introduc t i o n stephanie white Tools. Even the simplest of concepts can open up enormous boxes full of semiotics, definitions and other complexities. It must be the times, we all read too much theory at school and it has marked us like a chalk line Have thought a lot about tools since posting the call for articles, receiving the proposals and ordering this issue; thinking of transitive and intransitive tools, much like verbs. Some tools are single action things, others are part of a process: their particular use means little without a place in a chain of events. If the tool simply exists, and one delights in its making, its potential, its appearance, it rests as an intransitive object: meaning stops there. If a tool is important because it performs in a way that enables some change, it is transitive. In keeping with the materiality that is On Site review’s preoccupation, I have opted to go with things of material substance, beyond words and lines on paper, which often carry the most important qualities of architecture and design, but for this issue we want to break down process into acts of hand and tool. Tools have form. They can be simple or complex, but they all have a task, and their main import is the performance of that task. Yann Ricordel-Healy suggested I read Caroline A Jones’ 1996 Machine in the Studio: Constructing the Postwar American Artist, specifically Smithson’s ‘relation to tools as expressed through his writings and photographic documentation’.1 Jones points out that the post-studio art of the 1960s signalled a change in how art was produced — no longer the studio-atelier system but something superlatively American and masculine: a post-war industrial production of art. Her case studies are Frank Stella, Andy Warhol and Robert Smithson who all eliminated the authority of the hand and moved on to tools as generators of art objects. In Smithson’s case his tools were bulldozers and dump trucks. This stopped me in my editorial tracks, such as they are. My choice of tools as the subject of an On Site review summer issue was mostly because I like tools, we all have tools we use and love. The tools I had roughly in mind all had to do with the hand when the first three submissions came in: a tree-crusher, a backhoe called Buster and a piece on methodology. Of the tools you see here, in this issue, only a few are hand-held.
Mark Dorrian suggested I read Fabio Morábito’s Toolbox, pointing out that the tree-crusher, backhoe and methodology were all tools of pain. So many common tools are about cutting, breaking, ripping apart — violence inflicted on some unsuspecting material. Which is where, several months later, Caroline Jones’ outline of post-studio art as a masculinist, violent disruption of hitherto passive material, touches tools of pain. Smithson’s 1969 Island of Glass was planned for Miami Islet, ‘wind swept, preferably flatish and barren, in short an island that would have no commercial value’, in the Strait of Georgia off Vancouver.2 Controversy at the time was local. A barge of broken glass on its way from California to Miami Islet was intercepted as just more US junk to be dumped in Canada. Theoretically and conceptually, the project shifted to a search for other sites, culminating in Map of Broken Glass (Atlantis) and Map of Broken Clear Glass, both gallery installations. The feet of seagulls and the seals that would unwittingly climb onto an island of glass shards were outside critical discourse. It is still seen that his ‘dialectical method eschewed sentimentality and anthropomorphism, viewing the landscape as always in flux and apprehended in a necessarily violent confrontation of mind and matter’. 3 Looking back on it now, Smithson’s project is violent all the way through. And imperialist, and colonial. Tools of colonisation range from guns to treaties, railways to residential schools. Tools are enablers. And a vast range of enabling technologies allows ideas to be planted as surely as does a new seed drill. q
There are many ways to consider tools; clearly in their material and operative sense as a collection of metals and woods, machined parts and handles assembled to perform some task, and as instruments of measurement, taking the temperature of our desire to register the world we have inherited, mashed and manipulated, bruised and over-heated. Rather than On Site review’s self-selecting gender balance, very few women submitted articles this time. Where are the sewing machines that transform planar material into 3d forms? the knitting needles that make lines into complex garments, the bendy spatulas that smooth drywall better than those big rigid things made for the purpose? Is it that the word tool itself is something from the world of men’s work, and that women don’t think of the things they use as tools, rather simply as how to do something? q
1 C a r o li ne A Jon es. Mac h i n e in the Stud io: C onstructing the Postw a r A m e ri c a n Ar ti st. C h i cag o: Univer sity o f C hicago Press, 2019 2 h t t ps : //h ol ts m i th s on f ou n datio n.o rg/island-bro ken-glass 3 h t t p s : //j oh n cu l b e rt.word p ress.c o m/2014/10/04/erratics/
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on site review 39: Tools
