Conclusion

The sites for these two interventions were not originally selected with one another in mind. Through the research process it became clear that their similar nascent cultural conditions and the dramatic difference in their current state was worthy of critical consideration and also a joint exhibition. In relation to each other, the interventions ask why Lubetkin’s tower blocks continue to be occupied and maintained while St Peter’s Seminary exists as a ruin. However, the artistic method by which these ideas are conveyed and the complexity that the interventions contribute to these ideas establish the value of these experiments both for others in the field and for my own artistic practice.

 

First, we will revisit the function of artworks that adopt this creative methodology and medium. Menke states that for an artwork the aesthetically processual enactment of signifier formation must end in failure […]. When the direction of the act of selection is reversed, it becomes interminably deferred.[1] I have developed a method of movement intervention that destabilises the meaning of the components that together constitute the artwork. The uncertainty and contingency, and the tolerance for complexity and confusion of research conducted through creative practice, mentioned in the introduction, exist not only within the process but in the output (i.e., artwork) as well.

 

The goal of these interventions is not to point to an identifiable meaning, but to ensure the oscillation between meaning and material. The viewer enters the artwork via the kinaesthetically empathic experience of the moving subject. Husserl explains that experiencing ‘the other’ contributes to the two-foldedness of self-experience – composed of both the internal experiencing of one’s own body (ipseity) and the ability to account for it visually and tactilely as a three dimensional object (alterity).[2] Jonathan O. Clark’s description of the three-foldedness of dance, or in this instance performance, helps to reinforce this application of Husserl’s notion of pairing. Clark postulates that the presentation of another moving body or bodies through dance triangulates the two-folded relationship that the viewer has with his/her own body.[3] This facilitates a phenomenological factor crucial to the discussion here: the way in which both dance and movement performance extend the viewer’s movement repertoire of potential ‘I can’s’ while also consolidating the experiencing of his/her own body.[4] Because these performing bodies are situated within an architectural context, the viewer’s intersubjective relationship is to the performing body and the body as it relates to built space. Husserl posits that if it were possible for one to experience what another experiences, the difference between ‘I’ and ‘the other’ would dissolve.[5] Instead, self and other are maintained, and Husserl concludes that we are not dealing with an ineffective mirroring (kraftlose Spiegelung), but that the being of self and other are constitutively intertwined.[6] It is not that the viewer is having the same spatial/temporal experience of being carried up the staircase on another’s back, but rather that this experiencing of other informs self-experience, and thus alters the viewer’s understanding of the world (and here, specifically, a concrete staircase) as it is constitutively intertwined with the actions of ‘the other’.

 

These two interventions sit within a larger research project by the present author in which movement intervention makes inquiries into aspects of modernist architecture. To this end, interventions have been staged at sites representing early modernism, such as the Weimar Bauhaus prefabrication prototype the Haus am Horn, and at sites that represent a migration of modernism in its later stages, such as the Mesa Laboratory by I. M. Pei. By implementing the body as research tool, the technique of intervention uncovers and conveys ideas about modernist architecture differently than cognitive or text-based inquiry alone. Both interventions examined here are useful within this wider context in that each successfully exemplifies movement intervention’s ability to yield relevant information that was not found through text-based research and to state these findings through movement intervention as an artistic medium.

[1] Christoph Menke, The Sovereignty of Art: Aesthetic Negativity in Adorno and Derrida, trans. by Neil Solomon (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998), p. 54.

[2] Jonathan Owen Clark, ‘Dance and Intrinsic Significance: A Phenomenological Approach’, in Thinking Through Dance: The Philosophy of Dance through Performance and Practices, ed. by Jenny Bunker, Anna Pakes, and Bonnie Rowell (Binsted, UK: Dance Books, 2013), pp. 202–21.

[3] Clark, p. 27.

[4] Ibid.

[5] Shaun Gallagher and Dan Zahavi, The Phenomenological Mind: An Introduction to Philosophy of Mind and Cognitive Science (London: Routledge, 2008), p. 204.

[6] 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. 239).

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Above: Document of the movement intervention at St Peter's Seminary, 2011

Below: Bevin Court staircase in 2012