In summary…

Joanna Seitz
Art in the Public Context

To sum it all up, my proposals for this class have been to create, explore and manipulate a place. This has only been partially successful, as this is a huge undertaking with more possibilities and avenues to explore than feasible in a few months. Still it is my hope that I now have the beginnings of a project I can continue to narrow and refine into something smart and engaging.

Looking back over what I have done in the course of the semester, I realize that I have outlined a number of different projects that I now understand as an attempt to study this idea of “place”.

In the beginning, I proposed constructing a life-size dollhouse. Built to human scale, this three-walled domestic space could be walked into and through. It would be fully furnished and functional in terms of plumbing and electricity. In addition, the interior and exterior construction would be complete. Viewers would be invited to enter and explore the “house” or simply view it as a whole from the outside.

“…all cultural space – indoors and outdoors, built and ‘natural’ – is a function to a greater or lesser degree of the human response to its own evolving condition… the space enables the response, which in turn creates the space. Causer and caused, first and second, change places in a perpetually reversing metalepsis.”
- J. Hillis Miller

The impetus for this “dollhouse” lay in my interest in Miller’s perpetually reversing causer and caused of cultural space. Previously, my photographic work has involved shooting the lives and spaces of the people around me in an attempt to understand what makes us (and myself) tick. As many of these images were staged, it seemed logical that maybe not only the actions in the image could be fabricated, but the place itself. If I could construct a place, I would cause the construction of characters within that place. For me, fabricating this space within an art context could not only create something delightfully surreal, but locate itself within Nicolas Bourriaud’s theory on relational aesthetics – the idea that an artwork could create relationships among those who view it, and those relations could be judged and evaluated as any other aesthetic experience.

The second idea I proposed was to create and choreograph a performance piece originating from the point of view of the setting. Instead of the choreographic concepts dictating the accompanying visual elements such as set and costume to evoke or explain place, the setting/place would determine the choreography. I was not referring to site-specific performance, this would take place in a theater or gallery. For example, if the “setting” was a house, then the performance could deal with issues such as protection vs. intrusion, privacy, refuge, etc… Physical representation of the setting would be kept to a minimum.

This could be seen in two ways: a study of the phenomenology of performance or a performative study of the social contract that exists in cultural spaces. With the latter, I am talking about two things: understanding place through an abstracted expression of it’s essence; understanding place through the social contract it creates and how that contract creates place (chicken or the egg situation).

Unfortunately, the content of these pieces were not particularly original, but it did get me thinking. As I looked to develop these two ideas, I decided to try two things:

1. Make a series of photos and performance clips that explore ideas of place via the social contract that we find within them. These could be short, staged actions that either deal with expressing the social contract or the essence of the setting. Or use the setting to manipulate the contract. Is this contract what defines a place? Or does the place require the contract? What is the essence of a place? How do we know where we are?
2. Build a place. This would allow the audience to actually enter into this setting, and allow me the opportunity to use performance to manipulate the experience.

I built a “waiting room”. The