WEEK 10_Front and Back of House_Developed Plans

Week 10_Initial Spatial Planning_Front and Back of House

WEEK 10_ Performance and the City reading

Hopkins, D.J. Orr, S. Solga, K. (2009). Performance and the City. England. Palgrave Macmillan.

CHAPTER 11:

Agency and complicity in ‘ A Special Civic Room’: Londons Tate Modern Turbine Hall

Harvie, J

“The turbine Hall is a destination purely about looking (at art); its space is deliberately organized to facilitate looking, which - in the Turbine Hall – necessarily becomes mutual watching; and its visitors are directly engaged in producing its relational art.” P208

“The building offers wonderful views, but it also subjects us to being viewed. We are spectacularly objectified through the panoptical effects of the big space of the Turbine Hall and the multiple interior windows overlooking it; visitors constantly gaze upon each other.” P211

CHAPTER 13

Can the city speak? Site-Specific art after poststructuralism

Laura Levin

“The act of radically relocating the spectator to centre stage does little to undermine the position of the spatial mastery already accorded to viewing subject within theatres traditional perspectival frame.”

“ To be specific to a site is thus to demonstrate a sense of responsibility toward it and to perceive all of its inhabitants as potential collaborators. The artist is no longer the origin and perspectival centre of the work, but rather someone who patiently responds to events in the surroundings. Spectators are also part of the visual terrain: they are ‘moving, coloured shapes too’.

“…spectator, aware of his/her placement relative to others in space…”

p244

‘The individual feels himself to be a spectator without paying much attention to the spectacle. As if the position of spectator were the essence of the spectacle, as if basically the spectator in the position of a spectator were his own spectacle.’ P249

WEEK 9_Mid Review

BERNARD TSCHUMI

Le Fresnoy National Studio for the Contemporary Arts, 1991-1997

Tschumi designed the conditions of the in-between space to become the programmatic core.

The design gives the affect of ascending to a new level.

Explores a space activated by program.

My own project located in the St Anne’s church in Prague intends to become focused around the notion of the “in-between” space located between the new roof of the ‘white box’ and the existing

roof of the St Anne’s church.

HEAD IN BY MAGMA ARCHITECTURE

The structure is supported above the floor and made from fabric stretched between alluminium frames

on the walls and ceiling of the gallery.

Visitors view models of the practice’s projects – which are suspended inside the void – by standing underneath and inserting their heads through holes in the underside of the structure.

KATRIN SIGURDARDOTTIR

Sigurdardottir creates imaginary spaces within another space. Dealing with

scale to create a relationship between the work and the viewer. She uses

architectural structures to bring together nature and design, allowing the

viewer to participate with the work

Prague Crossroads.

• 30.09. 2004 Reconstruction of the Prague Crossroads
• 31.12. 2003 Reconstruction of the Prague Crossroads
• Looking at the structure of the site, to see how this can influence the design and structure of the spatial intervention.

Pati Diagrams Plan + Sections

Back (above) of House_ Performance chamber + main rehearsal space

Performance chamber_ White box

Front (below) of house: Auditorium entry_ Lobby_ Toilets

Back (below) of house: Hair and makeup room_ Conference room

Double skin ‘white box’

I Have decided to use the 'double skin' method for the 'white box' so that it remains a solitary spatial gesture when entering the space.

(Im)mater(iality) and the black box theatre as an 'empty space' of Re-production

Associate Professor Dorita Hannah, Massey University, New Zealand

"....20th century 'theatricians'', such as Meyerhold, Arstuad, Brecht, Piscator, Schlemmer and Grotowski, sought to eradicate the totalising proscenium arch and disrupt the boundaries between actor and spectator, exterior and interior, street and stage, intensifying the experience as an engaging hallucinatory event"

(p.27)

" Characterised by an unprecedented continuity between exterior and interior " (p.5)

(Maria Luisa Palumbo (2000) New wombs: Electronic Bodies and Architectural Disorders. Basel: Birkhauser.)

Mid review Feedback

KEY NOTES

The blank space, the emptiness in-between.

The viewer becomes an active agent, a participant producing and seeing unique aspects of the performance at every turn.

WEEK 8_Concept Design

Concept design showing my main precedent projects, my intervention in the site and main spatial ideas and moves. Initial Drawings to describe my planning and aesthetic concepts.

'Hero precedent project'

Massimo Bartolini

A Cup of Tea, 2000

Bed, drawing board, stove, chairs, carpet, book shelf, ladder, plaster, tiles, wood, neon, PVC, canvas box, sound system

(The official point of view, Milano Furniture Fair 2003)

Possible Performance Genre

Man Walking Down the Side of a Building (1970)

Walking on the Wall (1971)

Man Walking Down the Side of a Building Tate Modern

TRISHA BROWN

It is the signature work of Trisha Brown’s first artistic phase where she purposefully chose to have her work

performed outside of a conventional theatrical context: in lofts, galleries, rooftop spaces, parking lots and plazas.

Man Walking Down the Side of a Building’ has a similar impact on its audience, not just because of how unnatural it is to see someone walking towards you down the side of a building but also because of the manner of viewing: the

audience experiences discomfort and disorientation in having to look directly up towards their subject.‘Man Walking Down the Side of a Building’ is essentially about identifying and deconstructing dance as a spatial experience. Brown makes her audience see the world differently giving the impression that much of the dance is taking place in the wings, outside of the audience’s sight.

4am

dePaor Architects

Venice Biennale

Reduced continuity between inside and outside multiplies the encounter between here and there.

(www.archdaily.com)

My Concept Design Statement

Create a spatial labyrinth for spectators to explore as a means for viewing the performance held within the suspended “white box” which becomes enclosed by the structural labyrinth system.

By climbing up ladders and ramps to elevated viewing platforms, spectators can scan the fl

oating “white box” from varying levels, becoming an active agent, a participant producing and seeing unique aspects of the performance at every turn.

The ‘white box” becomes the blank space, the emptiness in between. The ground is no longer.

Feedback

WEEK 7_Relational aesthetics

Bourriaud, N (2002) Relational Aesthetics.

Artwork as social interstice.

The “encounter” between beholder and picture, and the collective elaboration of the meaning.

Theatre and cinema bring groups together before specific, unmistakable images. There is no live comment made about what is seen ( the discussion time is put off until after the show).

Encourages an inter-human commerce that differs from the “communication zones” that are imposed upon us. The present-day social context restricts the possibilites of inter-human relations all the more because it creates spaces planned to end this

Art is a state of encounter.

Form and other gaze

Wiltold Gombroowicz (writer) How each individual generates his own form through his behaviour, his way of coming across, and the way he addresses. P21

When the individual thinks he is casting an objective eye upon himself, he is, in the final analysis, contemplating nothing other than the result of perpetual transactions with the subjectivity of others. P22

Producing a form is to invent possible encounters; receiving a form is to create the conditions for exchange…p23

Serge Daney “all form is a face looking at me” p24

Participation and transitivity

growing number of stands offering a range of services, works proposing precise contract to viewers, and more or less tangible models of sociability. P 25

Spectator “participation”, theorised by Fluxus happenings and performances, has become a constant feature of artistic practice.

Fluxus artists focused on performance and also emphasized the projection of clear concepts through the implementation of simple actions. As in Happenings, the artwork depended upon the performance of viewers, who participated in the artwork. Obviously, including the audience was a radical departure from traditional performance, where there was a finite division between the performers and the audience

Conviviality and encounters

A work may operate like a relational device containing a certain degree of randomness, or a machine provoking and individual and group encounters

“society of the spectacle” p31

The aura of artworks has shifted towards their public

The “beholder” is encouraged to take up a position within the arrangement, giving it life, completing the work, and taking part in the formulation of its meaning. P59

Michael Fried: “The experience of the literalist art is an object in a situation, one which, virtually by definition, includes the beholder”