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Part I: The spaces of the page In thinking about space in relation to visual descriptions of architecture we should begin with the spaces where we encounter these images. The literal space where we first see graphic representations of architecture is that of the paper on which it is printed or drawn. The sheet of paper or page is not a neutral surface; rather, it is a physical site that engages with the image it contains. It is a space in its own right that has defined borders that enclose the image. And in the case of prints these are in addition to the
While the importance of space in Gothic literature and the role of spectacle in the staging of late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth century British Gothic drama have received much attention, little has been written about how Gothic dramatic writing gestures with space. By looking at how dramatic writers rhetorically used Gothics politically and psychologically charged spaces in their dramatic works for stage and page, this essay explores how space functions in pre-realist drama. The essay shows how a rhetoric of space functions in three examples of Gothic theatrical writing - Matthew Lewis‘s The Castle Spectre, Catherine Gore‘s The Bond, and Jane Scott‘sThe Old Oak Chest - and suggests that British Gothic dramas spatial rhetoric anticipates cinematic uses of space.
By the late 1960s cartographic formats and spatial information were a recurring feature in many conceptualist artworks. While maps have received some scholarly attention, Charting space offers a rich study of conceptualism’s mapping practices that includes more expanded forms of spatial representations. Departing from the perspective that artists were merely recording and communicating information, this book expands on the philosophical and political imperatives within their artistic practices. The volume brings together twelve in-depth case studies that address artists’ engagement with matters of space at a time when concepts of space garnered new significance in art, theory and culture. It covers a diverse range of subjects, such as London’s socio-spatial sphere in the 1970s, geopolitics and decoloniality in Brazil, the global networking strategies of the Psychophysiology Research Institute in Japan, the subjective body in relation to cosmological space from the Great Basin Desert in the United States, and notions of identity and race in the urban itinerant practices of transnational artists. Together the chapters shed fresh light on an evident ‘spatial turn’ from the postwar period into the contemporary, and the influence of larger historical, social and cultural contexts upon it. The contributors illustrate how conceptualism’s cartographies were critical sites in formulating artists’ politics, graphing heterogeneous spaces and upsetting prevailing systems.
3 White spaces: consuming traditional middle-class culture I t was February 2017, and I was in Somerset House, a famous art gallery, for a photography exhibition entitled The Eye of Modern Mali. I recounted the following experience in my fieldwork journal, while the memory was still fresh in my mind: I enter the South Wing, take a moment to orient myself and walk toward Sibidé’s photography exhibition The Eye of Modern Mali. I decide I’d like to go to the bathroom first, so walk towards it, clearly signposted, placed right next to the café. Then I have my first
Space/site: writing queer feminist transnational South Asian art histories In 2003 the city of Manchester, England, was deemed the most ‘bohemian’ and ‘creative’ city according to the ‘Boho (or Bohemian) Britain Index’ of 40 UK cities.1 The Boho Index uses three indices – ethnic diversity, proportion of gay residents and number of patent applications per head – as key indicators of the city’s economic health, and Manchester unsurprisingly scores high in all these areas.2 Indeed, its reputation once based on a thriving industrial centre, the city of Manchester
histories and crucibles of diasporic trajectories “where Europe is not at ‘the center’ – which retain a critical bearing on understanding contemporary diasporic formations and their inter-relationships.” Thus, it is necessary to deploy “diaspora space,” which is a concept introduced by Avtar Brah ( 1996 ) to explore the lateral connections between diasporas – the ways “in which
Visual control begins around the age of eighteen months: in such a case, it is control after-the-fact, since the eye follows the hand without yet guiding it. Only after the age of twenty-four months does the possibility of visual control over marking and gesture appear: the eye no longer follows the hand but guides it. Thus, the earliest drawings are not guided by a visual exploration of space but by an exploration of movement. At its origin, graphic expression is blind. It is guided by
6 Performance spaces: fairground, cabaret, exhibition The public needs to be violated in unusual positions. Francis Picabia (1978: 25) In Dada’s privileged spaces – the fairground, the cabaret, the exhibition, the cinema – from Zurich’s Cabaret Voltaire to the Salle Gaveau in Paris, via the Cologne Brauhaus Winter brewery or Otto Burchardt’s Berlin art gallery, it is enlightening to consider dadaist activities in terms of performance rather than simply spectacle, process rather than product. Although the term ‘performance art’ was first used around 1970 to
Civic identity and public space, focussing on Belfast, and bringing together the work of a historian and two social scientists, offers a new perspective on the sometimes lethal conflicts over parades, flags and other issues that continue to disrupt political life in Northern Ireland. The first part of the book shows how these disputes had their origins in the changes that took place during the nineteenth century in the character of urban living, creating new forms of public space whose regulation was from the start a matter of contention and debate. Later chapters show how the establishment of a new Northern Ireland state, with Belfast as its capital, saw unionism and Protestantism achieve a near-complete monopoly of public space. In more recent decades, this monopoly has broken down, partly as a result of political violence, but also through the influence of new ideas of human rights and of a more positive vision of political and cultural diversity. Today policy makers and politicians struggle to devise a strategy for the management of public space in a divided city, while endeavouring to promote a new sense of civic identity that will transcend long-standing political and sectarian divisions.
Space as potential 5 1 Space as potential Commoning experience What this work attempts to establish is a rethinking of the possibility of human emancipation through a rethinking of space: space considered both as a concrete social reality (city, house, public space, territory) and as a form, a pattern, which is employed, along with other forms, to establish and reproduce the contested meanings of social reality. Space is considered both the locus of experience and a powerful means for constructing thoughts on and representations of what exists. In terms of