Documenting interiority/inhabiting duration
(from The Interior Architecture Reader, edited by Gregory Marinic, 2018 Routledge)
Chapter 36
Documenting interiority/inhabiting duration
Marian Macken
In an alley in the Sydney suburb of Surry Hills stands a plum-colored wall with a black door. Two large sculpted matchsticks – one unlit, one burnt almost to the bottom – are attached to the wall next to the entrance door. Little signage alludes to the interior: this former t-shirt factory was once the studio and home of Australian artist Brett Whiteley. Since his death, it has shifted from a working studio to a studio reconstruction and is preserved as an adjunct exhibition space under the auspices of the Art Gallery of New South Wales (AGNSW). Whiteley’s work, based on the human figure, with an abstract, lyrical expressionism, is held in collections of the National Gallery of Australia in Canberra, the Tate Gallery in London, and the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Whiteley twice won the Archibald, Wynne, and Sulman prizes (the most prestigious art prizes in Australia) and is now recognized as one of Australia’s most prominent artists. The late Robert Hughes, longstanding art critic of Time magazine, writes, “His intellectual appetite is matched by no other Australian painter I’ve met.”1 Born in 1939, Whiteley left Australia in the 1960s on a traveling scholarship.
Over the course of his career, he occupied studios in Italy, London, New York, Tangier, and Fiji. He returned to Sydney in 1969, buying this property on Raper Street in Surry Hills in 1985 and occupying it as a studio and living space until his death in 1992. The space was the site for an artistic community to come together during his occupation, due to Whiteley’s social vivacity. Three years after Whiteley’s death, the Raper Street studio space was opened to the public and continues to present exhibitions of Whiteley’s work, public programs, and special events. The studio-museum is an example of a room preserved, and many such spaces exist as legacies of artists. The Brett Whiteley Studio is one of the few studio-museums in Australia dedicated to the work of a single artist, and it exists due to a good representation of work kept together by the artist’s family, their initiative of the proposal, and government support.
The studio-museum entry leads into a ground floor exhibition space. Upstairs, Whiteley’s working space is retained as though the painter had just recently walked out of the room; unfinished paintings and art equipment are left as if the act of painting will continue. The floor is paint-spattered, photos and newspaper clippings are tacked to the walls among hand-written quotes (“oysters think,” “actionless activity”) above shelves of books and objets d’art, while songs of Leonard Cohen play. Comparing photographs of the space from the 1980s with those more recently taken allows for “then and now” comparisons; however, due to the preservation of the studio, it is merely Whiteley’s presence in the photograph that reveals the time frame in which they were taken (Figures 36.1 and 36.2).
Figure 36.1 Brett Whiteley, Raper Street studio (1988–89) Image credit: Andrew Fisher
During the artist’s life, the studio’s output was the chief interest and importance: paintings, sculptures, and drawings documented Whiteley’s creative process, and the studio occupied a liminal space between the act of making and the made. The studio is referred to through these artworks. With the death of an artist, and this output ceasing, the physicality of the space is of interest, as the site of former artistic events. For the visitor, the opportunity and experience of being within the space gives an immediacy to the artist’s work. Rather than gazing at paintings, the studio-museum visitor may take an active role and walk into the space, be immersed and enclosed within the same space that the artist once worked in. For Edmund Capon, the former director of the AGNSW, the Whiteley Studio still feels “curiously occupied” by the spirit of the artist through its atmosphere. According to curator Barry Pierce, “exuberance, inspiration, and melancholy” are present in the space, a contemporary spirit that extends beyond the individual to being a time capsule of a generation of Australian artists.
A visitor to the studio-museum approaches with an expectation of authenticity, of being within the “real” space of the studio, an expectation which looms over and compresses the temporal distance between its former use as a studio and the present day of the visit. However, the visitor is entering a space that is no longer used or inhabited, but which, in fact, resists inhabitation (except by the “spirit” of the former artist). The space is observable but not occupiable. The visitor retains the role of the “viewer,” at once existing within the space but also a member of the audience. Depending on the curatorial philosophy, the passage of time is halted and change is excluded. These studio-museums suspend time and understanding of the temporality of place. It is not the artist’s studio that is being visited, but rather, the residue of a former inhabitation. The space becomes defined as a physical container of absence; the studio-museum becomes a vessel of a former creative dynamism. With the understanding that events and
experiences leave residual traces as proof of their occurrence, the studio-museum retains and preserves former artistic events: it becomes a spatial document, or spatial archive, that serves as evidence of a course of events. In this way, the room is a trace left by the past. As a spatial document, the studio-museum is more specifically a document of interiority. This spatial document occupies the same site and structure as the original and is imprinted with traces of its own original space, but it is no longer the original.
Replication
The studio-museum, as a replicated original space, has analogies with a full-scale, post factum model of the space. It operates similarly to the reconstruction of Mies van der Rohe’s German Pavilion, designed for the 1928/29 International Exposition in Barcelona (referred to as the Barcelona Pavilion), nearly sixty years after the original was dismantled. Naming the reconstructed Barcelona Pavilion – or studio-museum – a full-scale, post factum model makes explicit the experience for the visitor: one is walking within a replica. This aspect of replication is more pronounced in studios that have moved location such as those of Constantin Brancusi, whose studio was relocated from its original location in the 15th arrondissement to the Centre Pompidou in Paris, and Francis Bacon, whose studio was relocated from London to Dublin. Here, a team led by conservator Mary McGrath and that included archaeologists made drawings of the studio, mapping out the spaces and locations of the objects, even including the dust. In such relocations, it is more apparent that one is visiting a fabrication. These studio-museums operate as “metonymic signs of the experience,” somewhat like representation.
In the case of the Whiteley Studio, this replication is less apparent. Kester Rattenbury has written of the potential for the replica to usurp the original, using two-dimensional images as examples:
Sometimes a photo or a drawing – done either before or after construction – frames a specific architectural interpretation so successfully that it becomes the quintessential image: the “real” or “authentic” version of it, of which the occupied, adapted … or inaccessible building seems only a partly valid version. Sometimes, as the only record of a demolished building, it almost replaces the architecture in the idea of being “real.”
The three-dimensionality of the preserved studio-museum – its ability to be walked within – leads to the possibility of “conflat[ing] simulacra with the thing imitated.” For this not to occur, the original and the replica can be separated either by an interval of time, which offers a caesura, or by the different form that a reinterpretation provides. In the case of the Brett Whiteley Studio, the interval between the original and the reconstruction that stands to separate the two and overcome the common factor of the two occupying the same site is small. The temporal distance is insufficient to allow the reconstruction to sit next to the original, as another version. Although aware that the artist has departed the space, the visitor follows their imaginary passage from room to room; this co-habitation is the stronger sensation than that of a reconstruction. Here, three-dimensionality equates to authenticity. However, the lack of inhabitation of the space, its presence as a formerly creative space, calls this into question. According to Walter Benjamin, this is the distance that separates an original from its replica and defines it as an inauthentic space:
In even the most perfect reproduction, one thing is lacking: the here and now of the work of art – its unique existence in a particular place. It is this unique existence – and nothing else – that bears the mark of the history to which the work has been subject… The here and now of the original underlies the concept of its authenticity.
Usually the permanence of the full-scale assumes a reality, but reading the studio-museum-as-replica as a full-scale model questions this. Instead, the studio-museum investigates spatial artificiality. These spatial documents question the inherent authenticity that the full-scale space demands.
The work of German artist Thomas Demand offers a different form of documentation, one in which the original and the replica are separated by the different form that his reinterpretation manifests, yet also explores these issues of the original, the replica, and authenticity while documenting interiority. Demand makes full-scale paper models from two-dimensional images (found in the media) of architectural spaces, exteriors, and natural environments. It is not the building in the image that is made, but the space of event; for example, the hallway leading to Jeffrey Dahmer’s Milwaukee apartment in Corridor (1995) or the Florida recounting of ballots in the 2000 U.S. presidential election in Poll (2001). He then photographs the model and destroys it; the photographs are triple removed from the scenes or objects they depict.
The documented space of Demand’s work can also be seen as locations of former dynamic creativity, since creative output merges with the documentation of the space itself; they, too, are a form of spatial document. His work Archive (1995) reconstructs the personal inventory of filmmaker and Nazi propagandist Leni Riefenstahl (Figure 36.3). In this image, thin, grey-brown, unlabeled boxes (assumed to hold reels of film) stand stacked on the floor and on white shelving; a ladder diagonally cuts the middle of the photograph. Room (Zimmer) (1996) uses an unauthorized photograph of the New York City hotel room where L. Ron Hubbard, the founder of the Church of Scientology, lived during the early 1970s. In this image, there is a constructed messiness: an unmade bed with open boxes and other debris of inhabitation in the foreground, and a writing desk laid with papers behind.
Demand’s models are never things unto themselves; they are a means to an end, painstakingly crafted and subsequently discarded. Their three-dimensionality sits within the flatness of two photographs, one the catalyst, and the other the residue of their making. Through this process,
what might be considered thin constructions are imbued with depth. The smoothness of the photographic surface “is countered by the implicit thickness of subject matter.” According to Michael Fried, the photographs are “saturated” with Demand’s intentions: “the viewer is called upon to do nothing more than register the ‘madeness.’” However, these new images, although completely made, are devoid of evidentiary traces and marks of human use which we associate with the original scene. These spaces are chosen by Demand to be documented due to their former inhabitation (events happened here), yet now they are representations of uninhabited spaces, similar to studio-museums. Demand’s work also critiques the assumption of authenticity – in this case, that of photography. His work is not evidence or proof, but are traces of a process. Rather than merely documenting a space (Leni Riefenstahl’s archive), his work documents former creatively dynamic spaces; the space and process of making. His photographs are not evidentiary of one room but of a creative space and its activity, and due to their different form they do not “make a claim over the real.”
Figure 36.3 _Thomas Demand, Archive (1995) Image credit: © Thomas Demand, VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn; Courtesy Sprueth Magers
Duration Although these two examples of spatial documents (studio-museums and Demand’s photographs) display quite different media and dimensionality, they share an intention to document interiority. Three-dimensional, formerly creatively dynamic space is documented to preserve the trace of past artistic events. As documents, the question arises as to temporality:
In what way is the document sufficient in representing those histories where there is no evidence remaining – no longer a thread of continuity, a plenum of meaning of monumental history – but rather a fracture, a discontinuity, the mark of which is
obliteration, erasure, and amnesia? Furthermore, we may ask: What temporal zone does the document occupy, what is its relation to the past, to the present and even to the future? Is what is materially present, visible, or legible, adequate to an event that has passed out of present time?
When viewing Demand’s photographs, reflection upon the past is expected; it is the site of what once happened, what has been, and it is the manifestation of an event of making. The space is doubly preserved as a moment in time: when the events of occupation and the making of the construction occurred. The photographs are preserved moments, the subjects of which are no longer under the influence of decay or palimpsest. It is well understood that viewing photographs brings the past, that which has been captured, to the present gaze of the viewer, as Geoffrey Batchen summarizes:
Photographs, so it is said, always capture a moment in the past, a moment that we subsequently view in the present. To look at a photograph is therefore to experience a temporal movement back and forth between past and present; it is to witness the passing of time in general.
Temporally, studio-museums operate similarly, distending time. They too are preserved as a moment in time – when Whiteley last put down his paintbrush – similar to a photograph’s capturing of an instant. Eduardo Cadava writes of the photograph as an “abbreviation that telescopes history into a moment.” The studio-museum is a snapshot of inhabitation, no longer undergoing change, yet continuously present. A visitor experiences being within a room, within the three-dimensionality of the spatial document. This room has a scale and atmosphere and is influenced by the changing light of the day and the seasons. Hence, the visitor experiences two presents: the ongoing present of the spatial document (the moment of the artist’s inhabitation preserved) and the current present (the moment experienced by the visitor). We are able to be within “a passed past that
nevertheless remains preserved in its vestiges.”19 Edmund Husserl’s term of a “thickened present” refers to this spatial, durational quality, in which past events are retained as traces in the present. Stephen Kern writes, “the present is a continuous unrolling field of consciousness, thickened with retentions and protentions.”20
Mary Ann Doane suggests that modernism was obsessed with “the contradictory desire of archiving presence.”21 She notes, however, that “what is archivable loses its presence, becomes immediately the past.”22 This reading of the document dismisses the connection that is maintained between the past and the present: a former “present” becomes an ongoing present. What is severed, however, is the connection to the future. According to Arkie Whiteley, the artist’s daughter, the studio is “constantly evolving. It’s not just a mausoleum. We’re keeping it alive.”23 But there will be no future productivity, no future paintings with Whiteley’s signature produced within the space. With the original inhabitant absent, the power of territory and ownership has gone: the space no longer exudes a presence.
These spatial documents of interiority operate within multiple temporalities and demonstrate temporal complexity beyond Doane’s assumed “past.” Charles Merewether writes:
The document therefore carries forward not evidence of the past so much as that something has passed, and it shows us something that even the past may not have recognized till now, too late. There is a sense of a deferred temporality, a strange suspension of time that within the present is an uncovering not so much of revelation of an originating event of cause as that of recognition.
These spatial documents question the certainty of the sequence of past – present – future; they bring the events of the past to be “brought forward and contained within the present,” disrupting continuity.25
The Whiteley Studio, as a spatial document of interiority, joins the archive of the artist. Formerly, the artworks were the referents of the studio’s presence. With the studio assuming the role of recording and preserving the
space of creativity – emphasizing (a former event’s) pastness while preserving an ever-ongoing present – its documentary qualities shift its perception. In 1975, Whiteley wrote: “We should have a museum … it would be ten feet wide and a mile long, like a railway tunnel, and you could walk down someone’s life chronologically.” The studio-museum, as a trace left by the past, becomes a spatial archive similar to Whiteley’s museum. In the case of Demand’s photographs, already part of the artist’s archive, their reading brings a temporal complexity to the archive. The space of the archive, therefore, assumes a temporal narrative. Rather than temporal succession of past – present – future within the archive, there exists temporal simultaneity, and these documents, as traces, become “intratemporal, that which is ‘within-time’”; the future has a presence within the archive.
Notes
1 Art Gallery of NSW, Brett Whiteley Studio (Sydney: Art Gallery of New South Wales, 2007), p. 70. 2 Ibid., p. 175. 3 Ibid., p. 30. 4 Charles Merewether, “Introduction: Art and the Archive”, in The Archive, ed. Charles Merewether (London: Whitechapel; Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006), p. 10. 5 For an extended reading of the Barcelona Pavilion as full-scale model, see Marian Macken, “Solidifying the Shadow: Post Factum Documentation and the Design Process”, Architectural Theory Review 14, no. 3 (2009): 333–343. 6 Dublin City Gallery, The Hugh Lane, “History of Studio Relocation”, www.hughlane.ie/history-of-studio-relocation (accessed 29 April 2015). 7 Charles Merewether, “A Language to Come: Japanese Photography After the Event”, in The Archive, ed. Charles Merewether (London: Whitechapel; Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006), p. 127. 8 Kester Rattenbury, ed., This Is Not Architecture (London: Routledge, 2002), p. 57. 9 ‘While it has become a commonplace of the early twenty-first century to conflate simulacra with the thing imitated, the two remained relatively distinct between the wars. It was the difference between the two, not their similarity, which prompted Walter Benjamin to write such seminal
essays as “The Mimetic Function,” and “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” George Dodds, Building Desire: On the Barcelona Pavilion (London: Routledge, 2005), p. 5.
10 Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Reproducibility”, in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Volume 4, 1938–1940, ed. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003, 1939), p. 253.
11 Thomas Demand, Thomas Demand/Roxana Morcoci (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2005), p. 10.
12 Jasmine Benyamin, “Analog Dreams”, in 306090: A Journal of Emergent Architecture and Design, 11: Models, ed. Emily Abruzzo, Eric Ellingsen, and Jonathan D. Solomon (Princeton, NJ: School of Architecture, Princeton University, 2007), p. 90.
13 Michael Fried, Why Photography Matters as Art as Never Before (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008), p. 271.
14 Ibid.
15 Merewether, “A Language to Come”, p. 135.
16 Merewether, “Introduction: Art and the Archive”, p. 12.
17 Geoffrey Batchen, “Life and Death”, in Time, ed. Amelia Groom (London: Whitechapel Gallery; Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2013), p. 49.
18 Eduardo Cadava, Words of Light: Theses on the Photography of History (New York: Princeton University Press, 1997), p. 63.
19 Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, Volume 3 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985/1990), p. 120.
20 Stephen Kern, The Culture of Time and Space, 1880–1918 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983), p. 84.
21 Mary Ann Doane, cited in Sven Spieker, The Big Archive: Art From Bureaucracy (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2008), p. 25.
22 Ibid., p. 26.
23 Brett Whiteley Studio (Sydney: Art Gallery of New South Wales, 2007), p. 170.
24 Merewether, “A Language to Come”, p. 129.
25 Ibid., p. 127.
26 Art Gallery of NSW, Brett Whiteley Studio (Sydney: Art Gallery of New South Wales, 2007), p. 170.
27 Riccoeur, Time and Narrative, Volume 3, p. 122.
