Project Incomplete

Ryan T. Dillon Reinventing the Contemporary Marina Lathouri Essay Abstract 25 March 2009

The Incomplete Artifact

Can an architecture project, a building with a ribbon cutting ceremony that celebrates its opening and ‘completion’ be considered incomplete? And can this notion of incompleteness tied to the act of process detach architecture from the stranglehold of the Bilbao effect and iconic magazine driven buildings so prevalent in today’s culture? The answer to these questions may be found in the work of ‘project’ art.

The work of artists like Sophie Calle and Francois Bon and the

critical analysis of Michael Sheringham open insight to the concept of ‘project’ art.

Central to the project artists and their work is

process that emphasizes the incomplete.

The artist begins with a

conception of the process, dictated with rules and specifications that will generate the frame of the project.1

The artist does not start the

work with a conception of the final product and this manifestation is the root of the ‘project’.

This mark on the concept of art (and

architecture) forces us to re-think the aspects of space and time, the mental and physical, event and representation, and how we look.2 As Johnnie Gratton and Michael Sheringham highlight in their text The Art of the Project: Projects and Experiments in Modern and French Culture, ‘project’ art has expanded the space where art is made beyond the walls of the studio and into the external world.3

The artist is no

longer confined to an enclosed space, or to an easel.

The outside

world, our environment and surroundings become the studio and the interaction and documentation of that world the canvas and paint.

The

space of ‘project’ art is reliant on interaction, ‘an interface between the abstract and the concrete’.4 this re-siting.

Two outcomes can be extracted from

First, art or the making of it no longer has a

specific place in terms of where it is created, nor where it is exhibited.

Art has become placeless, only rooted in its immediate

surroundings of the chosen environment that is constantly in flux. Second, the space of the ‘project is always poised [in]-between the physical and the mental’.

This interstitial relationship between the

physical and mental (‘the virtual and real’) ‘tests the parameters of different kinds of understanding or participation’5 and places an emphasis on the event of the project and not the representation of the final product.6 The event is conceived not as a means to an ultimate representation, but as a scientific collection of data that uses representation only as a documentation of the process.

That project begins with an idea by

establishing a process that will follow a set of ambiguous and random rules testing the virtual concept set up by the artist.

This process-

idea acts as the frame or grid of the project.

7

It is this frame that

may allow for ‘something unforeseen to happen’

8

and places the ‘project

and performance on equal footing’ and renders the outcome or final object equal.9

To be clear the final outcome is not an ideal, nor a

means to an end, but rather it becomes just another stage in the process of the ‘project’.

This is critical to the argument because

whatever is presented as the documentation of the project-process indicates neither a beginning, nor more importantly an end, but an object that is ‘ongoing’10 or in transition and suggesting that there is the potential for evolving adaptation.

The object is intriguingly

incomplete. This incompleteness is inherent in the split between ‘execution and goal or conclusion’ as that outcome is strictly documentation of the process.11

An example of this process documentation for the art

‘project’ is evident in Francois Bon’s work, Paysage fer.

Bon set up

the project with the specifications to be followed based on an idea to document the French countryside.

During a five-month span every

Thursday morning Bon boarded a train, leaving at 8.18 in the morning traveling eastbound from Paris and arrived in the town of Nancy at 11.22.

The intention of the project, while sitting in the same

carriage and seat every week was to note exactly what Bon saw and what is visible from the train window.

To accompany this notation, Bon

invited photographer Jerome Schlomoff to join him and capture images of the French countryside from inside the train coach.12

The elements of

focus for this discussion are the train and the schedule of travel. The fact that the train has an ongoing schedule ensures that the concept of the incompleteness of a project is paramount.

The choice of

five months is arbitrary and in theory the project really has no real end or real beginning.

Consequently the documentation of the project

in written form accompanied with images is not time bound, nor is it site-space specific, but are strictly a record of the process and what had been observed. Recording of an environment can also be seen in the work of Sophie Calle and her project L’Hotel.

In her words, ‘On Monday, February 16,

1981, I was hired as a temporary chambermaid for three weeks in a Venetian hotel.

I was assigned twelve bedrooms on the fourth floor.

In the course of my cleaning duties, I examined the personal belongings of the hotel guests and observed through details lives that remained unknown to me.

On Friday, March 6, the job came to and end.’13

As

documenting the contents of the hotel guests with use of images and text Calle focuses on the traces left by the guests to not discover ‘who they are, but what they do’14 with the intent of unveiling markings that we all make.

What is important to note here is that while Calle

dates the images and text the incompleteness is evident, as this project could have continued for many more days, in other hotels in a different year, and the documentation and recording method based on the assigned rules would not have been altered. there is no end.

There is no beginning and

Like Bon, Calle art ‘projects’ record, and due to

its specifications render a placeless, timeless and most importantly lacking a finality, suggesting a beyond, while releasing ambiguous readings. This notion of the incomplete cannot be confused with the temporary. While similarities exist in both concepts (incomplete and temporary) the aspects of the differences are critical.

As Sylvia Lavin has

documented in her essay The Temporary Contemporary a shift from modern architecture to ‘contemporary’ was completed in 1954 and coined by Siegfried Gideon in his text A Decade of Contemporary Architecture. Lavin ties the contemporary to that of surfaces that generate special effects, which are tied to interior design, decoration, and most notable to fashion and consumer culture.15

In this sense architecture

transitioned to be a place to ‘display stuff’16 and the architect, or owner had curatorial responsibilities.

This attitude as curator

distinguishes the critical difference between the terms of temporary and incomplete.

To curate, to set up a temporary exhibition comes

equipped with a sell by date. finality.

The exhibit has an end, a permanent

Lavin states that curatorial surfaces of special effects

‘risk becoming obsolete’17, which means they have a conclusion.

They

become non-existent, as the fashion of consumer culture dictates that the surface of effects must change.

Being incomplete, on the contrary,

states that while the object or surface is not final it suggests that there is more to come fostering potentiality.

A future, or adjustment

to what already exists, but not a certain obituary. Returning to the artist Bon and his train project Paysage fer the role of repetition in the work reveals again the critical difference between ‘temporary’ and ‘incomplete’.

The train and its schedule are the

specifications, the frame for the work of (project) art.

And the

notation of what is visible is constantly evolving as imagery changes, and each passing trip reveals more and more of the same object.

The

device of repetition allows the artist to reveal objects that are already there and ‘hidden by habit’18.

The photographic images captured

by Schlomoff are ‘ultimately what the photograph renders is not something that the photographer set out to capture in advance but precisely something that he could not see, that was inaccessible until the photography provided the occasion for its revelation’19.

These

images are not temporary, they are real and not tied to changing consumer culture, but obscured by banality and in that sense their representation, or more to the point, their event is incomplete to the viewer.

By doing this type of process driven project through

repetitive actions the artist transitions from an ‘object of the look’ to the ‘conditions of looking’20.

This action places the subject in a

role to be interactive with the work, whether artist or viewer as a component of the artwork as opposed to a simple onlooker that looks upon an object of iconic imagery with no participatory action. Today, in architecture we are still detaching ourselves from the iconic building, the image of a thing that can be placed on a museum’s letterhead or coffee mug sold in the gift shop.

An object where the

process is irrelevant to the outcome, a final act that is cast in a permanent mold that is placed on shelf and catalogued as an artifact that will age into an antique.

The icon is a completed image that has

no recognition of a potential future or an ability to adapt to an everchanging technological world. it arrived.

It stands still with no reference to how

It is all about the fashionable now.

If architects can start to think about architecture in the manner of artists such as Sophie Calle and Francois Bon by placing a stronger emphasis on how the process of a project is the generator to the object we shift the entire operation of design.

The Bilbao-effect icon driven

projects start at the end and work backwards as a way to justify the final represented object of consumer culture.

The process driven work

starts with the specifications of a project, the brief, which facilitates how we navigate through the challenges and complexities. And the outcome emerges as an organism that reflects that process in a manner that delivers a sense of the incomplete because the artist and observer are still looking as the project has created ‘its own space and time, an intermediate time.’21 This attempt ‘draws attention to the present, to the unresolved matters of what is still in process’22 and categorizes the documentation of the event equal to the idea and process. By thinking of architecture on these terms the incomplete artifact that is on display is still critical, as the artists like Calle and Bon place much thought into how to document their project, the architect has to take utmost care in that presentation.

In this manner, the

idea, the design research, and the event of documentation are in the hands and mind of the architect as equal properties.

We must not think

of architecture as temporary or a completed object in finality, but an ongoing ever-changing work that is the resulting process of its conception as a 'project'.

1 2

The Project and the Everyday: Francois Bon Experiments in Attention, p. 191-192

Gratton, Johnnie and Sheringham, Michael, Introduction: Tracking the Art of the Project: History, Theory, Practice, p. 1-31, In: The Art of the Project, Projects and Experiments in Modern French Culture, Berghahn Books, 2005

3 4 5 6

Introduction: Tracking the Art of the Project: History, Theory, Practice, p. 2 Introduction: Tracking the Art of the Project: History, Theory, Practice, p. 15 Introduction: Tracking the Art of the Project: History, Theory, Practice, p. 15

Introduction: Tracking the Art of the Project: History, Theory, Practice, p. 3 Sheringham, Michael, The Project and the Everyday: Francois Bon Experiments in Attention, p. 191-192 In: The Art of the Project, Projects and Experiments in Modern French Culture, Berghahn Books, 2005 8 Introduction: Tracking the Art of the Project: History, Theory, Practice, p. 1 9 Introduction: Tracking the Art of the Project: History, Theory, Practice, p. 2 7

10 11 12 13 14

Introduction: Tracking the Art of the Project: History, Theory, Practice, p. 17 The Project and the Everyday: Francois Bon Experiments in Attention, p. 190 The Project and the Everyday: Francois Bon Experiments in Attention, p. 192-194 Calle, Sophie, w/ Paul Auster, Sophie Calle Double Game, p. 140-141, Violette Editions, 1992

Michael Sheringham, ‘Checking Out: Sophie Calle’s L’Hôtel and the Investigation of the Everyday’ p.415-424, Contemporary French & Francophone studies (Sites), Vol. 10, no. 4., December 2006, 15 Lavin, Sylvia, The Temporary Contemporary, In: Perspecta No. 34, p. 129 16 17 18 19 20 21 22

The Temporary Contemporary, In: Perspecta No. 34, p. 130 The Temporary Contemporary, In: Perspecta No. 34, p. 132 The Project and the Everyday: Francois Bon Experiments in Attention, p. 191 The Project and the Everyday: Francois Bon Experiments in Attention, p. 201 The Project and the Everyday: Francois Bon Experiments in Attention, p. 191 The Project and the Everyday: Francois Bon Experiments in Attention, p. 191 The Project and the Everyday: Francois Bon Experiments in Attention, p. 191