KASHA BITTNER: YELLOW SPOT (COPYRIGHT: 2010 AUTHOR, CENTRE OF CONTEMPORARY ART ZNAKI CZASU, TORUN)
YELLOW SPOTPROJECT
Yellow Spot. A project in the biggest room at the Centre of Contemporary Art in Torun (900 sqm, 7 m high). A project with the biggest room at the CoCA. A sitespecific project, made specifically for and in the particular space. A project that deals with the architectural aspect of the exhibition space.
The biggest room at the CoCA. So, dimensions. But also, proportions, segments, plan view and elevation, architectural details and relations between them.
Symmetry. The entirety of the relations between objects as well as the collection of those objects, or space. The building and the museum. Architecture and institution.
Yellow Spot. Exhibition of the exhibition space. (image 01)
YELLOW SPOT
Lat. macula lutea, part of f the retina responsible for colour perception and sharpness of sight, discovered by Samuel Thomas von Soemmerring1. A minuscule spot of immense significance.
LOOKING VS SEEING
Architecture takes more than looking. It is experiencing and perceiving. Art takes more than looking. It is experiencing and perceiving. Widz (on-looker)—that is the Polish word for someone that visits an exhibition. The term ‘on-looker’ implies passivity. Being an on-looker won’t suffice. We need a term that is more comprehensive, one indicating the involvement of thought. Seeing requires involvement on the part of the person looking. Any discourse on perception assumes first and foremost the presence of a perceiving subject and their disposition towards an object. The German equivalent for ‘on-looker’ (Zuschauer) stands for a person watching a theatre play. One visiting exhibitions is an observer, a contemplator (Betrachter). An observer, actively involved in the act of looking. Don’t be just an on-looker! Perceive, observe, experience. That means more than looking. That means defining and understanding visual space in a most corporal manner. Seeing determines our place in the world. (image 02)
MUSEUM NOT HOME
Home—a frame for life. At home means at one’s place. A matter of routine, a matter of carnival. In a world within four walls whose appearance is up to us. Where we feel secure. Day in day out, night after night. Rhythm. Monotonousness. Is it possible to discover anything new “at one’s place”? Is perception still working “at one’s place”?
Museum—a frame for art and its perception. A place where concentrated attention is protected. Because of its function and its architecture. At the museum, the focus is on one thing alone—the work of art. But what if this work directs our perception to the very place of exposition, to the space around? Does perception focus on that place, beginning with its architectural frame that contains the work of art, to the very idea of the museum? This is a question we may ponder about surrounded by the objects making up Yellow Spot. Its author, German artist Tilman Wendland, says: this room is not here for the display of my work, it is my work that aims to show this space. Before the project came to be, the artist contemplated the place. Sometimes he took his glasses off—the picture wasn’t sharp, but it was clear ...
The institution of the museum is a place for art and its audience. The museum building is architecture. The architecture of the museum serves art and people. It is your presence that constitutes this space.
ARCHITECTURE
It is not enough to see architecture, it must be experienced. Architecture establishes mental, experienced space. Architecture plus the sensitivity of members of the public constitute closed space-time. A microcosm. A sequence of elements that require our presence for completion. It is our corporality that completes the experience of architecture. Architecture concerns us directly. Its physical shape determines our movements; it directs the steps we take. You can knock down a brick wall only in a saying ...
Space is complete when time unites with our perception.
TEMPLE OF ART and WHITE CUBE
The buildings of the Museum Island in Berlin (erected in the 19th century), reminiscent of ancient temples in terms of style. The museum as a temple of art. This modern idea of the museum was translated into building shapes.
The modernistic space for art is the white cube, simple white walls without superfluous elements. (Speculative) neutrality. (Speculative) lack of aura. For the work of art to be a proper work, to be as autonomous as possible. As a result, gallery space lost its sacred appearance. Instead, it gained a sacred aura as a place inaccessible for the general public. Here insiders perform their rituals with no interference from anything that is not art. The idea of the white cube is questioned nowadays.
Modernist and postmodernist theoretical discourse on gallery space is over now and, suddenly, something intriguing (peculiar?) happens in Torun: an architect builds a white cube defined as a “temple of art”, providing the biggest room at the CoCA with four classical supports framing a round lamp in the ceiling. (image 04)
LAMP
The supports as well as the round lamp in the ceiling of the main CoCA room relate to classical architecture. A round skylight in the ceiling, so-called oculus, was already found in ancient temples. Circle is the perfect geometric shape, frequently used as a symbol of the sacred.
Wellness at the CoCA—the lamp is here to emit positive, energizing light. Initially, there was a plan to place a couch for light sessions underneath the lamp. You could now be relaxing up there in the light ... For a number of reasons this could not be done. A surreal platform with three steps has eventually been suspended underneath the lamp inviting you to come into contact with it, to rest in its positive light. Metaphorical steps to physical light. A road to the strange lamp. To the architect’s bold gesture. To his vision of the museum as a temple. Perhaps, to his reflections on Copernicus? The sun in the ceiling, a hole into the sky ...
SPACE
Begin with architecture and reach space. Space is the entirety of relations between objects or the combination of those objects. It is a form of exposure (time is another) that enables experience. A basic, common, intercultural form as it is determined by the human body (high—low, front—back, foreground—background, etc). Perception depends on the position of the eye, on where we are. Where we stand and where we linger. The left corner of the room and, more generally, the museum. Because we know where we are. Body and knowledge. Thinking eye.
Architectural space, cultural space, life space, cosmic space ...
INSTALLATION
The artist “entered” the architectural microcosm of the CoCA room and stayed there for weeks. He watched and he walked around. He saw and he experienced. He communicated with architecture and he let it steer him. He came face-to-face not with a white cube, perhaps, but with a giant rich in symbolism. His first step seemed natural: he took precise measurements of the room. This is exactly what our bodies do when we move around a place. Steps are measure. Taking measurements at a building site is the first task of an architect before they can start a new construction.
Wendland recorded the results of his visual communication with the room as well as his corporal experience on the lino floor. The outcome is a chart of lines and arches, a record of mathematical vectoric and horizontal relations but also of the artist’s physical exploration of the space. The record also reflects the artist’s obsession with architecture defined as layout, a project on paper, a drawing. (image 05) As though the artist followed the architect as he began to work on the building. The architect must transfer his thoughts and visions onto a piece of paper. Mise en page (insert onto a piece of paper), the French term meaning layout. Surface aesthetics. Contrasted with the aesthetics of deep layers, or staging: Mise en scène, to insert something into a scene, to stage something. This is how they work with space in theatres – first come measurements of space and its elements, directing the movement of actors comes last. Drawing board and theatre. Wendland started with a piece of paper and a line, looking for a method of transforming them into material objects. Finally, he organized space with the objects he created—an installation was born. He wished to extend field of vision, advocated the idea of decentralization and complexity. This is a strategy developed in early Modernism and in the German Bauhaus. Herbert Bayer, a graphic artist and space designer connected with the Bauhaus movement, deconstructed spaces and split the field of vision into many layers with passion2. He replaced the surface of walls with light screens in the arrangement of displays. That was his method of analyzing the possibilities of extending the field of vision, allowing the audience to reflect on the impact and function of exhibited works. In a drawing Bayer did in 1935, an inspecting eye grows bigger than the head. A most appealing utopia ... . (image 03)
It was also Wendland’s intention to extend the field of vision. The gigantic room at the CoCA escapes the eye; the field of vision is fragmented. Architecture incessantly imposes frames on what we see; it determines the limits for views that stretch out before us. An installation which corresponds with architecture may extend the field of vision or split it. Wendland breaks the central symmetry of the room and divides it into many layers. He directs the eyes of the public to the context. His objects are there to draw attention to what is next to them, above them, behind them ... To activate the perception of the observer. To enliven the motionless forms of the architectural frame. To provoke motion and reveal the time aspect. After all, it is motion and time that are responsible for the perspective in architectural images and space. The meaning of a whole takes shape in overlapping layers.
Working with a found “frame” rather than questioning it allows an open installation that offers room for experience, where the look of the observer remains uncontrolled.
The Yellow Spot project aims to draw attention to space and architecture. Objects don’t relate to one another, they redirect our attention to the room itself which reveals its original form for the first time. This is the ‘premiere’ of architecture as it has been conceived by the architect. Wendland’s installation reveals what was hidden and unites the random with the planned. This is exactly what happened when the artist decided to allow more light into one corner of the room. The shape of a balcony, which had been bricked in before the gallery was opened, appeared on the lit wall. Evidently, architecture is alive and its “finiteness” is only conventional.
GUESTS
Yellow Spot has “guests“ (so the artist says):
> A photograph by Krzysztof Zielinski, from the Millennium School series (2008). A visual story about a school which the photographer attended when he was a child, revisited 20 years later. A series of 42 pictures is part of the collection of the CoCA in Torun3. The collection is locked in a storeroom at the bottom floor at the CoCA. The photograph selected by Wendland and taken out of the storeroom downstairs to find its place on the wall of the exhibition room. A work of art takes over a wall in the museum. And a frame which separates the photograph from life and transports it to a protected area. There is the picture, too, perfect in form and technical precision. As geometric as it gets: in terms of composition that tends towards geometrization and the content. A blackboard, a circle, a set square, a protractor—mathematician’s and architect’s tools. The “golden section“ (way of dividing a line) named by Plato the key to the cosmos ...
> A mysterious drawing. Once abandoned and now rediscovered by Wendland at the top floor of the CoCA, in a room where once a workshop for children took place. A drawing signed by someone who claimed that he/she was less than 3 years old. The strange drawing holds appeal. A strange play of images and words. It wasn’t a child that made it. Workshop hosts claim that it was made by a teenager or a student, possibly a foreigner, an Erasmus student. Considering the phonological riddle and the irony we are inclined to think it was the latter but everyone should find out for themselves ...
It was clear from the start that this drawing must be part of the exhibition. It was object trouvé, an object found at the CoCA. Its unconventional nature and mystery, colours, content, play on words and meanings, irony and references to Copernicus ensured its place here. Copernicus—that means Torun. It turned out, eventually, that this train of thought was correct. Participants in the workshop were to generate a sound plan of Torun—children wrote down (drew) on music paper what was happening in the street. Recorded city sounds could be listened to at the top floor at the CoCA. They inspired one of the listeners, an Erasmus student as we like to believe, to create their own “plan” of the city. And this is the best reason why the drawing h a d t o appear in the Yellow Spot project.
The city cannot be separated from the CoCA and the CoCA cannot be separated from the city. Each building relates to its surroundings. There are not simple boundaries—does the shadow cast by the building belong to it or is it part of the outside world?
The immediate context for Wendland’s installation is one of the rooms at the CoCA. The context of that room is the space at the floor. The context for the floor is the building. The context of the building is the city ...
> A newspaper page, a picture of a harpist’s hands projected (in the artist’s vision) on an architect’s figure and his tower block overleaf. Galileo claimed that, if we removed the ears, the tongue and the nose, only forms and figures would remain. What would remain of those forms and figures, if we removed the eyes, the hands and the brain?
Architecture takes shape in the mind of an architect. More and more often, architects incorporate themselves into their building models. I enter that way, I spend some time there, I move from the shadow into the light, then I see that particular view—says Jean Nouvel, a well-known contemporary architect.4 He does this to see the place with the eyes of future users.
While working on the project for the CoCA in Torun, Tilman Wendland employed the same strategy. Yet the desire to see the work with the eyes of the public was one of his objectives. The other was the figure of the architect. Trying to follow the architectural vision, Wendland asked himself: “why did the architect install a colour lamp emitting relaxing light in the middle of the biggest exhibition space for contemporary art built in Poland after 1939?” A bold gesture on the part of the architect. A sign of his presence in the building. (image 07)
THREE ELEMENTS
(determinants of Wendland’s artistic practice):
> WORK IN SITU
“Work in situ is vital. My studio is no more than a rehearsal room for decisions that must be made in situ” (T. Wendland). His objects cannot be invented or planned; they need to take shape in a particular place as the artist communicates with the space. This is where actual work begins: the artist becomes totally engrossed in the dialogue with found space. He discovers new forms as they a p p e a r from careful observation of context. (image 06) Work in situ, in the sense of a process taking place in particular space, is crucial for Wendland. This is not about the effort that went into creation; the artist doesn’t make a film documenting his intensive work. As a result, he remains invisible. Light and ephemeral objects don’t give away how much work and time they required. Their light form and ephemeral nature are essential as they don’t control or appropriate architecture. The objects don’t “obstruct” the place. “It is important to see a place as it is, otherwise I’d create an entirely new space” (T. Wendland).
> MATERIAL
Tilman Wendland’s installations result from architecture of the place and material that is used. Form is determined by material, it never falsifies it, never transgresses the limits of the possibilities it offers. “It is important that the piece should not be subjected to stringent requirements as regards material. The choice of material can make work impossible in no time at all, if it’s too expensive or too demanding. Of course, a reverse situation is possible, material might be too weak, appear too cheap or fall to pieces before a week has passed. I make the decision about what material I want to use every time, depending on what I am working on. There is something I use a lot: white-varnished HDF. I started using it because it was economical and practial – I knew that I could buy it in any DIY superstore” (T. Wendland).
> ARCHITECTURAL CONTEXT
Wendland’s installations result from the architecture around and material that is used. His objects take form from the context, and when they appear within that context, it is the context indeed that gives shape to them. The context combines loose elements, imposes order on them and, consequently, determines their meaning. Every human intervention in the context changes it. Wendland accepts the fact that the room in which he works is not a pure white cube, he doesn‘t question it; instead he enters into a dialogue with space. Space is not subordinated to his work. White screens—surfaces for the play of meanings—reflect the space. Their “purity“ and openness leave ample space for the observers, it is their perception that attributes meaning to an object. Dialogue with found space, with the “frame“ is one strategy. White is another.
WHITE
“I begin with the wall or, like at the CoCA, with the ceiling and it is white, so that is where my colour comes from. Wishing to establish certain relation, I keep working in white. This is an obvious standard, known to everyone, and this is where I start. White is the best when it comes to conducting light and to me, it’s like immaterial support. White underscores structure” (T. Wendland). The artist intends to create a link between the observer and a specific place. White is the medium, the vanguard of the matter filling in the space. It doesn’t obstruct the view of what is aside. It gives room for impression and allows architecture to prevail.
White conducts light better than other colours and it is light that allows us to see things. We need light to get impressions of colour. White incorporates all colours ... Wendland’s white background provides a surface on which rays of light play. A movie theatre for light and colour. Gustave Moreau (On colour, 1893) advised: “Note one thing well: you must think through colour, have imagination in it. If you don’t have imagination, your colour will never be beautiful. Colour must be thought, described, imagined” ...
HIGH UP
High up, above the ceiling. The opening around the ceiling lamp makes it possible to take a look farther up. Beyond exhibition space, beyond representation space. The museum is alive. See it put itself on display, hear it breathe. It exhibits its smooth, white walls while hiding storerooms full of tools, paint and pieces of junk. It shows off the colourful lamp while putting the apparatus behind it and miles of cable out of sight. The museum.
Open/Closed. Visible/Invisible.
Go up the stairs or take the lift up to the gallery roof. Take a look at the room through skylights.
This is the last station of Yellow Spot, a project venturing to “exhibit” the biggest room at the CoCA. An installation that invites you to observe space and architecture on your own.
1 Soemmerring, born in Torun in1755, an anatomist, anthropologist, paleontologist, physician and inventor. He discovered the macula, or yellow spot, while he was performing an autopsy on a drowned body. He was well ahead of his contemporaries, he introduced vaccination against smallpox, opposed guillotining, invented a telescope as well as a telegraph. He conducted research on the nervous system and the refinement of wine, on the structure of human brain and on the harmfulness of wearing a corset. Sömmerring—a perfect representative of the European Enlightenment. A Japanese pheasant, an African gazelle and one of the craters on the Moon are named after him. A Torun street still remains to be named so.
2 Bayer's drawing inspired the Warsaw-based studio FONTARTE, responsible for the graphie design for Yellow Spot, to design a special typeface which was used in the prints accompanying the project.
3 “CoCA” is used in te rchangeably with "museum" here as the institution is obliged by the statute to create a collection, Museums are institutions that own art collections.
4 Interview with J. Nouvel in “CinémAction” 1995, no. 75
Illustrations:
(01) The CoCA room, plan view.
(02) Vitruvius (84 BC – 27 BC), in: The Ten Books on Architecture.
(03) Herbert Bayer, Diagram extended field of vision, 1935.
(04) Medieval carnival scene.
(05) Tilmand Wendland, a collage.
(06) A view of the installation of Yellow Spot.
(07) Wellness at the CoCA: energizing light as the logo for the project.
Kasha Bittner
Torun, February, 2010
Centrum Cztuki Wspólczesnej
Centre of Contemporary Art Znaki Czasu, Torun
ul. Waly gen. Wikorskiego 13
87–100 Torun, Poland
February 26—September 30, 2010