Here are
some thoughts on the recent work of Kelley O’Brien; they were published elsewhere but I'm happy to post them now as they raise some points I’ve
been thinking about regarding metaphors, axis and what Hugh Campbell refers to as "locative systems" that I hope to unpack further.
You can
find examples of her work here: cargocollective.com/
“This isn't some kind of metaphor.
Goddamn, this is real”
Shellac, ‘The Squirrel
Song,’ 1000 Hurts, (Touch & Go, 2000)
“What we are concerned with here is not texts
but texture. We already know that a texture is made up of a usually rather
large space covered by networks or webs; monuments constitute the strong
points, nexuses or anchors of such webs. The actions of social practice are
expressible but not explicable through discourse: they are, precisely, acted – and not read.”
Henri Lefebvre,
‘The Production of Space’
1: Steam
On certain winter days, when it’s cold and
wet enough, the walkway outside the library and museum at Cranbrook Academy of
Art steams. Quite literally. The Knoll Walkway, named after designer and Cranbrook
alumni Florence Knoll, is so well heated you could walk on it barefoot even
when it’s 20 below (I know; I tried).
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A short walk away is Woodward Avenue, the near 22 mile highway
that runs from Detroit in the south to Pontiac in the north-west.
It was the first road in the USA
to be concreted when a mile was completed in 1909. It begins in Wayne County
and ends in Oakland County where Cranbrook
is situated. On the way it passes numerous sites of historical importance
including the Detroit Institute of Arts and Henry Ford’s factory built in 1910 where
the Model T was first produced and the assembly line system was invented. Both
cities at either end of the highway - Detroit
and Pontiac –
are bankrupt and currently under emergency administration.
Two thoroughfares, two situations, two axes.
It’s tempting to read both as metaphors. This means to ascribe to them the
status of the symbolic or the poetic; to bring them within the systems of art. On
the one hand the steam at Cranbrook
speaks to both the energy that fizzes from the members and guests of its very
special community and the (perhaps obscene) power that cultural and
financial capital can mobilize. On the other Woodward Avenue can serve as a convenient
image for the history of 20th Century America. Whilst once at the heart
of the Fordist model of industrial, automotive might, Woodward Avenue now joins two ailing,
derelict, post-urban sites that have lost their previous functions and identities.
But these are not mere metaphors. They are
hard, concrete realities. And this, I think, is what Kelley O’Brien’s work is
about. It seems motivated by a fierce, stubborn refusal to allow the work that
she does to become subordinated to hegemonic hierarchies of metaphor.
2: Refusing
Armchairs
Yet, with O’Brien’s refusal comes a double risk.
A sweet gamble perhaps, but a tricky one nonetheless.
The first risk is that tiresome,
un-answerable question will rear its head once more: “but is it art?” As if that bureaucratic clarification had any
heft right now.
One, seductive, way of thinking about art
is through the inherited legacy of Modernist rhetoric of defining art as a
means of escape from the messy exigencies of reality. In its most decadent form
this means thinking like Matisse who said:
“What I dream of
is an art of balance, of purity and serenity, devoid of troubling or depressing
subject matter, an art which could be for every mental worker, for the
businessman as well as the man of letters, for example, a soothing, calming
influence on the mind, something like a good armchair which provides relaxation
from physical fatigue.”[1]
This, seductive, way of thinking about art
is also a way of thinking about art schools too. This approach conceives of art schools as zones of relative autonomy detached
from their environments. Such autonomy requires
preserving places like Cranbrook
as those where aesthetic practices
can be abstracted and protected from the outside world. A place of privilege
and luxury perhaps. A place of good armchairs. Yet, thankfully, this autonomy can take a dialectical form. The
armchairs can be refused (or at the very least made uncomfortable).
For, the luxury and
privilege of autonomy can also create a space where experiments may take place
without any guarantee of success; a place where values can be questioned and
tested even if it’s not known where this questioning will lead. Adorno opens Aesthetic Theory in the spirit of such
doubt: “It is self-evident that nothing concerning art is self-evident anymore,
not its inner life, not its relation to the world, not even its right to exist”[2] he
writes. This lack of self-evidence has consequences not only for art but for
art schools too. It calls their activity into doubt. Yet it’s precisely this
uncertainty that is important. Art and its schools provide spaces where
questions can be asked that either might not be asked otherwise or that
probably don’t have answers.
The lack of answers is
the second risk that O’Brien has committed to. The risk comes from embracing
this lack of self-evidence so wholeheartedly that it becomes necessary to leave
both sites of art and the academy. O’Brien’s refusal to design armchairs - even
though she’s in one of best-known places for furniture design there is - is not
a symbolic gesture. Instead it’s a discomforting, embodied choice. Her move
from the safe studio spaces of Cranbrook to Pontiac exemplifies the hazard she’s
taken on which – let’s be clear – risks failure that is actual, not
metaphorical.
3: Axes & Bodies
A path
may or may not be a metaphor, but it can form an axis too. And things can turn
around an axis and become aligned. In their collaborative meditation on
architecture, Chambers for a Memory
Palace Charles Moore and Donlyn Lyndon discuss how Saarinen created an axis
at Cranbrook in
the “broad artful passage” that leads from the gates past the reflecting pool to
the steps up to the museum and library. This axis, by the way, bisects the
steamy Knoll Walkway. The effect created is that: “an observer moving through
these spaces is almost always aligned with something: an arch, a gate, an
entry, a playing field.”[3] The effect is the creation
of a space of deliberation and of action where the participant is positioned
between the library to their left and the museum to their right and can choose.
Obviously, this is not a simple spatial choice. This axis is, Lyndon observes,
not neutral, it is: “a relationship across space, not simply a path.”[4] Both the Knoll Walkway and Woodward Avenue are
also not simply paths. They are also situated within a system of alignments
that are geographical, historical, economic and political. But they are not,
I’m arguing here, reducible to mere metaphors either. This is because axes are
inherently relational. Axes create relationships in space and time, between
things and people. Lyndon continues that:
“[Axes are] an extension of being face to
face; when you want to be certain to give your full attention to someone, or to
signal that you are doing so, you position yourself opposite them, your bodies
roughly aligned, your eyes attending to theirs.”[5]
With sign-posts, lights, paint and whatever
material she might have to hand O’Brien makes new axes, besides streets, along
rivers, between people. With each new axis new relationships are brought into
being. What she shows is that our relationships have an architecture. This is a
concrete architecture. It will always exceed whatever clumsy metaphors we
design around it.
[1] Henri Matisse, ‘Notes
of a Painter,’ (1908), trans. Flam, in Harrison & Wood (eds.), Art in
Theory 1900-1990, (Oxford:
Blackwell, 1992), pg. 76
[2] Theodor Adorno, Aesthetic
Theory, trans. Hullot-Kentor, (London: Continuum, 1997) pg. 1
[3] Donlyn Lyndon, Charles W. Moore, Chambers for a Memory Palace, (Mass.: The MIT Press, 1996), pg. 7
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