on mediating affect: art or the institution? Kim Bridgland
abstract This essay explores the nature of the art institution in terms of context and neutrality and specifically examines its role in the mediation of affect between the work of art and its audience. It looks at a historical shift in the relationship between the work of art and the art museum during the Modernist period, where the mediation, the ‘architecture’ of the art became to be seen as critical in the experience of the art as the work of art itself. The text follows the development of new museum typologies that emerged to accommodate this changing relationship, specifically focusing on the forming of the Dia Art Foundation in 1974. This foundation is important in its appropriation of existing industrial architecture in the exhibition of its increasingly industrially scaled Minimalist collection, but specifically Dia is important for its role in mediating affect and explicit control of context in three works by artist Walter De Maria. These works, both commissioned and maintained by the foundation are The New York Earth Room, The Lightning Field and the Vertical Earth Kilometer and are discussed here in terms of the architectural typologies of their encounter; these being the floating interior/prosthetic Other, the relational exterior/ sited Other, and the floating exterior/dormant Other respectively. In examining the possible encounters with these works, the essay will establish the formation of affect according to the Spinoza/Deleuze lineage of affective discourse; and will reference the loss of agency as described by Walker Percy’s The Loss of the Creature in questioning the myth of neutrality in the art museum. The essay concludes by looking beyond questions of site specificity and context in a work of art but to speculate on their relationship in the joint creation of artwork and affect specific architectures.
Tied up in the tangled history of Modernism is a shift in the role of the art museum as a neutral vehicle for a work of art, into co-collaborator in both the work of art itself and its mediation. As artists moved from representation into abstraction, the canvas no longer functioned as the portal into the picture plane, representing figuration, but began to act as a dynamic surface in the immediate present, mediating the figure. 1 Rosalind Krauss has discussed this as a shift from a museum of interpretation to one of experience, 2 or simply as the cultural logic of the late capitalist museum. 3 In this shift, as the art pushed further into the space of the museum, the architecture in its ability to engage the viewer and to articulate the works it housed became more important than a simply as white wall for paintings or a platform for sculpture, it became complicit in the understanding and experience of the art, and in doing so it became a part of the artwork itself. An artist who represents the mode of art making perhaps more than most, Richard Serra has echoed the changes in the painted picture plane above, remarking that the biggest break in the history of sculpture in the Twentieth Century occurred when the pedestal was removed; 4 a defining event which he understands as a shift from the memorial space of the monument to the behavioural space of the viewer 5 and thus defines the emerging role of architecture in the contemporary art museum. Now a participant in, rather than a passive support for the art, the art museum became the locus of contending ideologies; and every new development had to come equipped with an attitude toward it. 6 He further summarised this movement, so simply declaring that, as Modernism evolved, context became content. 7 So, the art in the Modern period, especially that of its most acute phase minimalism (for the size and cost of many of these works were immense), opened up a structural gap in art institutions, 8 demanding that new museum typologies bridge that divide. If art now clarified the architecture of the museum and if the architecture in turn clarified the art, then new buildings with particular qualities and relationships with their art were required. This rapport between art and architecture could be material, formal, tectonic, scalar, or all of the above. 9 Extravagant new buildings have been commissioned in this nature, as at the Guggenheim in Bilbao or the MAXXI in Rome, but importantly here many large museums have come to reside within existing industrial architecture either in the form of power stations as Tate Modern, or apartment buildings and factories as at Dia Art Foundation’s Chelsea and SoHo sites in New York, and further from the city at Dia:Beacon. 10 The Dia Art Foundation is important here in their support for a select group of artists like Donald Judd, Dan Flavin, and Walter De Maria who emerged in the minimalist break with the traditional parameters of painting and sculpture in the early 1960’s. 11 These artists and others around them were becoming increasingly involved with industrial materials and techniques and the Minimalist art that they were proponents for was often scaled
to industrial spaces too. Usually made in old lofts converted into inexpensive studios, it seemed fitting to exhibit this art in these settings as well - that is, in old factories and warehouses transformed into large galleries. 12 A level of reciprocity soon developed, whereby the art articulates the architecture even as it is framed by it, and this soon became characteristic of the Dia aesthetic. 13 Yet this very decorum soon became its problem, for it reduces the pressure that the art exerts on the architecture, and one would hope that institutions would foreground such contradictions rather than design them away.14 In establishing the shift from a museum of interpretation to one that enters into an active, relational dialogue with both the art and the behavioural space of the viewer, it is perhaps time now that we look more upon the viewer and to the nature and formation of affect. As a concept that almost by definition exists outside of language, there are various discursive understandings of affect, and so for the purposes of this essay it is important to note that we are aligning with the Spinoza/Deleuze lineage of affective discourse (This is distinct say, as to a translation of affect as a set of practices that produce visible conduct as an outer lining - as in the phenomenological tradition - or that are associated with psychoanalytic frames - as in a Freudian understanding. 15 Affect can be said to exist between, through, in and around human and non-human worlds, 16 and in this it is a non-linguistic state of becoming/feeling, before the world in the immediate present can be translated into intellectual thought or emotion. I like to understand it as the slippage that occurs between effect and content, which to borrow from Alan Badiou, we might also see as the slippage between being and event. 17 It is this slippage, this gap, which Brian Massumi suggests is the realm of the affective 18 and which I propose exists for us between the space of the work of art and its context, the architecture of the art museum. In relation to the work of art, Gilles Deleuze describes the work of both Paul Cezanne and Francis Bacon as not being paintings of figuration (that is, a work of representation, signifying a temporal site always elsewhere away from the body), rather he praises both artists for activating the figure, for allowing the viewer to experience and sustain this sensation, of the bodies relationship to the work in the immediate present. 19 Serra echoed this sentiment in saying that for him, sculpture exists in primary relation to the body, not as its representation but as its activation - its activation in all senses, all its apperceptions of weight and measure, size and scale. He continues by including the context of the work of art in its encounter, as sculpture engages the particularity of place, not the abstraction of space, which it redefines immanently rather than represents transcendentally. 20 Importantly, we can also see a capacity for profound affect in the Minimalist work of De Maria, as it opens a sustained complexity in which the ideality of form is challenged by the contingency of bodily perception. 21
Furthering this affective dialogue, Leigh-Ann Pahapill argues that encountering De Maria’s installation spaces require a double movement: away from the self (from sense perception logic) and back again, returning with the knowledge of a difference garnered from this mental engagement. 22 She continues and draws upon Deleuze’s figure/figuration dialectic, asserting that De Maria’s work seeks to refigure its own tactics - to disfigure while figuring so as to reveal the possibility of figuration (through its impossibility)... Disfiguring refuses to allow presence to present itself; in doing so, it makes presence experiential in the present through its own absence. The rift is neither present nor absent but plays between the two.23 However, Brian Massumi reminds us that the art museum is an affect-producing machine, an ideal mechanism for culture that contains an excess of affect but offers a lack of places to put it and even less vocabulary to describe it. 24 Without addressing this tension that resides in-between the art/architecture divide, Sylvia Lavin writes as she adds to this critique, museums offer mere foreplay, creating excited visitors who can only consummate their aesthetic experience elsewhere. 25 Furthering this she adds that today, affect should be defined as the internalisation of perception and not as feelings overdetermined by cultural codes. 26 In countering old condemnations of Minimalism’s theatricality, 27 Hal Foster stands behind Dia:Beacon’s substantial collection of these works offering that many of the installations there appeared less theatrical than sublime. As in the old Kantian conception, this sublime remains a double movement: the viewer is overwhelmed by immense works in vast spaces, but then recoups this awe intellectually, and so feels empowered by this force in the end.28 He concedes however, when he qualifies his support for this reciprocal pairing of art & architecture by including within his notes that, this empowerment cannot help but be illusory, that is to say, compensatory for the actual diminishment of individual agency in advanced capitalism.29 This diminishment of agency that Foster describes is so clearly illustrated in Walker Percy’s prescient text, The Loss of the Creature. First published in 1958, this essay ruefully explores the difficulty in having a meaningful encounter with a great work of art. 30 He writes that a transparent encounter is almost impossible because the work of art, the thing as it is, has been appropriated by the symbolic complex which has already been formed in the sightseer’s mind... The thing is no longer the thing as it confronted; it is rather that which has already been formulated. 31 Percy states that it is the mediated encounter of a work of art through the art museum and its extended media, which renders that work invisible; in this mediated encounter a viewer, often unwittingly, forfeits their ability to be arbiter of their own experience and surrenders an encounter with a work of art to those he terms a class of privileged knowers. 32 This class of privileged knowers which Percy so acerbically names, are the experts, critics and curators who generate the
obscure, symbolic package of the work of art, which is now not formulated by the work itself but by the media through which it is transmitted; and central to the impoverished encounter that this mediation allows is the institution of the art museum itself. 33 The key challenge then, in developing a truly reciprocal art/architecture complex is to reassert the sovereignty of knower over known; 34 to allow a person’s encounter with a work of art to recognise it’s individuality and specificity, as distinct from its typological or generic character. 35 In seeking appropriate precedents then, from which to outline possible architectures that might meet this challenge I choose to look at the mediation of three works of art where the architecture of the art museum, as it is typically understood, is entirely absent. These three works are by the aforementioned artist, Walter De Maria, and have all been commissioned and maintained in perpetuity by the Dia Art Foundation. De Maria is an especially interesting medium here as, described by Lynne Cook, the present curator at Dia Art Foundation and paralleling Percy’s analysis, his approach to a person experiencing his work is twofold: He seeks to orchestrate a viewer’s encounter with his art by foregrounding as far as possible an unmediated experience that resists easy consumption; at the same time, he attempts to preclude any unwitting surrender to expert opinion in the guise of theoretical exegesis. 36 Living his life away from the glare of the media field, De Maria has also distanced himself from the public role of the author, eschewing any responsibility of serving as the primary filter to meaning in his work. This task he entrusts to Dia, and it is their role as both caretaker and primary mediator of these works, which I will refer to as their architecture, that is important for this essay; for the nature in which one encounters the works is critical to their existence and it is the Dia Art Foundation which provides this framework.
The New York Earth Room floating interior/prosthetic Other Taking up residence on the second floor of a loft building at 141 Wooster Street in the now entrenched arts district of SoHo, New York City, is De Maria’s most visited work. In 1977, the artist filled the entire space of the apartment with 125 tons of rich, chocolate-brown soil, covering 3,6000 square feet of prime real estate to a depth to a depth of 22 inches. 37 That this work has chosen to take up as its home a site outside of a structured art museum is important, as it forces the otherwise typical apartment building to act as mute host to its new prosthetic Other. In this the work has a parasitic relationship to its architecture; although historically related to its SoHo loft aesthetic and no doubt referring to the commercial value of its location in terms pure real estate, it also could exist anywhere, engaging a new dialogue with whichever spatial and cultural situation it might appear in.
The work is also entirely free from the parent architecture’s exterior; it is separate from this envelope and potential free to move along separate planes to its host, offering no sign of its presence as an art work to the passing layman in the street below. Reinforcing this Other space of the floating interior is Dia, a silent presence represented by the Plexiglas barrier which acts as interface between the work and its viewer, restricting access to the space beyond and therefore increasing the desire and affective tension with the sheer scale and mass of the work. In the Earth Room, viewers gaze, as through the shut gates of paradise, at the fertile loam, the natural light streaming over it from an unreachable window, while they remain irrevocably locked out in civilization, on a literally lower level than that of the piled up soil. 38
The Lightning field relational exterior/sited Other Inhabiting a remote fragment of the North West Plains of New Mexico, The Lightning Field is a grid array of 400 stainless-steel poles, each two inches in diameter and sharpened to a point, covering a mile-by-kilometre area. Likely De Maria’s most well known work and certainly the most widely circulated as image a rather than as direct experience, the architecture of The Lightning Field maintains an intense, site-specific relational dialogue with its environment, though its principle role is the isolating of the work and necessarily the viewer from any normative context. Integral to an encounter with the work is the strict isolation with which it is kept from the symbolic complex of both the physical and theoretical human worlds. Under the terms upon which a visit to the work is allowed, there are never more than six visitors permitted at any one time, all of which are required to spend a full day at the site. The final stage in a visitor’s journey to the Field is being driven there by a Dia representative, who will return the following day to transport them back to civilisation. As the only link between the two worlds, this guide takes on the role of psychopomp; not delivering them to the afterlife but to an-Other place whereby a life in the immediate present can be experienced. At the site, the Dia Foundation is represented by an architecture of residence, in a restored log cabin, which is entirely empty of art history publications or any information about local climate, geography and history. Those who come to see this work in its remote desert plateau are offered food and shelter but no ancillary information beyond a short text the artist published in Artforum in 1980. 39 There is the clear intent here that the audience shall consummate their personal encounter with both the work and its site, slowly and in depth.
The Vertical Earth Kilometer floating exterior/dormant Other Though similar to The Earth Room in that it need not exist in any defined location, The Vertical Earth Kilometer sits apart from the previous two works in that it requires no contextual relationship at all, and as such it could be located anywhere, fixed or transient, temporal or permanent; it’s architecture is that of the spore. Installed in 1976, the work is a one-kilometre long brass pole installed into the ground and which reveals only the two-inch diameter surface of its upper end, encased within a red granite plaque, at the intersection of two dusty paths within Friedrichsplatz Park in Kassel, Germany. The least mediated of the three installations, the work remains concealed, a silent heterotopia, dormant until it is encountered by someone with their own external knowledge of its existence, whereby it draws upon the void and touches the earth somewhere beyond human knowledge. Here, the artist forces us to consider two things: How do we ‘know’ a kilometre? And correspondingly, how do we conceive of that which is Other? 40 Through its concealment, in the obstruction of its physical knowledge, De Maria asserts that we only understand the work through abstract conception. 41 It seems right to add to this a remark by Kenneth Baker, as the only sanctioned commentator of these works, that as first hand witnesses to the Kilometer’s installation die off, its audience will divide evermore sharply into those willing and those unwilling to believe that a solid kilometre of brass, two inches in diameter, extends beneath the disk visible at ground level. 42 If the work of art can be understood as the Other in relation to the viewer, than it is the architecture’s role in the art/architecture complex to reinforce and protect this relationship. The affective effect of the Other is increased with the distance that it held it from a normative context. In this the architecture acts as an elsewhere, to house the Other without it becoming tarnished with the same. In the three works mentioned above, there exist various relationships and architectural capacities, that of the floating interior/prosthetic Other, the relational exterior/sited Other, and the floating exterior/dormant Other. These relationships, and others like them erode architecture’s old sensibilities of authority and autonomous intellection, and instead allow for a kind of architecture, which is instead affective and eidetic because it shapes experience through force rather than representation. 43 In Sylvia Lavin’s Kissing Architecture, we are offered a further example of this mutual reciprocity between art and architecture. Here she uses the notion of kissing as a means of extending and intensifying architectural effects through the short-term borrowing of a partner medium’s flavour. 44 Today, she writes, architecture is also ready and able to contribute to the reinvention of experience, not personal or sentimental or idealised, but affective and political. 45
notes 1. Gilles Deleuze, ‘Painting and Sensation’, in The Logic of Sensation, London: Continuum, 2003 2. Nicholas Serota, Experience or Interpretation: The Dilemma of Museums of Modern Art, London: Thames & Hudson, 2000 3. Rosalind Kraus, ‘The Cultural Logic of the late Capitalist Museum,’ October 54, Fall 1990 4. Richard Serra, Writings/Interviews, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994. P. 141 5. Ibid 6. Brian O’Doherty, ‘Notes on the Gallery Space,’ in Inside the White Cube: The Ideology of the Gallery Space, San Francisco: The Lapis Press, 1976, P.20 7. Ibid, P.15 8. Hal Foster, The Art/Architecture Complex, London: Verso, 2011, P.110 9. Ibid, P.113 10. Ibid, P. 116 11. Ibid, P. 109 12. Ibid, P. 110 13. Ibid P. 112 14. Ibid P. 117 15. Nigel Thrift, ‘Intensities of Feeling: Towards a Spatial Politics of Affect’, in Geografiska Annaler: Series B, Human Geography, Volume 86, Issue 1, March 2004, pp. 60,61. 16. http://www.affectjournal.co.uk/glossaryaffect.html, 11th November 2011 17. Alan Badiou, Being and Event, London: Continuum, 2006. 18. Brian Massumi, ‘The autonomy of affect’, Cultural critique 31 (1995): 83-109 19. Deleuze, Ibid 20. Serra, Ibid 21. Foster, Ibid, P. 107 22. Leigh-Ann Pahapill, ‘Access/Desire: Obstruction, Concealment and Anticipation in the site Specific Installations of Walter De Maria’, Drain 7: Desire, 2006 23. Robert M. Geraci, Disfiguring: Art, Architecture, Religion, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992, P.964 24. Massumi, Ibid 25. Sylvia Lavin, Kissing Architecture, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011, P. 20 26. Ibid, p. 21 27. Foster, Ibid, P. 118 28. Foster, Ibid 29. Foster Ibid, P. 262, Notes to page 119, No.17 30. Lynne Cook, ‘Preface’, in Kenneth Baker, The Lightning Field, London: Yale University Press, 2008, P. vi 31. Walker Percy, ‘The Loss of The Creature’ (1958), in The Message in the Bottle, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1978, P. 47 32. Percy, Ibid, P. 54 33. Percy, Ibid, P. 57 34. Percy, Ibid, P. 59 35. Cooke, Ibid, P. vii 36. Cooke, Ibid, P. viii 37. Robert Hughes, American Visions: The Epic History of Art in America, London: The Harvill Press, 1997, P. 570-571 38. Pahapill, Ibid 39. Cooke, Ibid, P. viii 40. Pahapill, Ibid 41. Pahapill, Ibid 42. Kenneth Baker, The Lightning Field, London: Yale University Press, 2008, P. 32 43. Lavin, Ibid, p. 30 44. Lavin, Ibid, p.43 45. Lavin, Ibid, p. 113
illustration notes 1. 141 Wooster St., New York City, the building housing The New York Earth Room. Sourced: http://newyork.citysearch. com/profile/map/42246304/new_york_ny/vara_fine_arts.html#profileTab-photos 2. The New York Earth Room (1977), Walter De Maria. Long-term installation at Dia Center for the Arts, 141 Wooster St., New York City. Photo: John Cliett. Š Dia Art Foundation. Sourced: http://www.diaart.org/sites/main/ earthroom 3. The Lightning Field (1977), Walter De Maria. Photo: Shelly Bernstein. Sourced: http://www.suite101.com/view_image_ articles.cfm/2399174 4. The restored log cabin at the Field. Photo: Lizabeth Eva Rossof. Sourced: http://www.flickr.com/photos/ lrossof/541125335/ 5. The Vertical Earth Kilomter, 1977, Walter De Maria. Kassel, Germany Š Dia Art Foundation. Photo: Nic Tenwiggenhorn. Sourced: http://www.diaart.org/sites/main/verticalearthkilometer 6. The Vertical Earth Kilomter, 1977, Walter De Maria. Photo: Daquella Manera. Sourced: http://www.flickr.com/photos/ daquellamanera/853808118/