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GATES GATEWAYS
SIMON MARCUS SWALE
GATES / GATEWAYS
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The humble gate found afronting many a New Zealand property represents a threshold between the public and private realm. Gates and gateways both create and offer the negotiation of liminal space. For Maori, the waharoa is the gateway to the pa or marae, a threshold of immense cultural and spiritual value. More strictly it is the main walk or roadway in the pā, marae or sometimes, burial grounds, and hence itself a liminal space. By passing through the waharoa, one is transcended to another realm.1 As Pakeha te iwi, i have utilised the form of the suburban gate- and its shadow, as a device to explore the potential for explorations into notions of threshold and transcendence, perception and becoming. The gate and its shadow are non-divisible and are mutually inclusive. Neither gate nor shadow exist without the other- their pairing akin to a Deleuzian fold, a non-binary relationship whereby the interior is no more than the fold of the exterior- and vis versa.2 This symiotic relationship is also present in the waharoa. Of the waharoa she has designed for installation in Dunedon’s Octagon, artist Ayesha Green says “when you move through Ko te Tuhono, you are inside and outside, you are coming and going. 3
This work explores also the folded nature of our subjective selves, our relationship to the world from both physical and phenomenological perspectives. I have attempted to create objects, which when worn renegotiate the relationship between subject and object, activating space, the senses and the body. There is an attempt to make sense of the life world: to others, to space, to time and memory, perception and sensation. These gates are an attempt to mediate our relationships with the world; like artist Martin Boyce, I have sought to consider gates as portals- entrances to other places- physical, psychological and emotional. 4
‘‘It is a passage to our landscape, our life and the wairua (spirit) we share with the harbour ... As a monument to our tipuna and our tamariki, Ko te Tuhono transcends time and place.’’ 5
1. Victoria University of Wellington Library. ‘The Pa Maori; Gateways and Enrance Passages. http://nzetc.victoria.ac.nz/tm/scholarly/tei-BesPaMa-t1-body-d3d1-d13.html
2. Gilles Deleuze. The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota,1988.
3. Otago Daily Times. Interview with Ayesha Green. ‘Public art work to function as gateway.’ https://www.odt.co.nz/news/dunedin/public-art-work-function-gateway. 10 June 2020.
4. Tate. ‘Martin Boyce’. https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/martin-boyce-7630
5. Otago Daily Times. Interview with Ayesha Green. ‘Public art work to function as gateway.’ https://www.odt.co.nz/news/dunedin/public-art-work-function-gateway. 10 June 2020.
THE BODY
“Space is first of all grounded in the body a priori of culture and historical concepts” 1
“The feeling body manifest in holistic corporealstirrings such as vigour and languidness, in one’s being corporeally gripped by emotions and room-filling atmospheres, and equally in one’s corporeal orientation in the world in contexts of perception, action and spatial navigation. Moreover, the feeling boody presents an absolute location of subjective orientation and opens up the dimension of a predimensional, surfecless space…” 2
A work on the table, on a plinth, on the floor, whatever, can be addressed as a kind of sculpture. But when you take it into your hands, you change its status. You turn yourself into a pedestal, into a plinth, by holding the piece… that brought me to the idea of working with the body. I developed works to be used, to by acted with.” 3
1. David Seamon. ‘Body, subject, time space routine and place ballets’. 1980.
2. ‘Emotions outside the box- the new phenomenology of feeling and corporeality’. Hermann Schmitz, Rudolf Owen Mullan and Jan Slaby. 2010.
3. ‘Attempt to be a Sculpture’. Conversation between Franz Erhard Walther and Hans Ullrich Obrist, Mousse, no. 43 (April-May 2014).
SPACE
Richard Sennnet writes of his distinctions between borders and boundaries in urban space. Borders as operating with the possibility of ambiguity, a transitory space in contrast with the impenetrability of the boundary. Gates and gateways define space, either as border or boundary. 1
"Man's position in the world is defined by the fact that in every dimension of his being and his behaviour, be stands at every moment between two boundaries....By virtue of the fact that we have boundaries everywhere and always, so accordingly we are boundaries...Although the boundary as such is necessary, every single determinate boundary can be stepped over, every enclosure can be updated, and every such act, of course, this of create a new boundary" 2
“Space… is not originally encountered as the measurable, locational space assumed in physics and geography, but rather as a predimensional surfaceless realm manifest to each of us in undistorted corporeal experience.” 3
“Dialogical spaces are always transitional spaces, spaces of the “in-between” which have the potential to bring about an infinite number of different perspectives and opportunities.” 4
1. Richard Sennett. Building and Dwelling; Ethics for the City. London: Penguin, 2014.
2. Georg Simmel. ‘The Transcendent Character of Life’. 1918.
3. ‘Emotions outside the box- the new phenomenology of feeling and corporeality’. Hermann Schmitz, Rudolf Owen Mullan and Jan Slaby. 2010.
4. Gabi Schillig. ‘Mediating Realities and Magnetizing Space’. In, Schmuck als Urbaner Prozess. Tübingen: Ernst Wasmuth Verlag, 2015).
PHENOMENOLOGY
For Hermann Schmitz, the means to overcome the duality of the mind - body relationship reside in the concept of the ‘felt body’, and a phenomenology that considered rich modes of experience beyond the narrow perception capabilities of the sense organs. Here is a focus on the corporeal experience, an effective way of being in the world. 1
“The body is an expressive space” 2
“In a culture like ours, so preoccupied with images of bodies and bodies of images, we tend to forget that both our bodies and our vision hands lived dimensions that are not reducible to the meeting visible”. 3
1. Hermann Schmitz. New Phenomenology: A Brief Introduction. 2019.
2. Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Phenomenology of Perception. New York: Routledge, 2012.
3. Vivian Sobchak. Carnal Thoughts; Embodiment and Moving Image Culture. Berkeley: University of California, 2004.
SPACE_TIME
When we write place, then, we are also writing time” 1
“To be an artist, I have to have material. So I started to think about whether its plausible to say that when you act with your own body, your body becomes a kind of material. The space you are acting in and with becomes a material. Also the time you are working in and with becomes material.” 2
1. Martin Edmond. ‘Response Essay: PlaceTime’ in Extraordinary Anywhere. Wellington: Victoria University Press, 2016.
2. ‘Attempt to be a Sculpture’. Conversation between Franz Erhard Walther and Hans Ullrich Obrist, Mousse, no. 43 (April-May 2014).
ATMOSPHERES
“Emotions are atmospheres pored out spatially.” 1
"We perceive atmosphere through our social sensibility- a form of perception that works incredibly quickly." 2
"Atmospheres must be thought of as pulling together affect with sensation, materiality, memory and meaning, and call for closer attention to what comprises such combinations and what they make possible or draw into being.” 3
1. ‘Emotions outside the box- the new phenomenology of feeling and corporeality’. Hermann Schmitz, Rudolf Owen Mullan and Jan Slaby. 2010.
2. Peter Zumthor. Atmospheres: Architectural Environments, Surrounding Objects. Basel: Birkhauser Verlag AG 2006.
3. Shanti SumaRtojo and Sarah Pink. Atmosphere and the Experiential World. New York: Routledge, 2018.
GATES / GATEWAYS
Shown as part of the Handshake 6 group exhibition ‘Signing In’
