Writing at the library now. Yesterday's work at college had me in the UWE library, collecting materials on Christo and Jeanne Claude , Jenny Holzer and Tony Cragg. I've been writing about them for my visual database/cabinet. Writing about Chr & JC in particular was something of a revelation, because, as I wrote, i found myself dragged into the expression of how I interpret the work in ways I hadn't been prepared for...
I began to write about the spatial aspect of their work and the part
it plays in landscapes which are, at the same time as being real
landscapes, cultural landscapes. Then I wrote about how wrapping up a
building or erecting a lot of giant umbrellas or putting a curtain
across a canyon not only parcelled off a bit of the landscape- it
turned it, temporarily, into a sign for itself (a notion I get from the
wrapped items most of all. The curtain and the umbrellas work
differently, and I haven't explored my thoughts about that). We still
know it's the Reichstag under there, in all its lurking pungent aura of
power and history, and we encounter this new, hulking silver shape with
a sort of distressed reverence towards what it has become: a symbol for
the Reichstag. I tried to make the point that it was, somehow, like
walking into a book. This is something that perhaps the freestanding
things do better, and Jenny Holzer's projected texts and site-specific
installations, not to mention Ian Hamilton Finlay and Roni Horn do
something similar on different scales and using different objects to do
it with.
Walking across the road to a Christo sculpture, entering the valley
of the umbrellas, looking across to an island whose shoreline has been
wrapped, we enter spaces which have been mediated out of the norm. The
things in them are mediated, contained, transformed. They present a
symbol of themselves and they radiate this reflexivity to the context
around them. To be in Berlin while the Reichstag is wrapped could be to
enter a city that was reflecting on itself. The valley of umbrellas is
a geological and cultural wedge into American and Japanese history.
These sculptures are actions that prise open awareness of context by
putting the context into a temporary structure, a game that can enclose
the notions at play. Just like an artists' book does. It priveleges
meaning within contexts it can establish. The book builds a geography
from scratch, Christo and others work to transform existing real
geographies into the same sort of temporary space, radiating autonomy
and a suspension of mundane quotidian realities that would crush the
sense of history, of reverie, of here-ness that such structures can
produce and witness.
Earlier I mentioned Roni Horn. She's best known for her series of
photographs, I think. Sometimes heavily footnoted, subtle relations
creep between apparently unrelated things, or perhaps lots of pictures
of apparently the same thing gradually become charged with separate
meanings. Some of her new work involves pictures on individual stands-
an idea I am keen to steal in order to distribute a book across a
space. (My visual language is profoundly different to hers. It remains
to be seen whether or not it would work). But I also thought about
taking this idea into specific places, making a distributed book n a
site specific way that could actuate a space into a narrative space. I
thought of Christo's curtain too, and thought of a long book that would
bisect a space in a manner like a Serra sculpture, but with a different
sort of mass entirely.
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