between inside and out

porosity and the appropriation of urban space

By Kelly Warman
London, 2002
Plates............................ 3

Acknowledgements....... 4

Introduction....................5

Part One City Disturbance

1. Interpenetrative Practice 10

2. Porous Practice 13

3. Spectating the Everyman 16

4. Aimless Aim 19

5. Diverting Production 23

6. Intoxication or Revolution? 25

Part Two Architectural Mayhem

7. Reclaiming the House 30

8. Double Binding Dialectics 33

9. Homely Protest? 35

10. Opening a State of Enclosure 37

11. Passively Active 40

Part Three In Conclusion

12. Situating the Individual 45

13. Who’s Choice? 46

Bibliography 48

2
Plates

1. Teching Hsieh walking during Outdoor Piece. http://www.one-

year-performance.com/intro.html

2. Francis Alys walking through the gardens of the Casa de

Serralves. http://www.euronet.nl/users/kazil/advart02.html

3. Francis Alys, ibid.

4. Rachel Whiteread’s House.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/arts/news_comment/artistsinprofile/w
hiteread.shtml

5. Gordon Matta-Clark’s Splitting.

http://www.ku.edu/~sma/smahome/collection/pmattaclarkl.htm

6. Rachel Whiteread’s House, ibid.

7. Gordon Matta-Clark’s Splitting, from inside, ibid.

3
Acknowledgments

For informing me of Tehching Hsieh and his elusive one year

projects I would like to thank Roddy Hunter and his lecture series in

the first year of my degree. To Roger Bourke for his intensive

tutorial sessions on my practice, which poses the equivelent

questions but within the realms of practice. To Dell Olsen for her

continued unpicking/unpacking of inside and outside throughout the

writing of the paper. To Steven Eastwood for his unrelentless

support both theoretically and emotionally, in his ability to spot a

needle in haystack of words. I would also like to thank Merhan

Nasseri who has been living in Charles De Gaulle airport for eleven

years, for showing me that the inventive appropriation of public

space amplifies the unheard shout.

4
Introduction

“ The days of society are numbered; its reasons and its merits have weighed in the balance and

found wanting; its inhabitants are divided into two parties, one of which wants this society to

disappear.” Guy Debord1

The divides of social space into demarcated categories of

experience, such as public/private, production/consumption,

labour/leisure that are sanctioned by the state, are the terrain of a

multitude of creative and inventive appropriational acts by the

individual. This appropriation is characterised by the realms of

everyday doing and by the realms of culture. The totality of these

fixed divides occupies monumental status within western society

but as a result of this the individual will always seek the dissolution

of these binaries. Here I set out to retrieve the singularity of

appropriation that challenges the totality of a system which actually

mutilates the idea of individuality. So I ask these questions once

some examples of the latter have been established: Is the framing of

creative appropriation only bound to the realms of culture, to artistic

practice? Or is this frame temporal, shifting between the realms of

culture and the realms of everyday doing?

1
Debord, Guy The Society of the Spectacle trans. Michel Prigent and Lucy Forsyth (London: Chronos
Publications 1979) p. 23

5
The first section of this paper looks at, primarily, two areas of urban

space appropriation, the one of the artist and the one of the non-

artist. By appropriation I mean, to claim, to take something from it’s

original context and to make it ones own, to usurp. This can be

carried out ideologically or physically. The two artists I will

concentrate on in relation to this appropriation are Tehching Hsieh

and Francis Alys, both of whom have walked the city within their

practice. The non-artists are the Neapolitans Walter Benjamin

describes in his essay on Naples and the homeless people on the

streets of New York where Hsieh walked during his work.

Through Tehching Hsieh’s work, specifically One Year Outdoor

Piece, (where the artist spent an entire year outside) I will ask the

question: where does artistic practice stop and everyday life begin?

I will explore this ambiguity of actions, of social position, of

motivation and lastly of intent. I will examine the bleed between

non-artist and artist using Walter Benjamin’s notion of porosity

which is first used in his essay on Naples. This notion of porosity

will also allow me to compare the artist’s appropriation of the city

with the Neapolitans and the Homeless. I will discuss the latter

varying economical, political and social motivations for doing so.

I will look briefly at Karl Marx to frame and expand upon the divides

which take place within social space, those of public and private,

labour and leisure, production and consumption. Once these divides

6
are established it will enable me to apply Benjamin’s porosity to the

bleed that occurs between these binaries.

The second of the two artists is Francis Alys. Without specifically

focussing upon one particular piece I will explore the methodology

he employs to create work, a method which largely consists of

walking the city streets. I will propose that Alys challenges the

dialectic of production and consumption. To do this I will investigate

the nineteenth century figure of the flaneur, establishing his modes

of production and consumption. In placing these two together - that

of the flaneur and Alys - I will then introduce the Situationist

Internationale to discuss modernist revolutionary ideas on urban

space appropriation .

The second section of the paper will look at another two artists who

have used structure to appropriate social space, Rachel Whiteread

and Gordon Matta-Clark. I will be specifically concentrating on

Whiteread’s House, where the artist cast the inside of an derelict

house and Matta-Clarke’s Splitting, where he cut an entire

abandoned house in half. I will look at whether House extends this

notion of porosity into the realms of the physical structure, briefly

drawing upon Gaston Bachelard’s metaphysical investigation into

the division of inside and outside to also look at the uncanny

reading of House.

7
I will look at how Matta-Clarke challenges the constructs of

architectural structure by desecrating it and how he interrogates the

remit of urban renewal by recycling and re-using buildings. I will use

Michel de Certeau’s application of the greek work metis (ways of

operating) to talk through Matta-Clark's tactical reclamation of urban

architecture.

8
Part One City Disturbance

9
1. Interpenetrative Practice

“Our era is fundamentally characterised by the lagging of revolutionary political action behind the

development of modern possibilities of production which call for a superior organisation of the world.”

Guy Debord2

In 1978, Taiwanese artist Tehching Hsieh illegally emigrated from

Taiwan to America. Nine years later in 1987, artist Francis Alys

emigrated from Belgium to Mexico. Each independently made work

in their new found homes and both challenged the assumptions of

artistic practice and production whilst culturally displaced. Equally,

they interrogated the boundaries of everyday ‘doing’ by employing

the methodology of simplicity. In bringing these two artists together,

this paper seeks to answer some important questions regarding the

interpenetration between artistic practice and everyday life. For

both practitioners this interpenetration occurs whilst walking the

city. Both subvert an ordinary daily routine by appropriating the

street. Each one intrudes upon capitalist notion of constructed

binary divides of social space, such as labour and leisure, public

and private, production and consumption. Tehching Hsieh in

particular critiques the prefabricated and totalitarian systems that

impose organised living space by denying their necessity.

2
ed. Charles Harrison and Paul Wood ‘ Guy Debord Writings from the Situationist Internationa:Art and
Modern Life’ Art in Theory: 1900 - 1990 An Anthology of Changing Ideas (USA: Blackwell 1993) pp. 693-
700

10
 In 1981, shortly after he emigrated, Hsieh started his one year long

work informally known as Outdoor Piece, on the streets of Lower

Manhattan, New York. This was one in a series of one year pieces

that stretched from 1978 to 1986. Outdoor Piece involved the

simple itinerary of staying outside for one year, during which time

he was not allowed to step foot inside any type of roofed

installation or structure. All of Hsieh’s one year works have involved

a set of rationales that he must adhere to. In his first know

informally as Cage Piece, Hsieh spent an entire year locked in a

cage in his home, he documented this work by marking the wall

inside the cage and taking a photo of himself everyday. Although

very particular in their constraints Hsieh never explicitly states the

rationales for the works, he presents questions without answers.

The documenting of each piece is specific to the nature of the

situation he places himself in, for Outdoor Piece he recorded where

he ate and slept on a map and also mark where he had walked. This

work presents a particular ambiguity regarding the role and social

position of the artist. The differentiation between artist and

everyman - assumed to be obligatory within common practice - is

less distinct. This manifests itself in basic questions one asks when

addressing the work, such as: where did he sleep? Did he fulfil the

task at hand? How did he manage to acquire food? Did he see

11
friends? These simple questions refer to the context of the

everyday (the daily) and are typically asked when addressing the

situation of a homeless person. To expand upon these initial

enquires into the dialectic of everyday subversion I am going to

refer, throughout, to the notion of ‘porosity’, a term which was

coined by Walter Benjamin in his critique of Naples, Italy in 1924.

Benjamin uses the term porosity as a way of framing his perceptual

experience of the social and architectural space of Naples, although

porosity also occurs in the Neapolitans own experience and

utilisation of their city. During this paper I will refer to both the latter

and the former experience of this phenomenon.

1. Tehching Hsieh walking during Outdoor Piece.

12
2. Porous Practice

Porosity is the point of interface between two binaries, where the

two demarcated positions exchange and become porous. The

porosity occurs in Naples during the shift between delineated

architectural structure and it’s interchange with social space. This

results in an acute level of interpenetration between one thing and

the next. It is no longer clear where one building is in the stages of

dilapidation and the next is in progress. Buildings are also

simultaneously animated into the popular theatre, as Neapolitan

street life demands a passion for improvisation. The home too,

rather than being the unit of private affairs, spills onto the streets,

intermingling with the market place:

“As porous is this stone is the architecture. Building and action interpenetrate in the courtyards,

arcades and stairways.... Poverty has brought about a stretching of frontiers that mirrors the most

radiant freedom of thought. There is no hour, often no place, for sleeping and eating.”3

It is important to note that the porosity in Naples had come about

through intense levels of poverty, where social and architectural

space was utilised for improvisation and opportunity. Every building

and public space was appropriated for monetary purposes; nothing

could avoid this prospect of financial gain. Benjamin’s account of

3
Benjamin, Walter ‘Naples’ One Way Street and Other Writings (london and New York: Verso 1979) pp.
167-176

13
Naples poetically describes how any superfluous space or time must

be used at all costs to acquire the money to live. Swindling and

wretchedness of poverty reaches new heights in what he calls ‘a

playful love of trade’: marketing ones own home, renting out ones

own bed, selling music, toys, ice cream, cigarettes, toothpaste etc.

Applying this perceptive and experiential framework of porosity to

Outdoor Piece, it becomes clear that the interchange does not only

occur through Hsieh’s ambiguous actions but also through his social

and economic standing as an artist. The Neapolitans appropriated

their social and architectural space from necessity, a person forced

into the position of homelessness also does the same through

impoverishment. Is porosity born from the economical need to

appropriate ones environment? If so does Outdoor Piece comment

upon this need? Homelessness forces a person into the position

where they must condition their environment for functional purposes,

removing places and things from their original context and

manipulating them, for example, turning doorways into beds, using

cardboard boxes for blankets, claiming dry sheltered public places

as ones own. Although increasingly based on speculation, Hsieh’s

position logically would have been much the same, appropriating the

urban space. During the work Hsieh was arrested by the police for

vagrancy. Braking all of his stipulations he was pulled indoors into a

police cell and detained for 15 hours. The public walking the streets

14
of New York were not aware of Outdoor Piece. Here the role of the

artist providing critique as observer no longer exists (or is at least

invisible) within the realms of culture, but rather the artist is drawn

into a participatory role, within which their work and practice is

implicated in the realms of ‘doing’ and ‘everyday living’. In this

circumstance the fields of culture loose distinction from the daily

struggles of life and are not clear or autonomous in definition. An

‘in-between’ space that works co-dependently arises, a space within

which porosity transpires. Outdoor Piece specifically challenges the

constructs of non-contextual, gallery based, artistic practice and

production. If during a piece of work the artist is as liable for arrest

as a public member the distinction determining the moment of

artistic practice is equivocal. It is problematic to say that once Hsieh

enters a roofed structure he is no longer making the work, as the

constructs which were openly critiqued in Outdoor Piece were

adhered to, thus rendering the work questionable.

15
3. Spectating the Everyman

Hsieh had, one presumes, artistic intention - to produce a work

questioning the value of architectural structure and challenging

(predominately western) society's presupposition of organised living.

He therefore, logically, had a function, a purpose which is born from

critique, motivating his homelessness. What function or critique do

the normally homeless have from the perspective of the system and

society which is built on capital? One cannot merely reduce people

to the lowest common denominator of function and non-function, but

if Hsieh is differentiated in any way by this system then it is possibly

on these grounds, simplistic or otherwise. On a comparable level the

Neapolitans usurpation was based on spatial anarchy, made

possible through the lack of established capitalist state bifurcation.

Seizing the opportunity for intervention they partook in a ‘joyful play’

of labour, existing in both the areas of leisure and labour, a creative

and inventive necessity, a continuum on a daily basis. Outdoor

Piece was Hsieh’s everyday but for only one year. This integral

factor of allocated time on a rudimentary level is the distinguishing

element between the three examples: the Neapolitans, Hsieh and

the homeless. Conceivably, Hsieh was making a political

commentary upon a situation where the homeless are not afforded

choice. By allocating himself the choice to be homeless, he

16
becomes a representative which thus creates a status (through

stipulation) to show preference where others cannot. Does this

reading of the work engender Hsieh with the prestige of a social

hero, the one amongst many or a member of the intelligent minority

who comments upon the anonymous mass of the everyman? The

notion of everyman is often proclaimed within literature as a

representative, but of the mass, the general public. The notion of

the everyman is subject to collective generalisation, a body

generically referred to as the other, which is contrasted with the

individual, the one. This is examined in Michel de Certeau’s writings

in The Practice of Everyday Life, he addresses the idea of everyman

as nobody:

“...he is trapped in common fate. Called Everyman (a name that betrays the absence of a name),

this anti-hero is thus also Nobody, Nemo, just as the French Chacun becomes Personne, or the

German Jedermann Niemand. He is always the other, without his own responsibilities or particular

properties...”4

The anonymous everyman is used as a metaphor for the concept of

the puerile majority, denying the written public the opportunity to be

individualised within their own properties. Perhaps Benjamin’s

observations in terms of the everyman were limited by an idealised

4
de Certeau, Michel ‘Part 1, A Very Ordinary Culture’ ‘Chapter 1, A Common Place: Ordinary Language’
The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press 1984) pp. 1-5

17
and romanticised perspective of poverty amongst the public of

Naples. Poetically and lyrically Benjamin critiques from the confines

of spectatorship (and class), culturally observing the streets,

watching and translating the wretchedness and deprivation of a

people that were not supported financially, politically or

economically. John Urry, analysing Benjamin as speculative reader

of the city, points out in his book Consuming Places that reading:

“its not a matter of intellectual observation but rather a reading that involves ones fantasy, dreams

and wish-processes.’”5

Benjamin’s readings were therefore a combination of sub-conscious

and conscious perception. Reading is as much concerned with what

you’re observing as it is what you bring to the observation according

to both Benjamin and Urry’s analysis. The city then acts as a

receptacle of these projections. Urry would appear to interpret

reading as common practice for all, an activity frequently indulged in

by the everyman. It would rationally transpire that individuals

partake in their own critique of the city, by projecting their own sub-

conscious onto the city and therefore reading it. Thus the activity is

not only available for the intellectual minority of writers, artists and

thinkers.

5
Urry, John, Consuming Places ( London: Routledge 1995)

18
4. Aimless Aim

In choosing to be homeless Hsieh calls to mind the C19th figure of

the flaneur. For Benjamin. The flaneur (limitedly gendered male

through extensive previous literature 6 ) is the subject of Benjamin’s

scrutiny and of investigation in his unfinished collection Passenger-

werk (Arcades Project). Benjamin notes the flaneur’s capability to be

the original detective of the streets, deriving pleasure through

navigation. The flaneur does not follow obligatory rules, he walks

the city in a distracted and unpremeditated way. Flanerie is by it’s

very nature inventive - what de Certeau calls ‘the art of doing’ 7 .

This interrupts the choreographed routine flow of people, between

shops, to and from work motivated in commanding a purpose. The

Flaneur has no direction, no intention, he ascertains intent through

the act of walking itself.

6
For the purposes of this paper this issue of the gender of the flaneur and the gender of space is not
challenged. However, Pierre Bourdieu points out in the Kabyle House or The World Reversed [1970] : “It is
understandable that all biological activities sleeping, eating, procreating, should be banished from the
external universe and confined to the house, the sanctuary of privacy and secrets of nature, the world of
woman, who is assigned to the management of nature and excluded from public life. In contrast to man’s
work, which is performed outdoors.” He states that within this fixed divide of social space, the hidden of the
house, the private realm is the concealed sector of society, the female interiority of the domestic. The notion
of the flaneur has been investigated, applied and expanded upon across the span of the C20th. He has
been subjected to a reworking and updating beyond his original conception in the C19th. In this paper I
specifically use the earlier model of the flaneur to discuss some of the implications of walking in the city.
During this time he was wholly of outside/public personage. The relationship with Bourdieu’s ‘male outside’
is comparable as the flaneur is the he of outside space, in the working, productive realm of the capitalist
state.
7
de Certeau, Michel ‘General Introduction’ The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley and Los Angeles:
University of California Press 1984) pp. xviii - xxii

19
“The Flaneur in the chorus of [his] idle footsteps has a feel for passages and for thresholds.....He

actually discovers and invents passages, even when he recognises them as points of rupture in the

city’s fabric"8

A Flaneur has no need to run, the leisurely pace at which he

observes the city is the depiction of his leisurely posture, his time is

superfluously inessential. Comparatively different from that of the

Neapolitans, he observes the streets and is thus more associated

with Benjamin's position as a writer.

This presents an interesting dialectic regarding the matter of Hsieh

function as artist and commentator. The flaneur is a metaphorical

figure enabling discursive dialogue whilst looking at the order of

social and economic drives for critiquing the urban. He lets the

spectacle of the crowd act upon him until it is intoxicating. There is

a fetishised relationship between watching the crowd and this

intoxication. What is most interesting about the flaneur is his

autonomous and personal process, emphasising and preserving the

separateness of the individual. He chooses his fate freely treating

the city’s streets as his home, the crowd as his refuge (although the

flaneur is not in the financial or social position of needing to find

refuge in the streets). The flaneur retrieves the ‘one’ from the

8
Stavrides, Stavros Navigating the Metropolitan Space: Walking as a Form of Negotiation with Otherness
(Journal of Psychogeographical Research and Urban Research: http://www.psychogeography.co.uk ) pp 4
Stavrides, S quoting de Certeau, M The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkley: University of California Press
1984) pp. 97

20
masses by engaging in his specific spatial practice. This is

essentially entrenched in scopophilia the flaneur likes to be seen as

much as he likes to watch. In attempting to frame his role one might

say that he is a connoisseur of observation in navigating the city,

where the aimless stroll is the aim. Contestably, one could pose that

the aimless and inventive pathways of the flaneur defy the

structured rationalism of the city and also disrupt the inherent drive

of production and function, by the practice of the somewhat

purposeless (although the C19th notion of the flaneur does not

embody revolutionary ideologies, a discrepancy that perhaps

distinguishes him from Hsieh).

To reassess and essentially modify the flaneur would make his

position comparatively closer to that of the radical revolutionary. In

order to closely examine this re-definition of the flaneur I will now

return to look at the artist Francis Alys in relation to this notion.

Alys coins himself as a compulsive wanderer, in the loser/the winner

series in ‘98, he walked from one end of Stockholm to the other

wearing a bright blue woollen jumper which he snagged at the onset

of the walk, leaving a trail of blue wool behind him. This element of

the work Alys calls paseos, meaning stroll. As a part of these works

he walked dragging a little magnetic dog mounted on wheels in

Mexico City, ‘91. Then in Havana he wore magnetic shoes and

walked the working-class area of Pinheiros, Sao Paulo whilst

21
holding a punctured can of paint which marked the street behind

him. Without focusing on one specific piece I will look at Alys’

methodology as a mechanism for eliciting questions that expand on

the notion of urban space appropriation. I will also use this

mechanism to explore how Alys challenges the culture of

productivity. Alys' strolls, like the flaneur, are tactical in their

application, although they also are a way of drifting, navigating

where the navigation without clear intent becomes the intent. His

motivation is to waste time. His consistently methodological strolls

critically challenge this culture of productivity by denying

productivity, therefore subverting the production/consumption

dialectic. Alys’ strolls propose a particular question which comments

upon society’s imposed order and how society rewards beneficial

and worthwhile activity: it is expected of the artist to produce to

have a significant function in society through production. Strolling by

its very nature halts forms of capitalist production and labour by the

individual, an activity customarily confined to the designated times

of leisure. By employing an ordinarily leisure based activity, Alys

interrogates the delineated composite of recreational time that is

only measured in comparison to labour time. In removing what is

expected of the artist he interrogates the very sum of that

expectation. To understand these concepts more clearly it is useful

22
to briefly look at Marx’s social philosophy on the fundamental

conditions of capitalist production.

2. Francis Alys walking through the gardens of

the Casa de Serralves.

5. Diverting Production

Marx stated that capitalist production is separated into two areas,

on the one hand the owners of money who have the means of

production and therefore the means of subsistence. On the other,

free labourers; the sellers of their own labour, which Marx terms as

labour-power. The owners of production buy the labourers labour-

power, therefore the capitalist owns not only the product of

production but also the labourer her/himself. The organisation of

labour-power, Marx states, is the basis of capitalist production and

therefore consumption. This organisation concentrates the means of

production into a few hands who then buy the individuals work-

power from them. In exchange for this the individual receives

livelihood but only enough to enable him/her to work and consume

what he/she produces. Integrally, Marx maintains that the structure

23
of society (whose foundations are capitalism) and the state are not

two separate things; the state is the structure of society. Therefore

the structure of (western) society is largely created upon designated

activity for designated times, this enforces the power of the state

who owns the time of it’s labours, by owning their individual labour-

power. Alys' work opens avenues for diverting this reciprocal and

cyclical relationship between the owner and the labourer by

detourning the traditional forms of artistic production through

essentially wasting time.

In 1997 Alys was invited to create a piece for the annual InSite show

who's two host cities were,Tijuana and San Diego. For the piece

Alys decided to travel from one to the other, deliberately choosing a

route which avoided crossing the boarders dividing America and

Mexico. This resulted in a world tour which took him to Mexico City,

Panama City, Santiago, Auckland, Sydney, Singapore, Bangkok,

Rangoon, Hong Kong, Shanghai, Seoul, Anchorage, Vancouver and

Los Angeles. Over thirty five days Alys stayed in contact with the

InSite curator via e-mail. Documentation of the journey was

presented as an archive open to the public in the CICUT library in

Tijuana 9 . What is most interesting about this particular piece was

that InSite essentially commissioned an all-expenses-paid world tour

for the artist. By organising this trip not only did Alys parody the

9
Basualdo, Carlos ‘Head to toes: Francis Alys’ paths of resistance.’ Artforum trans. Vincent Martin
(Artforum International Magazine, Inc. April 1999)

24
contractual relationship between the artist and the institution but he

also comments upon the ownership of the institution over the artist

by withholding the production of an artist’s commodity. The work is

in opposition to the artist who is owned and confined to the gallery.

3. Francis Alys, ibid.

6. Intoxication or Revolution?

The modernist notion of the flaneur can be up-dated through this

critique of a production and consumption dialectic. The flaneur's

fetishised relationship with the crowd is based upon watching the

crowd's own intoxicating consumption. He feels absorbed in

spectating people in their daily consumption of commodities all the

social types and within the social context. He seeks any form of

commodity circulation found in the modern marketplace. The flaneur

consumes the spectacle of the crowd, therefore this ‘image

consumption’ becomes his commodity, as Benjamin emphasises:

25
“The flaneur is someone abandoned in the crowd. In this he shares the situation of the

commodity.....The intoxication to which the flaneur surrenders is the intoxication of the commodity

around which surges the stream of customers.”10

Here, after reviewing Benjamin's quote I propose a fragmentation of

the modernist notion of the flaneur into two conflicting territories.

The origin of Alys’ anti-productivity strolls can be directly related to

flanerie, the drifter, the aimless stroller, the observer of the streets.

Without being drawn into a participatory role the flaneur defied

imposed notions of productivity through walking the urban without

clear intent, obtaining motivation through the act of strolling itself.

The flaneur's urban practice has been embodied and expanded upon

by Hsieh and Alys but with their own addition of revolutionary

ideologies. As noted before the flaneur's aimless spectatorship

denies the inherent productivity of the capitalist society. It is here

that the fragmentation occurs, in his relationship with the society he

spectates. By abandoning himself to intoxication he thereby obeys

all modes of consumption, perpetuating the inherent drives of a

capitalist condition.

To elaborate on the notion of Hsieh and Alys' revolutionary

ideologies it is useful to look at the strategies employed by the

Situationist International, France 1957. There were twelve bulletins

10
Frisby, David ‘The flaneur in Social Theory’ The Flaneur (London and New York: Routledge 1994) pp. 82-
106, pg 86

26
issued which covered the movement’s principals; tactics for creative

and political engagement in an urban situation including the

‘spectacle’, ‘detournement’ and the ‘derive’ (which literally

translates as ‘drifting’). For the purposes of this paper I am going to

concentrate on the derive. Described by Guy Debord, one of the

movements key writers, as a tactic of “transient passage through

varied ambiences” 11. This tactic requires playful but constructive

cognisance of any psycho-geographical effects 12. The derive is the

strategic way of abandoning the rationalised incentive for walking

(of getting from a to b per se) and allowing oneself to be receptive

to chance encounters and particularities of the terrain. Alys' strolls

consistently employ this methodology to formulate work. The

ideology behind his work is parallel to that of the derive, as it uses

the notion of ‘drifting’ as a productive mechanism for commentary.

The SI devised a series of tactical ways to reveal capitalist society’s

empty form of productivity. The movement strove to shift the

meaning of productivity to that of inventive radicalism, within which

modern society is revolutionised by collectively critiquing

totalitarianism. Debord noted that capitalist society is without

11
SI 1958 ‘Definitions’ The Situationist International Text Library trans. a.h.s. boy
http://library.nothingness.org/articles/SI/en/display/7
12
Psychogeography can be explained as the perusal of precise effects on the mood and behaviour of an
individual from geographical sites. This takes place whilst on a derive in attempting to articulate the
experience of the city/urban through the noting it’s psychogeography. One gives attention to the
psychogeography of passageways, exit points, entry points whilst walking the city, which may determine a
course of action. Experimental derives are done without the aid of maps, photographs or charts, but can rely
purely on the element of chance. The derive is described from the table of definitions drawn by the SI in
1958 as: “Derive: An experimental mode of behaviour linked to the conditions of urban society: a technique
for hastily passing through varied environments. Also used, more particularly, to designate the duration of a
prolonged exercise of such an experiment.” (ibid.)

27
culture, he stated that all meaning is channelled into leisure and

recreational activities, transferring all modalities of pleasure and

meaning into the system of consumption. For this reason economic

poverty is not the only poverty in a capitalist society to affect a

community . Debord proposed that through the lack of productive

revolutionary politics and artistic intervention society is culturally

destitute. The primary focus of the SI was to claim back the urban

streets, to re-demarcate and re-delineate. They embodied romantic

revolutionary ideologies that sought to cut through the rationalism of

the modern urban space. Although Alys’ strolls are of a more cynical

nature, methodologically they adopt some of these tactics, but their

motivation and critique is fragmented. Alys strolls are parodic in

their critique. They do not adopt the intoxicating consumption of the

flaneur, yet they do not strive for revolutionary modernist utopia

either. Alys’ strolls sit in-between these motivations, they inventively

challenge but are also sardonically aimless.

28
Part Two Architectural Mayhem

29
7. Reclaiming the House

“The outside is a peculiar place, both paradoxical and perverse. It is paradoxical insofar as it can only

ever make sense, have a place, in reference to what it is not and never be---an inside, a within, an

interior.” --- Elizabeth Grosz13

On November 23rd 1993 two decisions were made, one, that British

artist Rachel Whiteread would win the Turner Prize, and two, the

work that helped her win it would be demolished. House,

Whiteread’s only (to date) public work, was completed on October

the 25th 1993, one year later in January ‘94 it was taken down at

the order of Bow Neighbourhood Council. The condemned victorian

terraced house of 193 Grove road Bow, East London, was the last of

it’s kind, either side the other houses had long since gone.

Whiteread obtained a short hold lease on the abandoned property

and proceeded to clear it out and cast the inside of it with concrete,

knocking down the exterior house walls, to reveal the bleak, grey

concrete structure underneath. In September 1974, American artist

Gordon Matta-Clark sliced a condemned suburban family house on

322 Humphrey Street in half. Splitting was one in a series of

interventions produced under the title of Cuttings that Matta-Clark

made during the period of 1971 to 1976. The house, still containing

13
Grosz, Elizabeth ‘Introduction’ Architecture from the Outside: Essays on Virtual and Real Space (USA:
MIT Press 2001) pp xvi

30
the detritus from it’s previous owners, was cut in half - a one inch

slice passed though every structural surface inside and outside. Half

of the split house was then bevelled down to extend the one inch

slice further, the four top corners of the structure where then

removed, exposing a fraction of the inside. Then in September,

1974, the house was demolished and removed. On a comparative

level both pieces of work operate in an apparently similar way: two

condemned houses, two artists re-using with a result that

discursively transforms the structure. Both are challenging the remit

of architecture by defamiliarizing the ‘house’, both mutate a fixed

and definable structure. But within these obviously parallel

discourses and methods,are revealed, political points of rupture that

I would like to discuss.

4. Rachel Whiteread’s House 5. Gordon Matta-Clark ‘s Splitting

Whiteread’s house on 193 Grove rd, was cleared of all it’s

belongings: carpets, left over furniture etc. Fittings were removed so

as the casting could prevail. A team of builders secured the house

from within so as they could begin spraying the inside walls with

concrete. They sprayed layer upon layer until the concrete was

31
stable enough to hold itself. The outside walls were then removed

and House stood upright. Commissioned by Artangel funding body

and Beck’s beer, this was Whiteread’s only public work to date. All

that is left of House now is the extensive photographic and video

diary documentation. During it’s time the structure caused great

controversy and debate, attracting much attention from the media as

well as the local community. House addresses similar issues that

were discussed in section one, such as the challenge of binary

divides of public and private space. Although, does House actually

seek to interpenetrate this divide, does it appropriate the

architectural structure, is it another extension of this notion of

porosity?

6. House

32
House was a solid edifice, a definable concrete building, which from

a distance appeared as any other typical victorian terraced house.

House stimulated a feeling of existential claustrophobia, of viewing,

simultaneously, the inside and the outside, where the public and

private shockingly coincide. Embedded within it’s concrete

bleakness were small domestic details, subtle patterns that unveiled

themselves lifted from the wallpaper of it’s past occupants. The work

was a closed form that was impenetrable, standing on the edge of

Victoria Park, a solidified memorial to what was once there, a

petrified past existing in the present. Many writing about and

viewing House have talked of having an uncanny experience of it.

Discussing the experience of uncanny will enable me to answer the

questionable element of House’s porosity and also establish this

experience of claustrophobia within it.

8. Double Binding Dialectics

“The uncanny is that class of the frightening which leads back to what is known of old and long

familiar.” Sigmund Freud ‘The Uncanny’ Art and Literature 14

14
Freud, Sigmund ‘The Uncanny’ Art and Literature trans. James Strachey ed. Albert Dickson (London and
New York: Penguin 1990) pp. 339-376

33
House is a familiar building which is disruptively re-made, locking

the viewer in it’s own past. What is familiar is not only the

iconography of the house, but also it’s representation of a home, of

being at home. A familiar, comfortable and intimate environment, a

private space which is concealed. Freud deducts that what is hidden

is also unknown and secretive which constitutes the emotions of

anxiety within the uncanny. The private space can therefore be

double binding in that it is familiar but also uneasy. The literal

translation of uncanny into German is unhiemlich, which in English

translates as unhomely. Whiteread’s House renounces the homely

of a home. It subverts the generic representation of a home that is

comfortable and familiar by making it cold and impenetrable. Unlike

the porosity in Naples the private space does not interpenetrate with

the public, instead it cancels out the private space, negating the

opportunity for movement in-between both. It does not allow for

passageways to take place, to transist between places. Instead

House solidifies time, it stops all forms of flow and circulation by

filling in space. The structure depicts the cessation of any form of

progression, it seeks not only to bind outside and inside together, it

also confines and mutes space. House represents a place of

entrapment, a place of conflict. Gaston Bachelard closely looks at

the object of the ‘door’, to metaphysically and also metaphorically

discuss the entrapment inside ones own being. He notes that the

34
‘door’ simultaneously gives rise to feelings of hesitation, temptation,

desire, but embodied within it’s physical threshold also are feelings

of security and welcome. The ‘door’ is rooted in the profound

unconscious and conscious emotions of freedom but also security.

Metaphorically Bachelard proposes that the ‘door’ is the threshold

between the inside and outside of the body:

“In French, one should always think twice before speaking of l’etre-la. Entrapped in being, we shall

always have to come out of it. And then when we are hardly outside of being, we always have to go

back into it.”15

House entraps the viewer within the domestic, halting space and

time. The structure of House is not porous, the concrete is fixed and

defined, there is no space, literally, within it for negotiation.

9. Homely Protest ?

In filling-in the domestic homely space House challenges the

marketing construct of home, which is that of luxury, warmth and

comfort by defamiliarizing it. Elements of this can be seen in the

current rise of home commodities and lifestyle choices 16 . Claire

15
Bachelard, Gaston ‘The Dialectics of Outside and Inside’ The Poetics of Space (Boston: Beacon 1969) pp.
213-214
16
These Home commodities come in the increase of TV shows such as “Home Front”, “Changing Rooms”
and the consumer growth area of “Homes and Interior” magazines.

35
Doherty the curator of the ‘98 Claustrophobia exhibition at the Ikon

gallery points out:

“...Socially and economically, Britain is still coming to terms with the legacy of Thatcherism,

particularly of the impact of “right-to-buy incentives”, the shifts in domestic policy are not about to

result in a socialist embracement of anti-consumerism.”17

House denies the warmth of home, under-estimated through over

familiarity. Does House speak for those who live without the warmth

and privacy that a home can provide, the poverty stricken, the

homeless? Materially House coincides with the concrete breeze

block of the poverty ridden high rise, the grey bleakness of tower

flats, subsequently House could be read as a tangible reminder of

the steady destruction of London's affordable housing. House

challenges home as commodity, of the private space which can be

produced/consumed and the falsified notion that it is accessible to

all. Although House may appear to champion these issues formally

and materially, it is interesting to note the position of the artist in

relation to these discourses.

House is not Whiteread’s first cast, prior and post House the

objects/spaces cast were often of the things contained within the

house itself: mattresses, baths, hot water bottles. Ordinarily

17
Doherty, Claire ‘Claustrophobia: We’re not in Kansas anymore’ Claustrophobia (Birmingham: Ikon Gallery
1998) p. 11

36
exhibited within the context of the gallery (the Tate, Chisenhale,

Ikon), her work begs to ask questions of the site of memory and it’s

relationship to objects. She re-uses familiar things to uncannily

congeal spatial division, to trace the embodied past memory of an

object but more importantly to render nostalgia actual and physical

within the object of casting. House is the ultimate cast in a series of

casts that specifically look at the private, secretive and hidden

aspect of the home. Although House differs in it’s contextualisation,

in the proximity of the public space and the politics of the place it

stood. Especially the housing shortage in that area an issue which

House undoubtedly addresses but perhaps only through default.

10. Opening a State of Enclosure

Matta-Clark’s Splitting however is politically motivated but in a

diverse praxis, the split of the house is the method for opening up

passageways, by exposing the architecture's internal mechanisms.

Splitting expands on the structure whilst also politically commenting

against it. Matta-Clark works with the negative space of a building,

of what is unseen by cutting in half he creates a new space, an in-

between that is negotiable and ephemeral. He states, whilst talking

against organised living space:

37
“Buildings are fixed entities in the minds of most people. The notion of the mutable space is taboo,

especially in ones own home. People live in their space with a temerity that is frightening.”18

The simple intervention of splicing a suburban family house in half

literally sheds light on the subject of the domesticated private

cocoon. It actively challenges rationalised approaches to

architecture. Matta-Clark de/re-structures his environment, he

appropriates architectural urban space by detourning 19 its

constructs. He reveals the functions and mechanisms that physically

perpetuate the rigid divide of public/private, inside/outside,

rendering buildings no longer secretive.

7. inside Splitting

18
http://www.fat-cat.co.uk/splitart/split.html Matta-Clarke, Gordon Cutting Together: Gordon Matta-Clark
19
Detournement is another situationist terminology, which is to introduce past or present artistic production
into a superior environmental construction, often a form of propaganda which witnesses the depletion of
superiority of these constructs. see ‘Definitions’.

38
For this matter the one inch slice down the middle of the house is

converted, geographically, into a new space, an in-between space.

Elizabeth Grosz in Architecture from the Outside specifically looks

at the in-between space. Grosz notes that it is the space that ‘brings

matter into being’, without being a material itself, it is a space that

is related to other spaces but has no place of it’s own. It is without

fundamental form or nature, yet it is that which facilitates and

enables because of this fact. Grosz talks of the in-between as a

place of “fraying and of subversion, where things become undone” 20.

Matta-Clark's precise incisions through the building create not only

a conceptual in-between but also physical one. The space of the

split is the space of discursive co-dependent negotiation, which is

comparable to the notion of porosity. It is proposed by Grosz that

such negotiation cancels out binary opposites through a porous

relation to one and other, buildings become interpenetrationable.

There is relatively little documentation of Splitting, Matta-Clark’s

anti-commercial ethos was implicit within his material interventions

as it was the documenting of them. Splitting was deliberately made

to be a temporary structure, to preserve the structure would only

support the institution he was commenting against. This

premeditated method of dematerialisation was a politicised

appropriation of the redundant building. Retrieving the wasted for

20
Grosz, Elizabeth ‘In-between: The Natural in Architecture and Culture’ Architecture from the Outside:
Essays on Virtual and Real Space (USA: MIT Press 2001) p. 91

39
re-use, for re-consideration, he reclaimed the superfluous shell by

challenging the structural integrity of architecture mocking the

totalitarian severity of the ‘square box’ house:

“By undoing a building, there are many aspects of the social conditions against which I am

gesturing....to open a state of enclosure which has been pre-conditioned not only by physical

necessity but by the industry that profligates suburban and urban boxes as a context for ensuring a

passive, isolated consumer - a virtually captive audience.”21

Matta-Clark defiantly contests of the capitalist society’s notion of

urban renewal, replacing older buildings for modern buildings. He

defied the culture of consumption and wastage in recycling the lost

abandoned structure. Gesturing against the effects of mass

consumption on the individual, especially it’s controlling and

pacifying psychology. His ethos affirmed that containment induces

the deterioration of the quality of social space and therefore the

levels of creativity, intervention and of personal appropriation.

11. Passively Active

Matta-Clark took a deliberate stance of defiant anti-consumerisation,

the only option in challenging this system was to revolt against it, to

desecrate and defy in the everyday. He did not attempt to work

21
http://www.fat-cat.co.uk/splitart/split.html Matta-Clark, Gordon Cutting Together: Gordon Matta-Clark

40
within this system to detourn or subvert it (as illustrated with Alys),

he acted upon with unconventional methods. Unlike Whiteread,

Matta-Clark did not receive a commission to obtain a lease on the

property for Splitting, instead without prior permission he worked out

of sight in a covert operation. Matta-Clark adopted the Situationist

modality of inventive revolutionary, which seeks to emancipate

society from the constraints of a totalitarian state. This activity of

creatively acting against, is critiqued by de Certeau when he talks of

the Greek word metis, translated as ‘ways of operating’. De Certeau

notes that metis is tactical in character, everyday ways of operating

so as the ‘weak’ can be victorious over the ‘strong’, in using ‘clever

tricks’ or ‘hunters cunning’. Stavros Stavrides writes that metis is

the inventive competence of the everyday individual, of the greek

sailor navigating through the open sea. He observes the particular

type of intelligence required of metis:

“ This kind of wisdom, multifarious and inventive as the wisdom of an experienced navigator should

be, It is not the wisdom of philosophers, but an everyday intelligence, appropriating every means

available in order to cope with changeful situations.”22

He goes on to describe that metis intelligence should be

multifaceted, resourceful and cunning. To be as inventive as the

circumstances may demand. De Certeau talks of how consumers

22
ibid. see Stavros Stavrides

41
use metis in tactical consumption as a means of appropriating the

system from within it. What is important for de Certeau differs with

Matta-Clark, on the one hand Matta-Clark states that the

organisation of society profligates a passive consumer, on the other

de Certeau writes that what must be considered is what the

consumer makes of what they consume, what they do with it. Matta-

Clark acts against what he believes is the consumer who is purely a

receiver, the author of their environment who has been pacified into

losing their authorship over it. Whereas de Certeau agues that there

is a totalitarian framing of consumption which fails to witness the

tactical and clandestine usurpation which is only called

“consumption”. This is everyday life as practice within which one

appropriates their language, reading, cooking, dwelling. De Certeau

uses the example of La Perreque an everyday tactic of diversion,

the worker’s own work disguised as her/his employers, using the

materials or the time at work for ones own means. An opportunity

for the worker/labourer to usurp the time that has been bought from

her/him by the owner of productivity during work time. Matta-Clark's

standing on the matter of pacifying consumption varies from de

Certeau’s, the critique of the ordinary person’s active role in

emancipation from the confines of the state/system lie in polarity:

the consumer who must become active and the consumer who is

already invisibly active. Comparably, Matta-Clark adopts an

42
inventive everyday intelligence, being resourceful and clandestine in

his approach, one could say that he uses a ‘way of operating’, a

metis, within his practice. Although still remaining ideologically

outside of owner/producer/consumer dynamic to protest against it.

Can Metis therefore be applied to the practice of the Neapolitans

and the homeless or are these two examples housed within

particular extremities and are not a representative of the ‘ordinary

man’ for whom de Certeau writes?

43
Part Three In Conclusion

44
12. Situating the Individual

Through the advent of a society ordered by means of production, the

need for rational, efficient and ordered social space arose. This was

parallel to the division of social time (which followed the industrial

revolution) into designated times for working and recreation (the

Marx model of capitalist production). The physical divide of

public/private space is established through the defined and

demarcated structure of buildings, but this has also partly been

effected by the fixed model of time division. The system/state exists

in the realms of outside, of public, outside of the home, sanctioned

by the order of a political economy governed by capitalism, which

infiltrates the private of the home. The domain of the public/private

delegates social and personal duties, refereeing ones actions. This

is a rational and logical strategy which orders society by means of

the employment of personal codes of conduct, in coordinance with

the state. The totality of this system actually mutilates the idea of

individuality, so how does one situate the individual amongst this

dominant order of society? The Neapolitans proved that existing

within an economic state of poverty the individual is not denied the

inventive and innovative activity of appropriation. They hold up as a

model for tactical usurpation which is in defiance of the constructs

of society. The homeless also prove by existing without physical

home one is not bound only by the constructs of organised living

45
space. Even though their critique - which is arguably unintentional -

is not framed and therefore not heard by a system that will only

listen to a critique that exists within a cultural frame. These are a

paradoxical mass of individuals, as Benjamin proved, who show

ingenious ways of enabling the singular among the many. This

renewed status of the individual as tactical operator retrieves the

singularity of personal appropriation and as de Certeau notes also

into an individual form of tactical consumption.

13. Who’s Choice ?

By stipulating one year outdoors, Tehching Hsieh demarcated his

own space, he appropriated social space by denying it’s constraints,

by negating the need for one half of the divide (that of the

private/inside). In doing so he proclaimed himself a representative

of usurpation, also of intervention but one which was already taking

place on a daily basis, that of homelessness. The liberties of having

choice to remain homeless for one year ultimately bind the work to

the art institution, even though the work challenges it’s constraints.

By determining the point of closure, by terminating homelessness at

a particular point, Hsieh calls into question the artists role by

mimicking a situation that is an actuality for some people. Hsieh’s

set of rules may have involved a greater severity than that of a

homeless person - to never step foot inside - which invites the

46
reading that Hsieh’s intention was to be more homeless than

homeless, a position which does not necessarily challenge the art

institution but rather champions it by working with grandiose

gesture.

The point determining artistic practice is the moment at which an

individual (or society) chooses to frame their forms of appropriation

within the cultural realm. What exists outside of that frame is then

perceived within the realms of everyday doing and living. Often

individuals are not afforded this choice and this is in itself a product

of a delineated system, which those who are provided choice in turn

critique. Regardless of the choice their are similar methods of

usurpation whether one is an artist or not. What distinguishes artist

from everyman is not only framing but the motivational aspects

behind them. The derivative of this intent and also it’s framing is the

dividing line between the different forms of appropriation even

though intentionally or not their result may be the same which is the

porosity of social space and social roles. The appropriation by the

artist should not be viewed in place of the appropriation by others,

instead - by taking a situationist perspective - the responsibility lies

with everyone to actively critique and appropriate the social

dominant order, whether that lies in the tactical diversion of time, in

slicing buildings in half, in living without a roof, in wasting time, or

in filling-up empty space.

47
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