vector 2_1.cdr - Universitatea de Arte "George Enescu"

critical condition: frontiers
154
Art and space perception
Vlad MORARIU
Vlad Morariu graduated the
Philosophy Faculty from “Al. I.
Cuza” University of Iaşi. At present,
he attends the master courses at
the same faculty and he is a
Erasmus exchange student for
Humboldt University Berlin.
The rebellion against the white cube means life's coming into its own
rights. A double causality undertakes the existential possibilities of the
contemporary gallery: on the one hand, the street, as symbol of
everyday life and of truly lived experiences, finds itself a place within
the gallery, on the other hand, the artistic object, as every-day life's
product, becomes itself an autonomous world, capable of determining
transfigurations within the society where it is being born. To
experiment an artistic event nowadays supposes the approach of the
choros: both from the point of view of the subject's aesthetic
experience, the choros itself being able to make possible any
understanding, and from the point of view of what is being
experienced, subsisting in the artist's and curator's concern for the
right space.
What does experiencing artistic situations created in an exhibition space
suppose? Put it this way, the question announces a critical step, in its full-blown
Kantian meaning; therefore, to answer the question, we have to search for the
conditions of possibility of the artistic events' setting-frame at the level of one's
experience within the exhibition space. A close analysis will have as result the
revealing of the basic structure that this type of experience supposes; namely,
on the one hand, the human subject, who enters the exhibition space and who is
ready to have a certain aesthetic experience; on the other hand, the object of
his/her own experience, the artistic object as such. On these grounds, the initial
question and the searching for its answer bare a greater significance as we
become aware of the diversity of the exhibition contexts of contemporary art.
Museums, galleries, artistic venues, non-conventional spaces, all these,
although structurally different, have a common feature: the artistic object is not
exhibited at random, the artist and the curator work together to find the right
place for its displaying; moreover, the contemporary art has allowed some types
of work to deal exclusively with the characteristics of the exhibition space and
which, as a final product, say something about their living environment.
Therefore, space does not interfere within the relation between the subject and
the object of an aesthetic experience as something exterior, but it is part and
parcel of this. Consecutively, the exhibition space becomes a place, namely a
space cognitively and emotionally experimented. Becoming a place, the space
cannot be reduced to dimensionality any more, hence supposing a certain
conception, a vision of the world in which both the artist and the lecturer of
his/her work live. Following this, the space becomes an essential
constituent of this world. But, if this thing is true, then an answer to the question
about experiencing artistic situations created within an exhibition space will
suppose a step towards the clarification of the ways in which we conceive the
space in its generality.
1. Choros and space in the Greek tradition, modernity and the
postmodern turning
The concern for mapping the Earth's surface, for explaining the nature
and the regions' position has always been the Geographers' main activity. But
this text doesn't deal with the quantitative measure of a space or with the
mathematical functions related to it. They talk about a dead, abstract space.
What we are trying to do here is to identify an inhabited space, the place, for
which any geography is impossible. Seen from this perspective, two other
concepts come at hand: topos and choros. If the first one has easily found a place
within the history of ideas, the second one had a discrete existence, sometimes
unperceived. Used by the Greeks, choros disappears for almost two thousand
years in order to be rediscovered recently, in Jacques Derrida's and Julia
Kristeva's texts which place Plato's dialogue Timaeus and his discussion about
chora in a new light. But what do the two concepts designate? The older one,
choros, meant, even before the Plato-Aristotle period, the subjective
significances attributed to a space, the emotional state determined by
someone's presence in a certain place. Opposing choros, topos took into account
1
the objective characteristics of the space . During Ptolemy there were already
two traditions, a chorographical one and a topographical one: while the first one
was dealing with the nature of regions (their qualitative description, which
supposed an explanation given to the nature of the cultures and civilizations
that were inhabiting these regions, of their relationship with the Divinity), the
second one, surviving till nowadays by means of oral techniques, contemporary
topography or journey diaries, initially supposed mnemonic abilities (abilities of
memorizing and reproducing orally a narrative about the visited places during a
trip, a narrative that usually bore a powerful infusion of symbols), eventually, the
2
ability of drawing becoming a necessity . For the purposes of this study, I will
leave aside any discussion about topos and topography. But, in what concerns
3
the choros, let us remember that in Timaeus, Plato develops an ontology which
divides the reality into three types: Ideas or Immobile Forms (first type), their
4
imperfect copies (second type) and receptacle, chora (triton genos ). Plato
admits it that chora is an obscure term and considers that its signification can be
best rendered by analogy, associating to it a series of images, among which the
5 6
one of an impressive thing , of a piece of gold out of which different shapes come
7
into being, or of mother and father creating the offspring . All these images
suggest that the receptacle is a material substratum, but nevertheless, Plato
8
uses the spatial concept of chora , its role being that of offering a place, a special
position to the copies which, temporarily, take a certain shape. Therefore, for
Plato, chora is that space which can be thought only together with the things
contained in itself; it offers shape and spatio-temporal position to any placed
particular, but it is also the medium where the relationships among different
particular things take place. We can find the same idea of choros, of particular,
subjective space, also in Aristotle's Physics, when he argues that every thing has
its own place and that every movement is a movement towards that place, where
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every thing ceases . Yet, the same work produces the seed of a new conception
[1] See Michael R. Curry,
“Discursive Displacement and the
Seminal Ambiguity of Space and
Place”, in The Handbook of New
Media, editors: Leah Lievrouw and
Sonia Livingstone, Sage
Publications, London, 2002, pp.
504-505,
http://www.geog.ucla.edu/~curry/
Curry_Disc_Disp.pdf
[2] ibidem, p. 506.
[3] Ontology is that part of
philosophy which answers the
questions about existence. It
supposes a systematical research
upon the reality's constituents and
the relation-ship among them.
[4] See Plato, “Timaios”, in Opere,
vol.6, 48e, Editura Ştiinţifică şi
Enciclopedică, Bucureşti, 1989; for
the english translation see for
example Bury, R. G., (ed. and tr.),
1960, Plato: Timaeus, Critias,
Cleitophon, Menexenus, Epistles,
Cambridge, Mass.: Loeb Classical
Library.
[5] ibidem, 50c, 50e- 51a.
[6] ibidem, 50a-50b.
[7] ibidem, 50d, 51a.
[8] See also Zeyl, Donald, “Plato's
Timaeus”, The Stanford Encyclopedia
of Philosophy (Winter 2005
Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.),
.
[9] Aristotle, Fizica, 211a, 3-5;
Editura Ştiinţifica, Bucureşti, 1966;
for the english translation, see for
example Aristotle, “Physica”, in
Richard McKeon (ed.), The Basic
Works of Aristotle, trans. R.P.
Hardie and R.K. Gaye, New York,
Random House, 1941, pp. 218-
397.
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