Occupation: ruin, repudiation, revolution

constructed space conceptualized

Lynn Churchill, Dianne Smith

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317086284
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Critique de l'architecture

Bringing together an international range of contributors from the fields of practice, theory and history, this book takes a fresh look at occupation. It argues that occupation is a prospect that begins with ruin--a residue from the past, an implied or even a resounding presence of something previous that holds the potential for transformation. This prospect invites us to repudiate, re-imagine and re-define lived space, thereby asserting occupation as an act of revolution. Authors drawn from the fields of architecture, urbanism, interior architecture, dance dramaturgy, art history, design and visual arts, cultural studies and media studies provide a unique, holistic view of occupation, examining topics such as: the authority of architecture; architecture as an act of revolution; women in hypersexual space; occupation as a serialized act of ruin; and the definition of space as repudiation. They discuss how acts that re-invent territory and/or shift boundaries--psychological, social and physical--affect identity and demonstrate possession. This theme of occupation is significant and topical at a time of radical flux, generated by the proliferation of hypermedia, and also by the dramatically shifting environmental, political and economic context of this era. The book concludes by asserting that it is through occupation (private and public: real, virtual, remembered, re-invented) that we appear or disappear as the individual or collective self, because the spaces we construct assert particular agendas which we may either contest or live in accord with.

1

Introduction: What?

Lynn Churchill and Dianne Smith

What is that feeling when you’re driving away from people and they recede on the plain till you see their specks dispersing? – it’s the too-huge world vaulting us, and it’s good-by. But we lean forward to the next crazy venture beneath the skies.

We wheeled back through the sultry old light of Algiers, back on the ferry, back toward the mud-splashed, crabbed old ships across the river, back on Canal, and out; on a two lane highway to Baton Rouge in purple darkness; swung west there, crossed the Mississippi at a place called Port Allen. …

With the radio on to a mystery program, and as I looked out the window and saw a sign that said USE COOPER’S PAINT and I said, ‘Okay, I will’. we rolled across the hoodwink night of Louisiana plains – Lawtell, Eunice, Kinder, and De Quincy, western rickety towns becoming bayou-like as we reached the Sabine. In Old Opelousas I went into a grocery store to buy bread and cheese while Dean saw to gas and oil. It was just a shack; I could hear the family eating supper in the back. I waited a minute; they went on talking. I took bread and cheese and slipped out the door. We had barely enough money to make Frisco. Meanwhile Dean took a carton of cigarettes from the gas station and we were stocked for the voyage – gas, oil, cigarettes and food. Crooks don’t know. He pointed the car straight down the road. (Kerouac1970, 156–7)

The intent of this book is to disturb the complexity of human occupation, to embrace a diverse range of vantage points – conceptual, theoretical and pragmatic – and to reveal something of the more intangible underlying realities. The hope is to broaden the discussion. What Jack Kerouac’s prose evokes is the illusory and sensuous nature of human occupation, that at any particular moment, we occupy a montage of multiple points or places simultaneously. These places are generated by us and/or maybe already exist within each of us. Instantaneously, our thoughts and our emotions draw us from the immediate physical location to places beyond it temporarily and spatially; and the associated feelings may be integral to the point of origin or disconnected, and sometimes, disquieting. As Berleant (1992) described, we are at the centre of the world that we experience. Perhaps this explains why the experience of others in the same place and time will invariably differ from our own.

Kerouac’s mid-twentieth century drug-infused account of his 1947 road trip across America contrasts dramatically to that of the contemporary world, where technologies have extended our ability to morph in different ways – that is, to extend and destabilize the boundary or periphery of our physical occupancy. As the following narrative potently depicts:

I get driving directions and check for traffic using Google’s real-time data. Don’t take the 405 at this time of day. Clicking on the little orange person, I am taken out of my world of stereoscopic vision to one constituted by nine camera eyes and stitched together to form a panoramic digital bubble that lets me see streets, interiors, and even oceans 360 degrees horizontally and 290 degrees vertically, I start to see differently, as if I am flying above the world, zooming in and zooming out at will, in a multi-perspectival digital bubble. What does it mean that this panning and zooming has become (almost) natural, that it has become how I see and experience the world, or how I want to see and experience my world? (Presner, Shepard and Kawano 2014, 24)

What the more recent, less poetic driving in Los Angeles narrative describes is the experience of numerous simultaneous realities made possible by increasingly widespread access to information technologies. Thanks to our ubiquitous devices, many of us live our lives sliding between physical and virtual realities, exercising a multitude of exponential extensions to our physical limitations. Expanded by our devices, everyday occupation has become a constellation of experiences and connections: slippages between here and anywhere, unrestricted, non-linear.

For many of us who live the more privileged life, this dynamic matrix of realities is the new normal. However, what occurs in societies with less access to technologies? Does the woman washing her clothes at the well in the Indian village think of her past life or project into the future, whether it is about dinner for her family, sharing stories with friends while in the fields, or how she would like to be in Delhi or return to her youth? Here again, occupation is composed of the past, present and future – physically by the pump with washing in hand, but emotionally or intellectually elsewhere.

What of the young boy with severe brain injury resulting from being king-hit¹ outside the local hotel? Now, (with the help of his carer), his life takes place in a motorized, technologically advanced chair and a responsive ‘smart-unit’. With a simple slight movement of the boy’s head, the unit automatically opens and the lights, air conditioning, blinds and other internal devices respond to his coming home. What could be an extremely limited occupancy has been transformed by the unit’s array of sophisticated technologies which serve to extend his body’s limitations. We can interpret that the boy’s dependence on technology is a complex integration with his sense of self.

We become the culmination of these experiences. When Wittgenstein describes the child in the box or under a draped sheet, for whom the ‘cubby’ has become a house – in this moment and this space, the house is real. Wittgenstein states: ‘thereupon it is interpreted as a house in every detail … He quite forgets that it is a chest; for him it actually is a house … . Then would it not also be correct to say he sees it as a house?’(1967, 206). The physical world has transformed through imagination and experience to be a particular place which the child occupies.

These stories of the child, the boy, the woman, the driver and Kerouac amplify the state of occupancy within any tangible setting that may be challenged, overridden, or manipulated by realities not only from within or outside the body but also by the body’s capacity to project across space and time. By observing examples from the extremities of human occupation, we come to understand how the everyday plays out.

The following chapters within Occupation: ruin, repudiation, revolution probe extreme and diverse constructions of human occupation. This introductory chapter situates the book’s precepts and challenges the reader to consider occupation in terms of the relationship between the interior of the body, the body itself, and the exterior world. You are asked to consider whether you can occupy, comfortably or authentically, the implications of any or all of the vantage points raised? Here, we draw on the work of Merleau-Ponty to introduce occupation as experience, of Sigmund Freud to theorize the complex synergetic interplay between the internal and external worlds, and of Acconci, Orlan and Stelarc to locate one’s body within the ambit of others across space, time and command.

Each vantage point teases the fixed views of occupation and sets the scene for the author’s conceptualization of occupation, infused with notions of ruin, repudiation, and or revolution.

OCCUPATION AS EXPERIENCE

Phenomenology seeks to understand (and explain) how ‘experience is lived and felt’ (Tomkins 2013, 262). Merleau-Ponty (1962) proposes that we experience the everyday places, things and events in terms of what they mean for us personally (52). Our surroundings offer opportunities that mould our experiences – and therefore, who we are. Inanimate things are just that; however, depending on how a person occupies a space, these elements become things – a handle is a handle when the particular object is used in that way. ‘For a person whose hands are paralyzed or amputated, though, or for the person who, having never encountered a doorknob before, does not know to twist it, this knob is not a handle, and the door may very well be experienced as intrusive … ’. (Bredlau 2010, 418).

The details of occupation are largely unrecognized: we simply exist. The person and the environment that he/she senses are a continuum, as Merleau-Ponty (1962), Berleant (1992) and others have discussed. For example, Berleant states that we do not just aesthetically experience the world; we engage with it through a ‘multisensorial phenomenal involvement with the environment, place or object, which is immediate … ’ and which differs every time we engage with the situation (Berleant 1992, 28). It is of interest that until the experience is interrupted in some way, such that we become conscious of the insertion or invasion, and in association, our degree of vulnerability or power, it is just taken for granted. Ideas, illusions, objects, places, people or collectives can all potentially transform the taken-for-granted world into a site of negotiation and reflection. For example, ‘ … the touch of a stranger who barely brushes against me can be experienced as invasive while the deep embrace of a friend is respectful … ’. (Bredlau 2010, 412).

The qualities of the experience of occupation are influenced by relationships between the person and everything that is other than him/herself in real time. However, it should also be noted that our immediate experience is seamlessly intertwined with our past and future worlds – we are what we bring to any moment.

… all aspects of temporality are rooted in the present … . We remember and imagine things from our current position, for we cannot be anywhere else than right here, right now. Even when we try to remember anger, or pain, or fear, we are still grounded in the here-and-now – we may use the expression ‘go back in time’ but, in Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology, it is more appropriate to say that we are bringing the past forward into the present. (Tomkins 2013, 262–3)

A person’s life experience, although continually evolving, yields a sense of longevity that is greater than those associated with any one daily event (such as having breakfast today versus ways of living over the last year). We exist through a continuous self-referential process that is linked to our identity; that is, a person’s a sense of identity is continually reconstructed through ongoing experiences. As Tomkins poses, experience relates to the ‘ … question of who I am – of identity in the phenomenological sense of “what does it feel like to be me?”’ (2013, 263).

Therefore, how occupation is experienced is intertwined with our being at any particular moment. However, the world we occupy is experienced as somewhat removed from us – a strategy which Bredlau states is necessary so our surroundings are not ‘in our face’ (2011, 412) and we can cope. She posits that we actively contribute to the experience:

Far from reflecting a lack of engagement, our usual experience of the world reflects our very active engagement with the world. The world keeps its distance because of our ability to give space the structure that makes this possible. The distance between us is the manifestation of a positive bond; the world shows us a courtesy that we demand. (Bredlau 2010, 412)

What is implied is that the places we occupy offer the potential to entrap, damage, or support us. In the words of Bredlau:

The world is, after all, capable of mauling us. It has surfaces that can cut us, trip us up, impale us, and bruise us. The skills we develop help insure that a world that could well be wild and potentially quite damaging to us is, instead, so tame and supportive that we generally do not even think of it as capable of attack … . (Bredlau 2010, 418)

Can the phenomenological aspects raised above relate to the book’s themes? The taken-for-granted world (in phenomenological terms, the ready-at-hand) exists in a state that is pre-thought. This contributes to a changing self that lives within an evolving interpretation of place. Thus, one’s life experience is in a state of ruining as past, present and future merge in an unconscious overwriting and transformative process. Objects and places can potentiate or afford acts that enable repudiation; and if disquieted, the experience may be constructed to enforce forms of revolution.

INTERNAL–EXTERNAL SLIPPAGE

Being elsewhere where our body is not has always been possible. Through human imagination, ancient myths, tribal storytelling, religion, classical theatre, psychotropic drugs and visual arts have always mindfully and deliberately inspired us to occupy somewhere where the body is not. As have illness, hunger, thirst, passion, ecstasy and exhaustion, although not necessarily wilfully.

To be human is to be both occupant and occupied in terms of space, time and sensation. Occupied by the past, present and future, our minds are not always able to control how the past re-visits us. This was the subject of Sigmund Freud’s research.

Sigmund Freud, the psychoanalytic theorist, was interested in formative exchanges between the interior body and the external world; he posited that, as a consequence of exchanges between us and the context we occupy, we become who we are. For Freud, these exchanges generated his notional understanding of the human mind’s topography, in which there was more than consciousness: the conscious mind (which is present at any time), preconscious mind (a place of retrievable memories and information) and the unconscious mind (the place of our archaic inheritance from which we are unable to wilfully access information) (1953, 697). Freud made explicit that we not only create and occupy the external world, but vice versa – we are occupied.

Speculating on what occupies our unconscious mind, Freud writes, ‘in mental life nothing that has been formed can perish – that everything is somehow preserved and that in suitable circumstances … it can once more be brought to light’ (1969, 6–7). Freud uses the analogy of the city of Rome to convey his concept of the enduring layers of the unconscious mind. A brief portion of his imaginings follows:

On the Piazza of the Pantheon we should find not only the Pantheon of to-day, as it was bequeathed to us by Hadrian, but, on the same site, the original edifice erected by Agrippa; indeed, the same piece of ground would be supporting the church of Santa Maria sopra Minerva and the ancient temple over which it was built. (1969, 6–7)

According to Freud, a portion of our mind is occupied by our archaic inheritance (our ancestral knowledge) that has an enduring place within our mind, and yet we are unable to wilfully access this. We do encounter sensations and instincts from this place, but these encounters are unexpected, outside our control and perhaps outside our understanding. One common experience is the ‘fight or flight’ mechanism that may be triggered if we feel threatened. Sometimes we are unable to explain what triggered the mechanism.

WITHIN THE OTHER’S AMBIT

A series of works by performance artists Vito Acconci, Orlan and Stelarc, each of which are more or less acts of voyeurism, pursue extreme sensations of the condition, occupant: occupied. In each case, the artist is interested firstly in generating a ruinous event in which their body is occupied by the exterior world. Secondly, by acts of repudiation, they change and gain command over space. Thirdly, they generate revolutions within the viewer’s body by shifting the physical and psychological boundaries between the viewer’s body and the artist’s body.

Acconci’s Seedbed, for example, comprised a pristine white gallery space with two speakers, and a false ramped timber floor under which the artist lay with his microphone connected to the speakers.

Sounds emanating from the speakers revealed to the visitor as she walked around the gallery or attempted to peer into the floor, that she was affecting a sexual response from Acconci. While he masturbated under her feet, he used his microphone to tell of her complicity in his arousal. This was so for any visitor, they would all be implicated, accomplices to the event which dramatically demonstrated the body’s vulnerability to penetration by the external world. (Churchill 2007, 156)

In this piece, Acconci demonstrated command over the space, and that he was able to penetrate the visitor’s state of being and impregnate their physical and mental sense of self. By destroying these boundaries, Acconci made them hyper-present. Although notions of territory and boundary are repudiated by Acconci, moral questions are implicated. For example, has he violated her, the visitor? Does the performance space allow one to occupy another where the same incident in a suburban street would inflame recourse? What permission does the interior of a gallery give to do this – regardless of the artist’s intent to provoke or question? Here notions of control, disempowerment and inescapable complicity are raised. How one is physically located influences occupancy – even for the other gallery goers. Unable to avoid becoming the voyeur, the experience altered the viewer.

Similarly invasive were the performances of Orlan’s surgical procedures staged during the 1990s. Again involving the interior body, a space – the operating theatre – and the viewer as voyeur were forever altered. Orlan underwent procedures including liposuction and facial re-construction while conscious. Reading philosophy aloud, and dressed in haute couture (as were the medical team members – who became complicit), Orlan repudiated the space of the operating theatre. Each of these works was composed of the elements of human occupation: individual sensation, culture, teamwork, ideas, prosthetics, territory, boundaries, power, technologies and the vulnerability of human flesh and blood. Each performance was filmed with live feed in real time to viewers (voyeurs) in galleries elsewhere in the world (Orlan 2004). Later, bodily morsels left over from her surgery were framed and exhibited in galleries (Orlan, Wilson and McCorquodale 1996) where they reiterated Orlan’s foray into the complexities of human occupation.

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Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Plates
• Notes on Contributors
• Foreword: Against the Interior, by Charles Rice
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction: What?
• PART I RUIN
• PART II REPUDIATION
• PART III REVOLUTION
• Index