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Andy Merrifield, architecture, art, British Library, exhibition, Henri Lefebvre, Laura Oldfield-Ford, Lea Valley, London, New York City, Owen Hatherley, Owen Jones, place, psychogeography, Sarah Sze, Space, urbanism, Victoria Miro Gallery, words

detail of Model for a Diviner, 2012, by Sarah Sze
An exhibition of work by the American artist Sarah Sze at Victoria Miro Gallery in London got me thinking again about space and place. She creates strange worlds in space using everyday objects, slightly reminiscent of Heath Robinson or Jean Tingueley. They all have names ‘Model for …’ reinforcing their link to architectural models and giving clues to what they may represent.
‘Model for a Print’ appears to me to represent an artist’s studio. All the spaces created are permeable and not enclosed though, which emphasises their sculptural quality but also their interaction with their environment. Outside flows into inside and vice versa. I think interpenetrable is the architectural terminology. There has been a move towards actual architectural models created in a similar way over the past few years. These would not look out of place in an architectural degree show or even the architecture room at the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition which I visited recently. The ways we represent space are interesting. Architects have no difficulty visualising buildings from plans whereas laypeople generally need an elevation or even better a three dimensional representation whether drawn or as a traditional model.
‘Model for a Weather Vane’ is perhaps the most conventional, more reminiscent of Alexander Calder’s mobiles, although apparently static. This also looks more like Sze’s Bird House project which came down earlier this year after a popular year displayed on New York’s High Line urban park. Perhaps the public success of that led to her being chosen to represent the USA at the next Venice Biennale.
Sarah said in an interview for the Guardian “The pieces in this show appear to measure space, or time, and now that I have two children, time is more significant. It has more weight.” The piece that particularly deals with time is Pendulum, shown in a darkened upstairs space. This unusually is based on a geometric form, a circle drawn on the floor. The structure is more enclosed than the other pieces but still permeable. I was very aware of wanting to go inside this space though, to be able to see ‘inside’ more closely. It clearly has an edge or boundary and an inside and outside.
The motorised pendulum swings mesmerisingly across the centre from one side to another, in changing arcs, always looking in danger of displacing something from the carefully constructed layers of items. These include an electric fan which stirs pieces of paper creating another moving element. There are paper cups and plastic bottles part filled with mysterious liquids, various types of measuring instruments, sets of plastic mice, paper fish, the whole creation like an elaborate experimental laboratory. The semi darkness and the star or pentagon symbol within the circle suggest magic rituals.
According to the gallery leaflet “Preoccupied with conceptions of how we continually locate ourselves witihn space, Sze’s works unfold as investigations of the psychological, and even emotional , understandings of our environment. We are always finding ourselves in space, oscillating between orientation and disorientation and with each location we experience an evolving history.”
I was thinking about how we experience space, enclosed and unenclosed. Open space always has a liberating emotional effect on me, particularly when moving from an enclosed space into the open. The sea, heaths and moors are extreme examples as distance in a flat space is more evident, but playing fields or a bridge over a river can have the same effect. The Millennium Bridge over the Thames is a good example. It is also a good example of an interpenetrable structure.
Increasingly open space is being controlled, tidied up and often privatised, not a new phenomenon of course, with the 18th century enclosures of common land one of the first politically explosive examples. Shopping malls have been discussed as a recent example. The Olympic Park is a current controversy. This was debated at another Writing Britain event at the British Library which I attended last week. The theme was ‘Journeys Through Urban Britain’ and the panel were Owen Hatherley, author of A New Kind of Bleak: Journeys through Urban Britain; Owen Jones, author of Chavs: The Demonisation of the Working Class and Laura Oldfield-Ford, creator of polemical fanzine Savage Messiah, now published as a book. They all record recent changes in urban spaces whether in writing or drawing. Other issues discussed were increasing economic inequality, dystopia, the current lack of government ideas on what we want from our urban spaces, the disappearance of mixed communities and municipal pride and initiatives to reflect that, how to avoid nostalgia and commodification and the effects of this on our urban spaces. They were articulate, angry, radical but in spite of everything ultimately more optimistic now about the future than they were a few years ago, mainly because there is increasing resistance to what is happening and positive action (such as Occupy) being taken to demonstrate this and bring debate into the public eye. It seems appropriate to be writing this on Bastille day and it does remind me of 1968 also.
I followed this with some reading from architectural theory books. With a partner who is an architect I have some good sources to hand! Dialectical Urbanism – Social Struggles in the Capitalist City by Andy Merrifield seemed a good place to start, “exploring the collision between abstract capitalist space and concrete human place” according to a review by Marshall Berman. With examples from New York and Baltimore to Liverpool it makes fascinating reading. The chapter on ‘Disorder and Zero Tolerance: The Dialectics of Dystopia’ is particularly appropriate in this context, which uses the clean up of Times Square in New York and the 1999 Reclaim the Street Festival of Resistance as an example.
Merrifield also quotes Henri Lefebvre from The Production of Space: “Spaces conceal their contents by means of meanings, by means of an absence of meanings or by means of an overload of meaning…spaces sometimes lie just as things lie, even though they are not themselves things.”
Another relevant issue discussed at the Journeys in Urban Britain event is that of tidying everything up – to excess in many people’s eyes. The title essay in the book Sweet Disorder and the Carefully Careless – Theory and Criticism in Architecture by Robert Maxwell, discusses our reactions to order and disorder. “Order is also something we count on, so long as we can choose it , and not be too subject to it. An excess of order can be just as disagreeable as subjection to disorder.” He discusses this in relation to aesthetics and our reactions to innovation in art and architecture, although using the English landscape garden as a primary example of the ‘carefully careless’. There is also an argument to be made for leaving some spaces alone altogether and not subjugating them to any meaning imposed from outside, although the concept of the ruin and the wild is also criticised as nostalgia. Surely not all space should be subject to control in the name of progress whether through art, leisure or commerce?
Related articles
- Sarah Sze: ‘I want people to stop and look at my art’ (guardian.co.uk)
- A New Kind of Bleak by Owen Hatherley – review (guardian.co.uk)
- A New Kind of Bleak: Journeys Through Urban Britain, By Owen Hatherley (independent.co.uk)
- On the white bus to Wythenshawe – council housing by design | Owen Hatherley (guardian.co.uk)
- Appropriation of public space on and offline (yrancken.wordpress.com)
- Andrea K. Scott: Sarah Sze’s sculpture from everyday objects. (newyorker.com)
- The White Building/ Lea River Park – review (guardian.co.uk)
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The Model of The Diviner pulled me in immediately–there really isn’t a “magical mystery tour” that I will not take–but the Model of the Pendulum brought the world to me. I can appreciate your wanting to “go inside” as did I.
In particular, I admire this sentence of yours: “The motorised pendulum swings mesmerisingly across the centre from one side to another, in changing arcs, always looking in danger of displacing something from the carefully constructed layers of items.” Just lovely, Diana.
“`We are always finding ourselves in space, oscillating between orientation and disorientation and with each location we experience an evolving history’” is a sentence from the gallery leaflet that, for me, articulates the human experience with place and our constant curiosity about space.
An extraordinarily fine post, Diana.
Karen
Hmm! Interesting which elements you alighted on – now there is more food for thought Karen.
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Pendulum is fascinating! A modern alchemist…
The thoughts on space/landscape were really timely after a few days away. Really enjoyed them.
Thanks for that and for the mention on your blog. It is always good to hit the moment!
That looks like Sweet-toof at it again on the banks of the Lea. The hammer was always going to fall sometime on old disgreeable Hackney. If it wasn’t the Olympics it would be something else. I’m about to read Ghost Milk by Iain Sinclair on that very subject and expect to have my mind blown yet again. On theories of space under capitalism the work of Henri Lefebvre is good, if dense, grounding. Some of it is still spot on. Boris sees the city as something to be tamed, as many have in the past. In privatised space, the rights of the citizen, such as they are, become fluid. You may photograph this building until we say that you cannot. This refusal may come at any time, or it may never come. Either way, our behaviour has undergone a subtle modification. Again,Diana, your post has got me thinking!
Ghost Milk is very relevant of course – it was a book he had to write. I have nearly finished it and although it has been heavy going in parts I am fascinated by his ideas and thought processes as well as his writing. He uses words in a brilliant way. You are right about the subtlety of the long term effect of policies of control. It is very evident in this country over the past twenty years particularly I think with the change in surveillance for example and also in individual attitudes of social responsibility, although that started with Thatcher.
Hi Diana, and thanks for your words on my posts. I’ve really enjoyed reading this, especially the permeability stuff – and very timely too! Also, the notion of what constitutes a model caught my attention as well. If one can become disturb notions of inside and out through permeability, can the same be said of naming something a ‘model’? Can a model replicate the function of the thing it is a model of or for until it is unrecognisable as a model? I have training in computer simulations and modelling so I guess it was inevitable that I’d think about this! Thanks, Kieron
Thanks Kieron – glad you found this relevant to your thoughts! Hadn’t thought so much about the concept of the model but I can certainly see what you mean (and why you are interested!). If the model is intended as a functional object it needs to fulfil that function and not go beyond that I guess? The appearance may not be dependent on the function. The same debate could apply to any art form based in reality to some extent particularly when it is used in a functional way – craft objects for example. There has certainly been much debate about that! I think it relates to the intention.
Hi Diana. I do think that some spaces need to be left to continuously create themselves. So important. For centuries, much of what we have learned has come out of us observing what already exists, in the way it exists, without our tampering or imposing. Such value is us leaving life be. And how rare is it these days…
Absolutely Kathryn! There is so little really natural space left these days. However even apparently natural landscapes have been heavily altered by human intervention in the past. Dartmoor in this country is an example which has been heavily used since prehistoric times and evidence of that can be seen in the landscape. I was thinking here of urban spaces more of course where it is even rarer for pockets of land to be left to go their own way.
Thank you – I find this all very interesting!
And the statement: “An excess of order can be just as disagreeable as subjection to disorde”, is a point I will reflect upon while walking around Amsterdam today. Disorder can both be a sign of openness and of indifference, two very different states of mind.
Hope you enjoyed your walk – a very appropriate place to reflect on such things – the Dutch always seem to manage the balance in urban development better than we do in Britain, although they sometimes verge on the over orderly, but maybe outside Amsterdam. Perhaps more in tune with the Scandinavian approach? Difficult to generalize of course but I think there are differences between different countries.
Hi. I like ‘Carefully Careless’ … small spaces created by ‘placement’ of objects. Personally, I think natural space is always functional and beautiful. As far as gardens go, I like spaces where the vegetation determines look of the ‘edge’, lots of curves and overgrowth. Jane
I think we are probably in agreement there. Natural spaces, as far as any are really natural, have their own beauty and function apart from human needs or interpretation. There is a lot to debate on what beauty is anyway. There is quite a fine line between overgrown and untidy in gardens. Nothing ever stays the same either of course!