Seance
Conversing with Spirits
Before talking to a spirit it is important to know that there are two different types of ghost which haunt us today:
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The Phantom and the Spectre.
(Terms such as spirit and ghost are cumulative umbrella terms by contrast.)
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"Phantoms lie about the past whilst spectres gesture towards a still unformulated future. The difference between them poses in a new form the tension between the desire to understand and the openness to what exceeds knowledge." - Davis C, 'Hauntology, spectres and phantoms' (2005)
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BURIAL
Ghosts are created by a process of burial. This is the means by which an entity is no longer able to contribute to conversation over time. After burial, their voice can only be heard by a haunting.
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SPECTRES
On one hand there are spectres. These are the spirits of abstract ideas, they haunts conversations as a recurring concept that has been rejected or suppressed out of a dialogue, they may take the form of the embodiment of an idea, or the spirit may be less corporeal.
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Conversing with spectres is not undertaken in the expectation that they will reveal a hidden secret. Rather, it may open us up to the experience of unknowing which underlies and may undermine what we know. As they have no voice, conversation is only fruitful when we examine how their presence impacts their surroundings when applied to the context it haunts. The Spectre is a deconstructive figure that often represents or embodies a dualism, hovering between death and life, presence and absence and making established certainties vacillate.
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PHANTOMS
On the other hand there are phantoms. These are the presence of dead figures for the purpose of trans-generational communication. The phantom embodies the legacy and personhood of the deceased, often haunting through spaces through association and their framework which still stand. The voice of a phantom may take the form of text that may be occasionally reactivated into conversation.
The Spectator
O'Doherty's spectre:
"As we move around that space, looking at the walls, avoiding things on the floor, we become aware that that gallery also contains a wandering [Spectre] frequently mentioned in avant-garde dispatches – the spectator" O'Doherty B, (1986)
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Sometimes called the Observer, the Viewer, occasionally the Perceive or the Beholder.
‘It has no face, is mostly a back. It stoops and peers, is slightly clumsy. Its attitude is inquiring, it's puzzlement discreet.’ (Ibid)
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It arrived with modernism, with the disappearance of perspective and emerges wherever called upon.
'(He) lies down and even crawls as modernism presses onto (him) its final indignities.'
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They are a dark wanderer, a reflexive trigger for a space land-mined for art.
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The spectator haunts in the bodies of the other. the shadow obscuring the art experience that comes with any public viewing. The spirit of the crowd that we assume to be part of and whose form is distorted by the unspoken preferences of the institution, embodying at once a dualism of presence and non-presence.
'It has no face, is mostly a back..'
Through this dualism its body suppressed to a back, the bodies of other people only haunt an artistic space when they are between yourself and the work, ergo only their back haunts the experience. All of their features are rejected, save their disembodied faculty of vision, represented by its two hovering eyes. The sounds of its footsteps, breathing and clothing are represented similarly as its haunting elements by the sole of its shoes, long cloak and small slitted mouth.
Put simply, the spectator represents the contrast of being welcomed and unwelcome, where the disembodied faculty of vision is welcomed, but where its attached body is unwelcome in its obfuscation of the art experience of other spectators, in accordance to the ideologies of the institution.
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O'Doherty paints the picture of the spectator as a passive body, however I feel this is inaccurate. The guest visiting an art gallery is deliberately active in searching for art experience, as attending an art gallery is an active decision madeas oppose to watching advertisements on TV. I do think that the visitors to a gallery can be conditioned/ positioned to a role of passivity by the ideologies of the gallery space.
Fisher's spectre:
Nostalgia
"The erosion of spatiality has been amplified by the rise of what Marc Augé calls the ‘‘non-place’’: airports, retail parks, and chain stores which resemble one another more than they resemble the particular spaces in which they are located."
M Fisher, (2012)
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The disappearance of space goes alongside the disappearance of time: there are non-times as well as non-places.
Haunting can be seen as intrinsically resistant to the contraction and homogenization of time and space. It hap- pens when a place is stained by time, or when a particular place becomes the site for an encounter with broken time.
(Ibid)
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It is characterised by similitude and the image of the double: repeat aesthetics seen side by side. Consider as above, the image of Anastasi's West wall of the Dwan Gallery 'Untitled' (1967). Where in its visual echo, the characteristics the aesthetic object can be emphasised and therefore haunted by itself.
Speaking on Anastasi's work, O'Doherty O’Doherty writes that after that show ‘when the paintings came down, the wall became a kind of ready made mural which changed every show in that space thereafter. Though I would say that by 'change' what O'Doherty is talking about is a haunting. Where Anastasi's work continues to affect even in its absence.
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The image of the double has long been associated with the concept of haunting. One need only think to the twins in the shining, for a powerful cultural haunting image.
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Freud discusses the double as a vision of terror. The double represents observable change, encapsulating concurrent contrasting concepts i.e. both good and evil, animate and inanimate, imaginary and real etc. Because there is comfort in the familiar, there is often fear in the unfamiliar. Conceptually, Nostalgia is the reminder or longing for repetition of temporal events, the image of the double therefore represents that paradigm of repetition as just as temporal effects are separated in time when repeated, visual repetitions are separated in space, allowing for observable comparison.
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The spectre of Nostalgia is an uncanny entity which reveals the emphasised qualities of similarity between two objects or events. It is summoned wherever there is a repeat aesthetic, haunting your experience within a space with your previous expereinces within spaces of repeated aesthetic.
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The spectre of Nostalgia represents the contrast of repetition and sameness through difference, as nothing repeated is ever the same, it must either be experienced in a different time or a different space. While the repetition brings attention to the quality of sameness, it haunts through the aspects of difference.
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Nostalgia has the appearance of Narcissus and Voice of Echo.
Sanchez's Spectre
Zeitgeist
Acerca de
Translated from German, Zeitgeist literally means the ghost of time and it is used to refer to the cultural spirit with a dynamic paradigm that evolves with time. An invisible agent or force dominating the characteristics of a given epoch in world history.
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While the gallery space aims to be a neutral container, the veracity of this claim is made observable when contrasted to the works it holds inside of it and the people that visit the gallery. As the site is inwards facing it is through these elements that the outside world is permitted to enter.
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American poet Sonia Sanchez writes that ‘Art… reacts to or reflects the culture it springs from’. (2010). We can therefore identify a zeitgeist; a spectre of cultural time, in looking at the works presented in art exhibitions. O’Doherty writes that in the framing of culturally reflective works, the modernist aesthetic that characterises the gallery ages visibly and becomes content. We can then see in our current zeitgeist, in its reversal of container and content, introduces new deconstructive motifs to the gallery space.
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We can also see the zeitgeist from outside the 'White Cube', although often less so as architecture is a slower to keep up with progressing cultural trends. But sometimes the aesthetic of the white cube sticks out in the architectural landscape.
If we can understand the site as timeless or 'frozen in time', then it is as the culture around it progresses in time that the aesthetic becomes dated.
Phantom of Ideology:
Adolf Hitler
This presence of this phantom, counteracts the notion that the space is ideologically neutral and it is in the ways that they associated meaning to the space that highlights its problems in this attempt.
The year following Barr’s first trademark white cube exhibition at MoMA, Adolf Hitler approved of its use in the Nazi’s first architectural project after coming to power: ‘Haus der Kunst’ (House of Art), Munich.
It was first in Nazi Germany, not America that the white walls became standard.
However, unlike Barr’s approach at MoMA with a focus on isolation and attempted neutrality, the German style emphasised the absolutist transcendence of order and some have suggested that its white-ness ideated cultural purity (Birkett, 2012). The aesthetics’ ideological principles that could have appealed to both of these institutions include:
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- order
- rationalism
- progress
- elitism
- extraction from the outside world
- universality
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These associations haunt the white cube format today as it represents the image of an industry which is often criticised for being elitist, universalised and removed from the world around it. When these criticisms are raised, so too is the historical conversation with the third reich. And so it is in this way, that this phantom continues to haunt past his death.
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This image of the phantom was created by turning an image of Hitler and others who were inside the Haus der Kunst white cube into sound and then back again into an image. The bodies of the nazis converge into one larger presence,, their ghostly feet are lost in the image, they do not spectate but are ingrained with the walls. Their likeness is lost, and even the artworks appear more human than they do. Meaning that the artworks reflect more of the outside world, whereas the nazis assist the space in alienating and burying art in this white mesh of noise.
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Phantom of Protection:
Alfred H Barr Jr
The formulation of the first white cube was by New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) director Alfred H Barr, Jr in the 1930s with his exhibition Cubism and Abstract Art (1936).
At that point, MoMA was still operating out of a Rockefeller townhouse, the walls of which Barr painted white for the first time, exposing the wooden flooring beneath its carpet and installing artificial lighting.
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‘The works were arranged to trace an art-historical narrative that ignored any political or social context’ (Cain, 2017).
This placed objective focus on the discourse of the artworks, giving each of the artworks the space and platform to speak for itself. Three years later, MoMA opened their doors to their 53rd Street building, which reflected the sensibility that sites of art curation should be designed from the inside out, with a focus on neutrality. The strategy of display was revolutionary at the time for its clean execution, adaptability and objective focus and this new building set a new precedent for art galleries, featuring several white cube gallery spaces which aimed to remove attention from the architecture and focus it on the artworks alone. Its architecture was designed in response to the increasing abstraction of modern art, such as in cubism and prepared the contemporary gallery space for the arrival of minimalism. It has since been largely globalised, to the extent that most contemporary art exhibitions fall under its aesthetic principles.
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Barr’s rejection of context may have been inspired by a fear that all societal factors are disruptive and harmful to the creation of art as he had seen in Germany and Russia in the 1930s. However, it is possible that in Barr’s attempt to exclude the influence of communist and fascist autocratic powers on art, he instead created an aesthetic that has come to symbolise the capitalist autocracy that controls contemporary art today.
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Barr haunts through the enforcement of his fears. The ideologies behind the maintenance of the white cube space is inspired by this fierce 'protection' of things obscuring an experience of art. Because of this, any way that the aesthetic is unfulfilled ( such as by the texture of the walls, or sounds that echo inside) or broken (through art genres such as land art or instututional critique); serves to summon the phantom of the space it assists to dismantle.
Phantom of Censorship:
Nelson Rockefeller
This photo shows Hans Haacke's work 'MoMA Poll' (1970), in which the artist who is known for such works of institutional critique, decided not to add anything new to the gallery he was exhibiting in and instead ask the gallery-goers a question, the results of which will be revealed by the votes being quantified in piles within transparent plexiglass containers.
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The question the artist asks is whether Governor (Nelson) Rockefeller, who is relevant as he is a major donor and board member of the Museum of Modern Art, -'s support of President Nixon's Indochina policy will affect the public's decision to vote for him. The work does not assert any political point as in itself completely impartial, however it invites the audience into sharing and expressing their own presence and concerns, especially within a context that is associated with these concerns by proxy. The Indochina policy for reference was a decision that would have been a vengeful strike after the Vietnam war, which many agreed would have been essentially an in-humanitarian warcrime.
It is therefore, the gallery's decision to censor this work, that reflects once again that the space is not free from ideologies and external influence.
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This phantom is characterised by engagement, works within the ideal white cube cannot be affected by external forces, and that includes the visitors to that gallery. Works in which call for the audience to interact and change the work, evoke a haunting figure of censorship and concern for longevity.