Introduction // Background // Theory and Context // Methods // Discussion i. Bodies and Buildings // The Pleating Papers // Discussion ii. Spaces and Voices // Other Stories // Conclusion // References and Image List

Theory and Context

In Louise Bourgeois’ Spider: The Architecture of Art-Writing, Mieke Bal engages with similar questions to the ones I am dealing with here, particularly how to write about art without reducing it to just one meaning amongst many. Bal takes as her case study Louise Bourgeois’ 1997 Spider, from the famous Cell series. For Bal, Spider proposes a ‘visual narrative that counters the reductionism inherent in the common mode of art-writing’.1

Bal proposes architecture as a meeting point between visual art and narrative, asking:

How can visual works of art, specifically sculptures that resist coherent figurative readings, tell stories? [...] The answers lie in the realm where sculpture becomes architecture and architecture becomes sculpture. Where these two domains of incompatible scale, volume, and density bounce back on each other, narrative becomes a tool, not a meaning; a mediator, not a solution; a participant, not an outsider.2

In this in-between state of being both/neither architecture and/nor sculpture, the work inhabits a transitional space which allows narrative to creep in, to be simultaneously explicit and ambiguous, particular and multiple. The body, and thereby the mind, is engaged in a state of being inside and outside, there and not there, in the moment of direct experience yet transported elsewhere by narrative association and memory. In turn, the ‘architecturality’ of Bourgeois’ art depends upon the place narrative, art-writing and art itself occupy therein, so that the architectural and narrative qualities of the work are interdependent and intertwined. The work ‘doesn’t tell a story but builds one’.3

British artist Phyllida Barlow’s work also occupies that transitional space between sculpture and architecture. An irregular construction of painted wood panels, untitled: upturnedhouse, 2, refers to architecture, and to the home, in both materiality and title, but has been abstracted, the material familiar yet distanced from its intended function. The piece, though architectural in material and somewhat so in scale, invades the space and architecture in which it finds itself, but appears insecure in its domination thereof. It appears on the brink of collapse, ‘flagrantly disobeying the rules of balance, symmetry, gravity and beauty associated with more classical forms of sculpture and architecture’.4 The work is at once confrontational and timidly irreverent in its engagement with space, both sculpture and architecture, and neither of the two. When writing about her work, Barlow extracts the poetic from the processes and materials of making, simply recounting word-for-word conversations/instructions between herself and her studio assistant:

they're sticking out-

do you need a hand?
no, I'll bind it all together with the wire mesh
…you can‟t carry it all…
no, but let bits fall5

John Kelsey’s Rich Texts offers another alternative model of writing about art that is irreverent towards traditional art criticism, offering sharp, incisive and often humorous essays on various aspects of art and the world it inhabits. Kelsey suggests that artists themselves – artists, I propose, such as myself or Barlow — have most power to change the way art is written about. He asks: ‘How can artists re-appropriate the discourse situation they are always already producing, and steal it back as a truth practice?’6 In other words, how can artists reclaim the arena for writing and talking about the art which they themselves make?

Kelsey focuses on the physical qualities of objects, allowing them a certain agency by engaging differently with art. Talking about glue in ‘Our Bodies, Our Shelves’, Kelsey states that ‘glue without an object is sculpture taking a vacation from its normal condition – actively selfunemployed. Not against form […] but brazenly in the midst of forms […] without the need to become attached’.7 Sculpture as written about by Kelsey is on ‘vacation’ from being told what to do by language, perhaps.

Taking a more confrontational line, Judith Butler writes in Excitable Speech of the potential of words to injure:

To be addressed injuriously is not only to be open for an unknown future, but not to know the time and place of injury, and to suffer the disorientation of one’s situation as the effect of such speech – that this speech makes the instability of the recipient’s ‘place’ clear – a place that may be no place.8

In response, I ask: what impact can words have on the reading of sculptures? If language takes its place through the provision of didactic texts read prior to the viewer’s own direct engagement with a sculpture, the viewer is displaced and prevented from taking his/her own place in relation to the artwork itself. He/she becomes disinclined to take his/her own position when confronted with an artwork. ‘If we are formed in language,’ Butler continues, ‘then that formative power precedes and conditions any decision we might make about it, insulting us from the start, as it were, by its prior power.’

But language is important in my own practice, forming another layer of narrative equal to but not taking priority over the sculptures themselves. One may stand without the other, but they also speak to one another, and in these conversations new narratives may be formed.9