Architecture and the Virtual - Hardcover

Jecu, Marta

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1783201940 ISBN 13: 9781783201945

Publisher: Intellect, 2015

Synopsis

Architecture and the Virtual is a study of architecture as it is reflected in the work of seven contemporary artists, working with the tools of our post-digital age. The book maps the convergence of virtual space and contemporary conceptual art and is an anthropological exploration of artists who deal with transformable space and work through analogue means of image production. Marta Jecu builds her inquiry around interviews with artists and curators in order to explore how these works create the experience of the virtual in architecture. Performativity and neo-conceptualism play important roles in this process and in the efficiency with which these works act in the social space.

About this title

About the Author

Marta Jecu is a researcher at the CICANT Institute, Universidade Lusofona in Lisbon and is also a freelance curator.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Architecture and the Virtual

By Marta Jecu

Intellect Ltd

Copyright © 2015 Intellect Ltd
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-78320-194-5

Contents

Introduction: The multiple is not only what has many parts, but also what is folded in many ways., 11, 
Chapter 1: Intensity: Performativity and the virtual, 21, 
Chapter 2: Palimpsest: Deconstructed architecture and the idea of the ruin, 51, 
Chapter 3: Leap into documentation: The post-conceptual space, 79, 
Chapter 4: Postdigital and the virtual: A question of density, 149, 
Conclusion, 197, 

CHAPTER 1

Intensity: Performativity and the virtual

I am for my work, what is called in traditional Japanese theatre, a kuroko: a character, all dressed in black (his face is covered too), who assists the theater from the backstage, who prepares the stage, who gives directions to the actors and sometimes appears on the stage, but always remains unnoticed. Without his presence in the background the theatre could not move forward. Still he has to always stay hidden, even though he appears in the foreground. This is the best position that I could take for my work. If I mingle too much with my work, then I will make a work about myself, but I would like to keep the work, as work, always in the foreground. My work exists only with the presence of the audience, without them my work would not be possible. I wish for the audience to act inside my work, without me taking an authoritarian role in this process. The audience and myself, we can be both actors in this play. To do this, one of my strategies is to upload my films and the documentation of my work onto YouTube. Everyone can re-use my works, appropriate them, as with any other material.

(Taguchi 2008)

Besides being site-specific and reacting to a specific cultural or political context, the works reproduced in this volume subsume simultaneously a multiplicity of possibilities that an initial situation can carry and surpass the limits of the present by addressing various temporal layers. Performativity is a key concept that is mentioned frequently during the discussions quoted here. It is a means of explaining how a mostly analogue, minimally built environment can transmit a virtual dimension, capable of being experienced, that expands the space beyond its sphere of visibility in the present. Performativity establishes a connection between the work and its environment, and embodies the effects upon its surroundings that it influences and shapes. These performative architectures are therefore temporary, fluctuating and subject to change. In considering these works, and in the talks with the artists about their approach to architecture and site-specificity, the reality that a work generates stays at the core of these discussions. It will be shown in the following pages in which way performativity is seen as the agency by which the virtual can temporarily actualize and how this is thought of, in conjunction with an already assimilated digital experience.

In 'Moment' (2008), Yukihiro Taguchi's first piece from 'Moments', a series of works that he calls 'performative', he lifted up the wooden floor panels of the gallery and constructed with them every day another installation inside the gallery. One hundred additional drawings showed possibilities of arrangements for the wooden bars. The gallery changed into a landscape of slopes, which seemed a cityscape, an archaeological site or a street in construction, while the panel installations could be used for table tennis, a cinema, a party setting or a large dinner table, on which Taguchi himself served sushi. In 'Moment. Performatives Spazieren' (2008) he decided to take the wood panels outside of the gallery into public space, and mingled them with various objects or constructions found on the streets of Berlin Kreuzberg. Every day he constructed new functional installations with them, which were usable and became urban furniture that generated their own social practices.

Brief historic overview of the term

The term 'performativity' comes from John Austin in his 1955 lecture 'How to do Things with Words' (Austin 1962) where he defines a 'performative utterance' as one that should not be considered true or false from the point of view of its content, but from the point of view of the factual realization of the action, which it describes verbally. In this case speaking is doing. The performative utterance brings an action into being, solely through its expression. Although Austin is excluding art in his consideration, his theory had a decisive role in art theory and slightly preceded the movement of the avant-gardes. Austin excludes all the arts, and, with reference to the theatrical field, suggests: 'a performative utterance will, for example, be in a peculiar way hollow or void if said by an actor on the stage, or if introduced in a poem, or spoken in soliloquy'. (Austin 1962: 22). Theatrical/artistic utterances are not included by him in the performative utterances he envisions, since they do not represent 'normal' speech. Therefore theatrical utterances cannot realize that which they express: 'Language in such circumstances is in special ways – intelligibly – used not seriously, but in ways parasitic upon its normal use' (Austin 1962: 22). Nevertheless, Austin's theory has determined the emergence of the 'performative turn' in various cultural arenas. Transferred into the domain of the visual arts it brought the understanding that alone through the existence of a work, through its self-assertion, its expressive potential manifests and can influence its environment.

Recent approaches that regard theoretical argumentation from the point of view of its dramatic and aesthetic value also have as a starting point the performativity of any type of utterance. Austin's book is considered as having made a step in this direction, by not only exposing a theory, but by also performing it: the rhetoric of his argumentation has been seen as a performative demonstration itself. Shoshana Felman (1983), for example, is not considering the 'what' in Austin's work, but mostly the 'how'. Felman's reading of Austin reveals what she calls Austin's Don Juanisms: his humour and his sense of spectacular demonstration, although his theory is not worked out systematically and has argumentative gaps. This theatrical ambiguity of Austin is, for Felman, a demonstration of the performativity of his theory itself, which emerges particularly from the failure of his theory: "The very performance of the performative consists precisely in performing the loss of footing. It is the performance of the loss of ground' (Felman 1983: 151).

In its 'failure', the applicability of Austin's theory is evident. As opposed to a decree, performativity is an utterance that tolerates the possibility of its negation and makes place for ambiguity, as does the argumentation of Austin too. The performativity of an artwork has the power to set into being that which it represents. Even though it does not represent the formulation of a definitive statement, and is itself subject to oscillation and fluctuations, a work of art can, nevertheless, set the frame of a possible dialogue, but only in the likelihood of an open and permeable structure.

Jacques Derrida's deconstructive reading of Austin shifts the focus of the analysis from the utterance as an individual expression to societal conventions and subordinates. In his analysis he transfers the individual relevance to a social one. His attention goes beyond the individual, intentional act to the infinite repetitions and processes, in which difference and similarity condition and at the same time enable, in a broader social field, a free and innovative agency of the individual. Derrida argues that no performative utterance could be successful if it does not represent a quotation in order to be recognizable (Derrida 1988a: 310).

Through repetition and a new reading in a certain context, which is itself never absolutely determinable and saturated, a difference appears. Meaning is therefore always relational, never absolute, and difference is a counterpoint to identity. In Derrida's vision, the potential of a work is being read as a cultural statement, which is formed by the different contexts of its reception. The work is a result of the layering of meaning by its various recipients.

Mieke Bal (2009: 1–15) also talks about the relationship between performativity and performance in light of the individual – social connection. In a brief article (2009: 91–106) she differentiates between the terms 'performance' and 'performativity' as follows: 'Performance, the unique realization of a work, belongs to another order than performativity, an aspect of a work that does what it says' (Bal 2009: 93). Mieke Bal understands performativity along the lines of Austin, as the emergence of an action in the here and now. Bal connects performativity with a charm, which belongs to the present, and is released by the presence of objects or situations in the moment of their occurrence. At the same time, Bal stresses, besides this charm, the embedding of performance in culture.

Bal talks about the 'here and now' of performativity, which functions similarly to the occurrence of an event. The intensity with which the performative character of a work emerges is therefore connected to its immediacy, which can be regarded as a momentary actualization of potentialities that a situation carries.

It was Judith Butler who started to extend the approach of performativity to cultural domains like the social sciences, by stressing, in her book Bodies That Matter, that the reduction of performativity to performance would be a mistake (Butler 1993: 234). Also, for Dorothea von Hantelmann, a demarcation between the areas of significance of the two concepts performance and performativity is essential in the field of contemporary art. Performativity is regarded by Dorothea von Hantelmann (2007) as being a quality of works of art to manifest themselves, to articulate in an expressive way, to become explicit and to gain in this way a power to create reality. This power develops independently from the work's content.

The performativity of a work of art is the reality which it manifests by the force of its existence at a place, in a situation, by the force of its production, reception and lasting. Performative is an allegation, the power to create reality [...]. The performative dimension designates the bounding of art in a reality, which every single work is also generating.

(Hantelmann 2007: 12)

As an interpretative paradigm and as an analytical model, performativity could be applied, in principle, to any work of art. Each work is performative merely due to its presence and can therefore be assimilated solely by how it affects the viewer and how it acts. From this line of thought, the relationship between the work and its spatial and discursive context is immediately deducible. Performativity makes concrete a potential for action, which is based in the conjunction of art with the domain of the social. Through the performative dimension of a work, its relevance becomes 'not the work as signifier, but its factual existence that represents the initial point of an artistic potential for action and affirmation' (Hantelmann 2007: 18).

Consequences of performativity: Non-auctoriality, questions of media, polemic intervention

In the interviews that I conducted with the artists, very often the differentiation between performativity and performance plays a crucial role with regard to a nuanced understanding of their work. The artists discuss their work not as a singular, unrepeatable auctorial gesture, but comment rather on the intrinsic statement that a built space carries: by its existence in a certain place; by belonging to a certain cultural climate; by its use that is conferred by various social actors. This definition of the work is based on the rejection of the model of the artist as creator of a subjective universe, which is symbolically coded according to a narrative content constructed by him or her. On the contrary, the work is seen as an ongoing performative project that has an autonomous presence, can change in time, and is subject to correlations. In this sense, the non-auctorial work can be understood as a sedimented presence in which historic layers of cultural significance have been deposited, while their performative presence triggers processes that expand their physical conditions.

Yukihiro Taguchi generally refers to his work as performative because 'it is the space that realizes the performance, it is not a performance by me or the audience' (Taguchi 2008). In the work of Taguchi it is the speculative use of media that brings social issues up. In most of his works he makes use of the 'stop-motion technique' and constructs a dynamic and fictionalized movement-documentation of his installations. The performativity of the situation depicted emerges by joining still images of his actions into an animated video. Taguchi brings movement into matter that is directly experienced through the mediation of film and its intervention in the temporality of the depicted events. In his video 'Visitor', made in 2007 in Sarajevo, spatial performativity becomes a force that can shape human relations, but also embody the power that the public space exercises over the individual. Without staging a dramatic happening in public space, Taguchi merely medially frames its presence by photographing himself with various passers-by in front of a public monument for the victims of the Second World War. The work shows how the translation from one media to another (action to photography to video) can produce an awareness of the political charge of space that results from a constant re-positioning and mental re-presentation (on both a public and a personal level) of cultural capital in space.

I have spent many days in the surroundings of this monument and have observed the specific temporal rhythm of this place. The space that resulted around this symbolic flame interested me, in the sense that it has developed its own performance. The tourists that spent time on the same spot had shaped a situation, an event, a meaning, by spending a fragment of their own time in this place. The consecutive moments of each of them were separated in time, just as they were separate in space, but the monument consists of these superimposed spatial fragments. In my film I have just joined together all these moments into one and the same spatial frame (using the stop-motion technique), and have constructed, therefore, a new continuity. Through this I wanted to direct the perspective from the people to the space. The space becomes the actor and the actions of the people become the actions of the space. Photography is a very suitable medium for doing that: I have joined separate images (since all these moments are separately experienced by each of these people recorded) into a video, in order to show that, for me, what is of ultimate importance is the performance of the space itself. The presence of all the tourists in different timeframes, in the same place, creates a layering, which I regard as an autonomous spatial reality, and which is depicted in this video.

(Taguchi 2008, personal communication)

In some of the actions that Taguchi performs in space, danger, and the experience of various tensions that inhabit space, is another means by which the spatial potential can be experienced. In his installations 'Surface' (2003), 'Spannung' (2003) and 'Supportable Space' (2003), Taguchi tests the forces of space. These vectors of tension that support space are made visible through the instability of space, as another signifier that can draw attention to and even make visible the powers of space: the wooden sticks, for example, can collapse on the viewer with any micro-modification of their position. Space is shown by Taguchi as an inherently dynamic structure. In his work 'Domino' (2006), the private library of a gallerist, arranged like a set of dominoes, is brought into motion by the minimal gesture of turning over a single book. The book-space, as an interior space of experience, is a space of information opened performatively in a 'readable form'.

The work of Sancho Silva brings to the awareness of the viewer spatial forms of organization. He transposes functions of some architectonic elements unto others: a roof is functionally different from a window, but in his work their functional logic shifts. These modifications generate differing temporal sequences, as each architectonical element brings with it another temporality (in watching architecture, in traversing architecture, in staying in architecture). In Silva's work these different moments get almost confounded and this creates an estrangement effect. In the work 'Shortcut' (2002) Sancho Silva has constructed a passage from one street to the next street through a house. He calls this shortcut a distortion, something that has been twisted: I propose an enigma, and the public is invited to solve the puzzle. This mental process is embodied in the movement of the person who is experiencing it. The work is to be used, it is not only visual, and I base my work on this duality as a dialectical experience.

(Silva 2007 interview)

Shortcuts permit the emergence of a new spatial configuration that reveals performatively a possible order underneath, which directs, controls and deceives the viewer, but also extends/ augments his physical capacities. This extension of the human with devices that are artificial, yet always constructed through the most basic means, is shown as being at hand and ubiquitous in our social environment. This human perception, framed by architectural devices that develop their own economy of influence, is always politically charged in Silva's work, with obvious connections to the panopticon type of institutional building.

(Continues...)

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Edition details

• Publisher: Intellect
• Publication date: 2015
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1783201940
• ISBN 13: 9781783201945
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 176