with artists developing spaces in the public realm ?  Muf architects  project of the regeneration of Altab Ali Park in Whitechapel, London,  is built on many layers of history and diverse communities and the process of creating the plans involved many diverse local groups. Architects typically work to a finished, envisioned outcome ,  however “there is a sharp contrast with what Katherine (Clarke) has taught me – that the conclusion is unknown – and the deceptive reassurances of architects who begin by describing a conclusion”. Kath Schonfield (This is what we do : a Muf manual. 2001)

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                                                  Altab Ali Park, Whitechapel, Muf Architects

 

 

Claire Doherty Situation, who was responsible for Situation in Bristol which created art happenings/events : “ If we understand place as an unstable, shifting set of political, social, economic and material relations, and locality as produced and contested through a set of conditions that we might describe as situation, our experience of works which truly produce remarkable engagements with place will be characterized by a sense of dislocation – encouraging us no longer to look with the eyes of a tourist but to become implicated in the jostling contingency of mobilities and relations that constitute contemporaneity.”

 

Francis Alys describes his landscape interventions , again in direct contrast to solitary Land art, as an  “attempt to democratise land art… here we have attempted to create a kind of land art for the landless, and with the help of hundreds of people and shovels we created a social allegory” (Doherty (Ed.) p.39 2009) .  And Lucy Lippard again on Land art illuminates that “ its location…is not closeted in “white cubes’…only readable to those in the know”. (Doherty (ed.) 2009 p159). The cataloguing nature of the work of The Center for Land Use Interpretation, set up by  Matthew Coolidge… in Lippards opinion is an heir to the conceptual art of the 1960s and 1970s :“Its casual, often humorous, fusion of geography and art”  and “Once you know the local you realise how connected it is to global capitalism; its tentacles are everywhere…Its all interrelated – gravel, development, water, tourism, adobe architecture, Land art, rock art, and so on.” (Artforum, May 12 2014)

 

 

In 1991 Places with a past ,Charleston, curator Mary Jane Jacob used the whole city as a site and in her opinion “the artists succeeded in creating works that were truly site-specific, that is, they could not be located elsewhere..The result was art that addressed a location.. the installations became like chapters in a book that together told a larger , more complete and alternative story of Charleston” (Doherty (ed.) 2009 p197)   The criticism of large art exhibitions is that anywhere can host an arts biennale, and globalism brings to localism a brief visit not necessarily guaranteeing economic upturn, again demonstrating the unevenness of capitalism (Massey 1994). 

 

I travelled to Venice to see Ho do Suhs film of the demolition of Robin Hood Gardens, his traces of interiors of flats with haunting images of occupied and then unoccupied flats, evoked an unsettling  feeling of time sliding past. Architects, Alison and Peter  Smithson, made a telling comment, in 1976 : “A building under assembly is a ruin in reverse.” 

 

 

                      

                                                               

                                                            Do Ho Suh Robin Hood Gardens

 

Kerstin Barndt  describes ruins as the “memory traces of an abandoned set of futures” and as  “palimpsests that invite us to contemplate a layered temporality”. Iraqi artist Hanaa Malallah poignantly points out that ruins, if left alone, can outlive us .(Malallah, 2018) Mourning is a process of revenance and one of  accumulating relics as referenced by K Till, (Gandy (ed) 2011 p167) Our spaces and places can be layered with different meanings. We can care for these places with an awareness of our ‘footprints in the ruins’. 

 

I can understand my practice now leaning towards  processes such as unfolding, unravelling, unrolling to demonstrate collections of residues, remnants, fragments, and relics.  How to unfold, unravel, roll out these many histories ? In the words of Virilio history can be curled up within layers and in different times, with no clear cut of layered time, they intersect and mix in different places like combinations of rock formations from different time frames, squeezed together, revealing multi temporalities. 

 

 

Sara Grisewood

September 2018

 

 

 

 

 

Bibliography

Doherty, Claire Situation, Whitechapel and MIT 2009

Gandy, Matthew (Ed.) Urban Constellations jovis Verlag. 2011

Hell, Schonle (Ed.) Ruins of Modernity. Duke. 2010

 Fang, Hu Towards a Non-Intentional Space The Path to Krameterhof Journal 66 – October 2015

 Mah, Alice, Ruination and post-industrial urban decline, 2013,Sage

Malalah, Hanna. Art and Vivid Ruins. Wimbledon College of Arts, PaintingResearch. 22/11/18 

Massey, Doreen Space, Place and Gender 1994 Polity press

 Rand, Steven, (Ed.) Atkins, Ault, and more.  Playing By the Rules : Alternative Thinking/Alternative Spaces 2010 apexart

Rendell, Jane Art and Architecture : A place between. 2006. IB Tauris

Virilio, Paul Bunker Ideology, first published 1975, this ed 2008, 

 

 

 

References 

 

Journal

E-flux 

Political Geography

 

 

Film

Gee, Grant. Patience (after Sebald) 2013

Rivers, Ben  Trees over there 

 

Exhibition

Venice Arcitecture Biennale, 2018 Freespace 

 

Bibliograpy

Borden, Kerr, Rendell, (Ed.) The Unknown City Contesting Architecture and Social Space., 2001

Doherty, Claire Situation . Documents of contemporary Art Ed Whitechapel/MIT 2009. 

 Gandy, Matthew (Ed.) Urban Constellations ed. 2011

Massey, Doreeen Space, place and gender . 1994. Polity Press

Massey, Doreen World City . 2007 Polity 

Roberts, Peter, Sykes, Hugh Urban Regeneration. 2000 Sage

Virilio, Paul Bunker Ideology. 1997 new ed. 2008 Princeton 

Hu Fang

Sebald, Rings of Saturn

Till, Karen E. 

Exhibitions

Venice Architecture Biennale, 201 

Whitechapel, Janet Cardiff, ongoing (1999)