Wednesday 7 September 2011

positions…

In August 2011, a group of artists, designers and an architect met at King Mongkut's University to explore how drawing, photography, creative writing, collage, film, and found objects — the visual arts, design and architecture — may be used to reflect about a house and, in the process, open up new avenues for doing research, and for producing  humanistic forms of knowledge, in a spirit of cooperative enquiry.

The owner of the house (Khun. A.) seemed appreciative of our interest in his house, and invited us to draw and photograph it, as we pleased, and to come again, and bring food, to share convivially.
From the start of the project, our concerns exceeded a simple interest in drawing or taking pictures of the house.

Looking beyond what could have been construed as its excentric and picturesque value, we saw the house as a significant object, and sensed what seemed a hidden exemplariness: manifest in its structure and in the resilience of its maker — but not easily pin-pointed. That would be the or a task of the project. On the way we found other things of equal importance.

The realization that this 'miserable' shack (or 'non house') may have an 'exemplary' value — in one of the fastest developing metropolises; where progress is measured by technological achievements and by levels of consumerism — was a turning point. It established the house as the focal point for a project that redefines art and design as research, along the lines of Action Research.

In its first phase, the project engaged with the house by making different forms of representation: drawings, photographs, films, poems, diaries, conversations, readings, formal and informal discussions, etc. to tease out the exemplariness of the house and its owner.
Our intention was to decipher this exemplariness, in non-reductive ways, and to see what insights may come out from our engagement with the house. 

The next step involves presenting these insights in the form of an exhibition at H Gallery, in Bangkok (August 23-September 30 2012), with associated publications, discussions, workshops, etc.

At all stages of the process we have been careful not to disrupt the peace and privacy of its owner.

Methodologically, it soon became evident that the project needed to address the limits of media representations which, in the visual arts, can be superficially descriptive or complacent, and convey more about the authors than about the realities represented.

For a year, drawings, photographs, computer generated models, films, readings, creative writing and conversations have mediated our engagement with the house, and our respective attempts to relate to and make sense of it.

In the process we have found ourselves repositioning aesthetics within ethics.

The outcome, to be presented at Project H, Gallery H, will consist of a series of 'open' visual propositions about the house; in an attempt to free it from the stereotypes and ourselves from the confort which prevent its exemplariness to become self-evident.

Our aim is to make this exemplariness more intelligible: and help us to perceive the house not just as an excentric object, but as a complex, multi-layered network of relations, that strikingly stands out in the concrete jungle that surrounds it; and endures, perhaps as something else — of the order of the  symbolic —in a world of social, economic, political and ideological contradictions.

Putting the house and Khun. A. in a position to give us a master class, is ultimately what the project aspired to do, for me, as lead artist: implicitly rather than explicitly.

Three 'divination drawings', used as a way of looking at the house from alternative perspectives, free from intentionality:





Reading Pattern Language by Christopher Alexander complemented this more intuitive process; making it less arbitrary and unlocking some new possibilities for free, open interpretation.