Expanded Spatial Practices
A symposium exploring the conditions and possibilities for cross-disciplinary approaches to spatial practice
 |
Jane Rendell, 'An Embelishment: Purdah', Spatial Imagination in Design, London: The Domo Baal Gallery, 2006 |
Research symposium in Art,
Architecture and Design
10-12 September 2009
Day 1: Presentations by practitioners and theorists
Day 2: Creative praxis workshop
Day 3: Presentations and a plenary discussion
Dr Linda Walker and Associate Professor John Barbour are convening a symposium in September on the theme 'Expanded Spatial Practices'. This research symposium will draw on perspectives from disciplines including architecture, interior and landscape architecture, visual design and visual art to explore conditions and possibilities for cross-disciplinary approaches to spatial practice. Research within the School
Keynote speaker: Professor Jane Rendell
Professor Jane Rendell BA (Hons), Dip Arch,
MSc, PhD is Director of Architectural Research at the Bartlett, UCL. An
architectural designer and historian, art critic and writer, she is author
of Site-Writing (2009), Art and Architecture (2006), The Pursuit
of Pleasure (2002) and co-editor of Critical Architecture (2007),
Spatial
Imagination (2005), The Unknown City (2001), Intersections (2000),
Gender
Space Architecture (1999) and Strangely Familiar (1995).
She is on the Editorial Board for ARQ (Architectural Research Quarterly) and
the Journal of Visual Culture in Britain, a member of the AHRC Peer Review
College and chair of the RIBA President's Awards for Research. In 2006 she
was a research fellow at CRASSH (Centre for Research in Arts, Social
Sciences and Humanities) at the University of Cambridge and received an
honorary degree from the University College of the Creative Arts. She was a recipient of AHRC funding in 2005 for the collaborative project
Spatial Imagination, and in 2008 for research leave to complete her
Site-Writing book.
Her work over the past ten years has explored various interdisciplinary
intersections: feminist theory and architectural history, fine art and
architectural design, autobiographical writing and criticism. She gives
talks at galleries such as the Barbican, the Tate and the Whitechapel, and
has recently written essays for artists and architects, such as Daniel
Arsham, Elina Brotherus, Nathan Coley, Janet Hodgson and Michael Pinsky;
galleries such as the Hayward, the Serpentine, the Wapping Project and the
BALTIC and projects such as the Estonian Pavilion, Gaspipe, Venice
Architecture Biennale, 2008, and Art Incorporated, Kunstmuseet Koge
Skitsesamling, Denmark, 2008.
3-day program
Thursday 10 September
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Time |
Symposium |
|---|---|
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9.45- |
Keynote address: Prof Jane Rendell, Bartlett, University College London |
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11.30am |
Jane Lawrence, Art, Architecture and Design, University of South Australia |
|
12pm |
Veronica Kelly, Art, Architecture and Design, University of South Australia |
|
12.30pm |
Louise Haselton, Art, Architecture and Design, University of South Australia |
|
2-2.30pm |
Steve Loo, School of Architecture and Design, University of Tasmania |
|
2.30-3pm |
Kathleen Connellan, Art, Architecture and Design, University of South Australia |
|
3-3.30pm |
Gini Lee, School of Design, Queensland University of Technology |
|
4-5pm |
Helene Frichot, School of Architecture and Design, RMIT University |
Friday 11 September
|
Time |
Workshop - Facilitator: Jane Rendell |
|---|---|
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9.30am - 5pm |
Saturday 12 September
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Time |
Plenary |
|---|---|
|
9.30-10am |
Julie Henderson, Art, Architecture and Design, University of South Australia |
|
10-10.30am |
Margit Bruenner, Art, Architecture and Design, University of South Australia |
|
10.30-11am |
Suzie Attiwill, School of Architecture and Design, RMIT University |
|
11.30am-12.30pm |
Plenary |
Site-Writing Workshop
Friday 11 September
Professor Jane Rendell:
In 1965-6, Robert Smithson worked as a consultant artist for an architectural firm called TAMS on designs for Dallas Forth Worth Airport. The project prompted his consideration of how artworks might be viewed from the air but also how to communicate aspects of these exterior artworks to passengers in the terminal building. This latter aspect he termed the 'non-site', and his interest in the 'dialogue between the indoor and the outdoor' led him to develop 'a method or a dialectic that involved…site and non-site' (see Rendell, Art and Architecture, a place between, I.B. Tauris, London, New York, 2006).
More recently, Miwon Kwon has pointed to Homi Bhabha's concept of 'relational specificity' as a way of emphasising the importance of thinking about the particularity of the relationships between sites. Akin to James Clifford's notion of site as a mobile place located between fixed points, Bhabha's concept suggests an understanding of site that is specific but also relational.
I have argued that a certain kind of site-specific practice, one that is both critical (self-reflective and desirous of social change) and spatial, that intervenes into a site into order to critique that site, should be called 'critical spatial practice'. Since the positions we occupy as critics, not only inform but actually produce our critical perspectives and interpretative stances - ideological, emotional, physical, psychic - I have been exploring the possibilities of criticism as a form of critical spatial practice, through my site-writing.
'Site-writing' examines how writing art criticism can be understood as a form of situated practice where the writing responds to those site suggested by the artwork: those that are there as well as here, those that exist in the memories and imaginations of the artist and critic as well as in the tangible present, those connected to the sites of the work's production as well as reception.
This workshop asks you to remake one site in relation to another, specifically to explore the potential of writing as a way of making relations between sites. Writing here includes not only as script but also as text, which might include visual images, and/or words as images, and also words as they are spoken and performed.
Brief
You will need to choose a site, this may be a single site in the city, a building, an artwork, an exhibition, a collection, a small-scale intervention, a detail. The site may also consist of a pair, series or constellation of sites connected by a key thematic that interests you - one that is formal/material or more theoretical/critical. Suggested sites in close proximity to the University are:
- beneath the nearby Morphett Street bridge, which goes over the railway lines; part of its lead-up has a pedestrian underpass with steps up to the bridge itself
- a new courtyard for students and staff that is gated and paved, beside the Kaurna Building
- a long concrete corridor that opens out from a set of student studio spaces, Kaurna Building
- the staircase the leads up through the Kaurna Building, which is where the School is
- the foyer to the Kaurna Building
- the University campus faces onto two parallel thoroughfares: North Terrace (the grand boulevard, so to speak), and Hindley Street (the seediest street in the city, and one the authorities are always trying to clean up)
- the Liverpool Gallery itself
- a terrain bordered by the Morphett Street Bridge, the Torrens River, the old jail, and Port Road.
You are asked to make a piece of site-writing that responds to and sets up a relationship between your chosen site (s) and the Liverpool Street Gallery. This is a medium size room within the postgraduate student studio, it is a robust space, part of a warehouse. It is where the workshop will be held.
To do this you will need to:
- Identify a site(s) of interest.
- Take up a position/develop a response in relation to the site.
- This position/relation can be articulated through any media - from experimental writing and spoken performance, to drawings, maps, objects, still or moving images. It should be a response to the site that is both critical and creative. You will need to consider the way in which your response relates to the site conceptually but also formally - take into account spatial, temporal and material issues of composition, arrangement, rhythm, structure, style.
- Your response needs to articulate and set up a space of relation between your chosen site(s) and the gallery - which might even need to refer to another site or elsewhere.
- Your response might consist of temporary specific interventions to sites, in which case you will need to think about how one site gets traced/referred to in another.
- A key aspect of this workshop entails an exploration of how we might move beyond 'representation' and think about new ways of documenting/tracing/referring to/associating with/suggesting even experiences and responses to sites through and in time.
Suggested readings
Gavin Butt, 'Introduction: The Paradoxes of Criticism', in Gavin Butt (ed.), After Criticism: New Responses to Art and Performance (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2005).
James Clifford, 'An Ethnographer in the Field', interview by Alex Coles, in Alex Coles (ed.), Site Specificity: The Ethnographic Turn (London: Black Dog Publishing, 2000), 52-73.
Nick Kaye, 'Site Specifics' and 'Robert Smithson: Mapping Site', Site-Specific Art: Performance, Place And Documentation (London: Routledge, 2000), pp. 1-12 and pp. 91-9.
Rosalind Krauss, 'Sculpture in the Expanded Field', Hal Foster (ed.), Postmodern Culture (London: Pluto Press, 1985), 31-42.
Miwon Kwon, One Place After Another: Site Specific Art and Locational Identity (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002), pp. 11-31.
Della Pollock, 'Performing Writing', in Peggy Phelan and Jill Lane (eds), The Ends of Performance (New York: New York University Press, 1998), pp. 73-103.
Jane Rendell, Art and Architecture: A Place Between (London: IB Tauris, 2006), introduction.
Jane Rendell, 'Site-Writing: Enigma and Embellishment', Jane Rendell, Jonathan Hill, Murray Fraser and Mark Dorrian (eds), Critical Architecture (London: Routledge, 2007), pp. 150-62.
Robert Smithson, 'Towards the Development of an Air Terminal Site' [1967] Jack Flam (ed.), Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1996) pp. 52-60.