Both photographs by Alexander Opper
Site-specific installation – equal volumes of repositioned soil and lawn from the main courtyard of the Johannesburg Art Gallery and Joubert Park respectively
Negotiation is part of an ongoing body of work[i] which considers underlying power relationships implicit in the disposition of space in various institutional and urban contexts. These site-specific works develop from my own position of being rooted in architecture and its traditional modus of ‘making’ or ‘doing’, towards its ‘unmaking’ and ‘undoing’. This interrogative process – of architecture in reverse – has emerged from an architectural education and practice-base of ‘doing’, the focus of which I am currently in the process of shifting, towards a practice of architectural ‘undoing’.
This particular work addresses the strangely dysfunctional relationship between the institution of the museum and the 'institution' of the park. It looks at the space of the park, adjacent to the museum, as another form of the archive, i.e. a sort of produced and lived archive, versus the calculated accumulation which constitutes the mausoleum-like and inanimate archive of the JAG’s collection. For this site-specific intervention, parts of the park’s and museum’s surfaces are physically cut and lifted out of themselves. The park and museum excisions are then reciprocally re-placed and dis-placed into their neighbouring typologies, respectively: a piece of the park’s lawn is cut-and-pasted into the museum; similarly a piece of the museum is cut out and transplanted into the park. This archaeological swap opens up questions about the passed down meanings, definitions and values of prescriptive and predominantly western typologies, such as ‘museum’ and ‘park’, in the context of Johannesburg.
The transplanting of one accepted spatial type into another results in a reversal, a typological doubling and re-naming of the two public ‘bodies’ under consideration: the park ‘becomes’ the museum and the museum the park. The dual intervention involves the literal cutting of the word 'museum' out of the grassy surface of the park – in a gridded, pixel-like font. Similarly the word 'park' is sliced out of the museum’s central courtyard. Each cutting manoeuvre results in exactly the same amount of block-like modular elements of grass (park lawn) and soil (shaded museum courtyard). These blocks are re-cast into their new positions - i.e. the museum soil is transferred into the voids resulting from the cut-outs in the park’s surface (in the park, the soil from the museum courtyard spells out the word 'museum'); the blocks of park grass are used to fill up the negative cut-out of the word 'park' in the museum’s courtyard. Over the course of the exhibition the soil transferred from the museum courtyard into the park is likely to become over-grown by the adjacent park lawn – i.e. the transferred piece of the museum will be 'consumed' and ‘disappeared’ by the park. The grass spelling the word 'park' in the museum courtyard may grow and blur into an unrecognisable, innocent- looking grass patch, or it may be rejected by its new host.
The shifted park and museum become ‘non-sites’[ii]– their removed substance is reconfigured, re-membered and absorbed into its new contexts. The uprooting of the matter – of which the respective surfaces consist – results in a simultaneous and precarious balance of difference, sameness and, ultimately, blurring – this uncanny condition is heightened by the presence of the palisade which acts as a mirror line between ‘park’ and ‘museum’. The way these two public institutions currently tend to marginalise each other and their respective user groups is undermined by the guerrilla-like qualities of this exercise of dual ex-scription, the forced slippage of the two surfaces into one.
The displacement of the park and museum respectively touches on notions of mirroring, doubling, mimicking, reversal, and even dissolution. The (un)becoming of these two complex publics questions why and how we measure and ascribe value to them: the mausoleum-like, mostly hidden museum archive and the visible, fluid and unpredictable ‘archive’ of the park.
The above process of ‘undoing’ the physical fabric is an attempt to understand but, more importantly, to interrogate and what is there. These deforming and transforming moves raise issues around the generally unquestioned conventions which govern a hierarchical disposition of spaces within buildings and cities; the power relationships which exist between these architectural and urban spaces, and the absolutist morphologies of architecture at large.
[i] For details of earlier site-specific works, see abstract for the paper Undoing Architecture. This paper was presented by the artist at the On Making colloquium, at the University of Johannesburg’s Faculty of Art, Design and Architecture, in October of 2009.
[ii] Negotiation (2009) develops Robert Smithson’s ‘Non-Sites’ – his indoor works which constitute matter from outdoor sites – into a potentially endlessly recurring dual transferral of an outside into an inside and back again (park to museum to park… ad infinitum).
-------------------------------------------------------
Photographed by Leon Krige
Accumulation #1: approximately a century's worth of cornice dust from the Johannesburg Art Gallery (2010)
Found dust on paper, steel frame, toughened glass
(2040 x 680 x 60mm)
(2040 x 680 x 60mm)
Image details, photographed by Leon Krige.
Photographed by Simon Marcus
Accumulation #1 consists of a large-scale ‘drawing’ made with dust collected in the Johannesburg Art Gallery (JAG), from the horizontal surfaces of the cornices in the three exhibition halls which house the ‘Time’s Arrow’ exhibition. For this site-specific work I collected approximately 100 years worth of dust which has accumulated on top of the cornices of the JAG's exhibition halls (these invisible horizontal surfaces are so high up that cleaning them, on a regular basis or at all, seems nonsensical).
Invariably much of the dust matter which settles in the JAG comes from the produced and lived 'archive' of the park and the city surrounding the museum. This dust is carried into the museum spaces by visitors to and employees of the JAG on an ongoing basis. The work documents this entropic transfer of invisible slowness – the dust has been permitted to steadily settle and has been more or less undisturbed for the almost 100-year existence of the museum (until I collected this accumulated matter). Removed from its state of obscurity, I translated the elusive dust into a frozen ‘drawing’ of itself. The work represents roughly a century’s worth of accumulated matter of absolutely no real or measurable value. Its capturing and distillation, framed by steel and trapped behind armour-plated glass, exhibited in a suspended state of endless levitation, comments on and interrogates the politics and codes underlying the more recognised and accepted systems used to ascribe monetary and symbolic value to the other stuff housed in the JAG’s official but, to a large extent, equally invisible collection.
