Jane Rendell » Chapters

Writing in the place of speaking

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‘Writing in place of speaking’, reflects on the relationship between art and writing as forms of practice that relate differently to speech, and discusses role of the essays and projects in the book in developing a new form of self-reflective criticism or site-specific writing.

This essay was published as ‘Writing in place of speaking’, Sharon Kivland and Lesley Sanderson (eds.), Transmission: Speaking and Listening, Hallam University and Site Gallery, (Sheffield, 2002).

Where the thinking stops…

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Starting with Walter Benjamin’s comments on Paul Klee’s ‘Angelus Novus’, this essay looks at the present as a place between past and future, a place where past actions and future intentions meet. From Rut Blees Luxembourg, Katherine Yass and Uta Barth, to Tacita Dean, Jane and Louise Wilson and Victor Burgin, contemporary artists working in photography and video, seem obsessed with capturing the present as a frozen moment, often in relation to permanently or temporarily abandoned buildings. These images are suggestive. These places have not always been and will not always be empty. Their very emptiness in the present passing moment allows us to project all kinds of alternative scenarios onto them – past and future. Like detectives we search for clues, traces of past occupations; like script writers, we set up props for future activities. A similar kind of interest can be found in the work of artists intervening in abandoned spaces, such as Ann Hamilton; dealing with material expressions of absence and presence, such as Rachel Whiteread; or exploring decay and transience, such as Anya Gallaccio.

This chapter was published as Jane Rendell, ‘Where the Thinking Stops’, Malcolm Miles and Tim Hall (ed.), Urban Futures, (London: Routledge, 2002).

Undoing Architecture

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‘Undoing Architecture’ is a complete reworking of a text I first wrote in 1998 on how architecture can be made by those other than architects. I re-wrote this essay for a conference organised by Doina Petrescu in Paris in June 1999 entitled ‘Feminine Practices of Space’. This is a key essay for me in number of ways. It is the first piece of writing where I draw directly upon my own experience of space and lay this down next to academic theory and more rational considerations of architecture. My recent rewriting of this essay develops a changing narrative relationship between three voices. First is the voice of conventional architectural theory with its rules and hierarchies. Second is the voice of French feminist theory that posits critical thinking as creative practice – that ideas have their own aesthetic and spatial language. Third is a personal account of a house once lived in, whose occupants undid architecture through their unruly inhabitation of domestic space.

This is a new version of an essay first published as ‘Doing it, (Un)Doing it, (Over)Doing it Yourself: Rhetorics of Architectural Abuse’, Jonathan Hill (ed.), Occupying Architecture, (London: Routledge, 1998) and republished as ‘(Un)doing it Yourself: Rhetorics of Architectural Abuse’, Journal of Architecture, (Spring, 1999).

Traveling the Distance

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‘Travelling the Distance/Encountering Another’, introduces a number of thematics connected with travel through the telling of five stories. The text interweaves three strands: personal reflection, theoretical commentary and a series of ‘addresses’, in order to examine various modes of activity, for example teaching and criticism, as travels or encounters with other places, practices and people. ‘Travelling the Distance/Encountering Another’ was performed as a site-specific talk and walk, at ‘taking place 1′ a conference on feminism and architecture at the University of North London, November 2001. This performance of a written piece, a site-specific walk rather than a talk, combines personal narrative with theoretical reflection, and is the first of what I later come to describe as a ‘Confessional Construction’.

This essay has been published as ‘Travelling the Distance/Encountering the Other’, David Blamey (ed.), Here, There, Elsewhere, (London: Open Editions, 2002).

Thresholds, Passages, Surfaces

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As soon as he set foot in the arcade, he felt a strong tingle of anticipation. The woman who sold costume jewellery was sitting right opposite the door to the side passage. He had to wait until she was busy, selling a brass ring or some earrings to a young working woman. Then he slipped into the passage and climbed the dark, narrow staircase, pressing against the damp, sticky walls. Every time he stumbled on one of the stone steps, the noise gave him a burning sensation in the chest. A door opened, and there on the threshold, dazzling in the white glow of the lamp, he saw Thérèse in her camisole and petticoat, her hair tied up tight in a bun. She shut the door and flung her arms round his neck; she had a warm scent of white linen and newly washed flesh. (Emile Zola, Thérèse Raquin, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1998.)

Sexual topographies described through the physical morphology of architectural space inscribe a series of territories, boundaries and thresholds, but the precise contours of this sexual geography vary culturally, historically and according to specific locations. In fiction and non-fiction alike, arcades feature as sites of dangerous sexualities in the city – of prostitution and adultery, of desire and fantasy. In Emile Zola’s Thérèse Raquin, it is a room above a haberdasher’s shop in the Passage du Pont Neuf in 1850’s Paris which allows the narrative of a dangerous love affair to unfold. In early nineteenth century London, arcades with their predominantly female work force and customers were frequently depicted as places of transgressive sexual activity, intrigue, seduction and prostitution. The Burlington Arcade, with its proximate relations of differently owned territories (the external city, the internal walking passage and the individual shop unit) created an erotic choreography of passing, touching and seeing – a series of gendered spaces – which served to articulate male concerns regarding women’s presence in the public spaces of the city.

What followsexplores the patterning of these gendered thresholds, passages, boundaries and surfaces in the arcades; both in relation to the specific ways in which activities of commodity consumption, display and exchange were historically configured in the Burlington arcade and its immediate context of early nineteenth century London; and also in more general relation to the ways in which arcades, and their conflation with the figure of the prostitute, feature in current debates in visual, spatial and gender studies. Discussed here with reference to the work of two particular critical theorists and philosophers – Walter Benjamin and Luce Irigaray.

Publication Details: Jane Rendell, ‘Thresholds, Passages and Surfaces: Touching, Passing and Seeing in the Burlington Arcade’, Alex Cole (ed.), The Optics of Walter Benjamin, (London: Blackdog Publishing, 1999). See also Jane Rendell, ‘Subjective Space: A Feminist Architectural History of the Burlington Arcade’, Duncan McCorquodale, Katerina Ruedi and Sarah Wigglesworth, eds., Desiring Practices, London, Blackdog Publishing, 1996; Jane Rendell, ‘ “Industrious Females” and “Professional Beauties”, or, Fine Articles for Sale in the Burlington Arcade’, Iain Borden, Joe Kerr, Alicia Pivaro and Jane Rendell, eds., Strangely Familiar: Narratives of Architecture in the City, London, Routledge, 1995; Jane Rendell, ‘Displaying Sexuality: Gendered Identities in the Early Nineteenth Century Street’, Nick Fyfe (ed.), Images of the Street: Representation, Experience, and Control in Public Space, London, Routledge, 1998. See also ‘Doing it, (Un)Doing it, (Over)Doing it Yourself: Rhetorics of Architectural Abuse’, Jonathan Hll ed., Occupied Territories, London: Routledge, 1998.

The Welsh Dresser: an atlas

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This essay is an encounter with a series of objects contained in a Welsh dresser. I sat with each object for a while and wrote down my thoughts. The thoughts I have start with the objects, with their nature as things, as material facts, as historical evidence, but spiral out creating a wider theoretical and spatial constellation. Walter Benjamin considered the photograph, as document rather than work of art, to invoke a mode of analysis rather than contemplation. But are these objects like photographs? Are my encounters with them moments of analysis or ones of contemplation? Is this where the thinking starts or where it stops? Certainly the view close-up reduces the frame, but this gives me time and space to reflect. An encounter with a detail is also a map of the imagination: an atlas of the welsh dresser.

The essay was published as ‘The Welsh Dresser: An Atlas’, Brandon La Belle (ed.), Surface Tension, (2003).

The Place of Prepositions

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‘The Place of Prepositions’, written in collaboration with artist Pamela Wells, explores the theme of angels in relation to Michel Serres’ suggestion that prepositions are angelic. The essay examines Wells’ work through a dialogue between French feminist theory and the practice of radical feminist artists in the US operating in the same historical period.

This essay was published as Jane Rendell with Pamela Wells (artist), ‘The Place of Prepositions: a place inhabited by angels’, Jonathan Hill (ed.), Architecture: The Subject is Matter, (London: Routledge, 2001).

How to take place (but only for so long)

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Irigaray notes that when her mother goes away, the little girl does not do the same things as the little boy. She does not play with a string and a reel that symbolise her mother. Because she and her mother are of the same sex, her mother cannot have the object status of a reel. Instead the little girl is distressed. She plays with dolls – a different kind of object from the reel. She dances, ‘this dance is also a way for the girl to create a territory of her own in relation to her mother’. In her dance she spins around de-stabilising existing connections between herself and her place, making new ones between herself and her (m)other. She creates ‘a vital subjective space open to the cosmic maternal world, to the gods, to the present other’.1

Irigaray’s notion of the daughter spinning to make room between her and her mother, resonates strongly for me. I imagine being five again spinning round and around in the middle of a room. Only stopping when the furniture, walls and floor begin to revolve around me, when everything around me slips out of place. . .

***

I have found those words of Irigaray so inspirational, for so long, that is hard now to consider them critically. I have come to take for granted that, for me, the state of ‘de-stablization’, my slipping of ‘out of place’, is a positive place to be. Why? Because I have connected letting go with liberation and assumed that my spinning is transformational, that by turning and being turning I can create future possibility, make no place into a new place to be. But for how long? The giddiness and the freedom of letting go that spinning offers can only last for so long. I, for one, cannot maintain myself in this place that turns me as I turn, that makes me feel so disorientated. As I suggested at the beginning, of this piece, the Paris conference got me thinking, differently, about myself and my work, about my almost uncritical belief in the utopian horizon of French feminist theory. But I know now there are difficulties with giving and with being out of place. Instead I realise that I need to take, to tale place, for myself, if only for so long.

Taking place.
How to take place?
Who to take place from?
How to give place back?
How to take place? (but only for so long)?

Publication Details: ‘Taking Place, but only for so long’, Doina Petrescu (ed.) Altering Practices, (London: Routledge, forthcoming 2006).

1 Luce Irigaray, Je, Tu, Nous: towards a culture of difference, London: Routledge, 1993, p.59.

From Austin Texas…

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This paper examines places of cultural exchange in relation to architecture and language. It does so with reference to three particular moments that took place on a journey from the United States of America to Guatemala, and back again. Each encounter concerns a misunderstanding that occurred as a result of the author’s desire to communicate. These three moments hold in common the creation of unpredictable trajectories, involving displacement and slippage. In each encounter, the desire to understand through dialogue and conversation turned out, through a combination of assumption, translation and imagination, to produce unexpected results. Each trans-cultural exchange is located within a specific architectural space and speculative connections are made between the spatial configuration and social meaning of these physical sites and their linguistic, material and physic equivalents. The paper argues that misunderstandings might be the starting point for cultural encounters that ‘return’ the subject to him/herself through transformation rather than repetition.

This paper was published as ‘From Austin, Texas to Santiago Atitlan, and back again’, Felipe Herandez (ed.), Architecture and Transculturation, Special Issue of Journal of Romance Studies in Latin America, (2003).

From Architectural History

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Abstract: I started out as an architectural designer and came later to architectural history. From there I moved into teaching art and writing art criticism. More recently I have returned to architecture, and to history, but my journey through art changed me and the way I write architectural history. This paper tracks the transformation in my own architectural history writing as a microcosm of a larger shift, a change in the role of critical theory in practicing architectural history. My paper locates architectural history in an interdisciplinary context, between history, theory and practice, and argues that architectural history can no longer only be understood as a form of research that locates the researcher as a disinterested observer. Rather, drawing on the work of post-structuralist feminist theory, I demonstrate how architectural history is a spatialised practice, a mode of writing, which constructs, and is constructed by, the changing position of the author. This is not so much a paper then, as an outline of an approach, my changing approach to the practice of architectural history.

Publication Details: ‘From Architectural History to Spatial Writing’, in Elvan Altan Ergut, Dana Arnold, Belgin Turan Ozkaya, (eds.), Rethinking Architectural Historiography, (London: Routledge, forthcoming 2006).