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