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The Poetics of Space in the Attic of the MFA Painting Building
PICTURES - The Poetics of Space in the attic of the MFA Painting Building
From september 12 till 16 the MFA Painting programme started with a group project in the attic of the MFA Building. Meaning of the project is to learn each others personalities, ideas and creativity, to become a learning community. The Swedish artist Madeleine Hatz, who lives in New York supervised the project as she did last year.
To initiate the project, they spent the entire first day up in the attic of the MFA Building, getting to know both each other and the space. Like last year they talked in order to outline the theoretics and the morals of this undertaking. Like last year Madeleine took as starting-point and inspiration the work of Gaston Bachelard.
Space and Place
Madeleine Hatz
The Attic Project had two polar points of departure:
a) The attic as space, and
b) the group working on the project ( all 1st year students present at the time + one second year student as itinerant participant).
Explorations in the conceptual field of notions of space, were based mainly on Gaston Bachelard's Poetics of Space. The "poetic imagination" in Bachelards sense attributes a certain meaning to the position of the attic, within the stacking order if the floors of a house: basement, groundfloor etc. Poetics of Space also deals with the notion of "dwelling". This notion implies a sort of personal projection, as for instance in seeing the inside of a sea shell as a huge landscape in which one can dwell*, in the sense of inhabiting, making oneself at home. The group talks evolved around "Intimate immensity", shifts of scale, perspective. I urged everyone to make themselves at "home" in the attic, and to examine the space as potential dwellings or receptacles for imagination and desire.
Notions of Space and Place also led us to philosophers such as Michel de Certeau (The Practice of Everyday Life) and Heidegger (Die Kunst und der Raum)
The following are notes I took during the 5 days:
? Tuesday AM 10 in the coffee room: 1st consensus: A Playground.
? Tuesday PM : The project got physically underway at the moment when quantities of string and other materials arrived at the attic.. Some were recycled items.
? Wednesday AM : An Attic Full Of Voices. The history of the building reveals it was once a school for small children. The strings are running like musical scores, or bouncing around the room as would a ball. The strings trace lines, so many trajectories or itiniraries.
echoes.
? Thursday: At every stage the project got redefined What was it? A playground?
A Web? A labyrinth? There were many reevaluations, tribulations as well as elation.
? Friday AM: On the final day it seems the project has coalesced into a
state of living anarchy. A kind of organic cohabitation? A Situation was
staged.
? Friday PM: 3 kilometers of String
We reviewed many of the issues raised by our work: What is anarchy? is it total lack of structure or an alternative structure? Utopia? What is Process and how does it relate to Practice? What is my role of the guest teacher? facilitator, catalyst, instigator? Various paralleles were drawn to the content of the group?s media class (about Guy de Bord?s Society of the Spectacle, situationists, etc.) and various references, as for instance the Greek myth of Perseus and the Minotaure in the Labyrinth.
3 kilometers of String is a very matter of fact nuts and bolts sounding title, that came up as a strong candidate when discussing titles. It is 3 kilometers of play, of the immeasurable. The attic today is? like a living organism?, a web taking on a life of its own? As a spider web or an obstacle course?
Paradoxically it is a situation accommodating simultaneously an impediment and a free flow of lines.
Some loose thoughts and observations concerning the attic project
Ruurd de Jager
We put 3 km of string in the attic, but it only fills up a small fraction of
the space, the attic even looks bigger now. It makes me wonder how much string would fit in the attic if we would fill up the entire volume of it. Maybe this would be enough string to put around the world (40.000km).
Art makes the invisible visible. The attic project is not just about the
strings hanging in a space, it is more about the space in between. We want people to see every bit of space there is, just like we did. Most of the time our perception of the space of a place is superficial and quick.
As we try to walk through the attic, the strings dictate our movement and make us aware not just of the space, but also of our basic physical relation to it.
Our contact, connection with the world is first of all a physical one. It?s always through sensory percepts that we get to know reality.Our consciousness is not a screen on which reality is projected. We constitute reality ourselves.
Consciousness is embedded in the bodily nature of our being, like words and concepts (thinking) originate from sounds.
The process of constructing the string sculpture forced us to examine the space very intensely. The final result is just a residue of this search. It can also be seen as a map of viewing directions of someone inspecting the room very thorough. Visually the structure is scattered and concentrated at the same time. As the work progressed and the amount of string increased, movement became harder. I stumbled and bounced my head frequently. This helped me get to know the space of the attic.We had to internalize the attic, so that, as Bachelard would say, we are not just in the attic, but the attic is also in us.
After a while, fastening the strings and moving through the web becomes an exercise in meditation. You?re totally focused and forced to live here and now, at this moment in this space. This is something humans normally aren?t very good at (unlike other animals).
The sheer seize of our bodies directed the way the web turned out to be; most strings are at working height (shoulders) and form a natural roof. The higher or lower you look, the less strings you?ll find, just because it?s harder to put them there (climbing, kneeling down). This makes the web more human in a way, as do the little ?faults?, like the loose ends and the strings that are not tight. The basic human tendency to decorate also shows up and helps humanize the place. So by just working there, not trying to make it more difficult then it is, we made the attic more human in a way, more a place we could live in, even though the truth is that no one would want to live there.
The web of strings reflects the group process and can be seen as an image of an open society as a whole. Everybody does what he/she wants do within some basic rules. Then the mechanism of opinions, feedback and adjustment takes away the extremes. Despite all differences the attic web looks like one system, that forms a visual unity.
While working we constantly affected one another's work, changing and even destroying it. The degree in which everything is connected to everything increases with the quantity of string (in the beginning we could all freely work in a corner of our own).
Free movement became harder and harder.
Maybe that?s the natural tendency of all evolving systems. They slowly come to a point where they start to suffocate themselves and some radical deconstruction and renewing is necessary.
After the presentation we will have to clean up the attic. Removing all the string is part of the whole project. We will rediscover the space of the attic once again. As we will not just remove the strings we added ourselves, but one another's as well, we will be confronted with the way the other participants worked. The most interesting way to remove the web will be one string at the time, no scissors allowed!
Hi Madeleine,
Some notes of what I did with the string: In the back of the attic I started to attach strings, from one side of the roof to the other and back. After all the talking and thinking I had a desire of putting the strings at random, thirsty of not knowing and not directing anything at all. After I while I stood back and saw I was constructing a roof, a light, airy and transparent roof, just a few centimeters above my head. By simply navigating in the space I found a roof for my existence. My mental habitation became physical. I created a place to breathe and repose, welcoming for myself and others.
Stephanie Janssen
Hi Stephanie,
Here are some notes from my note book...
A breathing room
a point o perspective (on the rest of the room of the attic)
a center of the labyrinth
beginning and end (candle )
Bedouin tent
Would be nice to have from you a word description of what you did with the string, choice of position in the room etc when you started.
I felt this area was a very strong element of the "web", which seems like a living thing, an organism. Like a head maybe.
By making a dwelling, a mental habitation (for yourself and by extension the viewer), your input here seems very Bachelardian!
Good Luck today, Friday!
Till soon,
Madeleine
Thoughts on Consensus
Katy Krantz
What is it to make a truly collaborative work of art? When we first began the process of planning our attic project, we were told that decisions should be reached through consensus. Unlike a ?majority rules? system in which the minority voice can be dismissed, a consensus model aims to make every voice heard, by coming to a decision that everyone agrees with. Our goal would be to ?collaborate,? not ?compromise.?
There were seven members of our group: two Dutch men, two Dutch women, one Chinese man, one Korean man and one American woman. Our ages ranged from 25 to 37. Although seven doesn?t sound like such a large number, in fact our numbers generated a wide range of opinions and ideas.
On day one, we sat in the attic and began to brainstorm ideas of what we might want to do up there. At first, we just listed our ideas. When we liked another person?s idea, we might say, ?Yeah, I like that? that would be cool.? In general, if we did not like a person?s ideas, we did not share that with the group. We generally remained quiet about ideas we didn?t understand or appreciate. However, as the need grew to narrow down our list and really pick a project, some members of the group began to voice concern and confusion: ?I don?t really understand how that would work? I don?t see why we would do that.?
At one point on the first day, one member of the group said, ?Well, I really want to do [project a]. If we decide to do [project b] then I?ll leave the group.? That was the first time our system of consensus was really tested. We urged her to stay. We tried to come up with a proposal that she could get behind as well. After much discussion, a plan was made and we decided to meet the next day to refine the details.
As the week went on, our plan changed many times. By the third day, we were beginning to grow tired of talking. Consensus had its rewards, but it could also be incredibly tedious. We decided, with a collective sigh of relief, to begin the physical work of the project, even if we didn?t have all the details hammered out. We would begin and see where the process took us.
Luckily for us, our project involved over three kilometers of rope and required the hands of every member of the group. The physicality of the work provided a much needed break from thinking. Again, we confronted our differences, although this time it was not only our ideas clashing, but also our actual physical bodies, as we moved throughout the increasingly chaotic space.
While our planning process had been reminiscent of a consensus democracy, our working mode took on a more anarchic feel. The idea was to allow complete freedom to do whatever you wished with the rope. Opinions were freely voiced: ?I don?t like that,? as well as ?Very cool.? Although it was important for everyone to share opinions and engage in an honest dialogue, it became clear that the opinions of others weren?t valued to the extent that they drastically altered individual process. Of utmost importance was to allow ALL expression without hierarchy or censorship.
Our attic project is finished now. One of the sweeter results of our labor is the camaraderie we now feel as a group, and the respect we share for one another. Although we may disagree, there is enough mutual trust to share differing opinions without fear of hurting feelings. To some degree, working collaboratively removed the ego from the art making. Using a consensus model forced us to really hammer out our problems, instead of gloss over them. It made us work harder and longer, but ultimately we created a project that all seven of us can claim is ours.
Katy Krantz is student of Hunter College, New York. She is studying as guest student at the Frank Mohr Institute during this fall semester.
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