HOUSES & STUFF
THESIS Marie Claire Gellings 2018
10761764
Artistic Research UVA
first examiner (supervisor): dr. Jeroen Boomgaard second examiner: prof. dr. Christa-Maria Lerm Hayes
HOUSES & STUFF
CONTENT
1. INTRODUCTION OF A HOUSE ...4
1.1 What is a house? ... 4
1.2 Ideas and preconceptions ... 5
1.3 Structure ... 7
2. THE ART OF BEING A HOUSE...9
2.1 (De)constructing a house... 9
2.2 House ↑→ home ... 10
2.3 Atmospheric perception of space and place ... 11
2.4 An Old Home ... 12
3. ENTERING A HOUSE, space, time, memory and perception ...17
3.1 Architecture → art ... 17
3.2 Art → architecture, 3 artists ... 17
3.2.1 Gordon Matta-Clark ... 18
3.2.2 Gregor Schneider ... 18
3.2.3 Rachel Whiteread ... 20
3.3 Time, space, memory and perception ... 21
3.3.1 Disturbing space and time ... 22
3.3.2 Disturbed memories ... 24
3.3.3 Perceptive disturbance, what you see, is what you get? ... 26
4. BUILDING THE HOUSE ...29
4.1 Walls & doors? ... 29
4.2 (De)constructing? ... 30
4.3 A Materialistic house ... 32
4.3 Assembling ... 35
4.5 Is it all in the mind or in the eye of the beholder? ... 37
5. CONCLUSION ...43
1. Olafur Eliasson, Your House, 2006
2. Olafur Eliasson, Your House, 2006
1. INTRODUCTION OF A HOUSE
house noun
uk /haʊs/ us /haʊs/ plural houses uk /ˈhaʊzɪz/ us
house noun (HOME)
A1 [ C ] a building that people, usually one family, live in1
1.1 What is a house?
What does it mean, a house? During my many travels in the subject I more and more realised that the first course of action should be to dis-cover what it means, the ontology of a house. This idea will firstly be approached through unravelling the structure, both its building blocks as architectural phenomenon and as emotional safe place
to live in.
It seems a valid question for a thesis that will research the ontology of a house: is it the construction or is it its own tory like Bill Bryson depicts in his book At home: a short
his-tory of private life?2 Here he uses the floor plan of his house,
a Victorian country rectory, to construct a book about the history of the house in general. He shows it as an extension of life by describing how the utility of rooms has changed by it’s use through the centuries. Or is it the house that is built in the book open house by Olafur Eliasson?3 With the
book Eliasson show a miniature sculpture of a house. The inter activeness of leafing through the book links to the ac-tions needed get into the house and thus creates a mental and physical picture of the house.
Is a house really 4 walls and a roof, as the proverb says?4
Or indeed is there a need for more building elements: a door to enter and windows to get light into the inside? Or
is a house merely a place to sleep in, prepare food and provide shelter in hard times? Is it the house an animal finds to its needs and carries around like a snail or a turtle, or is it the notion by the Vlaminck when he enjoys his fireplace?
“The well-being I feel, seated in front of my fire, while bad weather rages out-of-doors, is entirely animal. A rat in its hole, a rabbit in its burrow, cows in the stable, must all feel the same contentment that I feel.” 5
Researching the topic has shown me that he connection between house and home is almost unavoidable. Is a house immediately a home, or should they be two separate things? Is it just the meaning of the home that changes through using it and does the idea of a house stay static? Do the things in a house contribute to making it a house, the stuff
nee-1 “English Dictionary, Translations & Thesaurus.” Cambridge Dictionary, dictionary.cambridge.org/. 2 BrYson, Bill. At home: a short history of private life. Black Swan, 2016.
3 Eliasson, Olafur. TYT - TAKE YOUR TIME: olafur eliasson - open house. ARTBOOK D A P, 2017.
4 Graaf, Reinier de. Four walls and a roof the complex nature of a simple profession. Harvard University Press, 2017.
3. Cornelia Parker, Thirty Pieces of Silver, 2011.
ded to live there, the special rooms and its attributes, the little trinkets that serve no purpose, but still tell a lot about the owners?
Daniel Miller researches this topic for an entire street in London and he concludes that the people exist through their things, their specially saved memorabilia.6 For me it seems right: the need to research
see-mingly unimportant, yet revealing objects in houses like the useless matter in houses: dust, that remains after the house has been left, hair floating in the air, fallen beads, never to be found again, stuff that stays behind when the former habitants leave the house. Or just things you find in a puddle:
One large men’s black plastic work glove One dense mat of oak pollen
One unblemished dead rat One white platic bottle cap One smooth stick of wood
…..When the materiality of the glove, the rat, the pollen, the bottle cap, and the stick started to shimmer and spark, it was in part because of the contingent tableau that they formed with each other, with the street, with the weather that morning, with me.7
Just like Jane Bennett demonstrates in Vibrant Matter the agency of these accidental presences creates a connection to a place and everything in it. The stuff in houses we are all part of creates connections needed to make a living. These ‘little’ things we surround ourselves with unknowingly, by choice or by neglect are the stuff that can create art. Corne-lia Parker shows in her art just such a connection with mat-ter that generally does not matmat-ter anymore. All the parts mentioned above are components that make a home. In this paper all these components will be part of the research towards the ontology of a house and how persevering a place can hold on to the essence of its being.
1.2 Ideas and preconceptions
A house seems to be the amalgamation of needs. That is how it beco-mes a home: its structure provides safety, intimacy, togetherness, pri-vacy and many more human necessities.8 The architectural story of
de-velopment derives from these human needs. However in this time of political shifts and displacement, I wonder if that is correct. What is the ontology of a house that is no longer a fixed place? Shouldn’t it be more than one ontological idea? This question that emerged during the pro-cess will show the preconception.
An (artistic) intervention can change a house, the idea of a house. The idea of house always originates from walls and holes. Even in the most daring new constructions or desolate cardboard houses for drifters, 6 Miller, Daniel. The comfort of things. Polity, 2015.
7 Bennett, Jane. Vibrant matter: a political ecology of things. Duke University Press, 2010, 27.
4. Rotterdam.9 5. Schiedam.9
economic or otherwise homeless refugees that basic principle of walls and windows always forms the foundation of a house of the possibility to create a home. The exploration of the working techniques and theo-retical insights from the artists, historians, theoreticians and philosop-hers on houses and what the consequences are of interventions will be the core of this paper. New life through artistic interference provides a new view on the ontological value of an object. Can artistic interferen-ce redefine the ontology of an object? Through the work of 3 distinct artists I will support my theoretical argument that the ontology of de-relict/left/vacant houses can be redefined through artistic interference and results in a new view on architecture as such.
4. Rotterdam.9 5. Schiedam.10
My fascination for the changing of things, matter, subjects and houses, has a long history, both visual and conceptual. Each encounter with a de-relict house or architectural construction needs examination. The tech-niques for these endeavours vary, depending on what is at hand, came-ra, drawing materials or notebooks. The most recent discovery I made, concerns two houses in the same state and at the same time in com-pletely different
stages of exis-tence. The body seems to be the same, but in one of the houses has been lived in the other not yet. The difference bet-ween these two stages provides a look on life, what has been and what can be. In between the two phases is the pre-sent, an open plan to fill with ideas and new possibi-lities, and this is
the space whe- r e
art operates. At first glance the two places look the same. On closer exa-mination however the places are distinctively different. Both are houses, homes even. Both sheets of pictures show the building constructions familiar to any house, both display components belonging to homes: semi (de)constructed walls and designated places like toilets and kit-chens, electricity supplies, wallpaper halfway torn of the wall, curtains folded in a corner or still hanging and flapping in the wind through the open or removed windows etc. Zooming in on the content in the photos it becomes clear that the constructions are in different stages, and even in a completely different moment of their existence. The Rot-terdam house has the look of a robbed nest; the Schiedam house on 9 Old folk home Provenierssingel Rotterdam, a yearlong derilict space.
6. Rachel Whiteread, Ghost, 1990. the other hand, shows a search for meaning in empty
win-dow seals and construction details, both on walls and on floors.11 In the work of the aforementioned artists there is a
constant questioning of what the space means and how it can be used freely, and sometimes very personally, through the choices for which details can stay and which ones have to go.12 The details, that show how the house was or will
be-come a home, like cabinets and detailed choices for han-dles, sockets and fireplaces, are sometimes selected to stay in the artwork and thus play a role in the perception of the work.13 In Whiteread’s Ghost for example, the fireplace is
still visible with the suggestion of leftover ashes. 1.3 Structure
Just after a place has been emptied for new use or demolition and just before the new position, there is a moment of silence. That moment is the silence of the expectation of things to come. The leftover debris ta-kes possession of the location and the meaning of the place, and when the dust has settled, the silence strikes. It is appealing, and for years I entered those inviting and silent places to wander around, aimlessly. After a while the many left over and seemingly meaningless things ac-tually come to define the in-between-ness of these derelict and vacant places. These things can be details of lives lived before, like a coffee pot a kitchen cabinet, useless curtains, fluttering in the wind, entering through the broken windows, or the empty pots of paint chosen for lives yet to come, parts of lunches from demolition workers. Even smal-ler details tell a story, like the rubble left by squatters, builders or de-molition workers, like sticky tape that marks the place for a hole in the wall, forgotten by the builders in a new housing development, notes on walls that have to be taken out or desperate words spray painted on walls and doors. All this shows traces of former occupancy and it is thus part of a story in the making or of a finished story, with an open en-ding. The things left behind also determine the size of the emptiness.14
Is it through traces of human interference that the past and the future come alive? How these vacancies get agency? Wandering through the apartments and houses mentioned above I feel like the urban explorers in the stories by Garrett Bradley15:
An interior tourism that allows the curious-minded to discover a world of behind-the-scenes sights.16
The writer joined a group of people, who sought out buildings in the deep of the night, more or less as romantic 19th century criminals. For
me, in the two different places, old and new, still it felt like the objects were watching me in my endeavour to make sense of the place. The lon-11 Bachelard, Gaston, et al. The Poetics of Space: Beacon Press.
12 Matta-Clark, Schneider, Whitebread
13 Mullins, Charlotte, and Rachel Whiteread. RW - Rachel Whiteread. Tate Publishing, 2017, 22-23.
14 Heidegger, Martin, and H.M Berghs. “II.” Over Denken, Bouwen, Wonen: Vier Essays. Nijmegen: SUN, 1999. 15 Garrett, Bradley L. Explore Everything: Place-Hacking the City. Verso, 2014.
ger I stayed the deeper I felt involved with the heart of the house, and after a while it became my house, my stuff. My penetrating the place opened up space for creativity and the safety for my personal inter-pretation; I felt ideas form to start creating work. After assembling and getting acquainted with the inner secret of the house, at the moment of no return on the cross road of between being demolished or being built, there is the freedom of starting to archive and own the visual data gathered. To finally making work and in a way creating a house for the creativity to assemble new forms from the existing ones.
In the light of my research into artists that share a fascination for houses and homes, my emphasis will lie on the space in between art and scien-ce. The art part will be shown through the work of three artists: Gordon Matta-Clark, Gregor Schneider and Rachel Whiteread. The approach will partly be subjective, and it will make a more standoffish connection with the scientific part through theory and philosophy17.
The connection to a (de)constructive approach of architecture became more and more evident during the research. Accordingly the first chap-ter will be on that corresponding component in architecture and art. After the presentation of the theoretical background of this idea, the next chapter make a connection with the work of the aforementioned three artists, that share a deconstructive component in their work. In the conclusion I will connect the ends of this cautiously knitted layout with my own artwork.
7. Denis Charlet , “Jungle”, migrant camp in Calais, 2016.
2. THE ART OF BEING A HOUSE
2.1 (De)constructing a house
To come to an understanding of the term house it is apparent to start with the origins of the idea of a house as a building. What IS a house, where does it stand for?18 According to Heidegger the ‘is’ stands for the
transitive meaning of the subject, one that opens another approach to the concept of house.19 At the beginning of mankind there were
shel-ters that protected against the outer world, animals, rivals, or even re-ligious points of view.20 A house needs to be constructed to create a
lasting home. Which brings us to architecture, one of the oldest human crafts.21 Architecture is the craft to gain shelter, but also a way to
deve-lop a sense of unity. The idea of unity refers to the creating of units to give shelter, through separation, borders develop and thus ownership and privacy emerge. The hubs that accordingly appear can be seen as the start of cities. It can be argued that already in a house hubs appear. Every person needs space, a personal space to develop an individual course of life that in its turn creates the home.
Heidegger argues that many places can be houses, however not every house can be a home:
We attain to dwelling, so it seems, only by means of building. The latter, building, has the former, dwelling, as its goal. Still, not every building is a dwelling.22
The difference is compelling and opens an idea to a chan-ging concept, which depends on the need of the dwel-ler. According to Heidegger a building is not necessarily a house and even less a home. A truck driver sleeps in his truck, a drifter sleeps in his card board house, does that make it a home?23 Heidegger’s notion of when a place is a
home can however be questioned in our days of fugitives and their loss of home. To prove the master wrong with his own words: We attain to dwelling, so it seems, only by
me-ans of building.24 In this sense it is interesting to notice how
the need for a home creates new architecture.
The building or construction of a home can be seen in different ways, just like the concept of building a house. The need provides the archi-tectural approach of a building/house/home; necessity and time install the idea for a home. The more a house is lived in the more it becomes a home. It seems the home consists of images and requisites to build a 18 Heidegger, Martin, and H.M Berghs, Over Denken, Bouwen, Wonen: Vier Essay, 46. 19 Ibid., 46.
20 Sennett, Richard, The Conscience of the Eye: the Design and Social Life of Cities, 15.
21 Hoteit, Aida. “Deconstructivism Translation From Philosophy to Architecture.” Scribd, Scribd, www.scribd.com/ document/354414329/Deconstructivism-Translation-From-Philosophy-to-Architecture, 2015.
22 Heidegger, Martin, and H.M Berghs, Over Denken, Bouwen, Wonen: Vier Essay, 46. 23 Ibid., 46.
life. The more we gather, the more we come to a stand still. At the onset we only need shelter, like in the early times of human kind. Time creates new requirements. The longer one lives in one place the more one as-sembles to make live easier. The home becomes a style of living and in that sense it provides the idea of stability.
A house constitutes a body of images that give mankind proofs or illusions of stability.25
The stability of the idea of home means there is no need to wander and carry your home on your back (like fugitives, or nomads). The unstable home shows another way of living. Still the instability of a home doesn’t mean a life is unstable. The stability can be seen in the construction, as in the construction of a life. The building stones to create a house are technical; to become a home and part of a life the building stones need to be of a different order. A home depends on the choices made to divide the space in the house; a cellar is downstairs an attic upstairs, however do we need to use these designated spaces as is decided due to architectural ideas or past applications, even designed by the gover-nment?26 Shouldn’t it be up to the inhabitant to make the choices for
the use of the different spaces and in that way creating a personalized home?27 However the choice for a home isn’t always depending on the
luxury (reed basic living) needs of a habitant, it can also be depicted by political and economical choices in a society, that interfere with free choice.
2.2 House ↑→ home
A home, as been said before, the place where we feel safe, or is that me-rely the illusion of atmosphere in architecture brought up in OASE#91, the journal for architecture.28 Or is the place where to put your hat as the
song goes?29 From a more political view, it seems that indeed wherever
one puts his hat can become a home. Especially when people are on the run, and in need of a place to stay, any place can become a home. Even in a place that will not be permanent, people have the need to make a home. That sort of home cannot be the same as a fixed home where the illusion of stability reigns. Still even for a short amount of time the need to feel at home is a human demand for security, and to belong to society, to family, to things.30 A home is being built through the objects
that surround a household, practical or artistic. 25 Bachelard, Gaston, The Poetics of Space, 17.
26 Belien, Herman. Huis, Tuin En Keuken. Contact, 2000, 32-52.
27 Havik, Klaske. Sfeer Bouwen = Building Atmosphere. nai010 Uitgevers/Publishers, 2013, 3. 28 Ibid., 3.
29 “Marvin Gaye – Wherever I Lay My Hat (That’s My Home).” Genius, genius.com/Marvin-gaye-wherever-i-lay-my-hat-thats-my-home-lyrics, 2018.
Don’t you know that I’m the type of man who is always on the roam? Wherever I lay my hat that’s my home
Wherever I lay my hat Oh oh, that’s my home Mhm, yeah
That’s my home and I like it that way
To transform environments to become more human it is necessary to adopt an anthropology that is not based on a hierarchy of needs. 31
To follow up this notion on the dwelling it is logical to step over to the items needed to create a home. It is the human needs that provide the ideas to fill the house and create a home. The ‘stuff’ we gather in our houses make our homes, and it is interesting to note that this homely feeling only extends to a personal level. When for instance the home of a parent has to be emptied after a move to smaller dwelling or more tragic a death, the items that were essential to the home have to be re-examined. Are they still essential for a new home, another life? These decisions are a constant in deciding on the interior of a house and thus the status of a home. Every morning the day begins with these kinds of decisions, continuing during the day. These acts and decisions define our wellbeing in a place.
The puzzle of items we need to live, design the atmosphere we want to live in, when the atmosphere becomes safe and habits are formed, the items so special when they first appear became commonplace and are no longer consciously noticed. They become the invisible but impor-tant part of the way a house is perceived, they create the atmosphere in the background of the house and its hidden corners.
2.3 Atmospheric perception of space and place
The first moment in a place defines the reason for choosing a house to live in. The moment we enter a space is the moment we encounter a space.32 This first encounter with a space has no knowledge about the
size, construction, etc, of this space. My fascination for these first en-counters with space during derived from a trip to the Loire castles when I was around 9 years of age. The castle that impressed me most was Chenonceau, a castle that has been built as a bridge over the Loire. The pass over the river was the ballroom. My father (a couturier) told me the story of the music that filled the room and the beautiful gowns swer-ving over the floor. His father’s images filled the empty space. Since that childhood encounter empty spaces are places to fill with stories, true or not, mostly with images that emerge from first impressions. On ente-ring a building there is always a feeling, the atmosphere. Only after that initial unconscious perception there will be a more aesthetic notion of the space. And yet in that same moment the decision is made about what we want, how we want to continue with our living surroundings.
‘Dabei wird Atmosphären aber nur dann zum Begriff, wenn es einem ge-lingt, sich über den eigentumlichen Zwischenstatus von Atmosphären zwischen Subjekt und Objekt Rechenschaft zu geben.’33
Part of the focus in this research will be on the ‘in between area’ Böhme points out, that area where everything is still possible, a space for art to emerge.
31 Murray, M., et al. “The House as a Satisfier for Human Needs: A Framework for Analysis, Impact Measurement and Design .” The House as a Satisfier for Human Needs, World Congress on Housing , Sept. 2005, repository.up.ac.za, 1. 32 Pallasmaa, Juhani. “Space, Place, and Atmosphere: Peripheral Perception in Existential Experience.” Architectural
Atmospheres, doi:10.1515/9783038211785, 18.
8. Home of a coot, Amsterdam, 2010.
9. Home of a coot, Amsterdam, 2010. The first experience also shows our past, that is: our living past and the
choices previously made in different spaces. So coming back to the no-tion house, thinking of home and wandering around in my past, what then could my experience with that notion of house ↑→ home be? As I mentioned before: a house seems to be the amalgamation of needs and thus it becomes a home. This triggers a decisive experience from my childhood:
Getting up in the morning, and finding a wall in a different colour than it was when I went to bed. My parents sometimes had the
sudden urge to change our surroundings. Sometimes, co-ming home from school, friends or an outing, we would find them in the middle of a complete reorganisation of the living room, and after we helped getting the household into the order they envisaged, we all had to step out of the house to come back in with a an open mind and judge our new environment…. We loved the new arrangement every time, which might have to do with the having to put every-thing back if we wouldn’t like it. This formative experience tells a lot about my choices for homes and the way images and preferences form during my stay there.
To create a home, stuff is needed, and this is not just a hu-man need but also an essential and an omnipresent one. Looking back in my visual archive I find houses, mostly aban-doned and waiting for further actions. The places, like the coot nests are mostly filled with rests of former occupants. The items may looks like rubbish, but at a certain moment they (re)serve as essential parts of living. From meaningless
stuff it evolves to an essential part of the atmosphere of a home. From that moment on everything belongs in the home and in a certain place. It can even being moved through the house without a constant and specific awareness of objects belonging to the house.34
2.4 An Old Home
Two months ago, I discovered the aforesaid house in Rotterdam that suddenly was being emptied. It used to be an old folks’ home on the Provenierssingel in Rotterdam and now the place was in the process of being demolished. After consent from demolishing company to get inside, the place opened up.35 The rooms were almost bare, except for
the leftover, no longer needed/wanted items. At the side entrance of the building, the first observation was a photo book and envelopes with negatives and more photos. The photographs, both in the book, in the envelopes and scattered on the floor amongst the rubble, showed parties with elderly people, groups of people in different age catego-ries and homely situations in rooms.
My first impression of the house as I walked through it was that of in a wrongly built diorama, like the crooked settings in the film Das Kabi-nett des Dr Caligari.36 Still it felt very intimate, this rummaging about 34 Böhme, Gernot. Architektur Und Atmosphäre. Wilhelm Fink, 2006, 114-126. 35 Vermeulen Sloop- en Milieutechnieken, vermeulen-bv.nl, sinds 1946
10. Marie Claire Gellings, Old folks’ home, Provenierssingel, Rotterdam, 2017.
11. Marie Claire Gellings, A room in the old folks’ home, 2017.
a derelict place, and it became the start of an exploratory expedition. Also there was a certain tension about it; I could never know what I’d find next. Some rooms were comple-tely emptied of anything personal, even the toilet, shower and kitchenette were gone. This made it look barren almost like being inside in the structure of the architecture. In other rooms there was still some stuff from former residents left. Chairs, curtains, a pillow, a coffee can, a chair. Those rooms filled with memories of the former occupants felt like a sca-ttered collage of a life. Sometimes the rooms, or even the whole building looked like abandoned houses in war pho-tographs, places that people left in a hurry to flee the ene-my. I decided to make pictures. The first ones of the rooms were taken from a distance, but bit-by-bit I found myself zooming in on the smallest details of the rooms and of the construction. So in fact there were two strands of stuff in the documentation: the personal and the more general. I went back there several times. The more I did, the more the homely disappeared and more and more the house beca-me a structure of architectural ideas instead of a hobeca-me for people to live in.
The change in my interest marked a shift in fascination and a need to deeper understand the art works that came to mind: the bold work of Matta-Clark in his cuttings, the worn down shed by Robert Smithson, the works that show the use of what is and changing it into something new, a new view on derelict and lost stuff, through which the objects will gain a new life: art.37
At this point I discovered a surprising new direction in my photographs: the rubble became an important part of the place. The more time I spent in the houses, the more a sen-sation of familiarity came over me, without me being able to pinpoint what that was. Everything is where it is suppo-sed to be without actually ‘knowing’.38 A sensation that can
be linked to the feeling which arises from the work of Tuaza, Honig and Hong in Sensory Spaces.39 These works seemed
to always have been there, in that space, like they belonged. The embodiment of a space works intuitively and in time. Architecture works with strict rules and we know them be-cause we have always been living in these regulated spaces. The house that opened up during the demolition showed an open plan where everything was weirdly familiar and yet in a very standoffish way. The rules were clear, but the inside details were missing, so in an embodied way the place was distantly familiar.
37 Diserens, Corinne.Gordon Matta-Clark. London: Phaidon, 2004, Print.
38 Böhme, Gernot. “3. Rezeptions- Und Produktionästhetik.” Atmosphäre: Essays Zur Neuen Aesthetik.
Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2014, Print, 104.
39 Nelson, Mike. “Sensory Spaces 8,” 303 Gallery. Museum Boijmans Van Beuningwn, May 2013. Web., 2017.
12. Robert Smithson, Partially Buried Wood-shed, 1970, photo Glen Apseloff, 1982.
“In our age of massive industrial production, surreal consumption, euphor-ic communeuphor-ication and feuphor-ictitious digital environments, we continue to live in our bodies in the same way that we inhabit our houses, because we have sadly forgotten that we do not live in our bodies but are ourselves embod-ied constitutions. Embodiment is not a secondary experience; the human existence is fundamentally an embodied condition.” 40
As Pallasmaa says, the embodied experience is everywhe-re, and that experience creates the feeling of memory in the visited houses. We know what we see, because we live what we see. The moment of familiarity opens up a new approach to the construction. The newly observed details are not the obvious consumer articles, but the left over buil-ding materials, half broken down toilets and kitchenettes. At first the mind transforms it into a whole, even though it is only partly there; however after staying and becoming part of the building, the unnoticed articles become the essence of the place.
2.5 A New House
I decided to turn the process around: what would happen in a comple-tely newly built house? I visited a house in Schiedam, which was in the process of being built. Already at first sight it was obvious that where at the old folk’s home there was the dismal and abandonment, inten-sified by the left over personal components of former lives sometimes randomly shattered throughout the building, sometimes as if they were waiting to be used again, not being aware of the havoc around them. The collection of images I took in the new house showed, similar to the experience in he old house, a slow shift to a focus on details. However, here, as this house had not yet been lived in, my focus was aimed more immediate on construction details, like buckets of paint, tape, new wi-ring, etc.
My first observation of the new house was of the lay out plan of the place: an open room with on three sides large windows or actually holes in the walls that suggested windows. In the old house the open frames used to be windows that were opened during the demolition and the openings that developed in that way included the
view on the environment as a part the house instead of being a framed picture. In the same way as in the old house the window seals that were already in became frames of the surrounding cityscape.
In the middle of the room a metal stairway led to the upper floor. Opposite the stairway was the actual entrance. In all the openings for windows big sheets of plastic were han-ging. They moved to and fro in the wind, and showed a frag-mented view of the outside. Climbing upstairs revealed one big hole from floor to ceiling. In the rooms and bathroom
40 Pallasmaa, Juhani. The Thinking Hand: Existential and Embodied Wisdom in Architecture. Chichester, U.K.:
Wiley, 2010.
13. Marie Claire Gellings, A room in the old folks’ home, 2017.
14. Marie Claire Gellings, New house Schie-dam, 2017.
upstairs almost all the windows were already in place, which gave a to-tally new perception of the surroundings. While in the open holes the view was embraced by the house, the holes that had proper windows frames became a painting. A huge window at the other end had no glass or frame yet. It showed a view on the canal, the boats and the old houses on the other side; the view on the city became part of a collage view. In a way the frames and windows close the house.
After an hour my attention shifted to details: the way the building blocks formed a rhythm on the walls the way electric components stuck out of floors walls and ceilings. After a while the rests of the construction asked for attention: rubble in corners, paint spots, forgotten holes for electricity, wood randomly scattered on the floor, a window against a wall, waiting for further use, empty pots of paint, ladders laying in the ground, electric cables an plastic wraps and dust, smears of putty and cement, more dust and building rests. On my second visit the house was almost finished, and the floor plan for the details of habitation be-came clear. The house would be taken over by the inhabitants and the leftover construction ‘stuff’/details would withdraw in the house, wai-ting to re-emerge when the possibility would occur. The (left over) stuff in the houses organize the rhythm of the space, a thing power oscilla-tion between the house and the left overs which makes it come alive every time the place is visited.41 Every new pair of eyes makes a new
constellation of the stuff scattered around in the house.
Glove, pollen, rat, cap, stick. As I encountered these items, they shimmied back and forth between debris and thing-between, on the one hand, stuff to ignore, except insofar as it betokened human activity 42
Again, Jane Bennets notion that ‘stuff’ has agency made sense to me, even when it is not sure what the stuff says or what purpose it serves.43
The idea of agency can be troublesome. Thinking of stuff as matter opens the idea of humans as matter, which produces a new approach to art and architecture as part of the human world. As we are stuff/mat-ter ourselves, we become part of the places we inhabit and use.44 The
use of the place we live in produces signs of wear in the paths we make, wandering through the house. The human need for regularity creates that wear and tear; on floors where we always walk to the kitchen, the bathroom, the dining room where the chairs are always moved around the table in the same way, but also the cupboards and closets where objects that are often used are stored.
This notion developed even further, for my perception didn’t just ack-nowledge the agency at the moment but also manifested itself in the possibilities for art practice. In that moment it became clear to me what happens in making art. That first sliver of an idea for work derives from the strange and unexplainable choices for visual inspirations. Which shows that the agency of leftover debris in a derelict house can form 41 Bennett, Jane. Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things, 26.
42 Ibid. 43 Ibid., 44.
44 Coole, Diana H., and Samantha Frost. New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics. Duke University Press, 2010, 1.
the start of artistic ideas. Can the leftover proof of occupancy be an argument for the value of a vacant property? And does artistic work based on these kinds of ideas provide a new beginning for the places used as inspiration or even as material? How far can an artist go and still keep the original ontology of the object intact? And should that be the goal in the creative endeavour of translating these seemingly rigid structures?
18. Frank Gehry, La Fondation Louis Vuitton, 2014.
17. Frank Gehry, sketch, La Fondation Louis Vuitton, 2006.
16. Richard Serra, the Matter of Time, Guggenheim, Bilbao, 1994–2005. 15. Richard Serra, Wassende Bogen, Boijmans van Beuningen, Rotterdam, 1980.
3. ENTERING A HOUSE, space, time, memory and perception
3.1 Architecture → art
Architecture has been an important inspiration for art and vice versa. Space as an essential component of architecture also opened possibilities for art. Especially in the relation to the space we live in. The home is not just a matter of fact space, but it is a real part of the choices we make, where and how we live. The approach of the space we live in has changed a lot since the industrial revolution. A spatial awa-reness arose which led to a need of space for the way we live.45 Due to the industrial changes life changed
drastical-ly. Houses became bigger to provide accommodation for new appliances needed for a ‘better’ life. In the bigger living quarters a new emptiness needed to be filled. The decora-tions to fill in that gap showed the interests of the people living amongst the items they collected. In a sense it gave way to the human need to make a home through house-hold goods. Things showed the importance and wealth of the inhabitants. Art became one of the collectibles in the home, and even more than wealth it showed taste. This changed not just the home, but also the art world, and as houses became larger, so did art, sometimes even as big as architecture itself. An example of this growth in art can be seen in the work of Richard Serra. His work in the Museums Boijmans van Beuningen in Rotterdam and especially the work in the Guggenheim in Bilbao show how the art can be part of the architectural structure.
Artistic methods were used in architectural practices to come to a design. The initial steps in designing require the freedom to experiment and in that moment architects use the same mechanisms as fine artists. An example of that freedom in design is to be found in the deconstructive work of architects like Frank Gehry.
3.2 Art → architecture, 3 artists
To discover the possibilities in the combination of art and architecture my main focus will lie on the approach of archi-tecture by three artists. All three have a distinct approach to architecture in their work. Gordon Matta Clark dismantles architectural structures, Gregor Schneider approaches the subject in a more psychological way and Rachel Whiteread freezes the development of existing architecture.
19. Gordon Matta-Clark, Office Baroque, Antwerp 1977.
20. Gordon Matta-Clarck, drawings & collages, 1973-1975.
21. Gordon Matta-Clarck, drawings & collag-es, 1973-1975.
3.2.1 Gordon Matta-Clark
The works by Gordon Matta-Clark set an example for the combination of art and architecture; he approaches his artwork from his architectural background46. Matta-Clark’s
works are beyond just art and dazzle the visitors, not just by their grandeur, but also by Matta-Clark’s bold and da-ring choices in technique. His approach literally opens up houses and therefore creates a whole new way of looking at architecture.
In his work Matta-Clark turns the experience of the space he works in around. The holes he drills open the place up for new perceptions of a house. In a certain sense he takes the home away from the house and turns it into a technical en-deavour. It changes the view on architecture and at the way we live and make homes. The bold way in which he approa-ches a building makes it look easy to change architecture, but this is only suggestion: As he studied architecture, it is the technical knowledge that provides him with the free-dom to play and to oscillate between 2- and 3D, resulting in a seemingly total freedom in his work. In a sense he actually denies architecture its role as determining factor in order to play with the construction just as he plays in the photo col-lages he made as studies for his work. Through this way of working he attains a freedom in creating layers that would otherwise be impossible to perceive. These layers are on the one hand immanent to the original structure, on the other hand the work creates a new construction: it is architectu-re inside architectuarchitectu-re. By opening the structuarchitectu-re Matta-Clark creates a new view on architecture, and his work creates much more than just an opening up of the structure. The views allow for new possibilities and new perceptions.47
3.2.2 Gregor Schneider
The approach of architecture by Gregor Schneider seems to be the opposite of Gordon Matta-Clark’s works. In Das Haus UR Gregor Schneider creates his most important work. Mid 1980’s the artist moved into the apartment owned by his parents in Rheydt, Germany. Since then Schneider has wor-ked in the house. He left the façade for what it was, but he completely changed the inside. New rooms were built, and even turned around, so windows didn’t look out but at one another, older windows or walls. Some rooms were insula-ted and some were closed off, and the new rooms had a dif-ferent designation than the space had before, e.g. bedroom
became bathroom, coffee room. It spread an uncanny atmosphere through the building. The eerie atmosphere also seems to result from the idea that the house was still being lived in, however that impossible that seems. If so, who lives there and what do those rooms mean?
46 Lee, Pamela M. Object to Be Destroyed: the Work of Gordon Matta-Clark. The MIT Press, 2001. 47 Wigley, Mark. Cutting. Matta-Clark the Anarchitecture Investigation. Lars Müller Publishers, 2018.
22. Gregor Schneider, Das Totes Haus UR, Bedroom 1985.
23. Gregor Schneider, das Totes Haus UR, Coffee room 1993.
On arrival for a visit, it seems that Schneider lives in the house him-self. He is waiting in the door, and the ‘guests’ are invited to the coffee room for a starting drink before the tour of the house begins.48 Before
the tour starts, it seems to have started already; on trying the door in the room to continue the visit, the guests find that the door they used to enter the room can no longer be used: behind that door a wall appears.49 On leaving the
room through another door a mechanism that turns the room becomes visible. The house seems to be a maze that closes in on the visitors, especially when the original struc-ture shows itself as a suffocating embrace in the spaces in between the two structures, the original and the newly built spaces. No longer the house is as obvious as a house can be, the notion made by Böhme and Heidegger that the spaces we are used to are known without seeing it entirely does no longer work in this house.50 The changed surface plan
insti-gates a strange shift in balance. Normally houses are made in a prefixed structure where you instinctively know where you are.51 However in this house all the intuitions seem to
lead nowhere. Nothing is what it seems, although every-thing shows familiarity. It is never clear if the space is what it shows. Through the windows there is no exterior, behind the wall is a window or just another wall, or sometimes a staircase. The titles of the new spaces make them perso-nal, almost homely, but not always for the visitors: hallway, porch, bedroom, kitchen, storage cupboard, the last hole, the smallest wank, the end, the studio, coffee room, at the core, love-nest. Some of the designations sound familiar, but others seem out of place.52 The rooms are sometimes
impossible to enter and sometimes they convey such a feeling that it seems impossible to enter. The bedroom for instance is filled with personal items and the bed seems to have just been left. The house is never ready it seems. Schneider keeps working on it and adjusts the rooms and spaces to his insights of the moment. In the changes of the architectural structures the visitor gets lost in space and the time. Some rooms have small openings, some are insula-ted which produces a strange atmosphere and sometimes a door opens to a very small passage between 2 walls. We can never assume the ordinary. There seems to be a shift in space which produces a shift in the temporal perception. Everything changes when the ordinary changes. No longer is the bedroom just the bedroom, it clearly is somebodies bedroom but it is not clear who that is. The new constructi-ons change the house more and more into a piece of scene-ry for a haunted play. The theatrical becomes even more pregnant in the rooms where dolls are placed.
48 Kittelmann, Udo, et al. Gregor Schneider: Totes Haus Ur ; La Biennale Di Venezia 2001; Hatje Cantz, 2002, 12. 49 Ibid., 13.
50 Böhme, Gernot. Atmosphäre: Essays Zur Neuen Ästhetik. Suhrkamp. 51 Belien, Herman, Huis, Tuin En Keuken, 56.
52 Ibid., 24.
24, Gregor Schneider, ‘Wall Before Wall’ exhibition in the Bonn Bundeskunsthalle, Staircase, 2017.
25. Gregor Schneider, ‘Wall Before Wall’ exhi-bition in the Bonn Bundeskunsthalle, 2017.
26. Rachel Whiteread, Untitled (One Hundred Spaces), Tate Britain, 1997.
The space seems to implode in das Haus UR, a life changing alteration for the existing architecture that creates an uncanny experience as if the audience is part of a film, an illegal trespassing of a film set where at any moment the recording can start.
3.2.3 Rachel Whiteread
Rachel Whiteread’s work is even more imploded than Schneider’s Haus UR. The main technique used by White-read is casting objects from the inside, and the space that surrounds objects. Which results in negative spaces that re-veal the space we cannot define, like the space underneath chairs in one hundred spaces.
In her sculptures she brings a concept of space we aren’t al-ways aware of to the foreground. In this way these surroun-dings we cannot define become tangible. In the beginning of her career, she made casts of warm water bags, a closet and bath tubs, in time she moved on into sheds and hou-ses.53 Her work seems to have a straightforward form,
ho-wever on closer examination it is not what it is. It is different, as if you are looking into the item. Whiteread’s use of fami-liar forms and household items makes the work seemingly easy to read, however by turning the objects inside out the objects show tears of use and age that normally are not very visible. Her work emphasizes the things we know but don’t examine at length. It shows a dazzling insight into familiar/ unfamiliar structures of shapes. The negative space of fa-miliar shapes she makes, invites us to search for the original shape. Thus the enclosed subject invites the spectator him/ herself to open up to come to an understanding of what is presented. Most of the works derive of houses or household objects so that the work always has a connection to the hu-man body in size and in association. 54 This makes the work
familiar in shape and history, which is an important compo-nent for Whiteread. At the start of her career, many works were connected to the political situation in the country:
This was a semi-derelict house in East-London and I was very clear that it had to be in an area I was absolutely familiar with, and a building that was going to be knocked down. Grove Road was a green corridor with a view to Canary Wharf, one of Thatcher’s troubled economic babies, originally envisaged as an urban utopia 55
These works are history bound. In later works history equally plays an important role, but in a more detailed way: in the colours of the used material and the remnants of subjects in the casts. Whiteread’s interest in materials and their unique properties threads through all the works. Whiteread’s objects are at first just as ephemeral as Matta-Clark’s work. When the original is broken down after the cast has dried it will not 53 Mullins, Charlotte, and Rachel Whiteread, RW – Rachel Whiteread. Tate Publishing. 54 Ibid., 22-33.
55 Ibid., 50-51.
28. Untitled (amber bed) Faluing Angel, Tate Britain, 1991.
27. Rachel Whiteread Untitled (Torso), Tate, 1992/5.
be seen. She casts the history in the object, which will than come to a stand still in the object.
The sculptures document the history of the object up to that moment.56
As the original object is gone, only the other side of the ob-ject remains in the sculpture. Together with the use of mate-rials and techniques it is hard to recreate an image of what the original form was, which explains the uncanny attracti-on of the work.
3.3 Time, space, memory and perception
So far I have been discussing a rather separate approach of architec-ture and art. In the following chapter I will research the connection of these topics from a more theoretical point of view to connect it to my own ideas and works. The artists who use architecture as a tool will form the basis for this chapter.
Artists can create overlaps in time when they play with materials and forms to come to a concept fitting the ideas of their oeuvre in a certain time with materials and ideas from different times, while they speak to an audience beyond time.
Doubtless exterior things change, but their moments only succeed one an-other with respect to a consciousness which remembers them. We observe outside us, at any given moment, a collection of simultaneous positions ; nothing remains of the former simultaneities.57
As the works of these artists will show, time and space belong together, in their structure and in their behaviour as part of a bigger cosmology:
Quelle que soit la divergence des opinions soit sur la nature, soit sur l’ob-jectivité du temps et de l’espace, on ne peut nier que le temps évoque l’idée de mouvement continu, comme la notion d’espace suggère spontanément l’idée d’éten-due. Or le mouvement et l’étendue sont deux modalités ou plutôt deux espèces appartenant à la quantité continue. Ce genre de quantité possède, on lesait, des parties enchaînées les unes aux autres de manière à former une véritable unité, le terme d’une partie étant à la fois le commencement de l’autre.58
Time and space are inextricably bound up with architecture and with in this case art and thus with the perception of objects that derive from both art, architecture and the combination of the two disciplines. Em-bodied experiences and the atmosphere in architecture and architec-tural art, like installations, sculptures and assemblages form an impor-tant basis for in this paper. It is hard to think of a building, a house, a home, without thinking of past encounters with either similar places, times or experiences. Or in the words of Peter Zumthor, talking about 56 Ibid., 46.
57 Bergson, Henri. Essai Sur Les Donneés Immédiates De La Conscience. Press Universitaires De France, 1948, 173. 58 Nys, D. La Notion De Temps. Institut De Philosophie, 1925, 5.
29. Rachel Whiteread, House, Mile End, East London, 1993.
how he experienced his aunt’s kitchen as a decisive impression:
‘the atmosphere of this room is insoluble linked with my idea of a kitchen.’ 59 The impression of former experiences form the decisions made in the
design process. These ideas mostly derive from ordinary objects or ex-periences, in a matter of fact manner they find their way through the maze of stored memories, visual and textual on the uncensored archive in our brain.
3.3.1 Disturbing space and time
Tout le monde s’accorde pour définir le temps une durée successive contin-ue,une réalité idéale ou concrète,dont les parties se trouvent dans un flux perpétuel, passent sans interruption de l’avenir dans le passé par l’inter-médiaire toujours fugitif d’un instable présent.60
Time as successive duration is, as Nys says, a worldwide accepted, and used notion. However, in the arts a different approach of time is preva-lent, a more poetic one; time is visible in the materials and objects, but also in the historical layers of time in the work and,
eventu-ally in, by the work provoked, memories in viewers. Time is not always a core point of departure in the work of the three artists talked about in this paper, however for all three it is an important part of their design. They work with old ma-terials and create a new and sometimes disturbing present in their artwork. Gordon Matta-Clark works on houses that are lost in time: they can no longer participate in society. Instead he uses and overrides that standstill by reconstruc-ting the basic idea of the place. He reshuffles the visual per-ception of the place by means of holes that break through the basic structure of the building. Looking down through one of these holes in the floor in for instance Conical Inter-sect, one is confronted with many spyholes. Looking from the top down normally means you’d have to take the stairs to get down. Downstairs there needs to be a picture in one’s mind of the upstairs to reconstruct it visually from memory, to find a connection between the two moments and places. In this work Matta-Clark creates a dizzying new way of per-ceiving time and place, by opening up the construction. The view from the different floors thus creates the possibility to
behold time visually, resulting in a new view on architecture as a whole and more detailed on how we can perceive places in a different way.61
The boldness and ease of Matta-Clark creates the idea of handling a dolls house, delicate and easy to reconstruct.
Where Matta-Clark creates new connections between otherwise far apart spaces, Gregor Schneider uses the idea of a house to build a 59 Zumthor, Peter. “Thinking Architecture.” 9 as quoted in oase #91, 2013, 93.
60 Nys, D. La Notion De Temps. Institut De Philosophie, 1925, 7.
61 Bergson, Henri, et al. Essays over Bewustzijn En Verandering. ISVW Uitgevers, 2016, 11.
30. Gordon Matta-Clark, Conical intersect, la galería de Arte y Arquitectura: Building Cuts 1975.
new constellation inside an existing construction; rooms don’t seem to connect, some are on display elsewhere. When in Das Haus UR one loses the idea of direction, situation and time. The work is much more personal than Matta-Clark’s; the house belonged to his parents before he started working on it at age 16.62 Although the interior is fairly
com-monplace, it changes from room to room. The past is being renovated, much more than that Schneider works on the actual
interi-or, he works on the perception of time in an atmospheric sense. By changing the location and the sensory experience of rooms in the house, by turning and insulating the spaces the interior becomes different from what is expected from the outside. The rooms are in no way only architectural arte-facts they are full of personal items or references to perso-nal habits. Some of the items have their origin in an age long ago like in a time capsule, for instance the cast iron heaters that refer to the past times lived inside the house. It shows Schneider’s approach of time through material, creates an atmosphere that can only be perceived during a visit.63
Rachel Whiteread has a similar approach of time through the material she uses in the casts she produces, the drying takes time and the resin needs to be built op slowly, otherwise it might explode.64 So the work
itself is a time cell; the casting of products and spaces puts their deve-lopment to a halt. Within the cast everything has stopped and can no longer be touched. This aspect seems similar to the one in Das Haus UR. However there, and although the façade is still original, the interior changed and continues to change in the hands of Schneider. Schneider suggests a standstill in the work, however the house is constantly mo-ving on the inside, sometimes literally, like the coffee room that’s slowly turning.
For all three artists time seems to be a determining factor in the per-ception of the work. Not only because of the changing (Schneider), the detaining (Whiteread) or the sensory (Matta-Clark), but also as time based memories for the visitors in their photographic archive of holiday pictures or super 8 films from their youth. Everybody has me-mories stored in their visual memory archive of the brain popping up when looking at images in visual encounters like art exhibitions. And although that is not the goal of an artist, it is what happens; one image provokes another, connects to a story and from there an avalanche of images and stories appear in the mind’s eye. As Matta-Clark- and Whi-teheads’ works are mostly dismantled now and are only to be seen in photographs or films, looking at the documentation is a visit into the past of the work. All three make use of older houses. Some are dere-lict, vacant and ‘object to be destroyed’, as Pamela Lee’s book on Mat-ta-Clark is aptly called, some old but still in use, Gregor Schneider’s das Haus UR and in Whiteheads’ case, some specially built spaces from old materials to make a cast.65 These materials show the passing of time, 62 Schneider, Gregor. “Gregor Schneider.” Gregor Schneider, gregorschneider.de/.
63 Böhme, Gernot. “Atmosphere as Mindfull Physical Presence in Space.” Oase, #91, 2013, 21. 64 Mullins, Charlotte, and Rachel Whiteread, RW – Rachel Whiteread. Tate Publishing. 65 Lee, Pamela M. Object to Be Destroyed: the Work of Gordon Matta-Clark.
31. Gregor Schneider, das Totes Haus UR, Coffee room, Rheydt 1993.
due to the physical recognition or the non-recognition of a younger audience. In the work Untitled (Yellow Bed, Two Parts) Whiteread shows time and specifically the passing of time through colour and history. Although the cast of the bed arrests the object at the moment of the casting, the perception of the colour and its association pushes it into the past. It has an obvious relation to all sorts of memories and history. Whiteheads’ approach captivates history in the object; hence the future can only come from associations as a natural process. As time in her casts is on hold the forms can’t grow further, only in the minds of the visitors they can. For Schneider however, the disturbance of time and space seems to be a key part of his work.66 He carefully constructs,
or recreates a new version of the past. The way time passes through his hands through past belongings and through re-creation of ‘old’ rooms with future memories of the visitors, Schneider seems to create a tunnel in time. The objects in the room are part of the room, but also part of a life lived in the house before and being lived at present. The rooms being rebuilt again and again places them in past and
futu-re at the same time, details afutu-re old and new and the materials behind the walls that were there when the house was originally built are not knowingly part of the room in its new state. Matta-Clark’s work on the other hand seems to have become an anachronism. But although no longer existent, it continues to live on in the minds of so many. It keeps reoccurring in theoretical approaches of both architecture and art and has become a see-through hole itself.
Matta-Clark’s work is still an inspiration for young architects and artists, Schneider’s work relates to memories from personal pasts and pre-sents for the visitors in his work and in Whiteheads’ work the audience stand in a time wonderland, stuck in the concrete of the casted forms on display.
3.3.2 Disturbed memories
Memory, like liberty, is a fragile thing 67
During my research into the work of the artists above I realised that for all three their passion came from their past. Memory based passion of-ten creates the subconscious need for certain choices in life or career. In time that passion and need merge into memories. Often memories concern objects, be they small or big mostly in combination with a mo-ment in life. And even though these memories seem vivid, they are ne-ver true.68 Or at least they are different than the original. At one point
in time everybody has had memory playing tricks on them. For me, I remember a vacation in the south of France. We were at the beach in St Pierre sur Mer, France and every day we would be at the seaside. My most cherished object was a huge rock half in the sea and half on the 66 Kittelmann, Udo. Gregor Schneider: Totes Haus Ur.
67 “How Reliable Is Your Memory?” Elizabeth Loftus:. N.p., n.d. Web. 30 Apr. 2016.
68 PRI. “Studio 360 Live: Daniela Schiller on Memory.” YouTube. YouTube, 17 Jan. 2013. Web. 30 Apr. 2016, 5:15/12:05. 32. Rachel Whiteread, Untitled (Yellow Bed, Two Parts), Collection of Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden 1991
beach. My brother and I discovered new worlds, and we played a lot of, in our minds at the time, daring games. When I came back 20 years later however, the rock had shrunk into a very small pebble, where the huge cliff like holes from way back when were now sweet puddles with shells and small fishes. When I collect pebbles and shells I now think of that huge rock and I realise everything changes. The smallest items can become big, the largest become small and some become some-thing completely different from the original. Memory is a moving and changing concept and artists use that possibility in their work. The work creates a new agency of the materials and objects used, and thus a new memory. Any detail can be of importance when work is being created. It all forms a melting pot of ideas for future works. The smallest ide-as derive from hidden memories, often triggered by objects, sounds, materials, etc. This can happen at random, but certainly when looking at art. It is one of the reasons why it is complicated to assess art in an objective way. When creating art artists make use of that same mecha-nism. Their initial ideas are often derived from their history this subject is then objectified by transformation. For all three artists discussed here their personal history plays an important role in their work. Matta-Clark takes distances himself from his initial study as an architect; he then uses that distance by creating the notion of anarchitecture to come to life69. Schneider uses his personal past to create movement through
time in one place. During the on-going building process he moves time so the future is already there while the past is still leaving. Whiteread’s casts document the history of the object up to that moment.70 The old
measure of time is stuck, and changes in the new that continues for-wards. Contrary to minimalist and formalist artists the work breathes the history of the 3 artists. Although the work is not a subjective nar-rative, by choosing to show details from past lives of the objects, the work’s atmosphere becomes personal and hard to perceive objectively. Just like in architecture the quality of a space or place is not merely a visual perceptual quality.71The chosen objects are often common and
private and thus subjective, not only for the artist, but also in the way it relates to the memory of the visitor. A more scientific and cerebral ap-proach tries to banish the subjective, but it is impossible to remove the connection between the ordinary and the personal, and that struggle in art creates the playing field for artists.
History is an important concept in Whiteread’s work. In the casts she makes the past is captured with tangible details.72 In work untitled
(floor) that was made by taking a cast of a wooden floor, the surface
of each slab features a wood-grain pattern which shoe signs of wear. In many other works details are still visible of the former life the objects had. Colours are transferred into the casts of matrasses and bathtubs, tiny hairs from wooden panels and indentations in floor slabs or floor-boards. The work captures history. Gregor Schneider on the other hand seems to want to get rid of the memory, by creating new memories in newly formed rooms. He hides the memories in the space between 69 Lee, Pamela M. Object to Be Destroyed: the Work of Gordon Matta-Clark.
70 Mullins, Charlotte, and Rachel Whiteread, RW – Rachel Whiteread. Tate Publishing. 71 Havik, Klaske, Sfeer Bouwen = Building Atmosphere, 5.
the original walls and the newly built ones. In this space the memories will stand still and in a process that looks like fermenting, they will turn into history. Memory is a living process, in fact as soon as we think of a memory it is already false. No memory can be considered true; it is always on the move, changing with new information.73 History is a still
pool of stranded and sometimes forgotten memories and stories. Be-tween the walls in das Haus UR the memories of the former life are no longer part of the new house. Together with the artwork they are awai-ting their fate. While the visitors walk through the newly constructed interior there is a whole world waiting to be used between the walls. In das Haus UR the history of the house occurs sometimes when a visitor looks through a window, expecting to find a view to the outside street, but finds a wall of the original house instead.74 The suggestive details
of some rooms change a visit to the work of Schneider into a question: is this his history, or is my memory playing tricks? These details make the work feel specifically uncanny, because the visitor becomes part of the work. Much like the work of writers like Edgar Allan Poe, or the films by Hitchcock, the place suggests more than it actually shows, and these suggestions play a role in the uncanny atmosphere of the work. Nor-mally a visit to a museum or gallery keeps the visitor at a distance of the inner motivation of the artist. Works you can enter already demand a certain commitment and guts, because of the personal world of the artist you enter. Matta-Clark lifts this to an even higher level by making it physically daring to walk around in his altered structures. The public has to trust the artist to being able to surrender to the building. Going back to these works and experiences in your mind it produces an affect with hindsight. These are the kinds of works that grab you and will ne-ver let you go, as they become part of your personal history.
3.3.3 Perceptive disturbance, what you see, is what you get?
An important part of the way we look and interpret the house as sur-rounding space is the atmosphere.
The spatial shape of architecture is not merely a matter of what you see, but is rather experienced in and by the body, as if it were realised internally.75 A house is a complicated concept and everybody perceives in a
diffe-rent way: a project developer sees the economical value, an architect has a specific design in mind, a cleaner sees the impossibilities to get into the tiniest corners and remotest heights, an interior decorator spot the possibilities to fill the house, a dweller uses it, makes it part of fa-mily life and finally an artist gets inspired by a house or even develops it into an artwork. These different perceptions depend on different ap-proaches of the concept ‘house’ and they all depend on its applicati-on. Initially the way we look at a house is rather straightforward, due to the basic building elements. What we see is obvious: 4 walls, a roof windows and a door. For looking at a home the same mechanism ap-pears: doors, windows, walls, chairs, tables, walls and floor with
cove-73 PRI. “Studio 360 Live: Daniela Schiller on Memory.” YouTube. YouTube, 17 Jan. 2013. Web. 30 Apr. 2016. 5:15/12:05. 74 Kittelmann, Udo, Gregor Schneider: Totes Haus Ur.
ring and a lot of trinkets. However to really undergo a space it is ne-cessary to be in or around the place, just as it is a requirement to move around and measure an installation or sculpture, to measure the work against its measurement and thus to create an embodied and mental memory.76 The recollection of a place from the registration on tape, film
or in books can induce a memory, the embodied experience can only happen in the vicinity of the object. Only that experience can produce a true mental memory when relived in a photographic image. In this time of digitalization and easy registration it is highly likely that me-mory already comes from a recorded image and is thus in a way fal-se. Magritte’s ‘ceci n’est pas une pipe’ is still as poignant as
ever. Experiencing life art is different. The material plays a role, but even more so the situation the work is exhibited in. The atmosphere surrounding the work plays an important role in the way the work will be perceived. The difference in venue and thus in atmosphere will determine the way the work is looked at and received. The choices of venue are important for its perception; even a ‘white cube’ produces an atmospheric experience. Especially site-specific works need that chosen space, as they are made with the inten-tion to be in that spot. So when Whiteread created the
Ho-locaust memorial in Vienna, a place specifically chosen, she stood her ground when the city council decided to place it somewhere else, and eventually the work was placed in the anticipated location.77
So then what is the difference between a house and an art-house when we investigate a house that becomes art? Is our gaze different because we know we look at an artwork, can the work be seen as something else than as the artwork it is now? Has the essence of the house it used to be changed? Even though Matta-Clark approaches his work
with an architectural background, the result is an artwork. Gregor Schneider may rebuild his home over and over again, however from the moment he started reconstruc-ting the rooms, the house can never be anything else than a work of art. Whiteheads’ approach triggers a new way of looking at a house. Her casts make it possible to see a house inside out. Still it is an impossible endeavour to realise such a construction in the mind’s eye. We are able to see when a sweater is inside out socks worn inside out are common-place. However the structure of a house is, even when it is visibly the negative of itself, hard to conceive as inside out. As the house is seen in its basic architectural form, it is dif-ficult to dissociate oneself from that original examination of the object. Even though the work shows the inside out, the basic structure has still the familiar shape of a house. The question if it can be possible to look at a house/home the other way around as an artwork, emerges. An experien-ce with the ‘Groene Kathedraal’ by Marines Boezem shows that it is possible to see ordinary objects as an artwork. Boe-zem created an exact copy of the cathedral of Reims’s floor
76 Racz, Imogen. Art and the Home: Comfort, Alienation and the Everyday. I.B. Tauris, 2015, 7. 77 Mullins, Charlotte, and Rachel Whiteread, RW – Rachel Whiteread. Tate Publishing, 87.
33. Whiteread, Holocaust Memorial, Juden-platz Vienna, 2000
34. Marinus Boezem, de Groene Kathedraal, Almere, 1987 - 1996
35. Marinus Boezem, de Groene Kathedraal, Almere, 1987 - 1996
