The end of progress?
Spoken word performance
Over Line – Film still
Examining the homogenization of place
Filmed in London and Dublin's Financial districts and Cork's developing docklands
Modular Repetition - Video projection
Modular Repetition - Video still
Capital Shrinks Space - video still
The end of progress?
35mm photographs
Pulsating, p(l)ace, Wandesford Quay, Cork City
For Faoin Speir supported by the Arts Council Irl, curated by Ciara Rodgers
in conjunction with Cork Printmakers and Sample Studios.
28 April, 2022
Words by Dr. Eve Onley
I met Kate McElroy, Padraic Barrett, Aoife Claffey and Deirdre Breen within the capacity of supervising their individual thesis during their Masters of Art and Process at Crawford College of Art and Design, in 2021. I got to know them each a bit, as well as their work and thematic interests and concerns.
Post masters, I was very excited to hear that they were also then going to work as a collective and it is exhilarating to see how they position their work in relation to each other within a multi-modal collaborative scheme – as we see with this work displayed this evening.
A conversation I had with them in the run up to this event led me to revisit some of the texts and theorists that I refer to when talking about or presenting research that is concerned with the inter-relationship between the social human being and our environment and how each might impact on the other - as I believe this work speaks into and is also concerned with.
I pulled out some extracts to share here as I believe them to be relevant to and in dialogue with the work as a whole.
I will be quoting from cultural critic Jane Rendell’s text, Giving an Account of Oneself: Architecturally and architectural theorist, Douglas Spencer’s book, The Architecture of Neoliberalism: how contemporary architecture became an instrument of control and compliance (2017)
Jane Rendell was one of the first theorists I came across in my own research that brought art, architecture and the social sphere into critical play with one another through a socio-cultural framework of analysis. In Art and Architecture: A Place Between (Rendell, 2006), [she] coined the term ‘critical spatial practice’ to define a self-reflective artistic and architectural practice that attempts to question, transform and critically reflect upon the social conditions of the sites into which artists/ architects intervene.
This is how I understand and interpret Inter_Site’s work – as an ongoing process of critical spatial practice that situates the social-cultural-historical body at the centre of understanding or knowledge creation.
Rendell herself cites feminist theorists such as Donna Haraway (1988), who have conceived further notions of ‘situated knowledge’, for exploring how ways of knowing and being are culturally and spatially constructed.
Rendell terms her critical practice ‘Site-writing’ ‘which draws attention to the ‘situatedness of critical knowledge’, that again draws from the central point of human experience.
She argues:
I am interested in how criticism as a practice performs acts of interpretation, produced by, and in turn productive of, the changing positions and sites we occupy – materially, conceptually, emotionally and ideologically – as critics, (Rendell p338).
In this way the work itself – as I interpret Inter_Sites work – serves in ‘the performative act of critical engagement itself’ (Ibid).
What I find most interesting in this kind of work is how it makes us, the observers, complicit within the critical stance that the work is taking on. In this case an immersive critical experience of our inter-relationship with the built environment and what is left of our natural environment. How and where we might positon ourselves within it and /or articulate its continual impact on our sense of ourselves as social beings.
So for me –as a critical observer - this becomes the main question within the work:
How and where do we locate ourselves critically within the work?
Also,
Are we complicit within the oppressive structures that we witness within the work or merely compliant, or even unaware?
How is our own sense of self and our stories, directed by what Rendell refers to as ‘the cartographies of power relations and the differing positionalities they generate’ (Ibid) as expressed and supported by the planning and building of our living and working environments. Within the homogenisation of our city centres – as is reflected so well in this work – what is reflected back at us and are we to uncritically take on the mechanisms that are given to us and that we absorb and align our working bodies to?
And now I would like to interlink that thinking with some extracts from Douglas Spencer’s concerns with how our built environment is complicit within the shaping of us as neoliberal subjects. He argues the following:
The new architecture’s glass, steel open plan work-place quietly erodes the individuality of the human subject as well as the solidarity of a common workforce within an open and visible competitive environment. The negative physical and mental impact on the wellbeing of the human subject is sold back to us as a privileged freedom of movement and expression.
Architecture has legitimated its post-critical and projective turn as progressive and emancipator. They legitimate forms of power that operate on and through the constitution of the self.’ (Ibid: 2)
Neoliberalism is a truth game. Its accounts of human knowledge, social complexity and the economic market legitimate its management of individuals. Among the fundamental truths that neoliberal thought has constructed are those that state that individuals can achieve only a narrow and very limited knowledge of the real complexities of the world; that the planning of society by individuals is, consequently, an untenable proposition; that the economic market is better able to calculate, process and spontaneously order society than the state is able to; that the competition between individuals facilitated by equality of access to the market is a natural state of affairs; that the job of the state is to intervene to ensure that individuals are rendered adaptable and responsive to these conditions; that its truths are a guarantee of liberty. (Ibid)
They have, above all, posited the human subject as kind of post-enlightenment being – environmentally adaptive and driven by affect rather than rationality, flexibly amenable to being channelled along certain pathways, but uninterested in, even incapable of, critical reflection upon its milieu. (Ibid: 4)
As with neoliberal thought, much of architecture’s intellectual culture posits the construction of the subject and the social order as akin to the operation of natural systems. The function of architecture prescribed by this position is that of producing endlessly flexible environments for infinitely adaptable subjects. As neoliberalism presents itself as a series of propositions in the pursuit of liberty, architecture presents itself as progressive. This is the truth game of architecture. (Ibid)
Neoliberalism is understood by Foucault as a form of governmentality with its own particular apparatuses and techniques, its own means of ‘taking care’ of the self, though not for the self, but in order to render it entrepreneurial, to shape it in accord with neoliberal beliefs about the essential nature of the subject and its relationship to the progressive and evolutionary forces of the market. (Ibid: 5)
So we are encouraged to ‘abandon our utopian pursuits and become pragmatic, functional, and productive’, (Ibid: 145).
Things just are as they are, and should be left to be so. This accords, in effect, with the neoliberal truth games by which we are disqualified from making conscious plans for society on the basis of our ‘necessary ignorance’ of the social order. Its workings are beyond our [understanding], and any attempt to grasp these, in order to consciously direct them, leads inevitably to totalitarianism. (Ibid: 149)
This is an argument made by one of the original architects of neoliberalism - Friedrich Hayek, (author of The Constitution of Liberty) that has been echoed by many state leaders including Thatcher.
There exists an overt lack of criticality – self-criticality and instead the ongoing homogenisation of our unique cities carries the subtext , What is being built is good.
There is no room for any kind of political expression or human agency within the continued planning and homogenising of our cities.
Steel and glass squares that now line our quays, our once recognisable streets, evoke a perpetually empty reflecting gaze – as critically enunciated within this work here.
So how might we critically reflect on how this impacts on the body, the person who inhabits the city but has no say in how it is being changed?
To return to the main questions posited at the beginning…
Are we complicit within the oppressive structures that we witness within the work or merely compliant or even unaware or are we comfortable within them?
Work like this creates the critical space for such reflection.
I met Kate McElroy, Padraic Barrett, Aoife Claffey and Deirdre Breen within the capacity of supervising their individual thesis during their Masters of Art and Process at Crawford College of Art and Design, in 2021. I got to know them each a bit, as well as their work and thematic interests and concerns.
Post masters, I was very excited to hear that they were also then going to work as a collective and it is exhilarating to see how they position their work in relation to each other within a multi-modal collaborative scheme – as we see with this work displayed this evening.
A conversation I had with them in the run up to this event led me to revisit some of the texts and theorists that I refer to when talking about or presenting research that is concerned with the inter-relationship between the social human being and our environment and how each might impact on the other - as I believe this work speaks into and is also concerned with.
I pulled out some extracts to share here as I believe them to be relevant to and in dialogue with the work as a whole.
I will be quoting from cultural critic Jane Rendell’s text, Giving an Account of Oneself: Architecturally and architectural theorist, Douglas Spencer’s book, The Architecture of Neoliberalism: how contemporary architecture became an instrument of control and compliance (2017)
Jane Rendell was one of the first theorists I came across in my own research that brought art, architecture and the social sphere into critical play with one another through a socio-cultural framework of analysis. In Art and Architecture: A Place Between (Rendell, 2006), [she] coined the term ‘critical spatial practice’ to define a self-reflective artistic and architectural practice that attempts to question, transform and critically reflect upon the social conditions of the sites into which artists/ architects intervene.
This is how I understand and interpret Inter_Site’s work – as an ongoing process of critical spatial practice that situates the social-cultural-historical body at the centre of understanding or knowledge creation.
Rendell herself cites feminist theorists such as Donna Haraway (1988), who have conceived further notions of ‘situated knowledge’, for exploring how ways of knowing and being are culturally and spatially constructed.
Rendell terms her critical practice ‘Site-writing’ ‘which draws attention to the ‘situatedness of critical knowledge’, that again draws from the central point of human experience.
She argues:
I am interested in how criticism as a practice performs acts of interpretation, produced by, and in turn productive of, the changing positions and sites we occupy – materially, conceptually, emotionally and ideologically – as critics, (Rendell p338).
In this way the work itself – as I interpret Inter_Sites work – serves in ‘the performative act of critical engagement itself’ (Ibid).
What I find most interesting in this kind of work is how it makes us, the observers, complicit within the critical stance that the work is taking on. In this case an immersive critical experience of our inter-relationship with the built environment and what is left of our natural environment. How and where we might positon ourselves within it and /or articulate its continual impact on our sense of ourselves as social beings.
So for me –as a critical observer - this becomes the main question within the work:
How and where do we locate ourselves critically within the work?
Also,
Are we complicit within the oppressive structures that we witness within the work or merely compliant, or even unaware?
How is our own sense of self and our stories, directed by what Rendell refers to as ‘the cartographies of power relations and the differing positionalities they generate’ (Ibid) as expressed and supported by the planning and building of our living and working environments. Within the homogenisation of our city centres – as is reflected so well in this work – what is reflected back at us and are we to uncritically take on the mechanisms that are given to us and that we absorb and align our working bodies to?
And now I would like to interlink that thinking with some extracts from Douglas Spencer’s concerns with how our built environment is complicit within the shaping of us as neoliberal subjects. He argues the following:
- Architecture’s role in ‘the spatial complement of contemporary processes of neoliberalization...Championed...as New Architecture – it being ‘in thrall to the same notions of liberty as are propounded in neoliberal thought.
- ..What new architecture shares most of all [with neoliberalism] is a conception of the nature of the human subject, of its relation with the world around it, and of how it should be governed.
- This shared understanding of subjectivity has furnished architecture with the opportunity to design and build for the continued expansion of neoliberalism into the worlds of work, education, culture and consumption...’
- Both parties profess their hatred of hierarchical planning and their enthusiasms for spontaneous ordering and self-organization. Both have drawn substantially upon systems theory and cybernetics in the development of their theories and practices. (Spencer: 2017, 1-2)
The new architecture’s glass, steel open plan work-place quietly erodes the individuality of the human subject as well as the solidarity of a common workforce within an open and visible competitive environment. The negative physical and mental impact on the wellbeing of the human subject is sold back to us as a privileged freedom of movement and expression.
Architecture has legitimated its post-critical and projective turn as progressive and emancipator. They legitimate forms of power that operate on and through the constitution of the self.’ (Ibid: 2)
Neoliberalism is a truth game. Its accounts of human knowledge, social complexity and the economic market legitimate its management of individuals. Among the fundamental truths that neoliberal thought has constructed are those that state that individuals can achieve only a narrow and very limited knowledge of the real complexities of the world; that the planning of society by individuals is, consequently, an untenable proposition; that the economic market is better able to calculate, process and spontaneously order society than the state is able to; that the competition between individuals facilitated by equality of access to the market is a natural state of affairs; that the job of the state is to intervene to ensure that individuals are rendered adaptable and responsive to these conditions; that its truths are a guarantee of liberty. (Ibid)
They have, above all, posited the human subject as kind of post-enlightenment being – environmentally adaptive and driven by affect rather than rationality, flexibly amenable to being channelled along certain pathways, but uninterested in, even incapable of, critical reflection upon its milieu. (Ibid: 4)
As with neoliberal thought, much of architecture’s intellectual culture posits the construction of the subject and the social order as akin to the operation of natural systems. The function of architecture prescribed by this position is that of producing endlessly flexible environments for infinitely adaptable subjects. As neoliberalism presents itself as a series of propositions in the pursuit of liberty, architecture presents itself as progressive. This is the truth game of architecture. (Ibid)
Neoliberalism is understood by Foucault as a form of governmentality with its own particular apparatuses and techniques, its own means of ‘taking care’ of the self, though not for the self, but in order to render it entrepreneurial, to shape it in accord with neoliberal beliefs about the essential nature of the subject and its relationship to the progressive and evolutionary forces of the market. (Ibid: 5)
So we are encouraged to ‘abandon our utopian pursuits and become pragmatic, functional, and productive’, (Ibid: 145).
Things just are as they are, and should be left to be so. This accords, in effect, with the neoliberal truth games by which we are disqualified from making conscious plans for society on the basis of our ‘necessary ignorance’ of the social order. Its workings are beyond our [understanding], and any attempt to grasp these, in order to consciously direct them, leads inevitably to totalitarianism. (Ibid: 149)
This is an argument made by one of the original architects of neoliberalism - Friedrich Hayek, (author of The Constitution of Liberty) that has been echoed by many state leaders including Thatcher.
There exists an overt lack of criticality – self-criticality and instead the ongoing homogenisation of our unique cities carries the subtext , What is being built is good.
There is no room for any kind of political expression or human agency within the continued planning and homogenising of our cities.
Steel and glass squares that now line our quays, our once recognisable streets, evoke a perpetually empty reflecting gaze – as critically enunciated within this work here.
So how might we critically reflect on how this impacts on the body, the person who inhabits the city but has no say in how it is being changed?
To return to the main questions posited at the beginning…
Are we complicit within the oppressive structures that we witness within the work or merely compliant or even unaware or are we comfortable within them?
Work like this creates the critical space for such reflection.
