WAREHOUSE

In being ‘recorded and announced’ through the media as an ‘urban event’ (Wodiczko 1992, p.196) Wodiczko’s projections are absorbed back into the economy of images on which he draws. Yet, in remembering the ‘missing’ image, the ‘missing’ part, this media-documentation continues to ‘write over’ the city’s spaces, becoming yet another ‘repertoire of iconography’ in which its meaning are produced.

(Kaye, 2000, 217)

 

 

The projection of Wodiczko’s images onto other public buildings/statutes in order to make a statement inspired my own piece of work based on a similar theme. Much like the way in 1986 Wodiczko projected an image onto St Mark’s bell tower in Venice (image 1), I experimented with this technique by incorporating my own sketch of the ‘The Worth Room’ (image 2) straight back onto a realistic depiction, i.e, a photograph, from the site with which it was created from. This introduced the notion of conflict within the work through the use of line drawing and photography. The idea of the space behind the drawing as ‘missing’ also creates an interesting conception of layering, or lack of, much like in Wodiczko’s projections.

 

 

 

The second influential artist on my work was Texas-born artist Robert Rauschenberg. Rauschenberg works with a wide range of materials and techniques, and is most famously noted for his combination of two dimensional paintings with sculpture (a series of works he calls ‘Combines’). Collage features a lot within his work; the merging of photography with raw materials is an aspect of his artwork that takes my interest in regards to how it could be applied to an installation piece.

 

 

 

The combination of printed image, typed text and hand-written text in Rauschenberg’s Jewish Museum is an aspect that directly influenced my own work. The text acts as a label for its surroundings – without the writing, due to the distortion of the image, it may not be possible to gather any understanding from the work. Similarly, written text also plays a huge role within the library too – perhaps from the outside, without the words ‘Great Central Library Warehouse’ painted on the front it may also be impossible to comprehend just what could be on the inside of the building. Without written instructions inside the library, it wouldn’t function as smoothly. Like the written text at the bottom of Rauschnberg’s image, the library is full of standards and rules – all that are largely communicated through the universal medium of language and text.

 

The overall vision for my image was to capture the clashing of materials, in a way that resembled the opposing architecture that features throughout the library, within one frame. Whilst walking around the site, it is easy to recognise the original aspects of the building’s heritage and the modern design that has been superimposed in order to change its function into a library, which is something I represented through the stark contrast in colours. The fact that the site’s ‘title’ contains the juxtaposition of the words ‘library’ and ‘warehouse’ suggests a collide in the building’s purpose that is still continuing through its current structural design, and is therefore something I believe needs further exploration when creating our piece.

 

 

 

Works Cited.

Kaye, N (2000) Site-Specific Art : Performance, Place, And Documentation. London/New York: Routledge.

Rauschenber, R. (1963) Jewish Museum. [online] Available from http://art.millettdesign.com/portfolio/rauschenberg-liz-osborne. [Accessed 16/01/2014].

Wodiczko, K. (1986) Public Projections.The MIT Press, 38 3-22.

 

 

 

Drawing inspiration from Tim Etchells’ company Forced Entertainment, we were given maps of each floor of the library and began to rename and redesign aspects of it, we gave each part a more literal name, defining it by it’s use and purpose and by what it appeared to resemble. Rooms that seemed confined or cut off from the rest of the building were given names suggestive of confinement, such as a prison cell or jail building. Parts of the building that resembled other buildings or structures were named accordingly, such as renaming the turnstiles at the library entrance as a tourist attraction, such as the sort you would get queuing for amusement rides at theme parks, other students drew similar conclusions and named them after train stations, or other types of venues that require crossing through a barrier in order to enter.

My initial ideas for this site specific piece are very human interaction based, and so this means that in a way, geography does not catch my interest, so once I found the renaming of rooms to be done to the best of my ability I took a somewhat accidental sideways glance at the maps, not realising others weren’t doing the same, this could easily be classed as a misunderstanding of the original assignment, and to some extent, I admit it was… However I felt that I wanted this exercise to fit more with what I wanted to do with this site.

We’ve been studying the library for a little while and we’ve researched into the architecture, history and geography of the place, but for me, the shape, size, age and location of the building aren’t what the library is about, for me, it’s about the people.

So in misunderstanding and adapting the exercise, I started not just renaming, but reinventing the library, instead of taking a literal glance, I began to imagine what those who visit the library would prefer in place of some of it’s existing features. Stairs became slides and rope ladders, offices became restaurants and games areas, whilst study areas remained the same, additions were added to make the library more diverse and to provide spaces of distraction, relaxation and entertainment.

Perhaps in doing this, I have misunderstood the task at hand, but as John Lennon said…

“When I was 5 years old, my mother always told me that happiness was the key to life. When I went to school they asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up, I said ‘happy’. They told me I didn’t understand the question, I told them they didn’t understand life.”

Sometimes it’s okay to be wrong every once in a while, to err is human, and humans are what interest me, and what site specific is about for me, the way the site effects the people.

Another task we completed during our seminar was to draw a large observation of the library, as well as a detailed piece. I decided to sit down outside of UL101, and concentrate on the open plan of each four floors. I found it interesting on the semiotics level. You are kindly ‘welcome[d] to the library’; however on each floor, in the corridor it has signs in red that juxtapose the welcome, as it articulates ‘No one stand in this corridor’. This gave me the initiative to go round the library and look at all the demanding signs, which I personally never noticed; however there was plenty in sight! This has allowed our group to start coming up with possible ideas that we could dismiss these signs by getting participants to cover them, and implying our own rules to the passer-by’s. To take this drawing task to a level that would allow us to search more we drew a replica of a pupils drawing and connect it back to the library. When looking at other peoples work, there was one drawing that stood out for me; it was drawing of a detailed piece of architectural structure of the building, focusing on the steel work and its minimalistic surroundings that possibly nobody would notice. Taking this picture, I noticed that there were numerous shapes, including: circles, semi-circles, squares, rectangles, straight lines and diamonds. I took these shapes, and drew diagrams of how to replicate these shapes with the human body. I was influenced very much by Practitioners in Practice as we were studying Meyerhold that week, as well as looking at sight specific performances in libraries (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GNvZW2OH72E).