Marta Traquino, A Construção do Lugar pela Arte Contemporânea [The Construction of Place in Contemporary Art]. 2010. Ribeirão, Portugal: Húmus Editions. 172 pp. ISBN: 9789898139320
Reviewed by Andrea Mubi Brighenti, Department of Sociology, University of Trento (IT)
“Marching Piece” performance by George Maciunas. Flux Snow Event, New Marlborough (Massachusetts), 1977.
Contemporary artworks have addressed space in a variety of ways, often subtly and thought-provokingly, yet these important interconnections between art and spatial conceptions have not always been adequately recognised or explored in depth. As both an art critic and an art practitioner, Marta Traquino advances an original reflection on the construction, use and meaning of space in contemporary art. Indeed, Ms Traquino’s book illuminates a series of significant visible and invisible similarities between, on the one hand, a series of geographic and social theoretical conceptions of space and place and, on the other, a series of artworks belonging to the traditions of installation, performance, site-specific artworks and what is commonly, although vaguely, referred to as ‘public art’. In this context, the notion of ‘public’ plays a crucial role. Examining quite a few art exhibitions and events, one notices in them a complex co-presence of a ‘space of the public’, i.e. the space occupied by the audience (which includes how the artwork ‘reaches out’ the audience, and how the latter relates or reacts to the artwork), and a ‘public space’, i.e. the heterogeneous, visible and living space that hosts the art event, in which the artwork locates itself and upon which it seeks to act.
In order to explore the interweaving of art and space, Marta Traquino brings together a scholarly genealogy of spatial theorists and some of the most important art movements of the second half of the 20th century and early 21st century. By doing so, she reveals how a fruitful dialogue between these two streams of thought and practice might be developed. In the first part of the book, she draws on the spatial theories of Henri Lefèbvre, Marc Augé, Anthony Giddens, Yi-Fu Tuan, David Harvey and John Urry, stressing how the elements of ‘excess’, ‘compression’ and ‘mobility’ transform contemporary spatio-temporal experience. However, these same characteristics also seem to confirm the centrality of experience in the definition of social spaces and places. From this point of view, art and experience form a well-established couple. Yet while theoretically this intimate connection had been already noticed by pragmatists philosophers, it is in art movements such as Fluxus that the integration of the spectator into the process of creation of the artwork itself reaches its logical end-point.
The experiential perspective thus enables us to observe the inherent dynamism in the constitution of social space. A series of artworks from the late 1950s through the 1960s, which include for instance Allan Krapow’s ‘environments’ (1957-58), Dan Graham’s Homes for America (1966), Douglas Huebler’s Location Piece #2 (1969) and Vito Acconci’s Following Piece (1969), are discussed in details by the author, who notices that these artists reflexively highlighted how space is performatively produced and discursively represented. Other recent artists who have critically worked on what Lefèbvre used to call ‘spaces of representation’, specifically through large-scale artworks, are also reviewed: these include for instance Lawrence Weiner (Smashed to Pieces, 1991), Krzysztof Wodiczko (The Tijuana Projection, 2001), Susan Hiller (The J-Street Project, 2002-05) and Beat Streuli (with his late 1990s and early 2000s series of huge photographs of ‘strangers’ in public places).
One of Traquino’s central claims in her book is that place corresponds to an inhabited and lived type of space where the body represents the measure of an emplaced subjectivity always imbued with memory. A range of artists have elaborated on such an insight, focusing on either the body at a small scale, like Bruce Nauman in Square Dance (1967-8), or outdoor interventions on a larger scale, like Ian Hamilton Finlay at his Little Sparta garden (1966) and Gordon Matta-Clark with his famous house cuts (Splitting: Four Corners, 1974). According to Traquino, the Fluxus movement in particular has set an ‘open path’ in contemporary art as regards the reflection on the experience of emplacement. Fluxus’ motifs of ‘globalism’, ‘experimentalism’, ‘humour’, ‘simplicity’, ‘specificity’ and ‘presence’ all seem to revolve around a relational and phenomenological take on the artistic event. In particular, Fluxus artists such as George Maciunas, Dick Higgins, Alison Knowles, George Brecht, Mieko Shiomi and Ay-O instantiate the search for new types of ‘relations in public’ – to employ Goffman’s category – which question official and institutional definitions. This way, Fluxus art was designed to operate inside ‘social interstices’ which would challenge the common – and, mostly, taken for granted – ordering of space.
Contemporary artists such as the Istanbul-based Oda Projesi collective and the Dutch artist Jeanne van Heeswijk inherit many of the Fluxus’ early insights and resolutely proceed along a trajectory Traquino describes as ‘from public space to lived places’. But the institutional context in which contemporary artists operate and the public funding of site-specific artworks, installations and performances also give rise to contentious actions, in some cases even self-defeating ones. In the last sections of the book, Traquino critically reviews a series of cases in which some more or less pronounced ‘detachment between theoretical presuppositions and actual practice’ became visible. The case of Lisbon’s Expo ’98 is extensively discussed. In this as well as other cases, the limits of contemporary public art’s self-legitimation can be ascertained. As the artist Krzysztof Wodiczko acutely put it: ‘To attempt to “enrich” this powerful, dynamic art gallery (the city public domain) with “artistic art” collections or commissions – all in the public’s name – is to decorate the city with a pseudo-creativity irrelevant to urban space and experience alike; it is also to contaminate this space and experience with the most pretentious and patronizing bureaucratic-aesthetic environmental pollution’.
About the author as critic:
História da Arte: Marta Traquino
Da Construção do Lugar pela Arte Contemporânea I
Da Construção do Lugar pela Arte Contemporânea II – Do espaço ao lugar: Fluxus
Da Construção do Lugar pela Arte Contemporânea III – A arte como um estado de encontro
About the author as artist:
Que cor tem agora o céu?
Guest Artist – Marta Traquino
What colour has the sky got now?
