housing art
.
skip my waffle …
what is art? — Please Do Not Touch
————————————————————————
housing art: challenging the white cube
Back in 1997, as part of the fourth professional and final year of my time at the School of Architecture of VUW, I took a research subject that starting that year was no longer compulsory for architectural students.
For three years at the school, we had year after year seen those who takes it in their final year suffer during the seemingly torturous process of undertaking the research subject together with final year design. That was the ultimate combination and as gutsy as most architectural students are by the time they enter the fourth-pro year. It was undeniably a source of fear and immense stress to say the least.
Many of us that year still went for the combination. I guess it had come to embody more than just what those two subjects are; in our mind, the ability to survive the combination probably meant the final toughening up before leaving the School for the real world. Taking on the combination in one’s final year at the School had become a ritual that while greatly feared till the very last day it was also greatly admired and long awaited with extreme anxiety.
These architectural students would choose research topics that were wide-ranging including technical aspects related to structural analysis, construction techniques, practice-related and construction contract administration issues, architectural theories and criticisms and so forth. Some were more ambitious than others, some were practical and then there were some that were purely for the sake of architectural discourse.
I was fixated on writing a research paper related to Art. The paper was titled “Housing Art: Challenging the White Cube” when it was handed in for assessment. The limit and target for the length of the research outcome was supposed to be 10,000 words. My paper weighted in at a few over 19,000 words. Was I happy with the result? No, I wasn’t, because I felt it was incomplete. It was then that I realised that I had really bitten off more than I could chew. Even with what I had been chewing, it had given me indigestion that would linger on with personal and chronic effect.
After graduation, there were times I thought I would one day go back to that paper and finish it off properly. Many years have since gone by and apart from thinking over some of the issues I researched on in my head over and over again, I haven’t worked on the paper since.
Recently it finally dawned on me that the research topic was one that I would never be able to ‘finish’ given the way I tend to think through issues and the type of elusive, open-ended conclusions that I tend to arrive at. A subject like that for a person like me sooner or later would end up being a lost cause yielding nothing more than great discussion and pages following pages of theorising that are brain-teasing at best, which might be fitting for an academic, but I was no academic material, at least I didn’t think so (and still don’t to this day).
Having given such a long introduction, it’s time that I cut to the chase. There are sections in the 19,000-word paper that stands on their own and may be entertaining enough as my humble opinions on art and architecture for what they are worth. And perhaps during the exercise of excerpting bits and pieces from the paper further interesting ideas may arise (for light-hearted theorising in my idle moments that is).
Next — what is art? — Plese Be Quiet
.
