Topoï

topo誰

Aesthetics and Contemporary Art, by Roy Brand MFA Programme

Foreword to Roy, Over the last two years, i took major decisions.

One being to come to Israel, the second to enter the art scene.

Two unknown places. Full of promises and energy.

Alongside my alyah and decision to integrate the art world, arose major themes: im/migration, in/security, in/stability protection, maturity, territory, destination, duration expression, identity, memory, land, origins, separation, displacement, geometry and mapping.

Above all, and around me, walls are symbolic, they connect the soil to the sky drawing the horizon accross time. i am looking for my home.

b y E t h e l G u t m a n n , T e l A v i v, F e b r u a r y 2 0 1 3

Topo誰, a reflexion around the artistic pr/axis

Geometry is the tool to measure the earth. The visual representation of this metric space is represented by a line which, stretched between two points, enables to map a territory, by occupying, encircling, thus appropriating it. But a place could also be defined in other ways, challenging the laws of science, history, geography, or socio-politics.

Art opens new possibilities to define an area, to redraw it, in an nonauthoritarian manner. In deed, wether through materials found on site, or through one’s own body and movements, artists find new frames to outline new boundaries, - or sometimes, the lack of. Mind frames as bodies of evidence. Liberated from the given standard limits, artists offer new trajectories and units of measurement to normative surroundings.

The new mind cartography finds its origin from the inner and social construction as an individual and its transcription through mental projections.

Art is another body of land. The country for expression and interiority.

A space between seclusion and privacy, a home. In a way, one could say that the artist is the ever-lasting expatriate. Expatriation not as renunciation. But as resistance, exploring the world on a vertical line in search of an horizon and dwelling. The destination is no promise land, and the journey a long process of fragilization, with imaginary borders.

The basis is moving and uneasy to fortress, but offers a perspective of storing energy.

In different ways in different periods, the relations of the somewhat broken incertitudes appeared.

As sideways onto the road, they coexist, approaching recognition; the Real, connected and modified by storytellers, confident that multitude of stars sometimes return from the walls, watching them.

The reflexion of the place of home, both as surface and material enables to mirror how an individual is, while inhabiting a space in society, inhabited by the questions that result from occupation and appropriation. Land, identity, nationality, memory, dwell, protection, are necessary and reccurrent themes for the human collective construction of distinctive entities. The following works address to the normative structures. Through the artistic praxis, artists challenge the axes, draw the lines, collect the segments, confront the core-corps, dismantle the systems, question the angles; in search for a centre. Out of a body of land, they produce a body of evidence. “Originally home meant the centre of the world [...] because it was the place where a vertical line crossed with a horizontal one. The vertical line was a path leading upwards to the sky and downwards to the underworld. The horizontal line represented the traffic of the world, all the possible roads leading across the earth to other places. Thus, at home, one was nearest to the gods in the sky and to the dead of the underworld. This nearness promised access to both. And at the same time, one was at the starting point and, hopefully, the returning point of all terrestrial journeys. [...]

But to emigrate is always to dismantle the centre of the world, and so to move into a lost, disoriented one of fragments. [...] At its most brutal, home is no more than one’s name-whist to most people one is nameless.� 1

1 And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief as Photos, John Berger

Digging from the most inner part, representing its shapes, and, finally bringing them to exposure; positions the artist in quite an unsafe and paradoxical environment. Therefore, rises the question of the appropriate container. When the artist is both subject and object, whole and fragments, material while feeling immaterial, where lies the centre of his world? what kind of a place could shelter him? Are there such spaces of otherness 2 ?

“There are also, probably in every culture, in every civilisation, real places- places that do exist and that are formed in the very founding of society- which are something like counter-sites.[...] Because these places are absolutely different from all the sites that they reflect and speak about, I shall call them, by way of contrast to utopias, heterotopias. I believe that between utopias and these quite other sites, these heterotopias, there might be a sort of mixed, joint experience, which would be the mirror[...].

Heterotopias have a function in relation to all the space that remains. This function unfolds between two extreme poles. Either their role is to create a space of illusion that exposes every real space, all the sites inside of which human life is partitioned, as still more illusory. Or else, on the contrary, their role is to create a space that is other, another real space, as perfect, as meticulous, as well arranged as ours is messy, ill constructed, and jumbled. This latter type would be the heterotopia, not of illusion, but of compensation”. 3 “Home”, a still road-movie, by Ursula Meier The story of Home depicts a family living on the border of an abandoned highway in construction. The road has been closed for over ten years, enabling the father, mother and the three children to build up a land of absolute happiness for themselves. Away from the outside and far from the other, time is immutable, pleasure is suspended, in a still painting.

The movement comes exclusively from the family cell itself, in a homemade bohemian idyll style. The children cycle their bicycles up and down the empty tarmac, the father plans to finish building the swimming pool in the garden; and around, there is no-one, there is nothing. Empty fields and peaceful countryside. A no man’s land which they learn to 2 expression used by Michel Foucault to describe his concept of heterotopias 3 “Of Other Spaces”, Heterotopias (1967) by Michel Foulcault

appropriate, and which, over the years, has become the extension of their intimacy. The closed highway is inhabited by the omnipresent playful «bric-à-brac» of the family. Toys, bicycles, a sofa with television, a plastic swimming pool, naturally occupy the camp. A territory of dream.

One day, the heterotopia is disturbed by faceless orange-garbed road workers penetrating the zone in massive trucks, announcing the inauguration of the highway and automatically, the end of a remote domestic paradise. Traffic intensifies, the sound is unbearable, the access to the other side of the road is impossible. Isolation becomes obvious.

The opening of the motorway not only brings noise and pollution it also brings the family face to face with a world that they had been trying to ignore, that they were desperate to not be a part of. Incapable of giving up on the ideal of home, they gradually organise resistance. Every member, according to his temperament, deploys ingenuity to maintain a status quo and sustain the crackling image. Increasingly, paranoia and open hostility grow from the inside, disintegrating the family cell by forcing it to closer proximity.

The road, both visual and audible, becomes a character. Now moving and organic, it constantly interacts with the family. The kitchen window becomes a screen onto the other world, the outside. As the impact of the road takes a greater hold on the family, the sense of freedom and warmth that was palpable at the start is gradually replaced with a feeling of claustrophobia. Unable to abandon their island, they are embedded in spite of common sense, to lose reason. They resort to increasingly lunatic measures to block out the noise, from earplugs to bricking up their house entirely.

By shutting themselves off from the intrusion, they are forced to bear another growing [intrusive] monster, their bunker-shelter. The houseshell becomes a metaphor of one’s own skin, protective, yet fragile and invading. The elements are reversed. The perspective of the road becomes still, as the latter is «figée» in its state of the faceless other, the enemy with no origin, nor arrival point; and the house, so far pillar of stability, starts to articulate, rejecting thus abandoning its own inhabitants.

Home gives a cruel insight on two parallel co-existing unbalanced worlds: outside, the aggression by asphyxiation; inside, the agression of survival.

La Maison de Jean Pierre Raynaud For twenty-five years, Jean Pierre Raynaud worked on a project of an underground house. His own. A parallelepiped buried under-earth of 15 metres wide and 5 metres high, accessible via a staircase sinking into the earth. Totally invisible from the outside, the house expresses all the artist’s desires of confinement. Without windows, the only emergency exit is to be found on the ceiling. Jean Pierre Raynaud says about his approach to building his house, that “It was foetal, perhaps a zero point: the main idea was to provide maximum protection, to create a place where there was nothing to discuss with the world outside. Sinking into the earth helps me go deeper in my way of experiencing things. I have an easy relation with depth and depression. [...]

Outside it was like a field, there was no life, life was below, not a sign showing that I was there, it was a way to hide, to deceive enemy, somehow. [...] My ideal project was to disappear without a trace, to live my life without relation with the outside world.” 4 Throughout his life, Raynaud has worked and renovated his grounded house. The space was continuously rethought, modified, converted, and changed according to his evolving needs as a human individual. Function dictating form, and function becoming form. In the process, new rooms appeared while others disappeared. The structure, as well as the materials used, showed this crave for shelter. In deed, Raynaud marked his territory with white ceramic tiles set on a grid of 15 by 15 centimetres, joined by a black mortar of 5 millimetres. The white tiles, have become his artistic signature. They are related to the image of a clinic, as well as that of a home, used in hospitals and slaughterhouses, easily washed of dirt, thus keeping no memory of any presence, experience or sign of life. The black joint, played the role of the contour. Logically as to join pieces together, but also as an attempt to differentiate strictly identical elements. Raynaud purposely kept the joints “handmade”, while the tiles repeatedly filled growing areas, reminding of consistency and constancy.

Symbolic of Perfection and Absolute, the grid space functioned as a defence system against the outside world. The body becoming one’s total space, and the space defined itself in strict relation to one’s body. An enclosed space that paradoxically opened to a place of freedom. A space4 Jean Pierre Raynaud, La Maison, 1969-1987, Paris, Éditions du Regard

time continuum in suspension. Raynaud built for himself, a certain dwell for eternity. Heterotopic.

The house was the necessary answer to Raynaud’s condition as human.

It revealed the artistic praxis, as much as the axis as a man. Finding creative way to survive and tame the profound wounds and ubiquitous fears. Resisting the damaging machinery of society, Raynaud constructed another machinery, in the shape of a gigantic submarine monster. A fortress. A very grounded, yet invisible, mass of protection. Running like a well-oiled machine. The one that has, while protecting and hiding, revealed the very deep fissures. What was meant to remain lost, undiscovered or buried paradoxically screamed for survival by coming to the surface as the house was shown, visited, thus invaded. A situation that Raynaud felt intrusive and difficult. The house, which took the role of the bandage suddenly turned to a tickling blade. In response, Raynaud banned all access to the house to any person other than himself, for an arbitrary duration of twenty years. He continued transforming it until perfection. With little hope in human kind to maintain the house in its final state after his death, he finally had it demolished. Raynaud saved the fragments in buckets as artworks and presented the debris in 976 surgical containers. The destruction has been documented.

The house, with its modular and flexible condition over time, has looked at and after its own essence, merging with its creator, and becoming his skin. The house mirrored a Man. From fissures to splits, Gordon-Matta Clark Architecture could be as flexible and movable as clothing., or skin And sometimes architecture could be the body itself, giving shelter to the unborn. Gordon Matta Clark wrote in a letter to the New York Department of Real Estate: “I make sculpture, using the by-products of the land and the people”, and announced that the Anarchitecture movement is “about making space without building it”.5

5 Towards Anarchitecture: Gordon Matta-Clark And Le Corbusier, by James Attlee

If, for Jean Pierre Raynaud, the fissures were kept inside the house, Gordon Matta-Clark in his interventions, on the other hand revealed them to the open. The veins of his artistic work. If architecture was meant to be built, Matta-Clark has instead replaced it with spaces of collapse and removal. If architecture’s fundamental goal was to propose stability and protection, Matta-Clark’s tested its foundations by intervening on the existing structures. Producing architectural accidents, revealing instability and fragility. His work is a protest, suggesting both the failure of architectural social engineering and its inevitable basis in subjective, anti-social vision.

His “cuts” were actual holes on the building that challenged their support system. Fundamental elements to the architecture became absent and showed the construction’s instability. One could qualify his work as series of architectural “errors”. But with an aesthetic crudeness, Gordon Matta-Clark dug out from the walls a new architectural language, both symbolic and cultural, fruit of investigations on the form. Questions on the very limits of property and its appropriation, of its possibility to support both men and systems, but also on the proper and the improper.

By observing the way people lived on the street, he drew prototype forms, free of any commodity value, which could be used by anyone to create a shelter, as he said “beyond between and without walls putting to waste the most presumptuous building plans”.

Concerned with the abandonment of monuments and the fate of urban communities, Matta-Clark wished to charge deserted spaces, buildings, and parcels of land with new meaning by breaking the visual and metaphorical boundaries normally associated with the architectural “box”. So, to the extreme. As for the Paris Biennial of 1975, when he related two seventeenth-century buildings, both condemned to demolition, by a cone-like spiral visible from the street. Defying geometry, the normal coordinates for the horizontal axis and section for the vertical were interrupted to a degree which caused a sense of vertigo for the viewer inside the building.

From viewing to a new kind of voyeuring, he places the eye in the heart of the so-called architecture for a “better” world, the suburban american house; challenging the shape of utilitarian dream. In the Holly’s and

Horace’s Solomon house project, he therefore sliced a wide vertical line marking the exact middle of the building’s longer axis. The cut impeccably divided everything in its path: floors, walls, stairs, entrance and exit. Symbolically he enabled shadows and light to liberate the typical American house.

Matta-Clark was challenged by metamorphic gaps, voids, leftover, undeveloped places and ambiguous space. These places are an alternative attitude towards building; one that attempts to erase any principles or foundations that could rationalise space, thus underlining the idea of a vital cut opposed to an organised system.

Horizontal artist, the work of Francis Alÿs, “The mortar which holds the improvised home together - even for the child - is memory.

Within it, tangible, visible mementoes are arranged [...] but the roof and four walls which safeguard the life within, these are invisible, intangible and biographical.” 6 Francis Alÿs walks, writing and rewriting space. His line rather than fixing the world in a vast contour, makes its way into that world, horizontally, as the symbolic axis towards life.

The act of walking is a spatial and urban praxis, Alÿs inquiries there mobility, historical and social geography. A move beyond borders. The line, formally static, becomes dynamic, stating the vertical position towards the world no longer justifiable. As the line, when it writes and rewrites space becomes a protest against coherent and totalitarian division of space and map. Walking his walk into space, but also into time, in slowness and purposelessness. Resisting the modern cartography that dictates the line to come from a well-known point and arrive to another.

Green Line [in reference to the historic Green Line that was agreed upon in 1949 as the boundary between Israeli and Palestinian land] is the documentation of the performance in which Francis Alÿs walks in Jerusalem along on the border between Palestine and Israel carrying a 6 And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief as Photos, John Berger

leaking can of green paint. As he walks, the paint dribbles out leaving behind a wavering line on the ground behind him. The line articulates the border as an arbitrary mark in the sand. Graphical, therefore geographical, the print left behind is not meant to perdure. In deed, with time and traffic, the paint will disappear or be covered by sand, mirroring the creation of borders, their relative maintenance and fluctuations.

Delimiting nation states shifts and is distorted by wars, trade agreements, and annexations.

Francis Alÿs is not a city planner, he has no bird’s-eye perspective on the movement in there. He doesn’t leave the horizontal sphere, and in his act of walking, one can read a type of language, close to a conversation.

The movement of the walk isn’t exactly an anticipated one, it allows in its wanders, to relate to others and the space around. While Alÿs drew his green line, he passed by and met people on the way, some who’s home might have moved from one side of the border to the other.

Through his work, Francis Alÿs challenges another border, the one between the museum space and the real space. The walks mark a change of focus from translating the world to being in it. The line both being questioned and questioning. Material and surface. Testifying the work and its condition comes with documenting it. The viewer is encouraged to follow it horizontally, as the camera man has traced the artist in situ.

The three merging on the dynamic line of commenting on the world.

Francis Alÿs is a traveler, a world citizen,- where is his home, if not in a mobile dwelling, finding its centre while occupying it.

“It is not necessary to create a world, but the possibility of a world” 7. Wether physically or mentally, men need to relate to space and time. Defining its borders is vital. Delimiting the territory, outlining the surface means also inscribing a life lived. Now, does this place need a static address, nationality, coordinate, or physical mapping? Feeling at home, is by all 7 Jean-Luc Godard

means, respecting one’s integrity. “Home� could therefore be beyond geometry, in a moving spot, that would follow and translate the inner archeology; dwel the impalpable, irrational, emotional; and give shape to the dynamic fertile ground of humanity.