I thought I would bring to this project two aspects discussed in the recent first tutorial to explore - space and line, and employ them as influences as a way of expanding and using this task. Space and spaciousness in a universal and infinite sense, as well as space in the internal universe of the mind; line as a means of direction, the edge of horizons, the way time and space can travel and exist, and how these may relate in my work.
Can space and line really be influences? I wrote a list of my favourite things in art - things which could be influences, and soon came to museums and galleries, particularly certain types of museums, and specifically the V&A, or Victoria and Albert Museum to you.
Beyond the object and exhibits, the big frame of space outlines itself. To the universe it is small, but it makes you think about how big space is. There are all sorts of museums - the V&A is a massive decorative object in itself, crammed with mosaics and intricate flooring and carvings.
In fact, I was recently sitting in the V&A, waiting for a friend to arrive thinking about what such places mean to me. I happened to have my notebook with me, and this is what I wrote.
I have a great great love of museums, and as soon as I get past the initial congestion of desks and shops and people, I am there, in a place in my mind I absolutely love to be.
I love the floors, the space, the height. I love the marble and the sound footsteps make along the corridors.
I love the solidity of these places, the reasons they were built. I love the context, no matter what they show in this fleeting generation.
The patterns in stone and wood underfoot to out of sight.
I still have the same desire that I did as a child, to still be there after closing time and have the place to myself in the moonlight, getting spooked by the shadows of suits of armour, running wildly along the corridors, having access to those doors marked "staff only" and discovering there storerooms and attics full of mysteries.
I've always imagined having a home there, a flat, perhaps in one of those mysterious towers, covered over with glass, the whole roof my garden.
Ah. Every time. I walk along staring at the floors, wondering at the people who have worn away the stairs.
And then my friend turned up. When I think of the V&A, the Kelvingrove in Glasgow which was the museum of my childhood, museums in Prague, Manchester, and so many over the years I have visited, I get such a sense of the very stone, the glass, the big way light streams in through high windows, and I feel a connection to streams of people in the past and the future, passing through these places, all concerned with the best of humanity.
Jonathan recently started a thread in the forum, "Are museums our new churches?" Although that conversation has yet to take hold there, my simple answer to that is yes. They are to me. I have known this for some time. There is something so moving about multitudes of people devoting their life to art and craft and culture.
And so for the project a few ideas collided at once. My influences are museums, and the V&A in particular, and space/line. Tomorrow I am going down to the V&A to trace my lines of presence there. I will have in mind all those sensibilities about stone and museums and what they are to me.
I will take a UV pen and some luminous paint, and trace my journey, my thoughts, within the building. I will touch with my fingers, leaving a practically invisible trail, that will exist only in a certain visual spectrum, usually unavailable to humans in normal light and unaided. Already when I think of the V&A in this context I imagine it flipping in and out of perspectives as if I can see it made of glass or see its architectural blueprint or matrix.
I know this raises other issues - it is an invisible intervention, like being an even more elusive Banksy. It could be seen as some political statement, or comment. There are issues of vandalism, but even if I had the Louvre to myself, invisible ink and impunity, I'm sure I wouldn't scribble an invisible moustache on the Mona Lisa.
It also brings to mind the Polish artist Kryzsztof Wodiczko who projects onto buildings and monuments images which reframe and subvert their meanings.
The projection was made in Madrid, Spain just days after the outbreak of the first Gulf War, in January 1991. The images were beamed onto the triumphal arch celebrating the victory of fascist Generalissimo Francisco Franco in the Spanish Civil War. Wodiczko projected a pair of death hands... one grasping an M-16 machine gun, the other a gas pump nozzle. At the top of the arch the question ¿Cuantos? (How much?), was projected. In a 1988 interview, Krzysztof Wodiczko said this of his projections. "My work reveals the contradiction of the environment and the events actually taking place there. It is to do with politics of space and the ideology of architecture. City centers are political art galleries."
(http://www.art-for-a-change.com/Krzysztof/krzy.htm. Accessed: 3rd March 2011).
Okay, it is a wee bit subversive, but invisibly so. I have my own internal rules of what is permissible and acceptable. There are things I do not approve of in public art - manipulating people and ruining things. I appreciate the projected images because they completely change the context of the object. My idea is also ephemeral, admittedly invisible, but has the potential to add a layer of context.
Perhaps I will touch what I would normally touch, handrails and so on. Perhaps I will lay my hand on plinths and available bits of statues - there are some touchable there. Perhaps I will leave ghostly disembodied handprints, shining in negative. Or more likely I will trace my substance along the edges, cabinets, highlighting line and tracing out the skeleton of the building, leaving my signature to fade into the molecules of the stone as much as my presence or that of the streams of people past and present.
I don't know what will happen there exactly, what I will feel moved to do or what turns out to be possible there. My intent is to consider line and space, and what they mean, and have a different experience of this fond museum - we are all part of places we frequent and participate in, for a while at least - places are comprised of many elements, including their inhabitants.
Who are my audience? Perhaps no one. Perhaps when they turn off the lights at night a security guard will look twice at a corner, thinking he sees an apparition. Perhaps it will be obvious, and the place will be filled with glowing crisscrossed scribbles, leading them to replay the CCTV, and to me, and to prosecution.
I am used to being surreptitious with a camera. I will, and have, waited for hours for the right reflection or shadow to pass by rather than interfere with or manipulate people. A past tutor used to accuse me of sleight of hand, because I found myself unwilling to reveal. I am not deliberately secretive, it's just that I concentrate better alone. The onlooker.
To see all the traces between people, the invisible streams and pulls of connection, of repulsion and attraction. The psychological lines drawn between us.
I believe in the invisible aspects of art, the subliminal.
I am interested in the way insects see things, on a totally different visual spectrum. I like the idea of the security beams you spray on to see. I am also thinking of those projects which map what the eye actually looks at in faces and paintings. Perhaps if could we all construct our individual V&A through our sightline, we would create fantastic structures in different planes and dimensions. I am tracing my own psychological or art trail.
3rd March 2011
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