barren day 10
Indifference to forgery
To bring together components is described as assembly; rigid elements that lead to some articulation. (Ingold.T; 2012) They can be criticised for being negative, the enemy of conjuring a ‘sense of’ and arresting feeling. Luc Tymans deliberately aims for some indifference to his work by this strategy creating detachment by limiting time spent on a piece and assembling stand in components. He uses what is already represented and can be challenged as inauthentic.
This space holds components. Some of them literally taken from houses, window displays found and recycled, into a rigid set to frame and structure the space. Even the digitally printed screens are assembled from my photographs and altered blueprints, re-assembled to construct a still and distant image. The use of technical drawing, photography and components does have a telling of indifference. It is looking between the components that unfolds the personal knowledge of the space, reflects on encounters with elements and seeing them in a different manner ensures we look at the weakness of these components, their indistinctness in our everyday lives yet their prolific nature in ordering and producing our spaces.
Gerhard Richter uses both photography and painting to oscillate between realism and abstraction and when looking inside the space I can see the components which are realistically presented and then how they have shifted in horizon, setting and assembly. The set is familiar but unfamiliar – I dismissed its potential to be uncanny yesterday and deferred to Dave on this but the more I look, the more I see how utterly exposed the structures as a dwelling are. There is no hiding, and no encasing – it is transparent and relies on realistic components to do so. While we may have closed doors and private spaces how many of us feel transparent and exposed in living quarters and wish to look for a hole to run down.
From the female point of view I have to come to understand that homes are built for the functions of many things and they are rarely to do with the person of the female but female gender and her assumed roles akin to visiting within the home for domestic and family availability. So it is here, exposure, weak frames form a space with frailty drawing upon Lewitt like drawings of space to realistic structures; realism combined with abstraction rather than the formalist modernisms or representational drawing of spaces. This combination is I understand to be two of the components revealing themselves in my methods which create distance and an unease bordering uncanny, certainly it is unhomely and the insubstantial nature of many of the pieces echo this.
Another aspect to Tuymans is his use of amateurish , immediate and indifferent attitude to his own methods which comes under the scope of talks on failure and authentic forgery. For myself I see that time spent on a piece or the level of production value is entirely dependent on such intentions, and diffidence given. It is not required that I slavishly turn some of these frames into beautiful pieces, these frames are loose, exposing their very constructions. This is continued through the weave of thread that hangs pointlessly after being liberated from its structure. This loose attitude to materials evokes the temporal but more importantly the fleeting negation we pass over many of the spaces and surroundings we come across. We construct spaces according to another design influenced by a copy of somebody’s idea, we mimic spaces for lifestyles we don’t have but desire and so I feel many of our spaces are abstract to ourselves which I find unsettling. This notion of authentic/forgery directed at Tuyman’s (Dexter.E;2004)work and part of his critical output is one to toy over when considering how we live in spaces because I’m not sure how often we are living according to an abstract idea that bears no authenticity to how we really occupy and live in spaces. Therefore the space now seems far more satisfactory as a loose framework, supporting beams which look stable but at once flimsy, fragile representing much of how briefly we authentically forge spaces.
