Sculpture Studio Spring 2010

Project 3: Site, Place, and Installation

They Always Sit Together

- site-based work in the SMCM Great Room -

In retrospect, I honestly saw this third, site-based project in the beginning as part-extension and part-evolution of my interactive sculpture, I Can’t Breathe When You Sleep. In this thought process I was thinking that if in my last project I had interacted with a multitude of people on a personal level, would it be possible with a site based work to initiate a similar type of conversation/dialogue? It was interesting to me to think about my own site work in this manner because at the very outset of this project I assumed that a site-based work had to be a piece that had a massive, almost dominating physical presence either in a specific place (like a park or courtyard) or in a place built for the work (I am thinking Bill Viola’s video installations). However, once I came to the realization that my own site-based work could be something that played off of a viewer’s activity in a place and the “daily routine” of the site then I became much more invested in looking to understand the idea of site-based work.

     So as I developed the ideas for my own project I started to realize that I, personally, did not see site-based works as works that are a physical presence or monument to an idea or a “thing.” Instead I saw site based works as a way to draw the viewers attention to an idea, thought/mind set or in the case of my own work, a set of social dynamics, that are based around that particular site and the people that inhabit that place. With this idea in mind I realized that a perfect place in which I saw social dynamics on a daily basis, and ones that I wanted to draw attention to, and was also a place where it would be possible to directly communicate with the viewer was the Great Room.

Now the main thing that drew me to working within the confines of the Great Room was the social aspects that I see in there on a day-to-day basis. Specifically, as a student who eats regularly in that space I was interested in seeing how people seem to follow a specific set of rules or actions while operating in that space – namely how people always tend to sit in similar areas with the same group of people. However, the main aspect of this space that I had wanted to incorporate and then highlight through my project was the more “hidden” social aspects of the dining hall. In this case I am referring to the nature of gossip within such a large social setting; people sit with certain people and these groups gossip and talk about other individuals or groups of people and many times these other people may just be a few tables away! The constant talking and looking around at other people in addition to the nature of the viewer entering the Great Room creates an atmosphere of tension that I hoped to point out and have the viewer become fully aware of through my work.

     To point out these particular social aspects that viewers deal with while in the Great Room, I figured that the most direct way would be to communicate with the viewer in a similar manner to my last project. To that end I created a series of 12 statements that talk directly with the viewer through use of the words “I” and “You” in order to hopefully implicate them into noticing and challenging the aspects of social life in the Great Room that I find to be so disturbing and uncomfortable. Some of the statements that I put out on the tables in the Great Room (through putting out “table tents” on all of the tables) include “I know you saw me walk in”, “They always sit together”, “He/She never talks to us”, “You shouldn’t sit over there” and “I’m sitting three tables behind you.” By putting these statements throughout the entire Great Room I wanted to create a sense of “all over-ness” and a feeling that the viewer could not escape from being affected by my messages. Also, with these statements I wanted to implicate the viewer in a dialogue on two levels. On one level I wanted the viewer to be receiving a message and having a conversation with myself – as all of the statements and table tens are entirely hand-written, which creates a direct line between myself and them, and this piece is essentially messages and comments that implicate myself with them on some level. However, the pieces also work to make the viewer feel connected to certain “other” person – the one who saw them walk in or the person who never sits or talks to the viewer. My site-based statements work to create a triangle of communication between myself, the viewer and the “Other”- all through the statements based around dining hall social dynamics.

 

During the course of my piece’s time in the Great Room I found it interesting how the viewers/ Great Room visitors responded to the cards and my statements. Since I could not be at the site for the whole piece, the reactions I saw ranged from a sense of curiosity/humor (people would read the cards and look around to look for the “Other”) to mild discomfort (some viewers would ignore the card/statement or push it out of the way on the table). Of course this piece being a public site-based work, many of my cards were physically altered, such as having additional comments added to them - some cards new messages included, “You are creepy”, “Good stay over there”, and “Stop undressing me with your eyes, use your teeth.” However, one response that I received that I was not expecting was when some viewers read the cards and followed their “directions” but already suspected that I was behind the cards/ the project. Of course I should have suspected that some people would either recognize my handwriting or see similarities between this piece and my previous piece, but since I did not I honestly did not know how to respond to people saying that they assumed or knew that the project was mine at first site.

     In the moment I was slightly amused that a viewer recognized my work and was deeply interested in what I was doing with this work (they talked about how they would look around the dining hall when the card at their table said “I know you saw me walk in”). However, in retrospect I am not sure if this knowledge of my implication/involvement was a positive factor because if I wanted the viewer to be concentrating on their own presence and the presence of others within the context, both physically and socially, of the Great Room, then I do not think having myself being so quickly associated with the work helped to create this mindset. So if I had thought that the loss of anonymity had a negative impact in terms of the power of a piece in my last work, I absolutely feel that with this piece, the loss of anonymity/ having my name associated with the project so quickly really took away from my proposed meaning of the overall social aspect of a specific place.

 

With these issues in mind, it brings me to the main critique I have of myself in terms of this project. That critique being that, as the maker of this work, I really feel as if I was trying too much to “put myself” onto the site. When I say that I mean that while I feel that my statements were generally effective in making viewers aware at some level of the social aspects that I found to fill the site with tension, I still feel that I was not fully integrating my piece with the site it existed in. If an excellent site work exists fully within a site, I feel as if my statements are just resting on top of the Great Room – this could be due to the multitude of statements I was using or due to the cards being hand-written, which may have made the piece overly personal, instead of addressing a site and the viewers as a whole/group. If I was to work on this piece in the future I think it could become stronger through some form of editing – maybe boiling down my words to one or a few more universal, in terms of the Great Room, statements. Or I should consider in more depth if hand-writing statements is the appropriate measure to take to communicate such wide spread ideas as perhaps it creates to much of a personal connection between myself and the viewers, when I really want the viewer to be concentrating on the site they are in and what goes on within it.