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Essay by Jan Bryant Michelle Menzies’ installation discloses the indeterminate and complicated nature of space. Her triptych of interiors, shot with a large format view camera, sit in a strange and undefined relationship with the installation space. The empty area behind the images reinforces their two-dimensionality, so that we are immediately confronted by the spatial concerns of her work as much as by the representations of her rooms. She reminds us that when space is invoked, each time its name is uttered, it feigns a concreteness that produces a cleavage in the “emptiness” (a doubling of spatial spaciousness, if you like), so that space “appears” as nothing and everything all at once. It is in the formlessness of space that the endless echo of the void can be heard, but Menzies believes that the architectural edifices constructed against it represent our small and momentary victories, palpable signs of our existence. This is one reason why she sustains, through her recent projects, an interest in buildings. It is also why, in its connection with ontological concerns, Hegel called architecture the first art and why Bataille waged war against its form. And perhaps it is over this ground that the arguments of the mid-20th Century about the loss of perceived architectural monumentality were really fought. Perhaps it wasn’t about the endurance of the modern architectural ego after all, but about the most fundamental of philosophical questions: the question of our existence rubbing against vertiginous and abyssal disappearance. After all, as Denis Hollier reminds us when thinking of Bataille, for those who struggle to imagine the world anew, the world is lamentably trapped in architectural metaphor, our thinking is caught in its structures, its frame, its foundations. In this sense, it is architecture’s posturing to shelter and protection that returns instead as control, as limit, as restriction. However, the problem of space, as Menzies demonstrates, cannot be resolved in a simple dialectic between form and formlessness. It also opens out to the complexity of lived-life, the acknowledgement that our social, political and aesthetic worlds are spatially constructed. Menzies’ work deals with these concerns in the most tantalising of ways, not through the depiction of self-satisfied monuments, nor through images of buildings that attempt to subsume ideological motivations under aesthetic brilliance, but as in-between places. These are empty (abandoned?) domestic spaces that have escaped the cosseting demands of a pervasive design culture. They are, temporarily at least, secure from the dictates of the “decorator”, or, with their supporting myriad of TV shows, the invasion of the home renovator. Their neglect — and perhaps this is the very source of their attraction, for they seem all the more interesting because of it — designate them as very ordinary spaces. They are “non-aesthetic” in the sense that they sit outside contemporary aesthetic regimes. However, these ordinary spaces still hold the traces of past living, such as the small pieces of wallpaper that still cling to the walls. The rooms appear in states of suspended limbo, and they carry with them a seductive melancholia that forces us to pause, and by pausing, to contemplate. It is in the concentration of these details that Menzies’ questioning of space thickens: this is how she describes the narrative potential of these places. Loaded with many stories and memories, these houses, which are broken up, moved to temporary locations and are awaiting re-sale, are paused between past inhabitation and the possibility, the hopefulness, for further dwelling. They hold the stories of past life (why does one room, invaded, brutalised, seem all the more pictorial for its undoing), as well as the yet unrealised potential to be reinhabited, to “live” once again. The tiny traces of other’s lives are never fully removed; they remain as trace, as memory. Space is “thick” in quite another way too. In his work on space, Henri Lefebvre held that we live in constant negotiation with diverse spatial forms: the physical spaces of buildings, streets and structures (paradoxical spaces, seemingly fixed and sensitive to their own boundaries and limitations); social spaces and the flux and flow of the everyday (spaces that are necessarily ephemeral and changing but vulnerable to the political desires of others); and, mental spaces (the space of the imaginary, the representative and the utopian). However, in his recognition of these various spatial forms, Lefebvre, who never abandoned the hope for social change, asked how we might weave our way through the tensions created by the discontinuous nature of these differing spatial forms, to leave, in their wake, a unified and transformed spatial experience. How do we overcome the non-place of utopian dreaming? The melancholia that forces itself upon us in our viewing of Menzies’ work affects a similar transition, so that it is not about the pull of non-exisence (only the most undemanding meeting with melancholia would propose this) but quite the opposite. For Menzies, vast imaginative promise is found in these neglected, empty spaces. Transformation and invention demand movement (time) rather than fixity so that Menzies’ work plays around with notions of time in subtle and complicating ways. Firstly, at the simplest level, and in a clear denial that photographic images imprison and fix the past, Menzies’ still images, as we have seen, are animated by their narrative “thickness”. However, it is in the deepening of narrative, as we reach into (contemplate) a single image, and then onto a point within the image, and so on, until the tiniest detail holds the richest possibility — and then in our pulling back to move through the installation space to form connections between and across the trypitch until other stories surface, increasing the space’s coagulation — that we must confront the signicance and intensity of time in the work. However, the coalescence of past, present and future, now freed from linear constraints, is only one way that questions of time become important to the work. Natural light illuminates the space so that the affect on the images (themselves originally shot in natural light) changes. Depending on the time of the day they shift from a yellowy glow to blue. This is a reference to the way light is used as a “material” in architecture so that the architectural space determines how the images are lit. We might observe that the building that houses Menzies’ installation is grandly architectural where the rooms that form the subject of her trypitch are modest, unhomely spaces, whose fate might be — under different and less compassionate circumstances — demolition. But while we may relish the way these rooms have resisted, or, better, are beyond the consideration and dictates of design and its complicit affiliations with consumerism, and while we may fondly imagine a past for these rooms rich with domestic life, the protector of former inhabitants’ memories and stories, they are, nonetheless, in the frank glare of the day, manifestly unhomely. This is, of course, the origin of their terrible power, for as we have learnt from Freud, among others, the unhomely (Unheimlich) is not simply a spatial concern: as a metaphor for our subconscious, to paraphrase Schelling, Unheimlich is everything that ought to have remained secret and hidden but has come to light. This is also part of the psychological experience of Michelle Menzies’ installation; it impels us to move through a range of sensations, memories and desires — while also toying with some of our most basic fears and aspirations.
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