Lecture 6 (Fall 2011) Doug Rickard

Seen as an interview on the web site of Pier 24, San Francisco:
http://vimeo.com/30357393

I saw Rickard's work in early August 2011 in Pier 24, In person and not through the internet. Although his images are appropriated from Google Street view, it was interesting to see his work being put into an art collection. Pier 24 is one of the institutions backing his practice which is important.
At the end of my Spring 2011 semester I did nearly the same thing though to a smaller extent. I visited Baltimore virtually and was able to get very strong images off the screen of the computer. The moral dilemma came up: is it ok if am away from the decaying spaces, too safe and just watching a spectacle. Were I happy to not be taking the Greyhound and walking with a 4x5 camera on these streets? Better safe than sorry. But how is that changing my personal connection. Is it the same as visiting for a day versus living in the same city but in a safer area versus living on these streets. Isn't it superficial.
Rickard's reason to make his images with streetview was financial, just like me. And he managed to make really good images in the tradition of the FSA, Evans, Frank, Shore and other typical American photographers. Having the same concern about superficiallity, it is striking that he can actually access these various places. And this diversity is not superficial. He tries to contradict the universal image of America in social consciousness through showing places that are not restricted but out of the public attention. Or simply not part of the Spectacle.



East Baltimore, my research for a photographic trip, June 2011

Lecture 5 (Fall 2011) Nicolas Moulin

Seen on the website of Site Gallery, Sheffield, UK
http://www.sitegallery.org/archives/1048

He talked about his residency in the University of Sheffield and the show he had in Site gallery. I felt little uncomfortable as he was in the role of the wise foreigner visiting a troubled wasteland city and critiquing it. Well his work is not that but still there is some spectacle of the misfortune. I have been wanting to see his projects, the sculptures, videos and real prints. A review of this show can be seen in Frieze: http://www.frieze.com/shows/review/nicolas_moulin/
Moulin talked about his process. Exploring a place is for extensive period of time in order to get into the rhythm of life, understand its history and establish relations with the people living there. He addressed the romanticism of the decaying and seeing form without function as sculpture... I really get this 21st century romanticism from his work indeed. Being romantic without being silly is hard. References to architecture styles were in the talk but not too in depth. What I really admire Moulin though is his ability to not just represent but make things that are actually relevant to the place. He manages to make excellent work out of the sames concerns that I have.

Lecture 4 (Fall 2011) Mika Rottenberg

This was good to see. I felt many things from her work overlap with my interests but many are out of my sensibility. I truly enjoyed how she found the weird or obsessive people and made work with them. Or maybe exploited them, although they seemed willing to participate. These were the irregulars who don't conform to the normal life of 9-5. I wish I could do that. Also the Chinese restaurant waiting on the counter video added to the feeling she contrasts her other work with the insanity of normal life. On the other hand I felt she made more of a spectacle without going in depth. Her finding of the obsessive people reminded me of Diane Arbus.
The issues that Mika touched on were only stated but not examined. The first video showed was the most compelling and had some diversity of characters, the rest were becoming too much of the same. Her installations look is very appealing and picks on the senses but seems trendy. Is there anything more than the process and the moving parts?

Lecture 3 (Fall 2011) Deke Weaver

This one caught me off guard. It was not a lecture but a performance. I could not believe that this calm and absolutely controlled person can become insane onstage. The performance was really good, it is something similar to the script I wrote for a video at the beginning of the semester. His stories were more focused though. His fuzzy kitty act spoke so much to me as I always wanted to do an animation with a fuzzy cute duckling and dwarfs. I enjoyed his energy on stage and can see that he really enjoys what he does. Sort of nihilistic but I often feel the same way too. His fuzzy kitty video was, as he stated later, inspired by a breakup. The second and third stories relate to my current work, the school children and authority; the 9-5 person finding meaning in life. One of his answers at the end, whether he would perform for children, made me believe he is honest and this is really important. But maybe a person should be careful to what extent, his answer was that he is hesitant because of parents not children because if he wants to talk about huge throbbing dicks he would. For reference see the second video down.

DON'T BE A DICK: A Message From the Honorable Senator from Deke Weaver on Vimeo.

Lecture 2 (Fall 2011) Jennifer and Kevin McCoy

It was good to see the progression of their work. Their almost junky installations that require constant maintenance are interesting case in museum preservation. I liked the dream videos and the theater piece but the sound was disappointing. Somebody asked them after the lecture about it and they gave a good reason for that however I forgot it. I wonder how their work is seen today, when they started youtube was not in operation yet. There are many videos of classified moments in movies, edits to create another meaning. My favorite work though was the post apocalyptic shopping mall because of the topic, the manifestation in the work and moreover the fact that it was made for a mall! Though I truly respect their work I disliked their comment that only in America art is made fun. This was towards the end of the show. Well, their have their thing going well and as long as they are happy its all good.

Lecture 1 (Fall 2011) Zwelethu Mthethwa

The first visiting artist to show unfinished work and ask for opinions. This is very brave as the audience on this events wants authority. A lecture is not a studio visit. I like his work, for the most part. The series I hated was the staged people in parks in South Africa, they looked as bad stock photos. His other photo work is very traditional but in a location that has not been yet covered. I had the feeling that I see Walker Evans' photographs about another country. Mthethwa seems very involved in creating a visual account of these specific people at this point of time. In 50 years there will be a document of his subjects, who otherwise would not be able to leave a trace in public consciousness. And Mthethwa's photographs do exactly this, show something transient and until this moment anonymous. The merit of his work is to have as little intervention in the image and in the same time create highly sophisticated photographs. His personality in his work is his care for his subjects (emphasizing on them not himself), recognizing the importance of the topic he works on and making a really great job photographing it.

Vistiting Artist Meeting 3 (Fall 2011): Deke Weaver

I was not well prepared for this one. He was one of the most non emotional and patient people who has ever visited in such a huge contrast to his performance later that day. I showed him recent work, studies, the candidacy show, my older works on my web site. Yes, he liked them but he needed a story. One of his main concerns with photography, that the story behind the image is more interesting than the image itself. Do I agree about that? It depends on context. No image would draw as much attention as his performance, however, the topics of context and representation are more prominent in photography than story telling. If you are looking for a narrative you can more successfully see it in movies or plays. Images are perceived in a short instant but this is exactly what makes them interesting, the desire to project your thinking on the photograph. Images might not be experiences of themselves but the way that they trigger in the mind past experiences is what makes them intriguing.
In any case, it was my fault as I was not very excited about my work at this point, he asked me this question. Do you like what you do? Well, sort of. I wish I could do more, it's not the work itself but my inability to devote time.

Visiting Artists Meeting 2 (Fall 2011) Jennifer and Kevin McCoy

I feel that they separated my work in photo and video categories. The photo one they appreciated and accepted, referred to photographers I know (Dusseldorf of course) and praised the print quality. They saw the work on my web site as well. I fell they could not access the photo work though as much as they did the video work. And they did not like my art critic video. They expected more complexity in it as the joke becomes obvious too quickly. I agree. Speaking about Bulgaria they mentioned an artist living in New York they know of, Mariana Todorova. She deals with spatial stuff and her parents are architects or planners. I searched the name, which turned out to be wrong. The artist's name they referred to is Miryana Todorova, currently a grad student in SVA. She was my class mate in high school. I got in touch with her and tried to set a meeting in NYC when going for the NYFA panel but it felt through.

Visiting Artist Meeting 1 (Fall 2011) Zwelethu Mthethwa

We began looking at the candidacy images, a few prints though not all 12, moved to the rejects from the series that stay on my hard drive. These secondary images are about 50 including panoramas and videos. Zwelethu spoke mostly about formal aspects, black and white versus color, composition, choice of color palette, view point, light and time of day but not much about the ideas behind the images. I guess the urban issues I am working on are specific enough so that he couldn't respond to them. I showed him the waste industry images, which he liked. I suppose he was also confused as my work is not strictly documentary and goes into different genres. To my question about equipment, he has lately been shooting with a digital medium format camera and printing life size.

Independent Studio Visit 6 (Fall 2011) Hope Ginsburg

Hope Ginsburg
Faculty, Painting and Printmaking

Dana and I met together. It was interesting to see how she responded to different works. As I really appreciate the participatory element in artworks I was glad to see the conversation with Dana. She shared her excitement and concerns about her own work and had a very open conversation with Dana. Hope saw my photographs and simply accepted them without questioning. Then I showed my artist talk video with Claire and she liked as well because of the humor to it, the tackiness of the super 8 film.

Independent Studio Visit 5 (Fall 2011) I-Shian Suen, Ph.D

Dr. I-Shian (Ivan) Suen
Chair of the Urban and Regional Planning Program in VCU

As I am considering a career in urban planning I decided to definitely meet with people within the urban planning in VCU. Luckily I met with the chair of the program. He declined my request to be part of my committee as he is on other students committees already.
Ivan encouraged me to pursue a career in urban planning, as what I do now is research in this direction. He praised my photographs for their accurate observations and pointing to very specific issues but emphasized that they are interpretations. Urban planning goes into action for fixing these issues, or at least attempts to. My photographs show the surface of decisions and actions taken, they don't show what is beneath this surface: the reasons for the issues depicted.
From this conversation I gained the perspective of a non artist, whose ideas of aesthetics are based on everyday function. What is the direct application of this body of work, he would ask. His point made me understand better the writing of Bob Thall towards his photographic book The Perfect City where he discusses the definition of photo documentary. Although the work is about the relation between the public and urban spaces, it emphasizes on the aesthetics that are the product of these relations. Some weird beauty... (I am very skeptic about muddy adjectives).
My work stands between two realms, one of the fine arts and another of designing functional space and I feel that I have to find where exactly they overlap.

Independent Studio Visit 4 (Fall 2011) Jack Risley

Jack Risley,
Associate Dean, School of the Arts.

This was the most recent meeting, I showed him the VA Beach prints, the playgrounds from Crystal City. Jack seemed to be fairly entertained by the images and exclaimed that I make photos of the US that look like Soviet scenery. And this is also done in a spectacular way, capturing truly oppressive imagery. For me personally environments can be depressing because of their restrictions or their decay.
Also he wondered how I found Crystal City which he just recently visited for first time for a conference and was really influenced by the weird space. Then we discussed my research in urban planning, as I did find Crystal City through reading. His suggestion was to move my interest from public space issues from the 1980-90's to these of the 2010's.
As images he favored the passages from VA Beach. I showed Richard Misrach's Golden Gate series as reference - spectacular photographs. I also played the Crystal City water park sound track.

Independent Studio Visit 3 (Fall 2011) Gregory Volk

Gregory Volk,
Critic and full time faculty VCU School of the Arts

I showed him the prints from candidacy and the Bulgarian resort series. As well as the video with my 8mm film with preface by Claire playing the role of the critic.
He liked the candidacy prints, in his words, they are very strong images, great photographs. However, his main concern is their proximity to the work by other photographers, Gursky, Struth and Ruff. His challenge to me was to make the topic I am examining my own by having a personal style unmistakable with the others. Once again he pointed to Nedko Solakov, who like me is Bulgarian and Gregory knows personally. I showed him the Bulgarian vacation industry photos which he liked, they depict something different from the common knowledge.
However, the topic of nature and land use after the fall of communism is quite common topic where I am from. What should my "foreign" work be: form and subject matter to appeal the audience in the US or a personal investigation of what I am interested in? 95% of foreign art is selected to fit within the local narrative of what the world is. It needs to be different but only to the extent to strengthen the notions of what it is out there. Identity and differences are shoved in the face of the audience, however, the way they want to see it. Otherwise people are confused and simply dismiss the work if their expectations are not met.
Surprisingly, Gregory liked the video with Claire. He suggested to have more of this faces spewing nonsense with authority.

Independent Studio Visit 2 (Fall 2011) John Malinsoki

John Malinoski
Full time faculty Department of Graphic Design and Communication at VCU

He really focused on the topics my work examines. My images were triggering a conversation about the aesthetics as well as the politics of the public urban spaces and John has a very definite opinion. It was very encouraging to hear feedback from someone who sees through the images into the subject matter they are meant to interpret. I don't know whether my work is very successful if seen as art-for-art-sake, because of its political element. The photographs point to something controversial. People accept them as matter of fact and so far has been the most interesting during group critiques when the differences of how people evaluate the spaces depicted or the meaning of these spaces come to the surface. I have been really enjoying the arguments that happen when people don't even talk about the work but the questions it raises. When this happens I feel that my work has fulfilled its goal.
Meeting John Malinsoki was equal to meeting someone on the same page. I now wonder about the balance between the fine art and the research side of the current series. How would they work with gallery goers versus designers versus planners versus developers (investing with the spaces).

Independent Studio Visit 1 (Fall 2011) Ester Partegas

Ester Partegas
New sculpture faculty in VCU.
http://www.esterpartegas.com/

I was eager to meet with her after looking at her web site and seeing how our work relates. Ester has lived in the city of New York for the past 14 years after she moved from Barcelona. The visit became more of a discussion of her work as I kept asking her questions.
We talked about her life size mat board models, in relation to Thomas Demand's work and how they differ. Ester disagreed about the word "model" as they are spatial experiences. Instead of legendary media events in Germany, her structures are of the everyday spaces that one encounters. The spaces re-constructed, just like the ones in my photographs, are meant to mediate experience in such a way to minimize personal interpretation and the notion of place.
Another strong topic in her work is the aesthetics of waste and every day consumerism.
As she has moved in Richmond 2 months before the meeting, her initial drive was to photograph real spaces in order to make sense of them. Ester feels as a foreigner, in her words, as she moved from NYC to America. And she also is Spanish. She was really interested in my work from her standpoint, seeing images of the real waste facilities and mid sized American cities, and did not question or critique it much.
I wanted to have her on my committee but she declined. She has been in the university of 3 months now and this responsibility might be overwhelming. However, Ester insisted on having another studio visit next semester. I'll not miss it.

To From From at Across to in From. The Centerless Feeling, 2001

Black House 2003

Fixed and Hazardous Objects, 2010

The Baltimore Playground

Fallon Federal Child Care Center, Inc.
31 Hopkins Plaza
Baltimore, MD 21201
NAEYC Accredited
Operator: Child Time
Ages: Infant-5 years
Director: Miranda Whitman
Ph: (410) 962-2742
Fax: (410) 962-2536
E-mail: 0821@childtime.com

Website of the company running the facility:
http://www.childtime.com/our-schools/baltimore-md-0821/


This information is from a list with federal centers daycare facilities (the services are provided by separate companies)
After researching federal daycare centers in the DC area I found that all but one of them are far beyond more fences and gates. Of course the federal facilities have restricted access.

8 Books, movies, articles

1) "The Forbidden Fruits of Urban Exploration",
an article by Stipo Consult
On their web site here
As a PDF here


My personal reason to look at this:
A consultant firm in Holland boldly proposing to move play out of playgrounds. Children should not need a staged experience of life, instead the challenge is to make cities safe enough for them to play in the real environment. By definition children and teen's view point is related to situationist and flaneurist view of the city because of their drive to explore without and end goal.
This is valuable as it lets young people interpret the world more freely. This is important for everybody.

Quotes:
- "Stipo (urban strategy advisors) created a temporary team especially for Child Friendly Cities, consisting of urban planners, designers, education designers and public space artists"
p.1, The Forbidden Fruits of Urban Exploration

- "Our vision, combined with the basic trends require a new and rich approach. An approach away from the usual short term solutions. Short term solutions like creating places to hang out for youngsters on the edge of the living zone, where they don't bother us - but where youth mostly don't want to be (in Dutch "hangplekdenken"). And short term solutions like the formal mini-playgrounds for smaller children (in Dutch "wipkipdenken"). "
p 6, ibid

images by Helen Lewitt.





2) The Playgrounds and the City, Aldo van Eyck



The design of his playgrounds is bare and minimal. They have no representation but devices to explore spatial relationships. No narrative is put into the children play, no super heroes, no references to iconic figures or places.


Is it too intellectual? They look like Robert Morris' sculptures:



3) "City: Rediscovering the Center"
William H. Whyte

My Reasons to like it:
A great study of social behavior in urban spaces, this book is the collection of Whyte's research. Main point is participation: streets are spaces where interactions not staged by a central authority happen. The ability of individuals to interpret or re-purpose spaces is what makes environments to be places.
Key term: Chance Encounters

William H. Whyte - Social Life of Small Urban Places from Robin van Emden on Vimeo.

Quotes:
- "Now coming of age is a whole new generation of planners and architects for whom the formative experience of a center was the atrium of a suburban shopping mall. Some cities have already been recast in this image and more a following suit."
p.7 Whyte, William H., City: Rediscovering the Center, University of Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia, PA 2009

- "Suburban shopping malls are not the new town centers. They lack or forbid many of the activities of a center: soapboxers, controversy, passing of leaflets impromptu entertainment, happenings, or eccentric behavior of any kind including persistent non buying."
p. 208 ibid


4) "Dream Worlds: Architecture and Entertainment"
Oliver Herwig (text) and Florian Holzherr (photography)


Reasons to like it: More on the positive side, the book describes without judging. It is a study of synthetic spaces, with great photographs made for the book. These are heavily controlled spaces converting free time into a prefabricated consumable product.

Quotes:
"Disneyland is not profitable because of constant inovation, but on the contrary , because it gives consumers what they already know. Again and again, guaranteed: fast food dreams in fantasy worlds and in architectural settings palatable for the masses. "
p. 24 Herwig, Oliver and Holzherr, Florian, Dream Worlds: Architecture and Entertainment, Prestel Verlag, Munich, Berlin, London, New York, 2006

"The demand for artificial paradises is increasing... that the energy that goes into work is transferred from production to reproduction, creating an icon of the new leisure and society: a gleaming bubble in the middle of nowhere. "
p. 139 ibid


5) "The Perfect City" by Bob Thall



Reasons to like it:
Great architecture photography and even more helpful righting. While I enjoyed the New Jersey's photographs or George Tice, I did not find a solid statement in his book. While Thall's statement remind me of my own. He also looks at structures as manifestation of social phenomena.

Quotes:

- "The photographs in this book provide only modest insight into the complicated forces that shape the physical landscape of Chicago or any city... These forces operate too far beneath the surface for a topographical photograph to describe them. But the medium of photography is nonetheless very good at capturing and structuring visual epiphanies and a sense of place."
p, 107 Thall, Bob, The Perfect City, Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore and London, 1994

- "Those children of the 1950's are parents now. And when they think of travel that broadens of expanding their children's horizons of all the cliches parents reconstitute from their own past, the city is central, one of the icons. There is the West. There is the seashore. There is the farm. There is the forest. And there is the city."
p. 7 ibid, essay Peter Bacon Hales, The Museum of the City

6) Calamari Union (1985)
by Aki Kaurismaki





Why I like it:
The city is a stage. A group of thugs named Frank break into restaurants and bars but not to steal instead to serve each other. They live on the street and wander aimlessly, true situationists reacting to the everydayness in absurd manner. Their actual journey is from the working class part of Helsinki to Eira, the affluent part of town but they never make it there.

7) The Red Swing Project

Red Swing Project Documentary from erin harris on Vimeo.

An experiment into altering spaces through introducing 1 new element - a play device. This was carried out in different cities around the world.

8) Candy Chang - Before I Die project

Can be seen here on her web site

Another example of intervention within a space. A vacant house can be worked instead of only photographed.

3rd Word: Normal

It relates to my previous word choice. Disruptions are opposite of the norm. The question of space and place relates to setting collective norms and personal norms. It is interesting to observe art and activism in the 60's when many were strongly concerned with the interpretation of space and the later abandonment of the topic. In the 2000's this interest seems to be reviving... maybe. This statement might not be 100% true but there is a relation between the time when American cities declined and the time when people seem to move back to the cities. Many of the influential of the theorists and artists dealing with city spaces are European (west) and wonder how the socio-economical landscape changed there through the decades starting in the 60's (as I can only talk about Bulgaria and maybe East/South Europe). I have been in Amsterdam once and the obvious difference of the old and new city was very intriguing to me.

1) Sabine Hornig





web site: http://www.tanyabonakdargallery.com/artist.php?art_name=Sabine%20Hornig

2) Luisa Lambri





web: http://www.luhringaugustine.com/artists/luisa-lambri#

3) Cypren Gaillard





web site: http://www.bugadacargnel.com/en/pages/artistes.php?name=6564&page=presentation

4) Maximilian Haidacher







web site: http://mxdesigns.de/

5) Dede Johnston




web site: http://dedejohnston.com

6) William Pope L




Note: Bilal

7) Oleg Kulik
Note: Acconci Claim

Lecture 6: Sam Ekwurtzel

The lecture was very helpful for my own practice, many ideas came as a result, some information as well. The main thing in Sam's work is: awareness. I see it as exploration of space and place in a non political way, he framed it as the connection between oneself and the landscape. I was so impressed by the different media he is using to do that.

Hartford, CT, as a commuter city he mentioned is coming close to my work. I need to find commuter cities and photograph them (Richmond is not quite in this category). The next inspiring thing was the sauna. In order to provoke awareness of space and experience he uses challenges or stimuli: heat, sound through water, vision, movement and gravity. My favorite work is the underwater sound, it's immersive and not framed by an institution. This work is about the spectator's senses and interpretation of the space rather than the artist representation of an experience. A person can discover it or approach it on their own terms without mediated notions of what it must be about or any expectations.

Sam's works are on one topic but he makes them as separate projects. He did not show a single project building over time. I wonder whether this is good or bad in relation to my work. Also he avoided political aspects that might get into his work and this is the major difference in respect to my interests.

Lecture 5: Trevor Panglen

The lecture seemed more academic than artist oriented, I wonder whether the name of the school, part of a university, played in his choice. He did not speak of his images as art production but rather as part of his research. It became apparent at the end when a student asked him about the technical specifics of his photographs. Using large format cameras in difficult lighting situations and tripod head for tracking the movement of the Earth is quite interesting and he spoke little of it. His ability to jump between disciplines is quite admirable and as he mentioned he can talk on and on besides the one hour of the lecture.

His lecture was about boundaries, the narrative and work presented examines the difference between real boundaries and mental boundaries. In a sense it has to do a lot with space and place. The imagined secret bases and the real image of them (with the goats and the shepherd). His findings, however, are not so shocking as documentaries, for instance Taxi to the Dark Side, loaded with content and revealing reveal more than his work. For this reason I think the emphasis of his work is on mental boundaries more than spaces and places. He tries to expose the mechanisms of these boundaries and what they are meant to do. A simple research of platoon patches reveals a whole attitude and a language of a reality not that different from everyday life (work-family-sleep-work...) but the very specific lexicon of this reality makes it different. Another device was the research of fake companies and identities related to the CIA.

Panglen's work in a sense shows the boundaries of democracy as he stopped the CIA project after the findings of abductions by the CIA. While he was praising the constitution of the USA, this threshold he did not pass exposed a real boundary rather than a mental one. I was really interested in hearing more about the kidnapping in Macedonia (2-3 hours away from where I used to live!). Panglen did not comment on the democratic aspects related to these actions of federal institutions abroad.

Studio Visit: Trevor Panglen

Trevor did not look at the work for the first 10 minutes, instead insisted on me talking first. He was listening without much interrupting. I talked about my main topic space and place, looking at structures without emotions or the layers of everyday experience, mass media constructs of place or cultural baggage. I examine the mechanisms, used by the ones having power over spaces, of centralized creation of place; space as well as mediated notions of it as devices to form or control society by controlling social interactions. We talked about Atget and Struth on the side of photographic medium on this topic.
The way he responded to my work is: they are photos of real physical spaces however empty; none of them has identity, they are generic; they don't look like models; has very apocalyptic feeling to it.
He suggested to research at Guy Debord and the Situationist movement (which I research at the moment), the idea of psycho geography (which has to do with his work too). Trevor wondered whether I can photograph iconic places as empty and what that would bring. Also wondered whether I would photograph actual models.

6 books 12 quotes

Books:

1) Anthony Hoete, Reader on the Aesthetics of Mobility, Black Dog publishing, London, New York, 2003
I found this from Petrenko, one particularly influential work in the book is the spatio-temporal map of Western Europe derived from the speed of trains. Time is essential element in experiencing space, as noted many times in Eliasson's writings. It's interesting how so natural to my own experience is validated only after reading it from someone else... In any case I haven't really experienced space much in my recent past.

2) Matthew Coolidge and Sarah Simons, Overlook: Exploring the Internal Fringes of America with the Center for Land Use Interpretation, Metropolis Books, 2006
From several sources. Interpretation (mediation) as undertaking, connected ideas of Kaprow and Debord in contemporary American context.

3) Steven Henry Madoff, Art School: Propositions for the 21st Century, The MIT Press, Cambridge, London, 2009

4) Sabine Hornig, The Second Room, Hatje Cantz, 2006
Her wok plays with the normal and perception of space. NORMAL is my one next assignment topic.

5) Nedko Solakov, Emotions, Hatje Cantz, 2008
A Bulgarian artist, his work is not certainly about space although 2 of his pieces are very on topic. Annotations on the walls of empty gallery making the viewer aware of small details and imperfections, creating a narrative of supposed emptiness. The next one, Not So White Cube, performance in which two workers paint the walls one after the other in black and white respectively. The two "colors" circle around the space until the end of the show.

6) Martina Weinhart and Max Hollein, OP ART, Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt, Verlag Der Buchhandlung Walther Konig, 2007
This is more about the mechanics of perception. Contemporary art inspired from Op Art also deals with personal projections on the perceived and cultural context.

Quotes:

1) "My work is always about a generalization of forms that exist in many locations and already have an inherent placelessness... While there is something specific about each object, the process of reconstructing it produces a level of abstraction, an indistinctness which calls upon viewers to face the object as a counterpart and to think about where they know it from. "
Sabine Hornig, The Second Room, Hatje Cantz, 2006 p.40

2) "The flaneur was the hero of the modern city, enjoying the freedom to stroll in the boulevards and arcades, visit cafes and department store, get lost in the crowd but, importantly, to observe and be observed."
Briginshaw, "Keep your Great City Paris": the Lament of the Empress and Other Women, in Dance in the City, ed. Helen Thomas, Basingstoke Macmillan 1997, p.41

3) "Around 1840 it was briefly fashionable to take turtles for a walk in the arcades. The flaneurs liked to have the turtles set the pace for them. If they had their way, progress would have been obliged to accommodate itself to this pace."
Benjamin, trans H. Zohn, "Carles Baudelaire: a Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism" New Left Books, London 1973, p. 54

4) "Although Situationism was definitely interested in performance it rejected all forms of organized theater and especially dismissive of Alan Kaprow's practice of happening, which it regarded as depoliticised, exclusive and bourgeois. "
Nicholas Whybrow, "Performance and the Contemporary City. An Interdisciplinary Reader", Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. p. 88

5) "The Situationist International, officially operational in Paris between 1957 and 172, comprehensively developed the notion of drift (derive) as a form of reconception and remapping of the city based on a performative practice of walking without aim, as well as inducing impromptu diversions (detournement): that is triggering responses or situations in public places that momentarily introduced ruptures into the urban everyday (or aspects of the so called society of the spectacle)."
Nicholas Whybrow, "Performance and the Contemporary City. An Interdisciplinary Reader", Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. p. 88

6) "Where flaneur favors a form of ironic detachment from the society of spectacle Situationist practices are characterized by an active hostility to the representation of urban experience. Instead they are political acts which aim to reinstate lived experience as true map of the city."
Nicholas Whybrow, "Performance and the Contemporary City. An Interdisciplinary Reader", Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. p. 89

7) "Each individual has a different map of the city. But humans need to mark their lives against real and other people. When they cease to walk, the real spaces become less plausible then than the centralized reality of the media and are increasingly witnessed as a passing blur from a car window. They become abandoned, the the haunts of the disturbed. "
Graeme Miller, The Guardian, 15 June 1993, p. 28

8) "If controlling cultural consumption, situating the subject as spectator, is the essence of political domination, then activating cultural production on a mass scale, producing a society of performers is, Debord believes, the key to cultural and political change. For how can the spectacle function if the masses prefer to remake the world actively rather than to watch it passively on the screen or monitor in front of them?"
Lavery, "The Pepys of London E11: Graeme, Miller and the Politics of Linked" in "Performance and the Contemporary City. An Interdisciplinary Reader" ed. Nicholas Whybrow, Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. p. 164

9) "Space lays down the law because it implies a certain order - and hence also a certain disorder... Space commands bodies, prescribing or proscribing gestures, routes and distances to be covered... The reading of space is thus merely a secondary and practically irrelevant upshot, a rather superfluous reward to the individual for blind, spontaneous and lived obedience."
Lefebvre, "The Production of Space", Oxford: Blackwell 1991, p. 143

10) By asking the participants to perform an apparently mundane task ... Cardiff is encouraging them to perform the everyday. This sense of displacement which comes from consciously performing the everyday has been suggested by Allan Kaprow to encourage a heightened awareness of environment.
Gorman, "Wandering and Wondering: Following Janet Cardiff's Missing Voice" in "Performance and the Contemporary City. An Interdisciplinary Reader", ed. Nicholas Whybrow, Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. p. 175

11) Participants could feel momentarily separated from themselves.
(Kaprow), Rawlinson, Mugger Music, Internalia: Journal of the European League of Institutes of the Arts issue 2 (autumn): 24-31

12) "We obviously want spaces that work as biology. We want a space to live, to live not as a monster that overtakes the person, but as something that reacts. Action is great, but transaction is better. Action is ultimately private: transaction lets other things as well. We would love to make spaces that would actually react to people, as people react to those spaces."
Acconci, Basta and Ricciardi. "Vito Acconci: Diary of a Body 1969-1973" Charta, Milano, 2006, p. 88

6 books 12 quotes

Books:

1) Hans Ulrich Obrst, Olafur Eliasson, "The Conversation Series #13", Verlag der Buchhandlung, Walter Konig, Koln 2008
A very simple and influential book that helped me found myself again.

2) Phillip Shaw, "The Sublime", London, New York, Routledge 2006
Verbalizing and conceptualizing of the spatial experience, to what extent is that reasonable as language becomes another universe separate from physical reality.

3) Ronan McDonald, "The Death of the Critic", Continuum London and New York, 2007
After the frustration with cinema criticism class I embraced the idea of the dead critics. The book however triggered better thoughts as the value of critical thinking and how blogging or looking at what is liked leads to unification and lack of diversity.

4) Julian Stallabrass, "Art Incorporated", Oxford University Press, 2004
A good and refreshing book about art, reminding me of topics often silenced by institutions. It talks how art functions culturally and financially, but mostly the later.

5) Kelly Shannon and Marcel Smets, "The Landscape of Contemporary Infrastructure", NAi Publishers 2010
Infrastructure is one of my main topics as it shifts spatio-temporal relationships with the landscape. Who benefits and who suffers from these modifications to the personal experience of space? Who is making decisions for the others and with what motivation.

6) Groninger Museum, "P. Struycken", NAi Publishers, 2007
Architect and interior designer, valuable with making generic spaces open for interpretation. To what extent is possible to create a space that is structured and in the same time customizable by people's needs and tastes?

7) Jennifer Blessing and Nat Trotman, "Catherine Opie: American Photographer", Guggenheim Museum Publications 2008
My work was called American landscape photography and decided to look at another photographer who is branded in this way.


Quotes:

1) "Since my work is very much about the process of seeing and experiencing yourself rather than the actual work of art, it's problematic when your way of seeing is formalized through institutional structures - rather than your being encouraged to question your perceptual set-up."
Hans Ulrich Obrst, Olafur Eliasson, "The Conversation Series #13", Verlag der Buchhandlung, Walter Konig, Koln 2008, p16

2) "We need to understand that there are many different kinds of museums, but they ll have to allow people to look through them, to see the underlying institutional structure, and to understand that this is not a house of truth, but a constructed way of presenting history and reality to people." ibid, p 77

3) "The Alps and their location in the center of Europe is that they have almost become another theme park. The mountains have been industrialized or colonized into something no longer about spatial questions but about mediated relationships... They remain experiential, you can still experience the Alps, but you carry an image, a predetermined knowledge of what you are doing there." ibid. 113

4) "We tend to forget that we spend a large portion of our lives in vehicles... What does it mean to experience our surroundings through a glass plate that is perhaps ... like a shop window in terms of isolating the space?" ibid, p. 153

5) "By putting up a glass and isolating people's tactile relationship to the outside, our overall relationship to the outside changes - the sensation becomes more representational... I would argue that there is a proportional relationship between how many senses are engaged and the level of representation. " ibid, p 23

6) "The scenes that illustrate this book are all about us. For illustration, please look closely at real cities. While you are looking, you might as well also listen, linger and think about what you see. " Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, New York, Random House, 1961

7) "A very curious effect results from this benignly subversive approach: we may end up looking at one place or activity through a lens we normally reserve for evaluating another... it undermines our assumptions in a very generous manner, encouraging us to look at things from more than one perspective and alerting us to other ways of understanding that can renew our interest in the larger landscape." Matthew Coolidge and Sarah Simons, "Overlook: Exploring the Internal Fringes of America with the Center for Land Use Interpretation", Metropolis Books, 2006, p. 37-38

8) "This book might serve as an introduction to the Center for Land Use interpretation. But it's my hope that, after reading it, you forget about us. You can even forget the information about the cites we describe in this volume... In fact, you can even forget the very point that is being made right now. What matters is that after reading this book, or after encountering any of our programming elsewhere, you come away with a widened sense of awareness of the physical world that surrounds you." Matthew Coolidge and Sarah Simons, "Overlook: Exploring the Internal Fringes of America with the Center for Land Use Interpretation", Metropolis Books, 2006, p. 15

9) "There are two ways of organizing social space. The first aims at a single predetermined objective. It is authoritarian, rational, and reductive. It corresponds to the desire to control events and people on the part of those whose task is to conceive, organize, and produce.. Some people like this. It corresponds to a wish to manipulate and be manipulated. The other way of making social space... is a living process which imparts only key centers of activity in a clear spatial configuration and with an intensity of form and meaning that favors and expresses what we believe essential: living relationships and activities that spring from diversity unexpected initiatives, and above all, that something in social man that leads to the creation of community." Lucien Kroll, "Anarchitecture", in the Scope of Social Architecture , R. Hatch, ed. (New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1984), 167-9

10) "Construction finds its meaning only in the social relations that it supports." ibid, p. 167

11) "In Lefevbre's thinking, these attempts to speak for the users were bound to fail "because no one has the right for those directly concerned here. The entitlement to do so, the concepts to do so, the language to do so are simply lacking. How would the disourse of such an experiment differ from that of architects, developers or politicians?"" Lefebvre, "Productions of Space", p. 364

12) "The development is best known, however, not for Le Corbusier's architectural vision, but for the modifications that residents have made to their buildings over time. Occupied, the structures bear little resemblance to the blueprints as residents have added decorative elements that many architects would claim undermine the purity of the original design." Richard Milgrom, "Lucien Kroll: Design, Difference, Everyday Life" (Space, Difference, Everyday Life. Reading Henri Lefebvre, Routledge, New york and London, 2008) p 275