Here are some interesting ideas that arose out of focussed research this week. Namely a re-writing of a previously weak paragraph in my contextual review and a new visual aesthetic for the research.
The Third Reich
For the first draft of my contextual review I included an admittedly weak paragraph on associations between the white cube and race. The paragraph discussed Jun'ichiro Tanizaki's claim that the wanting to remove shadows from sterile white architectural spaces such as bathrooms, kitchens and toilets was akin to outmoded ideas of skin being a signifier of uncleanliness. The association therefore was with Renzo Marten's film which explored the history of the white cube gallery with colonialism and oppression. This point was weak in that it only really had one reference, which did not discuss directly with the white cube. it was also not even the main point of the paragraph, but a segue into discussing Tanizaki's claim that....
'"Modern man, in his well-lit house, knows nothing of the beauty of Gold,’
...explaining how gold, a material globally associated with value, cannot be experienced properly under an artificial white light, but instead that in dim rooms, it serves as an illuminator for its unique property of reflection and its true beauty emerges when reflecting the warm glow of candlelight.
This point brought up my own experience in painting, where a brunaille is applied to a blank white canvas in order to better gauge the tones in the painting. The point here being that just as artificial lighting obfuscates our experience of gold, so too might the blank white walls obfuscate our experience of visual artworks.
I decided to remove this paragraph from my revised contextual review.
Later, in researching for my contextual review, specifically in the history of the white cube and its standardisation, I came across the point that before it was standardised in the west, the aesthetic was first enforced in Nazi Germany. I did not want to make the point that the aesthetic is therefore associated with Adolf Hitler, as this would is not the case, however there are reasons to which the aesthetic appealed so much to the Nazis which demonstrates how the gallery space cannot fulfil its attempt to be removed from context and ideology. I also did not jump to include this as a point, until I had multiple sources which discussed the importance of this event.
Research Aesthetic:
Inspired by the visual aesthetics of the work of past students on the course, I have been thinking about ways in which I could tie together the enquiries of my research project under a cohesive graphic code.
The areas I saw as important are:
- The idea of haunting
- An association with sound, ideally ultrasound (without removing conversation with the visual)
- Something relational
- Something that could represent the breaking free of a closed architecture
- Something that ideally is not white
Previously I had thought that I could create images of ghosts in a digital 3D software, highlighting the point that Danish art historian Theis Vallø Madsen has remarked that he sees...
'…the characteristics of the white cube in our imaginaries of cyberspace’ (Holmboe, 2020)
...However, the point of cyberspace is certainly not the focus of my research project, but a point within it and the association and importance of sound is hereby lost.
I decided that bats may be a useful representation of these ideas, because of their haunting appearance and use of echolocation via ultrasound to navigate space.
Bats are commonly associated with hauntings, and famously use ultrasound to navigate space in the absence of light. Bats are not blind however, they have good eyesight for the day, echolocation merely assists flying in the night, therefore the eyes and ears assist in different contexts. There is the image of a bird in a birdcage, and the release from such a cage being an icon of braking free: I would hope to use this image with the bat to associate the braking free of the gallery to the haunting of sound. Bats are also black which contrasts greatly to white and I may use multiple bats to show relationality.
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