Wrapping & Research

“Wrapping ‘alienates, but at the same time makes clear what until now was blocked from our perception’”[1]

As well as the idea of preservation, the notion that wrapping can be used to highlight or bring to attention everyday objects that go day by day being unnoticed and taken for granted, is something that is of interest to us in our work. The objects we have chosen to wrap in our GCW Library site are primarily large ones that will demand attention such as: a person, a bookshelf, a self service machine, various architectures of the building and more, all linking to the buildings past, present or future. The concept of not only looking but ‘seeing’ is something we are keen for our audience to take away from this experience thus we are wrapping to open peoples’ perceptions.

With that in mind I began to look into the work of artist Rachel Whiteread, particularly her project House (1993). Whiteread filled an entire house with concrete, before removing the bricks to leave a cast of the interior (figure 1). Despite the fact the monument was demolished a mere few months after its birth, House made an impact. Just like Christo’s interventionist wrapping work, Whiteread alienated a house that people may have looked at but not ‘seen’ and in turned opened up people’s perceptions to it through making it stand out from the crowd.

In its short life House preserved memories. As Iain Sinclair observed “The furniture, the bric-a-brac ha[d] been cleared – as if for a death. … [but] the soul of the building, the spirit that had evolved between family and place, was still present.”[2] House was a monument and “the idea of monuments is to preserve certain issues in mind”[3].  Therefore it is also interesting to note “as Robert Musil wrote that ‘the most striking feature of monuments is that you do not notice them. There is nothing in the world as invisible as a monument’”[4] This quote particularly grabbed my attention when I think back to our original explorations of the library and how little I actually knew of what, to me, was a functional work space. The hidden away Zibby Garnett Library, the markings on the brickwork from the original warehouse and the back staircase or ‘invisible stairs’ as we named them on our ground plans to name but a few. It could be said that the Library building itself is something of a monument. That said the impact and statement made by House is very similar to that which we desire for our own wrapping work. Just as House draws attention to the architecture of a house, to the concept of a house and the political battle of “art against the real world,”[5] our wrapping draws attention to the contents and architecture of the space, not just its functionality.

The delivery of the performance to the audience will take place in Group room 2 of the library. Originally the room was to be completely immersed in our material, however on reflection we have chosen to only wrap half of the room in order to highlight the contrast of architectures and really expose the materiality of the space. Thus the audience will be presented with a projected video tour of the library depicting wrapped objects and a second video on screen of the process of wrapping, whilst sat in a half wrapped room, including half of the TV screen on which the video is displayed.

Prototype 2

Finally, we are debating whether to narrate the video tour in order to manipulate the audiences’ experience. As was noted with Forced Entertainment’s Nights in this City, “The effect of [the] narration is a force that stimulates each spectator to posit his or her own narrative”[6]. The extra stimulation of narrative may aid us to meet our desired aim.

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[1] Hanssen, Beatrice (1998) Christo’s Wrapped Reichstag: Globalized Art in a National Context, Germanic Review, 73, 4, pp. 351-367.