מעשה במרחב

The work of art is the outcome, among others, of a relationship between an artist and a workspace. Spatial Action is the visual plot woven from the places in which the member artists of two art arenas in Jerusalem spend time and interact: the galleries Agripas 12 and Marie. The studio, domestic space, external spaces, or the links between interior and exterior, the physical and psychological, are the intertwining threads between spaces that form the fabric of the contemporary visual narrative of workspaces and actions.

And yet, “Art preserves, and is the only thing in the world that is preserved. It preserves and is preserved in itself…”(1) Postmodern thinkers attempted to sever the artist from the artwork and described the work of art as “a paradoxical monument which does not commemorate a past, but rather, preserves itself in the absence of man.”(2) According to this theory, the gestures of art are no longer dependent on the creative artist who determined and shaped it. We can also add that the work of art is “a ‘compound’ of ‘percepts’ and affects’,”(3) a “‘being’ of sensations,” standing independently, existing on its own.(4)

We can continue to touch upon the theory of the “death of the author” that nullifies the clear relationship between signifier and signified.(5) However, let us now focus on the methodology of search and research that changes with each artist as he or she transforms, processes, and makes something come into being. Spatial Action refers to the extraction of those very same moments in which artists distinguish elements from the world and from life, adding to them “a pure bloc of sensations.”

To this end, we shall discuss seeing as gesturing towards the world emanating from the body and embodying the action in space. According to Maurice Merleau-Ponty, the ability to see is the capacity to be in the world. This makes the necessity for visual openness even more acute in order to create involvement in the world. Beyond the eye looking outward to the field of vision, there is a connection between the eye and the movement of the human body. This movement breathes life into renewed intersections and into the enigmatic link between things. In other words, the body constitutes “an intertwining of vision and movement” which makes a transition into concreteness and action like the ripening of a fruit coming into maturity. The world is not an external representation which artists see, but the artists themselves are born into the world, and therefore are part of and intertwined with the elements defining the world.(6) Thus, the artwork, made by the artist who moves bodily through the texture of the world, enables the existence of what seems invisible through “profane viewing.”(7)

Since the early 1960s, a revolution has taken place in the definition of the artist’s studio, in response to sociocultural and political changes, as well as shifting critical contexts. Since the margins of the studio space have been expropriated and deconstructed, the closed, isolated artist’s studio has been perceived as anachronism, a remnant of romanticism. However, despite the emptying out of meaning from the artist’s actions in the studio as a ritual act, the studio as a concept has not disappeared. In the postmodern era, artists’ studios have not ceased production, often acting as mediating, hybrid spaces for radical experiments attempting to forge connections between art and society in a constantly changing reality. The contemporary perception of the ideal artist’s studio is that it is a changing space enabling work in many different spaces, both concrete and virtual, in varying time frames. It is seen as a transdisciplinary model of observation of, and working with, the external world. The artist may work in an isolated room or perform actions in public spaces such as cafés, parks, or trains, wandering through the city, or through actions performed simultaneously in several locations or on several continents.(8)

Michel de Certeau wrote that every narrative is a spatial story – the story of a journey – and that our spatial narratives organize places, link them, and create routes and context-specific performances.(9) He draws a parallel between “story” and “memory” and the attempt to understand a specific event, to make the marks of the past speak and be revived into the present. The reporting is not precise, since the narrative of the journey depends on the context, and is in constant movement. De Certeau, who negates permanent traces or predetermined borders that dilute the practices of everyday life,(10) searches for routes and actions to mark the space as “trees of gestures”(11) in movement.