- Venue
- Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts
- Location
- East England
This is an austere portrayal of an austere building. Known as Blockhaus, the building in question is a stylish lump, a compact concrete mass with imposing elevations, rounded edges and small significant windows.
The film’s title gives little away. Knowing nothing about the artist or the location, my only prompt, without going back out into the corridor to read the accompanying leaflet and concise incisive essay by the curator of the show Adam Pugh, was the building’s name. I thought it might carry the same meaning as the English ‘blockhouse’, a small isolated fort.
The film begins with the interior of Blockhaus, which has a volume that is both engaging and unfamiliar. We see straight away that it is not, in fact, a military installation; if the shape of the interior resembles anything it’s a cinema auditorium. There’s no one in the building to show us how it is used; it is the furnishings – wooden pews and very little else – that tell you this is a church. The palette is limited to greys and browns. The small red glow of a stained glass window at the far end of the space stands out.
When the film moves outside we notice that people are still absent. We see the classic 1960’s wood-shuttering finish on the concrete exterior of Blockhaus. The film frames the building in a deliberate way, offering us its planes, curves and edges but no hint of its urban context. There are no journeys to the building and no views from afar.
The achievement of the film is to present Blockhaus as an object of contemplation rather than a space for inhabitation. It’s like a film version of the installation shot and the surroundings of Blockhaus are shown bathed in the reverential quiet of a gallery space. In Brian O’Doherty’s phrase, Blockhaus is presented in ‘a kind of eternity of display’.
Then the camera begins to track very slowly across the elevation of the building. Somehow this made me uneasy. It raised in my mind the mechanics of film-making, the question of who’s operating the camera. At the same time, the tracking shot is too slow and deliberate to evoke a human gaze following the forms of the building. The view we are offered is disembodied, a pre-programmed examination, a robotic survey of a building that is distant and almost unknowable. Each inch must be observed and the data brought back for further examination.
During one of these tracking shots, a figure is visible for a second walking at the left hand edge of the frame. We have an impression of a long coat, or dress perhaps, before the track has moved slowly right and the figure is no longer in view. This brief appearance activates the margins of the screen. It suggests that the building is depopulated through planning rather than through chance. People are present but lurking out of shot. Like Bonnard paintings, the extreme edges begin to hold all the movement and the interest. In a subsequent shot a breezy poplar tree at the edge counter balances Blockhaus in the centre. Later still a pigeon bursts from the left, loops in front of the building and exits again, confirming the sense of life forces that are being held back, absent but ready to return into the frame.
Concrete and Samples II: Blockhaus is a restrained powerful film, and offers a thorough representation of a building that Adam Pugh’s accompanying essay describes as a ‘sacred Modernist building.’ The essay describes how this film and a second in the show (portraying another Modernist building) together work ‘to locate the idea of architecture as sculpture.’ The third film in the show, Carrara, explores a vast marble quarry. Pugh’s essay suggests that through dialogue with Carrara the concept of architecture as sculpture ‘is complicated and expanded to the extent that each element – architecture and sculpture – is unmoored, existing in a state of free exchange, able at once to refer to the constructed and the coincidental, the ordered and the chaotic.’
My experience with Concrete and Samples II: Blockhaus – the only film that I watched thoroughly – was of an approach far too grounded in the familiar discourse around architecture. At the end I was still waiting for it to shift, to unmoor, to float free.
Architecture in the UK is first and foremost a site for visual contemplation. This forms the basis of how we think about buildings. Architects’ images of buildings can show elevations, volumes, choice of material, detailing of corners and finishes, but struggle to represent the building as a lived environment. Architectural 3D ‘flythrough’ and ‘walkthrough’ films can now show amazing detail of wall colour, play of light and shade, exterior views, while still communicating a sense of a building that is entirely in the domain of the measurable and the rational. As Jonathan Raban put it in 1974 ‘a dream like Campanella’s: a dream of glass and grass and concrete, where a handful of watercolour humans, tapering from the shoulders down, flit their spidery way through an architecture so simple and gigantic that they cannot corrupt it.’ This is to be expected; a professional class uses a specialised language, and focuses on its particular responsibilities to the physical fabric of the building. However discussions amongst the people responsible for commissioning, using and maintaining buildings are also looked into considerations of appearance and rarely able to incorporate the experiential. The images associated with a new and significant building represent the whole form, and are seen from high up, from above, from a distance, not from a human perspective.
The theorist and writer Henri Lefebvre wrote that ‘the techniques of drawing practiced by architects, indeed the whole practice of architecture, privilege the eye above all the other senses and sustain the tendency for image, and spectacle, to take the place of reality, a tendency manifested throughout modern capitalism.’ Lefebvre was concerned with space rather than architecture in particular. The built environment is always at risk of becoming fixed as the material product of decisions made in the past. In Lefebvre’s terms, space is a process of production rather than a product, so the nature of a building is produced by the manner in which is used, its socio-culturo-economic dimensions, as much as by its RSJs and plate glass frontage.
What is the relevance of spatial theories and architectural criticism to artist film? Aglaia Konrad is not creating an environment for people to inhabit. Yet I began to feel that Concrete and Samples II: Blockhaus was a very stylish version of the architect’s ‘walk-through’ film. It was reinforcing the notion that a building is a coherent object, a made thing emerging from the imagination of a few gifted people. Perhaps I am in search of someone who can apply a different artistic strategy altogether; rather than ‘architecture as sculpture’ I want to find ‘architecture as performance’ or ‘architecture as inhabitation.’
(Concrete and Samples II: Blockhaus is part of Apparent Positions, four succesive moving image installations with the final installation on show until 10 Feb 2013. Apparent Positions is curated by Adam Pugh and forms part of the Changing Landscapes programme at the Sainsbury Centre for Visual Art.)