In this exposition, movement intervention within architecture is defined as a creative practice with an output such as a live performative, video, or photographic artwork. The notion of kinaesthetic empathy is a key consideration in discussing how these artworks are experienced by a viewer, and here they are approached in particular via Edmund Husserl and his notion of pairing. Husserl regards the most fundamental form of empathy as one’s understanding of ‘the other’ on the somatological level.[1] He terms this a concrete form of intersubjectivity, compared with secondary intersubjectivity, which concerns inner states or emotions.[2] This exposition adheres to the former, arguably more straightforward type of intersubjectivity, which relies on the process of pairing. Husserl’s notion of pairing involves an individual using analogy to perceive another person’s living body as similar to his or her own. Through pairing (it is also possible to apply Adorno’s term mimesis[3]) movement intervention within an architectural context has the potential to modify the viewer’s self-experience regarding architectural space by replacing the habitual actions that occur in built environments with out-of-the-ordinary body movement and configurations. Unlike an encounter with an object, which is unidirectional, transference between two persons, according to Husserl, moves in both directions: ‘In coming to understand the other, I draw on what I know from my own case […] through my encounter with the other, my own self-experience is also modified.’[4] This transference between ‘I’ as the viewer of an artwork and ‘the other’ as the performer within the artwork can be seen, for example, in Lucy Gunning’s video work Climbing Around my Room.
It is likely that the viewer (‘I’) has experienced, either personally or through observation of another person, the traversal of a vertical surface (for example, climbing a ladder); however, it is less likely that this has been executed or observed under the circumstances presented in the video – namely, the negotiation of the topography of a domestic interior’s perimeter without touching the ground. Thus, through encountering this video that utilises movement intervention, a viewer’s self-experience of architecture can be modified through observation of the performer. Describing the movement quality of the performer’s actions is an important step toward identifying the phenomenological effects of this video work. Maxine Sheets-Johnstone defines four primary qualitative movement structures: tensional, linear, amplitudinal, and projectional. She clarifies that these qualities were discovered ‘in the course of following Husserl’s classical phenomenological method and of engaging in a phenomenological analysis of movement’.[5] In Gunning's video work, both the linear and the amplitudinal qualities of the woman’s movements generate their own contradictions. By adhering to the perimeter, the climber uses her body to trace the longest line possible within the room. However, that it repeats, that the line is traced twice, points to the restrictions that the room’s dimensions impose on the subject by determining the length of her movement loop. The linear quality of her movement is contradictory in that her trajectory draws a line of maximum length while the exact repetition of her movement sequence emphasises the limitations imposed on her motion by the room’s dimensions. Amplitudinal qualities concern the magnitude of a movement – its expansive or contractive, extensive or constricted qualities.
[6] Here, another contradiction is presented, between the way the performer expands to fill the space by exploring the room’s diameter and height to the fullest and the restriction highlighted by her constant contact, which often involves pushing against the room’s walls and ceiling. The movement qualities of these dynamic actions provide substantial phenomenological depth to the experience of pairing between the viewer (‘I’) and the performer (‘the other’).
Brown’s equipment piece Man Walking Down the Side of a Building takes a different approach to pairing by reaching (nearly all) its audience through the pre-reflective, or phenomenological, experiencing of observing a person walking. The audience includes individuals who attend its performance (two stagings pictured right) and those who view video footage and/or photographs of its many stagings, including of the original performance in 1970. In this work, the performer displays the identifiable aspects of a person walking vertically on a horizontal surface despite being situated in a horizontal position with feet on a vertical surface. The arms swing in opposition to the legs and the body alignment is straight from head to foot, actions not at all natural to descending the side of a building. This careful orchestration of movements that simulate walking allows the viewer to identify, albeit falsely, an action he or she executes regularly. Sheets-Johnstone’s qualitative structures of movement can again be referenced to better understand the experience of pairing. As in Gunning’s work, the performer’s linear movement quality is the most prominent. With a single dramatic line change from horizontal to vertical, Brown transforms a quotidian activity into an extra-ordinary spectacle, as height and gravity exponentially increase the degree of risk and danger of a two-minute walk. A similar simplicity is found in the present author's video Bevin Court and the Sivill House (see ‘Artworks’). Here too a variable that alters the performer’s movement quality is introduced to an everyday activity, in this instance ascending and descending a stair. The angle of the body is not the variable, rather the variable is a second performer’s engagement with the primary performer, which shifts the amplitudinal quality of her movement. The notable increase in effort behind her movement and greater requisite of balance and strength alters and intensifies their temporal quality. Bevin Court and the Sivill House and Man Walking Down the Side of a Building both employ a distinct shift in movement quality to intervene in an architectural scenario.
The phenomenological experiencing of artworks such as those described above distances the viewer from an automatic understanding of the relationship between body and building. The term aesthetic negativity, as used by Theodor Adorno and rearticulated by Christoph Menke, helps describe this distancing. According to Menke, ‘the negation of automatic understanding […] is an event immanent to aesthetic experience: it negates precisely that automatic understanding that we attempt to carry out in the identification of aesthetic signifiers by releasing the processuality of this understanding.’[7] What Adorno refers to as the ‘automatic identification’ of an object – in this case architecture and architectural objects – is negated or deferred. Instead, the movement intervention instigates a process of attempted aesthetic understanding that undermines itself, indefinitely deferring the establishment of a stable or singular meaning. Menke posits that this deferral, which is due to an oscillation between the meaning and material of the artwork, correlates to the aesthetic stringency of the work and determines its aesthetic value.[8] Here it is also proposed that such a correlation could exist with an artwork’s potential as a research tool. In this proposed scenario, the intensity of the oscillation between meaning and material would be linked to the possibility for the artwork to access and also convey new knowledge.
My interventions at Bevin Court and the Sivill House and at St Peter’s Seminary approach the buildings as politicised objects, leading the viewer beyond basic categorisations such as brutalist or ‘post-war’ architecture by employing the moving human figure to consider factors such as the architects’ values and intentions and the buildings’ place within contemporary culture. These artworks engage certain architectural aspects of each site to reflect their current state in a heightened and enduring form.[9] The ability of the exhibition of the artworks to enhance these aspects of the work in a significant way was a key finding of the research. Through the process of installing Bevin Court and the Sivill House and St Peter’s Seminary within a specific architectural context and presenting these works to a specific audience, it became clear that a movement intervention could extend beyond the context of creation into the context of reception.
Another example of the importance of the reception context for a movement intervention within architecture is Anahita Razmi’s video work Roof Piece Tehran. Razmi reframes Trisha Brown’s original Roof Piece (performed in New York City) by staging the piece in Iran, where the performance and the newsworthy political protests shouted from the same rooftops are illicit activities. The video was exhibited at the 2011 Frieze Art Fair on twelve wall-mounted screens at disparate locations throughout the venue, thus echoing the spatial relationship between the performers in situ dancing on separate rooftops. This spatial parallel both contributes to the phenomenological depth of the artwork as experienced by the viewer and extends the intervention begun in Tehran into the Frieze exhibition. The dancers, who are simultaneously hidden in Tehran and on display in London, deepen the dimension of the work as it responds to its context of reception. The ability of an artwork’s presentation to contribute to the phenomenological depth and to its potential meaning will again be addressed in the section ‘Context of reception’.
[1] Dan Zahavi, ‘Empathy and Mirroring: Husserl and Gallese’, in Life, Subjectivity and Art: Essays in Honor of Rudolf Bernet, ed. by Roland Breeur and Ullrich Melle (Dordrecht: Springer, 2012), pp. 217–54 (p. 245).
[2] Zahavi, p. 242.
[3] Richard Wolin writes that, according to Adorno, ‘In art the mimetic faculty, long repressed, is emancipated; one no longer need suppress the desire to be “like” the Other.’ Adorno’s use of the term mimesis concerns freedom from the (capitalist) tendency to objectify the Other, freedom from Being-for-Other. Compared with conceptual quality of philosophy, it is the sensuous qualities of art that facilitate this mimetic engagement. Richard Wolin, ‘Utopia, Mimesis, and Reconciliation: A Redemptive Critique of Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory’, Representations, 32 (1990), 33–49 (pp. 42–43).
[4] Zahavi, p. 236.
[5] Maxine Sheets-Johnstone, The Primacy of Movement, expanded 2nd edn (Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company, 2011), p. 123.
[6] Sheets-Johnstone, p.124.
[7] Christoph Menke, The Sovereignty of Art: Aesthetic Negativity in Adorno and Derrida, trans. by Neil Solomon (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998), p. 25.
[8] Lambert Zuidervaart, Social Philosophy after Adorno (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), p. 21.
[9] Paul Crowther, The Phenomenology of the Visual Arts (Even the Frame) (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009).
Above: Trisha Brown, Man Walking Down the Side of a Building, performed by Elizabeth Streb at the Whitney Museum, New York, 2010
Below: Trisha Brown, Man Walking Down the Side of a Building, at the Tate Modern, London, 2006
