[-empyre-] Critical Spatial Practice

[Kevin Hamilton <kham@uiuc.edu>]

Hello all.

Thanks to Renate and Tim for initiating the topic, and for doing such  
a great job of publicizing it across the lists. Thanks to Millie and  
James as well, for launching a month of good discussions.

Though I'll only be speaking here for myself, my connection to the  
topic of "Critical Spatial Practice" [CSP] is inseparable from my  
relationship to a few other people (who also read empyre). I've been  
talking, reading, and working with Nicholas Brown, Sarah Kanouse,  
Sharon Irish and Ryan Griffis on efforts surrounding this topic for a  
few years now. Others here at Illinois have also gathered around the  
topic in the interest of discussion, production, tours and writing. I  
would point to the individual projects of these colleagues, and some  
of our group work, before I would point to my own projects as  
examples of CSP. That said, I'm happy to participate in this  
discussion by introducing my view of our conversations and concerns.

First, and simply - how do I use the term? For me, Critical Spatial  
Practice is a useful term for describing efforts to understand  
THROUGH ACTION the ways in which political and social subjecthood is  
a spatial, and therefore bodily, sensory concern. Attending to how  
subjecthood is granted or denied through organization of space and  
senses; how justice and injustice is carried out through the same;  
these are familiar theoretical concerns. Projects that I encounter as  
Critical in their engagement with Space employ theoretical  
examination primarily as part of action, constantly attending and  
adjusting to the ways in which one's presence constructs new spaces  
for others. To borrow from Mobility Studies, these projects pay  
attention and respond to the ways in which one person's movements  
occur in relation to, or even at the expense of, the lessened  
movements of others - especially when posed as "critique."

/// Broad Questions

These are some questions I keep coming back to in my engagement with  
the topic:

1) I've been surprised to see the thread so far focussed so much on  
questions of reception. As such, it's also been largely a discussion  
of Art, with some (to me) familiar assumptions about Art's capacity  
for fostering at least personal transformation, if not social change.  
How might we talk about examples of CSP without resorting to avant- 
garde models in which enlightened cultural producers educate,  
influence or enhance through "secular spiritualism" (phrase from  
Chris' posts) or perceptual/ethical superiority?

2) How can we understand and influence the material, social and  
political specificities of temporary or habitual perceptual practices  
without instrumentalizing sensation in the service of aesthetic  
affect or political effect? Can we talk about particular sensoria as  
more or less free or rich outside of an ends-oriented approach?

3) What about Art has been, or continues to be, useful to "Critical  
Spatial Practitioners"?

And some questions to ask of particular projects:

1) To what ends are a group's efforts to mis-use, re-use or enliven  
particular spaces put by the economic conditions that make a project  
possible?

2) Who is a particular project for? As an artist I tend to think  
about this question in terms of "audience," but for many of the  
projects I associate with CSP, this terminology makes less sense, and  
even hinders the work. We might ask who a project is "for" in terms  
of justice, or even in terms of discourse. Whom does a project stand  
for, or from whom does it seek a response, if any?


/// Some examples

Here at Illinois, there are certainly a collection of examples that  
recur in our exploration of these questions. Nick Brown and Ava  
Bromberg included many of these and more in their current project, / 
Just Spaces/. (http://justspaces.org/projects.htm.) We've also talked  
a good bit about the works of Multiplicity, The Long March, Suzanne  
Lacy and Stephen Willats. Several of the artists from Mass Moca's  
Interventionists exhibition have come through here as well in the  
past few years, and the successful incorporation of that show's  
language into institutional practices - conference panels, job  
descriptions, graduate theses - have given us plenty to talk about.

We could do worse in this thread than to pick a project from such  
examples and discuss it. But with those examples on hand as a way of  
vaguely orienting how I've experienced the subject of CSP, I'll  
provide some more background on how I came to the topic, and then  
wait for Catherine to post as well.



/// CSP at Illinois

Critical Spatial Practice is the name of a reading group here at  
Illinois, now in its second year of (fairly minimal) University  
sponsorship. We borrowed the term from the work of Jane Rendell, who  
inspired us during a visit to campus as part of a symposium about  
walking. In between our individual busy schedules we've been reading,  
researching, writing, and planning on more projects than we've  
actually realized. We ask questions about how the spaces we live in  
are produced, and we look to apply what we learn from those questions  
toward the construction of new, even temporary spaces where we live.  
We try to do these things at the same time. (For a good introduction  
to some of our common themes and concerns, I would point to the just  
published collection of interviews we conducted for Critical  
Planning, a journal out of UCLA. http://www.spa.ucla.edu/critplan/ 
current_issue.htm)

What I find valuable in our group's discussions is a hesitance to  
separate practice from theory when it comes to understanding and  
influencing spaces. For example, if racial injustice is constructed  
in part spatially, through everything from Indigenous Land Law to the  
proliferation of racist sport mascots, then any effort to create a  
space of reflection and critique is also implicated. Rather than  
seeking spaces of refuge from negative influence, the projects I find  
most helpful about CSP engage reflection in action, through  
(difficult) processes that require critique to be part of specific  
social commitments. A central challenge here is to keep critique as  
an action, and not an attitude or position. (An interesting post by  
Gene Ray to this end just appeared on Thing via http:// 
transform.eipcp.net/correspondence/1189078355).

The most useful metaphor here, and one that began my engagement with  
the topic, is still that of a walk. In 2003-2004, we organized the  
year-long symposium series Walking as Knowing as Making, an imperfect  
spatial act (not an "intervention") here at Illinois. Other events,  
like Nick and Ava's Just Spaces (http://www.justspaces.org) have had  
more focus, more attention to there own spaces, and certainly more  
academic rigor. But through a combination of uncomfortable speaker  
rosters and roaming meeting locations, we stumbled onto some  
productive imbalances.

A walk constructs the walker, through where she walks and what she  
senses, but a walk also constructs the space around it, through that  
walker's presence in a place. To attend to and understand how this is  
happening minute-by-minute is to call so much attention to steps as  
to cause a misplaced foot or two. But through oscillation of  
reflection ("who am I IN this space" "who am I FOR this space") and  
action (moving onward), a path might be wisely altered as informed by  
experience. A conversation with a co-walker might change through new  
knowledge gained from seeing and being seen. If this sounds romantic,  
it's because we're not walking right now - you're reading and I'm  
typing.

(I think here too of the metaphor introduced by Erin Manning and  
Brian Massumi at Sally Jane's Flows Conference in Newcastle this  
summer - that of the gentle "steering" of a co-walker to the right or  
left through a series of infinitesimal adjustments in relation to one  
another.)

The metaphor of the walk keeps in play the phenomenal and the  
political, the influence and presence of bodies and senses in the  
construction and experience of just and unjust spaces. Also  
important, the walk has been so blithely celebrated by so many  
cultural producers at this point that we have plenty of warnings to  
keep in mind. For starters, contemporary psychogeographical  
experiments and the embrace of de Certeau's tactics by walkers may  
engage space, but "critique" is often relegated in this work to the  
realm of symbol, where it is easily smoothed into operation by city  
planners and creative industries.

I'll end there for now, having set out a few broad questions, some  
account of our history with the topic here at Illinois, and some  
theoretical concerns I've had around the topic. I'd be happy to take  
up any of these, but also want to give a chance to the threads  
already started to respond and continue. The thread this week about  
Interfaces is one that is also of great interest to me, though it's  
not come up as often in my work on CSP. After Catherine posts, we'll  
see where the conversation goes.

Kevin Hamilton
Assistant Professor of New Media and Painting/Sculpture
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign