USI Theory
Norman Douglas
SPACE
Lefebvre writes that architectural spaces represent a political use of knowledge, imply an ideology designed to conceal that use, and embody a technological simulation of the possible within the existing mode of production. Any theme proposed by any galerie or haus devoted to the presentation of art and architecture risks specialist representations that run counter to everyday life as we experience it. But for some time, a challenge has been set before the marginal actors in natural-human social space: To produce a single, de-fragmented space by re-addressing the human production of specialist space through thought and act. In Lefebvre’s words, “space as locus of production, as itself product and production, is both the weapon and the sign of [our] struggle… This gigantic task now calls for the immediate production of space, both as product and as a work, in the sense in which art created works.”
Borderlines
In New York—the westernmost point of a line that draws its semicircle to Graz in Austria—borderline behavior is one more mythologized attraction for tourists and transplants alike. The quasi-madness, the ersatz lunacy magnetizing dreamers to XX Century Gotham, is legendary, the fantasy of filmmakers in LA and Bombay, Helsinki and Sydney. The infinite line of the Empire State Building is said to herald capital’s primitive longing for the sun, for holy transcendence. But its penultimate spire bears useless dirigible moorings, a direct trajectory to the moon, a lunatic fringe of skyhooks that support Adolph Loos’s thesis of “ornament as crime.” 2 Borderlines are for crossing, like rules are made for breaking. Caught crossing the borderlines, one is crucified: jailed, expulsed, exiled. The markings of measurement are rules removed from the body and infused in a meter stick, or invested in law, to never give an inch.
Art Space as Borderline Interface
Borderlines have been established for the division of space, which is not only about property, but also about the production of specialist labor. But the gaps between these spaces, “between the space of the philosophers and the space of people who deal with material things” escapes definition. This is because there are no border-lines, no divisions of space that are not the products of history, which is once again the product of economics.
The avant-garde draws its name from the fragment of an army that raced to the walls of a fortress, spreading terror and misinformation, setting fire to the surrounding terrain. Into the no man’s land of negotiation, over the borderlands of dispute, across urban areas of poverty, neglect, and so-called racial isolation, the artist prepares the way for speculators, dealers, cops and boutiques. Despite the nominal efforts of Dada, Bauhaus, surrealists, constructivists, Lettrists, Situationists, Fluxus and more, Kreuzberg is now Berlin Mitte, Soho is a shopping mall, Saint Germain-des-Pres rivals the Marais in high rent. Is it possible to determine a practice that blazes a trail toward a less concrete borderline; not to an end of the dusty road and its famine or, even a new road’s beginning but, off the road without blindfolded benefit of a four-wheeled tool? Maybe the practice must involve neither approach nor retreat. Maybe we need to permanently inhabit the borderlines in a borderline experience for a continuous infiltration by space through the electric body politic.
Borderlines in space, borderliners in space. These terms are the products of epistemological abstractions, are gravestones worn with time. Their use value is suffocated in the thickening atmosphere of exchange value, which demands their renewal to continue the production of labor. Water, like our skin—or ourselves—borders the air. Its sound and its smell are carried to any number of fishes and birds, to people and pets. Through its electromagnetic makings, space clamors to be recognized. The sun’s unitary heat and space’s cold create and cross our borderlines, joining and erasing them in a single, undulating, polar-charged space.
A Model of Space as Borderline Interface
Unlike space, the model is temporary. The model is a work in the sense that nature is a work—like a town with its fields, waters and forests. It is the work not of the planner or architect but of the users, the work of a populace whose activities nurture the model’s growth, the work of the environmental material that informs the work of all the natural producers of the work.
The purpose of producing such a model is strategic. This strategy, “the study of natural rhythms and of the modification of those rhythms and their inscription in space by means of human actions,” rejects the devices of “demarcations and orienting markers to be memorized, designated and invested with symbolism.” It is a momentary and practical model toward awareness of local bodies as subjects in the design of space and everything in it.
Triple Play: individual electric & Bernd Knaller
Three individuals meet in the electromagnetic space of two urban environments. Bernd Knaller of Graz, Vibeke Jensen (a Norwegian based in New York ), and Black Man Norman Douglas each assume “the part of the researcher. A researcher who finds what he [sic] is looking for in the specific way he is searching.” In the pursuit of a total non-totalitarian exploration of ArtSpace and its Border-Lines (borderliners), these people have initiated a process conceptually linked to the derive and its corollary detournement.
Circle Line/Outta Site
http://www.thing.net/~vibekeie/tr001.htm
