Spatial experiments: art,geography,pedagogy

As you know I’ve spent some time at the Institut für Raumexperimente as part of my interest in experimental spaces and events. I’ve been exploring the beginnings of the school and how it functions, alongside reading some of your interviews, in particular The Conversation Series book. There seems to be a trace of the school as an idea from quite a long time ago. I was wondering if you might talk a little about why you wanted to have the school, or the class, and what you hoped to do with it.

The Institute opened in April 2009, but you are right, I started thinking about different types of knowledge production and different ways of generating matter – of co-producing reality, you could say – long before that. To avoid the studio becoming a mono-generator, I’ve worked to diversify it, for instance by establishing the idea of an archival workplace, which is both retroactive and, hopefully also to some extent, proactive with books and film projects. The same goes for other parts of the studio, even as far as the kitchen. Despite this, and the fact that I think I have established a sustainable system, it was clear to me that the studio nonetheless follows a sort of pre-defined trajectory. The idea of the school was to counter this: instead of taking an idea and working with it, creating a work of art out of it – I’m generalizing a bit, but you could say this is how I typically work in my studio – I was interested in going the opposite way, in doing a work and tracing it back to the ideas it originated from. I hope to create a workplace or environment where the studio and the school share an emotional space. I actually plan to move into that space, too. I don’t know if you know, but I’m building an apartment on the top floor.

Oh right! I wondered what that room was for. I noticed that you have talked about some sort of flat, apartment or hotel there. ¹¹ It’s interesting that within the same building there are all these sorts of spaces, which are overlapping and inflecting one another.

There is actually already a guest room and a tiny project space where friends such as Ivana Franke, Peter Weibel and Wolfgang Breuer have exhibited. The idea is to extend this further so that at some point – with a bit of luck – I would have an artist’s studio that is both a museum and a school. Furthermore, I might have a studio where people have different modes of spending time. Some people would live there, some would only be visiting briefly; and everything else would be in between. The school is an experiment about beginning such ideas.

That touches upon a few questions I’ve been hoping to ask you about. One is how you draw upon Jean-Luc Nancy’s philosophy, in particular your use of his notions of ‘being-together’ ¹² and ‘being-with’. ¹³ When I’ve attended classes, you have talked about generating a sense of intimacy and of belonging to a community. I’m wondering how the philosophy relates to the work practices?

There is a tendency to suggest that either you work alone or you think and move as a group – to take it for granted that it is either/or. Art, somehow, still has this great modern ghost floating above it; and I think this idea has great limitations. It’s important that one challenges it both in one’s artistic practice and as a person – in the way one interacts within a group. I’m not necessarily particularly good at this myself, but bringing to the table such ideas, like Nancy’s notion of being singular plural, help us develop tools which suggest that disagreement can also form a sphere, or an atmosphere, or a certain form of collectivity. You need a sophisticated idea of being-together in order to be able to argue for a greater sensitivity in the time and the society we live in.

Is the school then less about education and more about trying to cultivate this sort of sensibility?

How can that not be education? You are right in the sense that the Institut für Raumexperimente is not running an orthodox curriculum – a great deal of the curriculum is transferred to the participants – as we call the students – by virtue of having to live it. The success of the school is very much dependent on the quality of the dialogue among the participants as well as with visiting guests and me. It’s like an interview or a discussion; a continuous exchange. It’s only when you have a good question that you can provide a good answer. The Institute as a programmatic system might look good on paper, but the actualization of the taught matter and the responses of the participants are what will detect the success of it. You might have a great teacher, but if the students are not interested, it doesn’t matter how great he or she is. And you might have great students, but if the teachers don’t know what to tell the students, it also won’t matter.

I find it very interesting that you talk of success and failure. I wonder if, while that might be one way of measuring whether or not the school has worked, I wonder who then makes that decision. Will it be you saying the school has worked or will everybody who has been involved with the school be part of the process? I’m not quite sure how an evaluation of these experiments, of the school, will work. Maybe this is not something that has been pre-determined?

I don’t think measuring the school makes much sense because clearly, the point from where you measure it, would always give you a different answer. The only way I can imagine a success rate is by determining if the participants develop enough artistic precision to be capable of executing precise questions and answers in the future and in their life; that would indicate whether the school is a success or not.

The name of the school, when it is translated into English – ‘the Institute for Spatial Experiments’ – struck me when I first heard it as being something that geographers might be interested in. And there’s one particular geographer with whom I know you’re friends and whose work you talk about quite a lot. ¹⁴ I was wondering what in particular it was about Doreen Massey’s work that you find so appealing and how you draw on her work.

I think what Doreen does so well is that she never sees the world as having a solid centre. She has somehow liberated herself from a perspective on the world, ruled by solidity, by stasis, and has established an incredibly sensitive way of describing things in flux without them losing their cultural, social or political meaning. This has inspired me a great deal. She can talk about the complexity of temporality, about time as it passes, in a stunning and beautiful way without losing track of the sense of responsibility that comes with living in the world today. I find it a very helpful and quite pragmatic tool, especially when primarily working in the somewhat elitist and egocentric art world.

I wonder if you might talk a little more about relations. Certainly, in Doreen’s book For Space, she’s developing a notion of relational space. ¹⁵ Indeed, thinking about relations, or thinking-relationally, has interested many within Geography, and beyond. I wondered how the notion of relational space speaks to that of relational aesthetics? ¹⁶

For many people, space is stable, with boundaries and fixed dimensions. Their understanding is guided by the stigma of modernity and traditional definitions of space as being of three dimensions, with time probably being the fourth. The success of the theory of relational space lies in what it has given us: micro-sensibility. With it we have acquired a methodological toolbox to study our environment that is much more sensitive to local conditions than the still-dominant idea of space as objective and neutral, as something simply ‘out there’. I can imagine that relational thinking is very liberating to fields such as geography and especially landscape geography, which is concerned with measuring the world, since to understand space today clearly requires tools that are relative to the way we go about it. We need to challenge the idea of externalized space, the idea that there is a space ‘over there’, like a container, that we can enter physically if we want to, but to which we have no access if we decide to stay here. Talking about it, like I just did, we have already internalized it and we are already there to some extent, and this is an example of the kind of relational thinking that I find very productive. Having said this, I find it important to stress that these relational tools should not be confused with the fact that it also makes a difference to literally put on your shoes and walk into a given space. One has to accept that talking about things from a distance is still quite different from actually walking through the space, enjoying the actualization that takes place. In my view, there is an element to the theory of relational space that one should be extremely wary of: at least within art, it seems to me that relational thinking has created a sort of buffer zone to reality, a relational cloud of aesthetics that only rarely takes physical hold of society. One should not forget that we are still in the world with real people. The world is very real, but in the art world, thinking about something often seems to be enough. Of course thinking is also doing and this is a very important step. And sometimes thinking about doing as doing, is not enough because then when you do something that again creates a thinking that is very closely connected to the doing, you are caught up in. But sometimes I have the impression that relational aesthetics is more about the thought than the action and doesn’t really go out of its own bubble.

I draw inspirations from the idea that space is relative, which does not necessarily overlap with relational space in that sense. The idea that space is to a greater extent negotiable, and the performance of negotiating obviously twists and turns and bends all the other dimensions, just like time does. In the novel Flatland, ¹⁷ for instance, Edwin A. Abbott plays with the idea that you can divide space into units, which works very clearly with the idea that it is all a construction. And if it’s a construction we have the possibility of changing it. I think it has an incredibly generous way of looking at reality as a model and by doing so, it allows us some freedom to diversify our use of models in general.

I wonder if we might talk a little about experiments. What is an experiment, and what can an experiment do? When you’re working in your studio, or your laboratory as you call it sometimes, I wonder what constitutes an experiment and how might it differ from a test, for example. ¹⁸

I think testing is something you do to save time, whereas experimenting is something to extend time. And there is another important component: championing your ideas is actually pulling an experiment. Now, sometimes you also have a feeling that hasn’t quite crystallized into an idea but you can still base an experiment upon that feeling, and in this way push the experiment in front of the idea. I feel perfectly comfortable working in this terrain, which is obviously associated with modern artistic agendas. For example, Picasso was constantly obsessed with some sort of feeling or intuition and would just paint based on that. I highly admire this, even though I’m very troubled by the idea of the grand master. I might be generalizing again, but I believe that an idea has a different type of routing in the world than a feeling. When you do an experiment based on an idea, it is often connected to the world, since the idea has to do with a situation that has taken place somewhere with someone, whereas if you base an experiment on some kind of feeling or intuition or whatever you might choose to call it that would be harder to link to a situation or a conversation or something like that. At the school we talk about these methodological principles. And when I’m in the studio, I hold up a red piece of cardboard in front of me and I imagine the wall being red, just like some kind of sculptor would have done 50 years ago; a small experiment.

And that’s something you do regularly?

I do it all the time – this is how I work. I also think of an exhibition as an extension of the experimentation in the studio. The exhibition that I had in Berlin last year was one big experiment machine, I would say. ¹⁹ In the school we also do a lot of experiments – we even sometimes re-enact old ones. For example we replayed the missing limb memory experiment. In order to cure patients suffering from phantom pains after having a leg or an arm amputated, the Indian neurologist V. S. Ramachandran in 1995 invented a mirror-box with which one can treat the patients through the use of visual feedback. The patient places the good limb into one side of the box and the amputated limb into the other side. Due to the mirror, the patient sees a reflection of the good limb where the missing limb would be and thus receives artificial visual feedback that the missing limb is now moving. By repeating such experiments, you can take theoretical matter and implement it in your body. Talking about gravity is very different from experimenting with how it feels, which is actually quite easy. Another funny experiment is just to think about gravity. That is already a strong mediation of the felt gravity. And I think within this very small field that we could call the thinking of and the felt gravity, there are tiny experiments which are all very much about the idea that we are actually never in a situation of thinking about gravity without also feeling it. This is interesting, because it is one of these fields of experiments where it’s clear that the body and the mind are obviously one. Which is always the case, but with gravity it’s uniquely connected.