ELEMENTOS NECESARIOS PARA EL TRABAJO

The worlds we study are created, in part, through the texts we write and perform about them... These texts are always dialogical - the site at which the voices of the other, alongside the voices of the author, come alive and interact with one another.

Denzin (1997, p.xiii)

As a major theme for the research programme, Chapter 5 discussed the significance of clay as material per se, specifically focusing on the

dissonances of clay in inconstant form. This chapter examines siting of work, as a further major characteristic of contemporary ceramic practice utilising impermanence. Location and placement of impermanent work are

considered, as experimented with in personal practice and illustrated in that of contemporaries. Implications of siting and placement are discussed as a means of setting such practice in a wider theoretical context.

6.1 INTRODUCTION

The power that siting of art objects has on their impact and construed meaning has a long history:

Where an artwork is seen – be it in a cave, a church, a palace, a museum, a commercial gallery, an outdoor space, or a private home – and where it is placed within that chosen space can confer a meaning… It is a key issue in the appreciation of art. Newhouse (2005, p.8)

At the start of the research programme a variety of experimental pieces were made, engaging with impermanence in non-gallery locations. In retrospect, it is clear that among other issues, such as the significance of material

(Chapter 6) and the role of record (Chapter 9), this was a way of intuitively testing the importance of place in personal practice. Site was explored as destructive force (Tidal Transience), as statement (Converse:Mao) and as

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collaborator (Traces). The issue of site for work has been considered for each installation, often being the direct stimulus for work.

6.1.1 Engagement with place

The fourteen elements making up Converse:Mao (Figure 4.2, see also 2.2.1, p.42) were carried daily on a birding visit to China. The press-moulded faces in British-sourced raw clay connected with the earlier gallery-installed

Fallacy50. Here they personified the stringencies of the Mao regime, and the

two-week trip was spent reflecting on the way contemporary Chinese society works in the context of a Western (admittedly narrow) understanding of Chinese communism. Each day there was a wait for a location to present itself pointing up issues of Maoism, resulting in varied sites – a field latrine, a ditch full of dead fish, an incense-holder at a Buddhist temple, a drainage outfall etc. A publication (Appendix 10, book archive of the work) with diary entries indicates all the sites.

The way the faces were installed (see Figure 6.1) was also stimulated by their context. Each response to site was different, some positive towards, some rejecting of, the Mao regime, and the experience emphasised the variation in response which location can stimulate, in association with personal mood and circumstance.

The frequency with which siting is an important (while not ubiquitous) feature in my impermanent clay-based work led into investigation in order to better understand its significance. This review of connection to place in personal and case study work (e.g. Eden, Cushway, Tattersall, also Cummings, Twomey, Cummins and Piper, and Gormley) explores the phenomenon and contextualises it as a distinctive strand of ceramic art practice engaging with impermanence.

Due to its frequency and complexity, this aspect could be the basis for a thesis in its own right. A selective approach was therefore taken to draw out strands of specific interest to my own praxical development.

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Figure 6.1 Installing Converse:Mao, No.4, 31.10.14. The vastness of the industrial landscape was oppressive here, hence an urge to crush the piece underfoot. Image © Dr. J. Eccles 6.1.2 Categorising location

(a) Site-specificity. An historic definition is:

an artist's intervention in a specific locale, creating a work that is integrated with its surroundings and that explores its relationship to the topography of its locale… The term also applies to an environmental installation or sculpture created especially for a

particular gallery space or public site. Guggenheim website (undated)

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Reflection and experimentation during the research programme led to the identification of scales of importance for location in impermanent work using clay. The term ‘site-specificity’ is used in the more restricted sense to

encompass cultural and historic resonances of place as well as the usual topographical aspects. I endorse Aitchison’s view (2005, p.1): ‘It strikes me as ironic that the term site-specific is generally employed as shorthand for work that takes place outside of cultural spaces like theatres and galleries’: practitioners, including myself, may use institutional sites where appropriate to work and its personal meaning.

In 1985 (and cited by Kwon, 1997 p.86), Richard Serra stated a key characteristic of site-specificity to be that:

to remove the work is to destroy the work… The scale, size, and location of site-specific works are determined by the topography of the site, whether it be urban or landscape or architectural enclosure. The works become part of the site and restructure both conceptually and perceptually the organization of the site. Serra (1985)

Whether a work impacts in such a way on a site that it alters it physically or not, for some personal work there is only one possible physical site because the maker’s meaning embedded for that work51

is directly connected with a place or event, as was the case for Converse:Mao (6.1.1, p.133). Nag Puja, see 7.2.1, pp.165-168, is another example of a site holding particular

meaning. The term site-specificity is thus used to indicate resonance unique to an individual site. When material also relates to such a site, as in RePlace (see 9.3.2, pp.214-216), that site has heightened specificity.

I recognise a latent paradox in desiring a specific site for the purposes of personal meanings, with the knowledge that others may (and frequently do) remove installations. However, as indicated elsewhere, in my own practice installations and their meanings are gifted to finders to engage with at their own discretion, unconditionally. Potential appropriation is a crucial part of personal meaning as the work’s instigator, with the expectation that this is an

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Given discussion elsewhere about personal meanings for impermanent work, I do not automatically extend meaningfulness to other percipients. My meanings may – or may not – be applicable for them

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individual (perhaps singular) response. Relationship between maker and percipients is as evanescent as the work frequently is itself (e.g. RePlace and

Converse:Mao). Intimacy of scale enhances the capacity for adoption by a

finder in an open setting.

(b) Site-sensitivity. For work that is relevant to a site but could also be located elsewhere without loss of meaning, the term ‘site-sensitivity’ is used. Work such as the Traces exhibition (see also 5.1, pp.110-113) created a dialogue with a permanent collection of important Chinese ceramics, requiring a setting such as the Oriental Museum, Durham, with its fine MacDonald ceramic collection. It would equally have held its meaning in a similar setting, such as the Sir Percival David collection at the British Museum. It was site- sensitive in connecting directly with an environment with the characteristics to enable meanings to be drawn.

(c) Site-allusiveness. Other work, such as ReCollection (6.2.3, p.145), could be re-located with little impact on meaning, this being bound up with form, its disintegration and its narrative. Placing it in a historic/museum setting added gravitas. The site’s pebble matrix (Figure 6.7) physically enhanced the work and its dissolution unexpectedly, as the elements gradually subsided into their surroundings. Such a setting is site-allusive in providing a sympathetic, appropriate environment without specific connection for the work’s meaning (this would have altered had it been installed at the Roman villa inspiring it). The personal work referenced in the thesis has been categorised in Table 6.A in relation to these three terms, indicating the importance of clarifying meanings:

- Site-specificity (1) - Site-sensitivity (2) - Site-allusiveness(3)

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