WAREHOUSE

“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.

Immaterial labour and, how living in a knowledge based economy has changed our understanding of production. – Mette Invartsen

When standing in the library and observing them entering, exiting and going straight to doing what they came here to do it made us think About work about the labour of the library that people come here to sit write, read and leave they do not stop and notice and look around. They go there to work to produce something palpable. We liked the idea that around all the movement of the bodies the library remained constant. Though having been changed and built on during the years and used for many different things there are still remnants of the old warehouse. It’s as if the old building is being preserved by the glass exterior and the new extensions. We then started to think about the idea of preservation. We looked at Christo and Jeanne Claude’s wrapping of the Reichstag in 1995 and their idea of preserving the building because of its history and in our opinion clearing it of all it preconceptions.

 

Image 1 – The Wrapped Riechstag, June 1995 .

We also liked the idea that the library preserves knowledge. It stores books, journals, maps, artwork, religious texts and now in this generation it also stores online e-books, journals, academic articles, reviews. as a group we felt that this needed to be highlighted. So taking the influences from Christo and Jeanne- Claude and the site itself we decided to wrap objects within the library then documenting  it through filming and then presenting our archive of wrapping within a wrapped room in the library.

We then had to think about the materials we would be using to wrap and the first one that sprang to mind was paper or rather tracing paper, we also thought about using greaseproof/baking paper as it had the same transparency as tracing paper yet could be sourced at a cheaper price.

 

Image 2 –  Objects wrapped with paper.

After our exploration with paper we realised that it would not give us the effect that we wanted to create with wrapping. it creased t easily around objects, such as the stool, and looked too messy, so, we went back to the drawing board.

 

Works Cited:

Christo and Jeanne Claude. Wrapped Reichstag Berlin 1971-95, TASCHEN

Performance Research ‘On Labour and Performance’ (2012) Routledge, Vol 17, No 6, December 2012

 

 

Labour has become visible in performance work. Research formats and open forms, educational frames, works in progress, presentations of artistic processes have become an important part of the artistic production and the theoretical discourses around performance.

(Klein, 2012, 1)

With so much exposure into how works of art come about and are formed, we decided we want to incorporate this exposure into our final piece. The fact we also have to blog about our process means that we have documented every step of the way by filming prototypes of both the wrapping process and of the finished shot (image 1). We intend to show both films side by side in order for the spectator to have a clear idea of how we went about creating the final images, much like Lone Twin have “often acknowledged the central place of physical work within their pieces” (Whelan et al, 2011, 95). Lone Twin’s work ethic within their pieces has built a “temporary sense of home/community” (Whelan et al, 2011, 96), which is something we have also found in the library. By wrapping objects in the presence of other library users, we feel we take temporary ownership over the objects/areas that we wrap – a concept that is alien in a transient building that hundreds of people use and pass through every day.

Image 1 – Exploration of Wrapping, Great Central Library Warehouse (2014)

 

A lot of exploration recently has been going into the materials we use to wrap with. Our original idea of tracing paper (image 2) worked well on hard surfaces and areas with well-defined angles, but was really hard to control on other objects that were perhaps more rounded. The transparent sheeting (image 3) moulded really well to any shape but we decided we wanted a material that was more durable and also less see-through, as we felt the clear material took away from the intrigue behind the wrapping. We then moved on to thin white sheets (image 4). The sheets seem like the most feasible option at the moment, as they are reusable but also easy to manage and look the most striking on camera. We are going to continue our exploration of materials, testing out bandages and masking tape, with the addition of stitching the sheets as opposed to tying and sticking.

 

Image 2 – Exploration of Wrapping, Great Central Library Warehouse (2014)

 

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Image 3 – Exploration of Wrapping, Great Central Library Warehouse (2014)

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Image 4 – Exploration of Wrapping, Great Central Library Warehouse (2014)

 

At the first public presentation of the cinématographe in 1895, the Lumiére showed the 50-second short film ‘La sortie de l’usine Lumiére á Lyon’ (Workers leaving the Lumiére factory in Lyon). They thus established not only the documentary method in early film history but also positioned a motif – the worker ‘after-hours’.

(Klein, 2012, 11)

 

We hope that, like the documentary of the workers leaving the factory, the footage of us working to produce a final piece will help to depict what the library is like ‘after-hours’. It could potentially captivate the individual to envisage something they saw happening in the video within normal day light hours, thus making them think of different functions for the building in much the same way we are approaching this project, placing both the artist and the spectator within the same mind set.

 

Works Cited

Klein, G. (2012) Labour, Life, Art; On the social anthropology of Labour. Performance Research: A Journal of the Performing Arts, 17(6) 1-13.

Whelan, G., Winters., G, Williams, D., & Lavery., C. (eds.) (2011) Good Luck Everybody : Journeys, Performances, Conversations / Lone Twin. Aberystwyth: Performance Research Books.

Our initial ideas of wrapping a section of the Library, with inspiration from Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s Wrapped Reichstag (1995), and reconstructing the railway lines that once ran between what is now the library and Engine Shed, through writing over the space as Forced Entertainment did in Nights in this City (1995), hit a stumbling block recently. Firstly, it was pointed out to us that we were spreading ourselves too thinly trying to be somewhat overambitious with our project and it may result in a lack of quality in our work. Another problem encountered was down to the materials we hoped to use, mainly because of the budget of the piece is restrictive of the quality of materials available and therefore we risked our work looking like a cheap gimmick.

That said we did not want out hard work and passion for our original idea to go to waste. We chose to narrow our work down to the idea of wrapping, asking ourselves what is it to wrap something? Why do we wrap? And what sort of things do we wrap? A common response to all these questions was preservation. We wrap presents to preserve the surprise, the Ancient Egyptians wrapped bodies to preserve them, old items are often wrapped to preserve them from damage, perhaps wrapping is also an element of control. After this we considered the definition of the word:

Preserve

1. To keep alive or in existence; make lasting: to preserve our liberties as free citizens.

2. To keep safe from harm or injury; protect or spare.

3. To keep up; maintain: to preserve historical monuments.

4. To keep possession of; retain: to preserve one’s composure.

5. To prepare (food or any perishable substance) so as to resist decomposition or fermentation[1]

From here we spoke about how the Library is a place to preserve books, its previous use as a Warehouse was also to store and preserve, not to mention that the architecture of the building has itself been preserved from demolition. This made us want wrap items in the library, items that are central to the buildings past, present and future. After playing around with a few materials including baking paper and tracing paper we found that the material was only any good when wrapping square objects or those with straight edges. However we then discovered large sheets of white cloth. We found that this material was more workable on a wider range of objects, providing both larger surface coverage and definition. Another discovery was that it was more effective on larger objects than smaller ones due to the impressive visual impact – something we are striving for.

This brought us to the performance aspect of the piece. Tim Etchells says of Nights in this City, “a guided tour of the city [Sheffield] with its audience and performers on board a bus,”[2] that it “avoided facts in search of a different truth … playing always to the differences between on-route and off-route, centre and periphery”[3]. I think that this can also speak to us in respect that we wish our wrapping, of both obvious and more subtle objects, to be done at night and documented on video both as process, and in particular as a guided tour, before it is returned to normal in the day. The audience would then be invited into a wrapped room to watch the tour, completely immersed by the material that has been on a journey around the building. I believe that this piece of work may just give a slight insight to the audience as to what we have been doing on the module as a whole, as the greatest affect it has had on me is the way I look at things. It is my desire that after the video the audience may also begin to open their eyes and actually look at their surroundings. Etchells also discusses the idea of created text, the “texts of other passengers (‘That’s where I used to work…’ That’s the place where…’)”[4] As the majority of people who will witness our performance will have some affiliation to the space, the video may provoke a similar reaction from our audience with their own text in relation to it, their own personal history. It is exactly that which I hope our group is able to evoke with this piece.

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