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