Potholes and intermediate spaces: when art enters life
by Ellen WagnerRecently it was shown again: a white painted clapboard facade in the style of an American suburban detached house rolled through the streets of Detroit. On the platform of a giant truck the neat front section of the building was driven to an engagement at a performance festival. Mobile Homestead (2010/13) is a reconstruction of Mike Kelley’s parental home. While the ground floor is used on the site of the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit for exhibitions and meetings by a range of initiatives, self-help and hobby groups, its labyrinthine basement is reserved for studio work and cannot be viewed. The detachable façade, however, goes on tour through Detroit several times a year and provides a platform for artistic and social projects in public spaces.
Kelley’s work almost seems like an allegory of the questions that are raised in relation to art the moment it leaves behind the realm of the museum to enter the urban environment at large: (how) can art manage to highlight not only social agendas but its own aesthetic engagement with those agendas? (How) can it have not only “reflexive potential” but also an effect that withstands the everyday? How many horsepower are needed to drag a work into life? And how much privacy is art permitted?
The first spaces in which art, natural curiosities and cult objects were demonstrated and thus frequently isolated from “life” were 15th century cabinets of wonders and private collections of objects that were brought togetherfrom different contexts and periods. Whether they initially served to demonstrate the power and worldliness of the rich nobles who owned them or were created for the purposes of study, these collections developed during the 19thcentury in particular into institutions initiated by the middle classes and partly funded by the state with the purpose of facilitating experience, education and memory that could genuinely be termed collective. To this day the museum remains a place where new connections are established between things that have been removed from their original contexts, collected and ordered according to new principles – such as an intention to teach, a chronological design, the taste of an individual. According to the philosopher and historian Krysztof Pomian, it is precisely due to their separation from everyday life that the things in a museum become representative communicators between us and something invisible: such as the past, the geographically distant or the contexts from which the artists originated. Exhibits come from the invisible – but are also intended for something invisible: namely “the future” which could be located in our remaining reactions to what we have seen.
Art history is full of endeavours to bring “usual” life into the realm of art in order to allow this to be seen better or differently and to breathe some “fresh air” into art. Installation art has developed in museums increasingly since the 1960s not least from an impulse to bring art and “normal” life into exchange with each other. The features of the montages and environments that can be regarded as precursors of the installation are a targeted involvement of the viewers and a continuity between the artistic space and its exterior created by the use of everyday materials such as newspapers, car tyres and consumer objects. An intensified relationship to life is demanded from and claimed for art: it creates fleeting situations that are difficult for collectors to store and in the case of site-specific installations that are dismantled after some time and either cannot or can only be reconstructed in a different form.
Of course installation art – in contrast to “real life” – can ultimately be collected perfectly well, just as defining documentary and saleable forms can be found for happenings and performances. The reason for this, among other things, is: no matter what part of life one puts into art – it automatically turns into something different. However, this something different does not have to be a dead and disarmed exhibition object. Rather it is something independent in the intermediate space between art and life that bridges the gap to each of the others. This at times skilful, at times rather awkward but always improvised and temporary bridge happens paradoxically because this thing that exists in between art and life brings a further detachment into play: one towards itself.
Jacques Rancière, who is repeatedly quoted in the context of political art, speaks of a characteristic “separation” between art, the contexts in which it originates and its potential effects in life. However, like Pomian, he is not concerned with creating a new link between viewers and certain life circumstances through art in keeping with that separation, but rather with the “gaps” within this triangular relationship. Art commandeers an “aesthetic distance” and in doing so calls for a “new division of the sensory”. This means: new means of perception will be possible with regard to what was previously self-evidently associated with certain meanings and functions in everyday life – but which can perhaps be interpreted and used entirely differently. This “gap” does indeed seem to exist, to put it crudely it is a hole, a pot hole at that, in which by circuitous routes art can suddenly come to life after all – when viewers suddenly start discussing what political intend might be implied in an artwork or how realistic an application of the ideal society put forward in a project as a model might actually be in practice. Art can become a driving force of social change without itself being the direct cause of those changes or specifically targeting such an effect. Even art that does not bring “life” into the museum but instead leaves its own four (white) walls behind is gripped by this transformational dynamic.
One criticism occasionally levied at an art that seeks out new spaces is that it parasitically appropriates atmospheres it is incapable of creating itself. Some exhibitions simply make more sense to viewers – as well as to those who curate and install them – when they do not take place in the museum building but allow new accessibilities to be created. There is almost always a mixture: the fascination of a picturesque or striking location attracts visitors while at the same time confronting them with a web of concepts, circumstances and what has developed between them. These can spill over onto visitors to the exhibition and the neighbourhoods of selected location.
The question when faced with nomadic, mobile or also simply local urban art exhibitions and projects is therefore: Is this implicitly about a mobility from one location to another that could be interpreted as a reflex-like adjustment to the art market’s fast pace and flexibility with neoliberal connotations? Or does art deliberately take on a route to a specific place, with which it enters into a physical and discursive exchange while offering points of contact for very different publics?
When the transportation of art metaphorically speaking enters life, art has to prove itself under the more exacting conditions of public spaces beyond the museum that govern the temporary “co-habitation” of art with everyday society through very specific demands such as guidance and liability. Here it will be revealed whether an artwork succeeds in establishing a space of its own that asserts itself but does not claim any independent significance. The challenge is to bring the institutional art space – that also resonates beyond the institution, by picking up on certain habits of seeing and representation for example – into a relationship with the aesthetic space of an artistic work and also the social spaces in which it can find an audience. Between these spaces of art and the spaces of its exterior as well as practiced means of perception there lies a spectrum – nota clear boundary. This spectrum, within which the realms of art and life broadly overlap, can be exploited in its full breadth.
The facade of art goes on tour through life. This image, which could be created in response to Kelley’s Mobile Homestead, does notinitially sound flattering. Art per se, it is suggested here, can only have a superficially staged effect on life. However, Kelley’sMobile Homesteadfacade genuinely has several effects: it travels through districts of the city, attracts attention and creates space for what people bring to it. Is that still art? Or has it become life? An artistic facade? An artistic “as if”?
Anyone who says “as if” will raise their eyebrows – while (for purely anatomical reasons) involuntarily opening their eyes wider. Scepticism can produce an interest in looking closer because no matter what art one carries into life – it automatically turns into something else. In the philosophy of art that “as if” means an aesthetic illusion that can be recognized as such and is convincing precisely because of this – similar to a game played with great seriousness by children who behave “as if” they had transformed themselves into an animal or “as if” they were adults working in a particular profession in order to try out these roles and see the world through other eyes.
This “as if” – a loose analogy could be made here – is also related to Rancière’s “aesthetic distance”. Similar to life in the museum, art as its own “as if” in life is distanced from itself. This does not mean that it is notart any more. In almost all cases it can still clearly be recognized and experienced as such. However, an art “that protrudes from itself” to some extent cannot only address new audiences. It can also place a distance between the established art public and its own habits of observation.
One becomes alert outside the art spaces one knows – to the behaviour of the people around one, for example: are they art tourists too? Holiday makers and sightseers? Or maybe locals? How is one actually behaving oneself right now? What attitudes does one adopt to new places influenced by art but also to art influenced by these places?
A façade that enters detached from its building can be seen from behind – but it also, precisely because it resembles scenery, directs attention to what is happening in front of it. Pursuing this metaphor, the art that dares intrude into life can also be read as a façade and scenery – even when it literally confronts us as something other than scenery.
Artistic projects in public spaces arise, just like art that is critical of institutions has done “within museum walls” since the 1960s, within a specific architectural and social environment. Its conception is shaped by mostly self-selected though never entirely predictable and controllable surroundings – and vice versa. They are, as one might say along with Rosalind Krauss that these are “site constructions” that deliberately introduce new elements to spaces but in the manner in which this happens are tangibly influenced by the individual dynamic of these spaces and are driven by them to a certain extent to live and grow (or overgrow). Art and its location both interpret each other afresh, each becoming material for the other although the artistic work in particular has to react to specifics of the selected location – even in such an unexpected way that an original project idea will be redirected or organized in a new or different way. The artistic work and the location become inextricably entwined with each other though without merging indistinguishably into a single image that is all too easy to consume.
Through its sometimes alien presence an artwork that is site specific to such an extent can awake a sensibility to phenomena and processes in the landscape, in urban spaces and in social fabric which it itself directs, highlights and experimentally reinterprets but which we ourselves are still in many ways able to influence more. Presumably not solely through the experience of this specific artistic work and its “aesthetic illusion” – but very probably prompted by it and the gaps it leaves not least in relation to its artistic interaction with “life” and which may function as spaces in which to think and act. If art in life is its own “as if”, “merely” its facade or scenery – then we are left with the streets and the stages along which it moves.
Art is not “real estate”, not an immovable space for experiences that is reliant on its fixed location in an institutionally and architecturally closed space. The artistic space itself is anything other than closed and is permeable by “life” in both a democratic and a commercial sense. In turn life is also more than receptive to art and various processes of aestheticization. Only by recognizing this capacity for reciprocal influences will it become clear that the contexts of life and of art must actively seek each other out – no matter in which direction – in order not to be blurred together as a single entity.
Originally, according to Mike Kelley, he wanted to buy his parents’ house and dig secret tunnels into the earth. Nothing came of this subversive encroachment on the neighbours’ private lives – the “anti-social” moment of Mobile Homesteadremains contained within the non-public basement labyrinth. At the same time Mobile Homestead invites artistic and non-artistic initiatives to present ideas – yet it refuses to keep these walls still, just as in the basement it reserves the right to always remain inaccessible to the public to some extent. This manner of openness which does not simply offer itself but demands that its viewers show an interest in its various locations, and does not simply invite them but also confronts them with the boundaries of what may be observed is the horizon towards which the façade of art on the bed of the truck is bumping along.