Documenting interiority/inhabiting duration

Author: Marian Macken Year: 2018 Source type: chapter (Ch. 36 of The Interior Architecture Reader, ed. Gregory Marinic, Routledge)

Raw file: raw/chapters/macken-2018-documenting-interiority-inhabiting-duration.md

Summary

Marian Macken reads the Brett Whiteley Studio (Surry Hills, Sydney — a former t-shirt factory occupied as studio and home from 1985 until the artist's death in 1992, opened to the public in 1995 under the Art Gallery of New South Wales) and Thomas Demand's paper-model photographs as two instances of one operation: the spatial document of interiority. The studio-museum, with the artist gone and output ceasing, is "the residue of a former inhabitation" — "a spatial document, or spatial archive, that serves as evidence of a course of events"; as such it is "more specifically a document of interiority," occupying the same site and structure as the original while being "no longer the original." Against the expectation of authenticity that compresses the visitor's temporal distance, Macken names the preserved studio a full-scale, post factum model (like the reconstructed Barcelona Pavilion) — three-dimensionality here riskily "equates to authenticity," and Benjamin's "here and now" locus of authenticity is invoked to question it. The second half of the chapter turns to duration: studio-museums and Demand's photographs "operate similarly, distending time" — the visitor experiences "two presents" (the preserved moment of inhabitation and the current present), a Husserlian "thickened present" in which past events are retained as traces; and where Mary Ann Doane's archive severs the archivable from presence, Macken's spatial documents sever instead the connection to the future — no future paintings will bear Whiteley's signature there — producing an archive of "temporal simultaneity" in which "the future has a presence."

Key Claims

The Brett Whiteley Studio is one of the few studio-museums in Australia dedicated to the work of a single artist; it survives "due to a good representation of work kept together by the artist's family, their initiative of the proposal, and government support" — the institutional ecology a studio-museum requires.
The chapter's founding reversal: during the artist's life the studio's output (paintings, sculptures, drawings) "documented Whiteley's creative process, and the studio occupied a liminal space between the act of making and the made"; with death and the output's ceasing, "the physicality of the space is of interest, as the site of former artistic events" — the referent of the studio's presence shifts from the artworks to the room itself.
The studio-museum's specific offer is immersion rather than the gaze: "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."
The preserved room is atmospherically haunted by consensus of its witnesses: former AGNSW director Edmund Capon finds it "curiously occupied" by the spirit of the artist "through its atmosphere"; curator Barry Pierce finds "exuberance, inspiration, and melancholy" present, "a contemporary spirit that extends beyond the individual to being a time capsule of a generation of Australian artists."
The visitor's expectation of authenticity — "of being within the 'real' space of the studio" — "compresses the temporal distance between its former use as a studio and the present day of the visit"; but the space "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 chapter's central concept: "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." Preserving "former artistic events," the studio-museum "becomes a spatial document, or spatial archive, that serves as evidence of a course of events… 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."
The analytical instrument: the studio-museum "as a replicated original space, has analogies with a full-scale, post factum model of the space" — the analogy made explicit in the reconstructed Barcelona Pavilion, "nearly sixty years after the original was dismantled." Naming it a full-scale, post factum model "makes explicit the experience for the visitor: one is walking within a replica." See post-factum-model.
Replication is more apparent in relocated studios — Brancusi's (moved from the 15th arrondissement to the Centre Pompidou) and Francis Bacon's (moved from London to Dublin, where conservator Mary McGrath's team, including 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."
Via Kester Rattenbury: the replica can usurp the original — a photo or drawing can become "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 preserved studio's three-dimensionality — "its ability to be walked within" — leads to the possibility of "conflat[ing] simulacra with the thing imitated." Separation requires either "an interval of time, which offers a caesura, or… the different form that a reinterpretation provides." At the Whiteley Studio "the interval between the original and the reconstruction… is small. The temporal distance is insufficient" — so 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."
The undoing of that equation: "the lack of inhabitation of the space, its presence as a formerly creative space, calls this into question," against Benjamin's authenticity-thesis — "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… The here and now of the original underlies the concept of its authenticity" (Selected Writings 4, p. 253).
The chapter's sharpest claim about scale and truth: "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."
Thomas Demand supplies the counter-media: he "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" — the Dahmer hallway in Corridor (1995), the Florida recount in Poll (2001) — "He then photographs the model and destroys it; the photographs are triple removed from the scenes or objects they depict."
Demand's spaces are "locations of former dynamic creativity, since creative output merges with the documentation of the space itself; they, too, are a form of spatial document": Archive (1995) reconstructs "the personal inventory of filmmaker and Nazi propagandist Leni Riefenstahl"; Room (Zimmer) (1996) uses an unauthorized photograph of the New York hotel room where L. Ron Hubbard lived in the early 1970s — "a constructed messiness."
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" — thin constructions "imbued with depth," the photographic surface's smoothness "countered by the implicit thickness of subject matter" (Jasmine Benyamin, p. 90); Michael Fried: the photographs are "saturated" with Demand's intentions, "the viewer is called upon to do nothing more than register the 'madeness'" (Why Photography Matters, p. 271).
The parallel made exact: "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 photographs critique photography's own assumption of authenticity: "His work is not evidence or proof, but are traces of a process… 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.'"
Despite different media and dimensionality, both spatial documents "share an intention to document interiority. Three-dimensional, formerly creatively dynamic space is documented to preserve the trace of past artistic events" — and both raise Merewether's temporal question of the document: "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?"
Demand's photographs are "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."
Batchen's photograph-theory grounds the temporality: "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" (Time, p. 49); Cadava: the photograph as an "abbreviation that telescopes history into a moment" (Words of Light, p. 63).
The chapter's durational claim: "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. The studio-museum is a snapshot of inhabitation, no longer undergoing change, yet continuously present."
The room remains live while frozen: "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)."
Husserl names the condition: "a 'thickened present' refers to this spatial, durational quality, in which past events are retained as traces in the present"; Stephen Kern: "the present is a continuous unrolling field of consciousness, thickened with retentions and protentions" (The Culture of Time and Space, p. 84). See thickened-present.
Against Doane's archiving thesis — modernism's "contradictory desire of archiving presence," where "what is archivable loses its presence, becomes immediately the past" — Macken objects that this "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."
The future-severance at the Whiteley Studio: Arkie Whiteley insists the studio is "constantly evolving. It's not just a mausoleum. We're keeping it alive" — "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."
Merewether's deferred temporality supplies the documents' deeper time: "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" (The Archive, p. 12).
The sequence-question: "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."
The archive reframe: "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."
Whiteley's own 1975 prophecy makes the studio-museum a biography-machine: "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" (AGNSW, p. 170) — "The studio-museum, as a trace left by the past, becomes a spatial archive similar to Whiteley's museum."
The terminus: "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."

Connections

Concepts: spatial-document — the chapter's central coinage (the studio-museum as "a spatial document, or spatial archive… more specifically a document of interiority"); post-factum-model — the analytical instrument (the studio-museum/Barcelona Pavilion as "a full-scale, post factum model"); thickened-present — the durational condition (Husserl; "two presents"); house-museum — the artist's studio-museum as the typology's third subcategory; interiority — interiority as documentable residue ("observable but not occupiable"); temporality — distended time, deferred temporality, disrupted past–present–future sequence; trace — "the room is a trace left by the past"; memory — the archive's temporal narrative and simultaneity; interior-as-biography — Whiteley's mile-long tunnel museum ("walk down someone's life chronologically"); period-room — the studio preserved "as though the painter had just recently walked out of the room"; plurality-of-befores-and-afters — the contrast-case (the preserved moment excludes change; Massey's plurality admits it); architectural-photography — Demand's triple removal and the photograph as preserved moment; simulation-hyperreality — the risk of "conflat[ing] simulacra with the thing imitated"; representation — "metonymic signs of the experience"; liminality — the working studio as "a liminal space between the act of making and the made"; forms-of-absence — the "physical container of absence," the vessel of former dynamism; white-cube — the visitor's retained role of "viewer" within a walkable exhibit; time-travel (method) — the "then and now" photographic comparison.

Authors: Marian Macken (author) · Gregory Marinic (editor of the Reader) · Walter Benjamin (the authenticity-thesis: "the here and now of the original underlies the concept of its authenticity," quoted from Selected Writings 4, p. 253) · Edmund Husserl (the "thickened present," the chapter's durational instrument)

Debates: truth-and-illusion — the replica/original joining (Benjamin's missing "here and now"; simulacra conflation; Demand's photographs that "do not 'make a claim over the real'") · static-vs-dynamic-architecture — the preserved studio as the static pole's museal form ("the passage of time is halted and change is excluded") against the working studio's creative dynamism.

Related source notes: Massey — Time travel — the sibling temporality chapter: Massey's plurality of befores and afters admits an interior's change; Macken's preserved studio is the freeze that plurality refuses — and both read interiors through photographs; Downey — To dwell means to leave traces — two museal-interior chapters: the architect's house museum (re-creation, shifting optics) and the artist's studio-museum (preserved moment, severed future); both run on Benjamin's dwelling-trace; Spankie — Lines of Enquiry — the room as the site of a practice's arrangement, preserved as evidence ("the two-room psychoanalytic setting" as instrument) vs. the studio-museum's preserved making; Hedges — The waiting room — two temporal interiors: suspension (waiting) vs. distension (preservation), both drawing on Husserlian time; Hollis — (Re)constructing Histories — reconstruction's trust-question, which Macken's post factum model reposes at full scale; Fuss & Sanders — Berggasse 19 — the interior photograph as exhibit and the room "turned inside out for public display"; Croft — Movement and Myth — the musealized modernist interior as controlled object; Stokes-Rees — Symbiotic spaces — the museum interior as narrative vs. Macken's archive as trace-carrier; Jacobus — Toward the immaterial interior — the interior as cultural register vs. Macken's interior as document; Marinic — Internal disconnect — two documentation-chapters of the interior's afterlife: erased material memory vs. preserved artistic presence.

Direct Quotes

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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.'" (Kester Rattenbury, ed., This Is Not Architecture, p. 57, quoted)

"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."

"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." (Walter Benjamin, "The Work of Art in the Age of Reproducibility," Selected Writings, Volume 4, p. 253, quoted)

"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."

"He then photographs the model and destroys it; the photographs are triple removed from the scenes or objects they depict."

"His work Archive (1995) reconstructs the personal inventory of filmmaker and Nazi propagandist Leni Riefenstahl… 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."

"The smoothness of the photographic surface 'is countered by the implicit thickness of subject matter.'" (Jasmine Benyamin, quoted)

"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."'" (Fried, Why Photography Matters as Art as Never Before, p. 271, quoted)

"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."

"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.'"

"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?" (Charles Merewether, The Archive, pp. 10, 12, quoted)

"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." (Geoffrey Batchen, "Life and Death," Time, p. 49, quoted)

"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. The studio-museum is a snapshot of inhabitation, no longer undergoing change, yet continuously present."

"Eduardo Cadava writes of the photograph as an 'abbreviation that telescopes history into a moment.'" (Words of Light, p. 63, quoted)

"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.'" (Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, Volume 3, p. 120, quoted)

"Stephen Kern writes, 'the present is a continuous unrolling field of consciousness, thickened with retentions and protentions.'" (The Culture of Time and Space, p. 84, quoted)

"Mary Ann Doane suggests that modernism was obsessed with 'the contradictory desire of archiving presence.' She notes, however, that 'what is archivable loses its presence, becomes immediately the past.' 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."

"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."

"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." (Charles Merewether, "A Language to Come," p. 129, quoted)

"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."

"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.'" (AGNSW, p. 170, quoted)

"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."

"His intellectual appetite is matched by no other Australian painter I've met." (Robert Hughes, on Brett Whiteley, via AGNSW, p. 70, quoted)

"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."

Open Questions

The chapter names the studio-museum a spatial document that "questions the inherent authenticity that the full-scale space demands" — but does the reduction of full-scale (the model, the drawing) claim authenticity differently, and does Macken's own book-and-model work (The Book as Site) document interiority at the other end of the scale?
"Here, three-dimensionality equates to authenticity" (the co-habitation sensation) — yet the space "resists inhabitation." Is the visitor's co-habitation an authenticity-effect the preservation manufactures, or the residue of the original's genuine atmosphere (Capon's "curiously occupied")? Can these two sources of the feeling be told apart in situ?
The Whiteley Studio's temporal interval is "insufficient to allow the reconstruction to sit next to the original, as another version" — a reversal of the usual worry (that time erodes authenticity): here proximity is the risk. What temporal interval would suffice — and is the caesura quantifiable, or only formal (Demand's different form)?
Demand's photographs "do not 'make a claim over the real'" because their form differs; the studio-museum's form is identical. Does the document of interiority therefore divide into claim-making (the walkable replica) and non-claim-making (the paper model photographed) — and where do the relocated studios (Brancusi, Bacon, dust mapped by archaeologists) sit between?
Macken severs the future, not the past: "What is severed, however, is the connection to the future." Is the preserved interior's future-severance structural (no signature-bearing production is possible) or curatorial (a decision, revisable — cf. Arkie Whiteley's "constantly evolving… not just a mausoleum")? Can a studio-museum ever keep its future open?
The archive gains "temporal simultaneity" — "the future has a presence within the archive." What does an archive look like when designed for a future that never arrives — and is Whiteley's mile-long tunnel museum (walking down "someone's life chronologically") the very linear temporality the spatial document's simultaneity undoes?