The neutrality, minimalist sterile environment of Victoria Miro and its contrast to the raw urban chaos of Old Street reflects the the architects' (Claudio Silvestrin and Micheal Drain) effort to create a space that allows focus and contemplation of the art, and dispells distractions from the outside . The creation of an interior that relates to nothing reminds me of a passage from George's Perecs "Species of spaces and Other Pieces" in which he is trying to imagine a space 'relates to nothing', a space without use. However, he finds that to be a struggle, as all spaces have functions and connections to past memories.
"I have several times tried to think of... a useless room, absolutely and intentionally useless. It would not be a junkroom, it would not be an extra bedroom, or a corridor, or a cubby hole, or a corner. It would be functionless space. It would serve for nothing, relate to nothing...A space without function. Not "without any precise function" but precisely without any function; not pluri-functional (everybody knows how to do that), bu a-functional. It wouldn't obviously be a space intended solely to "release" the others (lumber room, cupboard, hanging space, storage space, etc. ) but a space, I repeat, that would have no purpose at all...How does one think of nothing without automatically putting something round that nothing, so turning it into a hole, into which one will hasten to put something, an activity, a function, a destiny, a gaze, a need, a lack, a surplus?... I have encountered many unusuable spaces and many unused spaces. But I wanted neither the unusable nor the unused, but the useless. How to expel functions, rhtythms, habits, how to expel necessity? I imagined myself living in a vast apartment, so vast that I could never remember how many rooms it had...All the rooms except one, were used for something. the whole point was to find the last room. It was no harder , when all's said
"I have several times tried to think of... a useless room, absolutely and intentionally useless. It would not be a junkroom, it would not be an extra bedroom, or a corridor, or a cubby hole, or a corner. It would be functionless space. It would serve for nothing, relate to nothing...A space without function. Not "without any precise function" but precisely without any function; not pluri-functional (everybody knows how to do that), bu a-functional. It wouldn't obviously be a space intended solely to "release" the others (lumber room, cupboard, hanging space, storage space, etc. ) but a space, I repeat, that would have no purpose at all...How does one think of nothing without automatically putting something round that nothing, so turning it into a hole, into which one will hasten to put something, an activity, a function, a destiny, a gaze, a need, a lack, a surplus?... I have encountered many unusuable spaces and many unused spaces. But I wanted neither the unusable nor the unused, but the useless. How to expel functions, rhtythms, habits, how to expel necessity? I imagined myself living in a vast apartment, so vast that I could never remember how many rooms it had...All the rooms except one, were used for something. the whole point was to find the last room. It was no harder , when all's said
No comments:
Post a Comment