During the writing of the research paper, I had been keen to find some way to allow for the text itself to interface with space, so as to avoid an isolation of its ideas from the actuality it discusses. In some sense, I had hoped that the research paper could in some part become a form of spatial intervention itself.
A rather straightforward method of addressing this came when re-considering my use of non-opaque materials (see 2-17). By simply placing the text of my Methodology for Spatial Intervention onto transparent material, the reader is forced to confront their surroundings, which appear directly within the boundaries of the page.
Some distortion can be seen due to issues with the printing process.
Many thanks to Sandy for the picture/hand!
Further to this, I began to consider ways in which the text could be installed using techniques I had touched on when trying to produce an intervention previously.
Though I have yet been unable to test this, I am considering that hanging the document within a space will create a multiplicity of interference; not only is the site accommodated within the text, but its physical presence must be confronted when manoeuvring the site.
STEPPING BACK… AGAIN
Unit 2 began with an interrogation of the gallery space (see 2-2) and a consideration of how this particularly deliberate kind of site influences our experiences and understandings concerning the art it contains.
My thinking has returned to this space through my attempts to produce spatial interventions and in turn, the aforementioned methodology document.
Embedded in my concern with space is a particular interest in the relationship between art and space, representative of some wider ideas about the effects of space that I am gradually developing.
The art gallery fascinates me, but it is a highly political space over which I have little to no agency. As I have discovered from attempting to intervene in space in recent weeks, and through the histories of the artworks discussed in my research paper, the selection of site is crucially important. In my virtual world experiments earlier in Unit 2, I reckoned with this fact, opting to simulate the space and embracing a separation from reality inherent in this manner of interrogating the space (see 2-3).
Now, producing the methodology document has ignited some sense of how I can engage with the gallery space in a way that recognises my lack of agency in relation to the sites in question, and perhaps maintains a stronger position in relation to GCD practice than my previous attempts to engage with it as an ‘outsider’.
The methodology document, in relation to the experiments discussed in 2-17, serves as almost a stand-in for the press release or information sheet that would accompany an exhibition. I have started to consider the role of the designed ephemera that accompanies the gallery experience itself in shaping its overall identity; a suggestion of space, supplementary in some way, a kind of institutional narrative handed on a neat piece of A4 paper.
What form would a gallery take that exists only through this ephemera? Would the same spatial relationships exist between art and audience? How can this material be used as a tool for examining or challenging the intangible qualities of the art gallery?
Some questions I will be considering going forward.