The Docter's Arrival - Richard Battersby

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The night air was thick with moisture brought on by another July downpour as the large Mercedes hurtled through the park’s dark glades, a dim reminder that the summer was going a little like the business – slow and with disappointing results. Smelling almost as seductive as the air itself, the doctor reached for his attaché, clutching another remedy in his bottomless arsenal. This one would last, he chuckled to himself, at least until he was due at the event. Sniffing the air with caution, he lowered his chin to the window frame, feeling its bullet-proof glaze chaffing his freshly gilletted skin, sensing its vulnerability. Beauchamp Place seemed a little different from how he remembered it, not quite so many rangers, perhaps a few more recent arrivals, though just as much attention to the shop front cosmetics. If he pitched his next lunch with just the right amount of right, he might just land that deluxe parking bay he’d been eyeing up, taking 7 and a half minutes off the trip to the Therapy Power Bootheque. He noticed with his usual precision that the 53 was obscured by the throng of excited bodies huddled under the new canopy, a well-lit lesson in how to stand in line when such an event was in store. Signalling his appreciation to the driver, he slowly placed one brogue in front of the other, steadying his restrained joy as he headed for the threshold.

Victoria Adams and Gareth Bell Jones, Untitled

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Victoria Adam and Gareth Bell-Jones, Untitled, books rearranged on book shelving - 176 Gallery Resource Room, 2009

Contingent Ground; Post Foundational Politics, Violence and the Art Object - Tom Trevatt

In Oedipus the King the tragic conflict still centres, at least in appearance, on specific concerns: the throne of Thebes and the queen who is both mother and wife. In The Bacchae, by contrast, Dionysus and Pentheus have nothing concrete to fight over. Their rivalry centres on divinity itself: but behind that divinity there lies only violence. To compete for divinity is to compete for a chimera, because the reality of the divine rests in its transcendental absence. It is not the hysterical rivalry of men that will engender gods - only unanimous violence can accomplish that. Insofar as divinity is real, it cannot serve as a prize to be won in a contest. Insofar as it is regarded as a prize, it is merely a phantom that will invariably escape man’s grasp and turn to violence.

Rene Girard, Violence and the Sacred

Within the exhibition structure certain discourses are played out, certain positions are put at stake. The exhibition is an empirical object with which to understand artwork, history and the production of knowledge, but also, allows a challenge to be set, arguments to be laid down and battles to be fought. The combat takes place on a number of levels, and is scarred by continually oscillating internal infractions. Claims are made for position, space, attention and meaning. This is true not only of the process of hanging or curating an exhibition, but also of the exhibition itself.

Contested Ground brings these questions to the fore. What claims can an artwork make to a certain ground? What desires are played out when objects ‘touch’ each other in time, circumstance, space and co-incidence? What occurs in the ‘between’ between works of art, and what claims can these works make on that between space? What this amounts to is a political question. The space between beings, the space on which beings rest, the ground they mark out, what is contested, is necessarily engaged with the political. The ground here, what the contestation is over, is more than just topographical, it is ideological, ethical, political, aesthetic, &c. What the ground amounts to then is the structures and formations of systems of thought that define how one makes decisions and about what the decision is made.

What final foundation do these claims use to mediate their battle? Through the procession of the recent history of philosophy the foundation on which we may have once stood has been evacuated. It has been cleared, withdrawn, removed and abolished, according to Heidegger, what now remains is an abyss. Whereas, within what we call foundationalism (the form of thought that supposes that society and/or politics are founded on undeniable, ultimate and immutable principles), the question of being had recourse to a higher fundamental, or transcendent Other (otherwise known as logos, substance, spirit, the absolute, infinity, God, idea &c), post-foundationalism removes this ultimate foundation of Being from the equation, replacing it with the absence of ground. Heidegger withdraws the ground from the metaphysical question, leaving us in an a-byssal position. The ultimate ground of the social on which the political ‘decision’ is made has been removed, however, as Oliver Marchart argues in his recent book Post-Foundational Political Thought, this does not mean the complete removal of all grounds. In fact, post-foundational as opposed to anti-foundational thought, suggests that the foundations for the social are removed and replaced in a processural manner, oscillating continuously, grounding and ungrounding. Marchart accounts for this in an adroit move; utilising the Heideggerian concept of ‘ontological difference’ he posits that the field of politics is conditioned by this difference. At the ontic level, the level of things, he positions politics, as in the day to day running of a state etc. at the ontological level he positions the political, as the question of the nature of politics. This he names political difference.

Marchart’s thesis provides the conditions for a processural movement of ungrounding and grounding to occur temporally. The social sphere is articulated through a process whereby one claim makes the jump from the particular to the universal, instituting itself in a hegemonic procedure. This hegemonic nodal point seeks to ground society, give sense to it, however, as there is an inherent lack within the particular claim to universality that comes from it’s very position as particular, i.e. it cannot speak universally, it ultimately fails. The failure of the nodal point to speak universally, to gain full presence within society and totalise the field of discourse, its inherent lack or constitutive split comes from the political difference Marchart determines.

As he asserts:

[W]hat occurs within the moment of the political […] is the following double-folded movement. On the one hand, the political, as the instituting moment of society, functions as a supplementary ground to the groundless stature of society, yet on the other hand this supplementary ground withdraws in the very moment it institutes the social. As a result, society will always be in search for an ultimate ground, while the maximum that can be achieved will be a fleeting and contingent grounding by way of politics - a plurality of partial grounds.

The ground achieved is necessarily and productively contingent. It is through this contingency and the plurality of partial grounds that the political comes into play within social discourse. If particular subjectivities come into conflict and they can have no claim to a higher principle to mediate their discourse the resulting crisis must make an appeal to a quasi-transcendental ground. A hegemonic operation that instates temporarily one particular claim to fill the position of Master signifier.

The shift to discussion of signification is a pertinent one. We understand the aporias inherent in signification - that there is a constitutive gap between saying and meaning - and that this is a tendency that pertains to all signifying structures. What we must come to terms with is that the inherent and necessary contingency constitutive of the political applies within the sphere of the exhibition. That the political decision based on the contingent relation between the signifier and signified gets taken within the exhibition structure. That the process of viewing art is constituted by the very political paradox, the foundational abyss, the grounding and ungrounding of the sphere that we are discussing.

The Power Tower Thing

Kelly Wojtko in conversation with Jenny Moore Koslowsky

KW: Was there anything in particular about the project, or the space, that made you interested in participating? In the end I think it was crucial that both of your towers were in the space. At the very start of the show the viewer was confronted with their authoritative, commanding presence; was this the reaction you hoped people would have upon first seeing them?

JMK: I think there is an initial command that I hope to achieve with my sculptures, but one that can be equally undermined when looked at closer, or from a different angle. The fact that the skinnier guy was so tall, positioned right on the altar, and yet had to be secured to the ceiling in order to stand up was really interesting for me and opened up so many other readings than what I had expected. For instance, I was thinking about what you said about altar pieces and how the church used to build huge domes above their altars so that the visual cues led straight up into 'heaven' or the sublime/the divine. You mentioned that my sculpture may sit in the place of this kind of architecture and, while I might be twisting your words, it reiterated for me this hero/anti-hero status that my work sometimes takes. In one way, it is a commanding structure, which in terms of the church altar could be a metaphor for something metaphysical, but it also (physically) depends on the architecture of the building. Do you know what I mean by this? It's sort of become a chicken and egg question for me when thinking of power structures in this way.

Let's start from the beginning: you asked what attracted me to the project in the first place. The space was a major draw, because of its unique height and layout - I've never had my work viewed from two levels before, so that was an exciting experiment for me, especially because in the end I found myself more fond of the view from above than below. Physical space always teaches me something about my own work - this could be in a purely formal sense (how does this angle work with that one, what does a wood sculpture look like in a wood room?), or in a conceptual way. I am coming to terms with the fact that there is a bit of formalism in me (Conrad, the architect, chuckled at that statement saying “you have to come to terms with that?” To clarify; it's not that I deny formalism as a valuable pursuit in art, or think that there isn't room for formal concerns since Conceptual Art or any nonsense like that, I just mean FOR ME, considering the practice I come from and the trajectory of artists I would have associated myself with, I didn't know this about myself before now.)

I guess another thing about the show that appealed to me (in a masochistic way) was the concentrated, brief timetable of the thing. The more towers I build, the more I see them as transitionary, or provisional, gaining life and meaning and context from the disassembling and re-building of them in different orders, adding a bit here, a bit there, tacking on a new assortment of materials, but also recycling and reincorporating elements from other works: like a snowball effect. I like to think of pieces of the previous space rubbing off onto my materials and being reinvented in a new situation. So, having to build something so substantial (and so precarious at the same time) for a short period of time seemed appropriate. It seems to
mimic my life in some ways! Or maybe it mimics a lot of people's lives, this accumulative, re-building thing of day-to-day survival.

But back to you - what about the whole idea of 'Contested Ground'? It's hard not to try and read some serious politics into a title like that, especially considering the whole Palestine/Israeli occupation and all those other lovely things that remind us of the harshness of our world. Not that I have a particular interest in this kind of direct international relations-type politics in terms of my own work but I was curious if other people read it that way.

KW: To be honest in terms of the title of the exhibition I hadn't recognized its reference to the Israeli/Palestinian conflict but I think you're dead on. We are products of the time we live in, and I think it’s impossible not to subconsciously include aspects of the present circumstances of our lives into whatever it is that we're doing/making. In the end our idea of 'contested' grounds ended up playing out more behind the scenes and I think was mostly important for the artists and curators participating in the project. You stated it perfectly while we were talking during the weekend of the exhibition that the idea that any work of art is able to retain its autonomy, remaining unaffected by other works when it’s in a group exhibition is a farce. The 'contesting' going on between works in an exhibition is more a productive way of instigating discourse between them.

Besides the practicality of the placement of your taller tower directly where the pulpit would have been, I think its location enhanced the tower's inherently authoritative content. You've mentioned in previous conversations that your skinnier tower was also about authority and power, possibly the loss of it, or that the power the tower was alluding to was false. Could you talk more about the play you created between the instability it portrayed and the strength traditionally associated with such structures.

JMK: Fair enough that the war-politics of the Middle East didn't determine your choice of the title 'Contested Ground.' The show itself had its own contestations: between objects, ideas, timetables, participants, you name it! As you mentioned, we talked about this on the weekend of the event and I told you that I don't see art exhibitions as being able to function any differently. In a very broad sense I think most shows could have a title like ‘Contested Ground’. The idea that you presented to me as the basis of the show - that all things would be competing, all spaces and objects and time slots would be active and shifting - is another thing that attracted me to participating. I think it's a very honest way of approaching curating because all of these things happen, even when we try and pretend that they do not, or that a white cube situation can obliterate these problems, creating some 'pure' space for viewing, come on, that's just impossible.

As an artist working in the world, I have to accept that my work will be tainted or enlivened - you chose the word - by its context and interruptions. This is the reality of how people encounter things in the world; the factors are endless and cannot be controlled. So, as you said, sometimes the contesting that goes on between the factors is where the really interesting conversations, debates and connections can take place.

About the power tower thing, (this struck me as really funny when I read your email): I see myself looking back and forth between two types of towers/structures. On the one hand there is Tatlin's tower, the Eiffel tower, and the tower of Babel, all built with revolution in mind. They aim for the future, they are more pictorial, they try to see (maybe nostalgically) into the future or towards some better society. On the other hand, there are structures like watchtowers, military defense/prison towers, hunting decks and crows nests on ships. These are all much more aggressive and directly offensive in their use. Their use itself is key because they act as much more functional buildings than the first examples. So I think that I'm flip flopping between these typologies, talking about power and/or authority, but also reminding us of revolution, then tearing down that idea of revolution through references to aggression, all the while trying to maintain an inch of optimism about social change and the visioning of some 'other' place, which deflates me once again to the ridiculousness of an altruistic social project. It's a vicious cycle! Back and forth, back and forth! Somehow I can decipher the Hero and the Anti-Hero in this see-saw action of mine and that really interests me: how to combine two concepts, both using the title 'heroism' but to very different ends (think of the tragic Greek hero vs. the macho man on the land hero).

KW: Regarding your POWER TOWERS (I'm not going to be able to get that out of my head now) I really liked looking at them as apparatuses, structures which are meant to aid other purposes. Since they could be seen as podiums or platforms from which political or military leaders deliver speeches, I also think of dictators (here I'm mostly referring to the skinny one) and possibly the rise and fall of dominate political systems: this coming from its implied function as some sort of tower, yet one whose function has been deliberately put out of reach: a relic of its original purpose. The hope you talked about possibly lying in the removal of what could have been repressive. This reading is greatly influenced by the image I have in my mind of your towers next to Simona's sandbags. Together your works caused that central space to take on the feel of a battlefield or some sort of training camp. How do you feel your worked changed (if it did) being situated with Simona's work?

JMK: Part of me really likes how you put it: ‘a relic of its original purpose,’ because there is something OTHER, whether that be a figure or landscape or situation, that I hope my sculptures call out to. At the same time, I have a hard time thinking of the term relic as one which is alive and present in the now-ness of our lives – a relic is more of a narrative object, loaded with perceptions and desires and stipulations and speculations. Having said that, I now wonder if art and relic could almost be synonymous?! Many might argue that art objects are not necessarily narrative but I tend to believe that people (viewers) are narrative and therefore bring stories to the things they encounter, experience, and engage with.

Okay, bringing it back to your observation that my work at 176 suggests an alternate purpose – I agree. The tension between fragility, instability and power or authority is crucial here because that alternate purpose must be one without definition, one that is open to possibility, rather than fixed in a certain mode or system. I definitely think my work changed by being situated with Simona’s work, but by now you may know that I think all artwork changes according to its situation. In this case, the main space of 176 really did become some sort of obstacle course, training ground, or war game, and yet I was surprised that the atmosphere was not as hostile as it could have been considering the elements placed in the space. Maybe the luxuriousness of Simona’s leather sand bags, and the awkwardness of my towers worked together to push it past a straightforward ‘battle-ground,’ both suggest unorthodoxy or a play with expectation, and therefore possibly with function.


Jenny Moore Koslowsky is a Canadian artist, currently completing an MFA Art Practice degree at Goldsmiths College, London.

Kelly Wojtko is one of the contributing curators as part of 'Contested Ground,' she is currently undertaking the MFA in Curating at Goldsmiths College, London.