1
Critical Spatial Practice: Curating, Editing, Writing
Jane Rendell
With a background in architectural design, followed by doctoral research in architectural history,
and then a period teaching public art and writing art criticism, my work has focused on
interdisciplinary meeting points between different disciplines – between feminist theory and
architectural history, conceptual art practice and architectural design, art criticism and
autobiographical writing. Through collaborative and individual research, both books and
exhibitions, this chapter looks at a number of curatorial and editorial projects I have been
involved in from the late 1990s and how these relate to my work as a sole author of architectural
history and art criticism.
In exploring issues of method or process that discussions of interdisciplinarity inevitably bring to
the fore, Julia Kristeva has argued for the construction of ‘a diagonal axis’:
Interdisciplinarity is always a site where expressions of resistance are latent. Many
academics are locked within the specificity of their field: that is a fact . . . the first obstacle is
often linked to individual competence, coupled with a tendency to jealously protect one’s
own domain. Specialists are often too protective of their own prerogatives, do not actually
work with other colleagues, and therefore do not teach their students to construct a diagonal
axis in their methodology.i
Engaging with this diagonal axis demands that we call into question what we normally take for
granted, that we question our methodologies, the ways we do things, and our terminologies, what
we call what we do. The construction of ‘a diagonal axis’ is necessarily a difficult business.
Kristeva’s phrase ‘expressions of resistance’ suggests that the problem encountered when
disciplinary procedures are questioned is related to identification, a key term in psychoanalytic
theory.ii
And in using the term ‘ambivalent’ to describe the encounter between disciplines – an
‘ambivalent movement between pedagogical and performative address’ – Homi Bhabha also
points to the unconscious qualities at work in interdisciplinary practice.iii
It is precisely for this
reason that I am a passionate advocate for interdisciplinarity; such work is not only critical and
intellectual, but also emotional and political. In demanding that we exchange what we know for
what we don’t know, and give up the safety of competence for the dangers of potential
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incompetence, the transformational experience of interdisciplinary work produces a potentially
destabilising engagement with dominant power structures allowing the emergence of new and
often uncertain forms of knowledge.
Strangely Familiar
Strangely Familiar: Narratives of Architecture in the City – an exhibition, symposium and
catalogue, whose working group included architects, graphic designers, film makers, multimedia
artists – was produced as a response to an invitation to curate and design an architectural
exhibition. The curatorial and editorial team, comprising Iain Borden, Joe Kerr, Alicia Pivaro and
myself, choose to critique the notion of architectural history written only by architectural
historians, consisting of boards on walls describing the work of famous architects. iv
Instead we
invited academics from disciplines outside as well as inside architecture, such as cultural studies
and geography, to provide a narrative (a thousand-word text), several images and an object
related to a specific site in a city. The catalogue comprised an edited collection of these visual
narratives, while the exhibition took the form of a mini ‘Manhattan’ built of coloured plinths, one
for each contributor including their narrative and related object. [fig. i]
Each interpretative stance revealed a place that was ‘strangely familiar’, familiar because certain
aspects were already known, strange because they were revealed in new ways. The contributions
investigated a diverse range of subjects and adopted a variety of interpretive and analytical
procedures. From these Strangely Familiar identified three editorial and curatorial themes for
engaging with public space: memory and remembering; domination, resistance and appropriation;
experience and identity. We adopted these themes as organisational strategies that worked to give
the catalogue a conceptual clarity and the exhibition an aesthetic coherence using different
colours to indicate one of the conceptual themes. Yet in hindsight the strong visual identity of
both catalogue and exhibition made it difficult for the more complex, subtle and often
unrecognizable tactics of urban resistance to emerge.v
In order to develop further the dialogue
between design intention and user occupation, for The Unknown City, the book that followed
Strangely Familiar, we extended our editorial invitation to contribute essays to practitioners as
well as theorists, asking artists, writers, film-makers and architects, to comment on how they
understood the relationship between the production and experience of the city.vi
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Intersections
In my view, the edited book is an invaluable site for developing both multi- and interdisciplinary
debates. The editorial process has for me, often involved identifying a new area of study, one
located at the meeting point between previously distinct and separate areas of thought. This was
the case for Gender, Space, Architecture: An Interdisciplinary Introduction, where we, myself
along with co-editors Iain Borden and Barbara Penner, brought together over 30 seminal texts
relevant to studying the relationship between feminist theory and architectural space. We
organised the book into three sections, the first and the third parts both followed a historical
trajectory which explored the development of feminist theory over the past 30 years, through
gender and women’s studies in the former, and architectural design, history and theory in the
later. In the middle section we adopted a spatial rather than temporal attitude to our editorial role,
and selected essays drawn from a number of related fields, from anthropology to philosophy, to
indicate the broad range of disciplinary procedures pertinent to the study of gender and space. For
InterSections: Architectural Histories and Critical Theories, a set of specially commissioned
essays, which I co-edited with Iain Borden, we took a different approach to our editorial role and
approached architectural historians and theorists, asking each author to address the relationship
between critical theory and architectural history in their own work and to develop an essay which
explored their own research processes and the development of their conceptual thinking as
integral to the subject matter of the chapter.vii
At the same time as working on these edited volumes in my own individual research I was
investigating the interdisciplinary meeting point between feminist theory and architectural
history, specifically examining the ways in which feminist theory questions the methods of
architectural historical enquiry, the subjects and objects we choose to study and the ways in
which we study them. For The Pursuit of Pleasure, I was seduced by two texts, one a feminist
polemic, the other an urban narrative.viii
These two texts created places of methodological struggle
– dialectical sites where questions of spatial and historical knowledge were raised – where I was
located between theory and history. It was the intellectual labour involved in sketching out this
theoretical context for conducting feminist architectural history in my individual research that
enabled me to locate the key works on gender, space and architecture in numerous disciplines and
realize that there was a need to bring them together in one edited volume.
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A Place Between
It is also possible for individual research and collaborative research to work the other way around,
for an edited project to establish themes, which can then be explored further through an authored
book. When I was invited to guest edit an issue of The Public Art Journal, I asked a number of
theorists and practitioners to reflect on my proposition: in what ways could public art be thought
of as social space. I was interested in how various forms of ‘spatial practice’ carried out by public
artists engaged with the kind of issues developed through ‘spatial theory’, in the writings of
cultural geographers and critical theorists. The various artists and writers who contributed to the
volume each addressed public art as ‘a place between’, from art and architecture collaborative
muf, who discussed their work in terms of a place between people, as ‘what it takes to make a
relationship to make a thing’, through to cultural geographer Steve Pile’s essay on the city as a
place between what is ‘real’ and what is dreamed.ix
For several years after the publication of the journal, I continued to position myself in ‘a place
between’ art and architecture, theory and practice, exploring the patterning of intersections
between this pair of two-way relationships. In Art and Architecture: A Place Between I traced the
multiple dynamics of this investigation and, in so doing, drew on a range of theoretical ideas from
a number of disciplines to examine artworks and architectural projects. At its core, Art and
Architecture: A Place Between is concerned with a specific kind of practice, one that is both
critical and spatial, and that I call ‘critical spatial practice’. In art such work has been variously
described as contextual practice, site-specific art and public art; in architecture it has been
described as conceptual design and urban intervention. To encounter such modes of practice, I
visit works produced by galleries that operate ‘outside’ their physical limits, commissioning
agencies and independent curators who support and develop ‘site-specific’ work and artists,
architects and collaborative groups that produce various kinds of critical projects from
performance art to urban design. x
Although described as an authored book, this project could also
be thought of in a curatorial sense, as the selection and arrangement of a number of artworks and
architecture projects.
It is perhaps through distinct forms of selection and arrangement that the difference between
editorial and curatorial practice is defined in my work. Both roles, curator and editor, work by
continually developing and clarifying the relation between the establishment of a theme at an
initial and general level, followed by the selection of works that indicate the range and scope of
possibility inherent within a theme, concluding with particular manifestations of that theme
5
through the specific contributions. The degree to which the editor/curator imposes and follows
through the potential offered by an initial conceptual framework varies, from those projects where
the individual works, often artefacts that have already been produced (as in Gender, Space,
Architecture), realise a pre-existing thematic, to those where the production of new works
generates the final composition both materially and conceptually, often involving a critique of the
initial editorial/curatorial proposal. However the activities of editor and curator differ according
to the qualities, codes and processes associated with the contexts in which they operate, while
texts and books traditionally prioritise sequence, where arrangements tend to be structured
according to the ‘before’ and the ‘after’, objects and sites allow for more spatial possibilities in
arrangement, allowing multidirectional aspects of production and reception to come to the fore
particularly through simultaneity and juxtaposition.
Material Intelligence
In 2003, I became involved in curating an architectural exhibition, but in an informal capacity
through conversations with Bobbie Entwistle who approached staff and students at the Bartlett
School of Architecture to contribute to an exhibition at the Entwistle Gallery, which became
called Material Intelligence. The works she selected for the exhibition constituted artefacts that
had been produced as part of an architectural design process, for example, drawings, photographs,
models and other types of object. An important discussion focused on whether the exhibits
required any written or spoken explanation, for example in the form of accompanying statements
drafted by the curator or narratives written by the architects. We both agreed that the exhibition
was stronger visually without texts placed on the gallery walls. But in retrospect, in my opinion,
this decision produced a problem. An art gallery setting expects and effects specific conditions,
positioning all objects within its physical parameters as ‘artworks’ Material Intelligence was no
exception. As a result the artefacts exhibited were viewed as artworks not as part of architectural
design process. This resulted in a tendency to consider them as isolated objects when they had
been fabricated not as solo entities but with an imagined other in mind – an architectural design,
in some cases an intended ‘building’. An accompanying narrative might then have worked, not to
explain the artefacts on display, but to situate them in relation to the objects to which they
implicitly referred, and to architectural design discourse as well as fine art. [fig. ii]
Spatial Imagination in Design
During 2005, as director of a research cluster, ‘Spatial Imagination in Design’, funded by the
EPSRC and AHRC as part of Designing for the 21st Century, I had the opportunity to work with
6
colleagues Peg Rawes and Penelope Haralambidou in an editorial and curatorial capacity, and
much of the project description that follows is drawn from as well as developed out of the
editorial introduction to the project co-authored with Rawes.xi
Our cluster was composed of
fifteen members, drawn from architecture, exhibition, product and interactive design; fine and
public art; psychotherapy, history, economics and philosophy; structural engineering and
construction management, with project partners Kate Trant of CABE (Commission for
Architecture and the Built Environment) and Greg Cowan of the RIBA (Royal Institute of British
Architecture). Through a series of three workshops, each one devised and led by different cluster
members, we explored the spatial imagination as a mode of perception and tool of production in
the experience and design of space, through particular design processes of: 'modeling', 'writing'
and 'drawing'.
From the outset it was the group’s intention to develop their understandings of the spatial
imagination through the production of artefacts. The site chosen for the exhibition of these works,
The Domo Baal Gallery, housed in an eighteenth-century house in Clerkenwell, London,
provided an important context for the development of the research – this was a location that
provoked the spatial imagination of all members of the cluster, both through the architectural
features of the original design, but also through patterns of historical and contemporary
occupation.
Designed between 1730 and 1750, the textured edge and central rose of the white ceiling in the
main first floor room of the gallery were the most evocative manifestations of the delicacy of
spatial imagination in the rococo, an architectural style connected with this historical period. The
initial occupation of the building as a family home and a solicitor’s office had left traces, for
example in the form of a double door, hinting at the complex negotiations between domestic and
institutional space which continue in the building today, where the everyday and private life of a
family coincide closely with the ongoing and public activities of an art gallery.
This space provided an opportunity for each cluster member to make a new work which drew on
collective understandings gained from previous conversations, visits and walks, yet informed by
each individual’s own particular interest in the spatial imagination. The final works exhibited as
Spatial Imagination took the form of proposals and exhibits – including sound pieces, texts,
drawings and models – that operated across the disciplines of art, design and architecture and
communicated the spatial imagination through a configuration of material designs. [fig. iii]
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Out of the production of these art and design works, three key preoccupations emerged: first, an
interest in the use of the imagination in the operation of political power – both as a tool of
oppression and of resistance; second, an understanding of imagination as a space of ambiguity
between designer and user, and third a desire to combine the traditionally separated design
processes of drawing, writing and modelling in new hybrid forms of art, design and architectural
practice. For example, artist Brigid McLeer’s ‘writing-as-drawing’, located in the gap between
the double doors, in re-writing Alain Robbe-Grillet’s novel La Jalousie (1957), which explored
how the emotion of jealousy heightens the perception of space between individuals. In placing the
architectural model she produced as a design tool for curating the exhibition in the corner of the
gallery, architect Penelope Haralambidou’s ‘drawing-as-model’ demonstrated the extent to which
the imagination produces multiple space-times, producing a mis-en-abyme or a space within a
space [fig. iv]. In repeatedly writing the word ‘purdah’ (a word which refers to a screen or
architectural element as well as a veil or item of clothing) my own work transformed the first
floor window to the street – an architectural site of visual connection – into a screen – one of
separation. Where the definition of purdah in certain versions of the Koran, demands covering as
a response to female embellishment, ‘An Embellishment: Purdah’, suggested that artifice
structures rather than decorates divisions in the gendering of space [fig. v].
Each piece was an example of the materialization of the spatial imagination in action, drawing
attention to the important role practice-led research plays in critiquing the traditional methods of
academic research as well as the conventions of architectural design. As physical statements, the
exhibits did not seek to be understood as demonstrations or applications of pre-existing
theoretical ideas, but rather as provisional works, which registered the importance of discovery in
the process of art, design and architecture. The accompanying catalogue played a key role in
providing a view of the works in progress. In the editorial we offered a framework for thinking
about the ways in which the cluster’s research interests ran through the different practices,
methods and works in the exhibition. And through image and text, each cluster member
contributed their own perspective on the various ways in which the spatial imagination is both a
tool for investigation and proposition in the design of objects and spaces.
Critical Architecture
Over the past two years, I have also been working on another collaborative project, Critical
Architecture, with Mark Dorrian, Murray Fraser and Jonathan Hill, this time a conference, a
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special issue of The Journal of Architecture and a co-edited book.xii
Critical Architecture brings
together essays and projects that examine the relationship between criticism and critical practice
in architecture, exploring architectural criticism as a form of practice and considering the
different modes of critical practice that comprise architectural design – buildings, drawings and
texts – as forms of criticism. The division of criticism and design in architecture hinders the
production of innovative work, and so we decided to locate the themes of Critical Architecture at
four different intersections between architectural criticism and architectural design:
‘Criticism/Negation/Action’ (Mark Dorrian), ‘The Cultural Context of Critical Architecture’
(Murray Fraser), ‘Criticism by Design’ (Jonathan Hill) and ‘Architecture-Writing’ (Jane Rendell).
These conceptual strands structured the conference and the special issue of The Journal of
Architecture and will be used to frame the debates in the co-edited book. The themes reflect
issues of concern to practitioners and theorists alike, and allow the relation between criticism and
design to be negotiated by contributors in varying ways.
‘Architecture-Writing’, my own particular theme, explores the new ways of writing architectural
criticism produced when criticism is considered a form of critical practice. Discussions in art
criticism concerning art-writing have begun to introduce questions of subjectivity, positionality,
textuality and materiality in new critical writing practices and re-think the relationship between
criticism and critical practice in the visual and performing arts.xiii
I am interested in how the
issues this debate raises might allow us to speculate upon the relation of creative practice in
architectural and spatial criticism.
Recently in my own writing as an art and architectural critic I have explored the position of the
author, not only in relation to theoretical ideas, art objects and architectural spaces but also to the
site of writing itself. This interest has evolved into a number of ‘site-writings’ that investigate the
limits of criticism, and ask what it is possible for a critic to say about an artist, an architect, a
work, the site of a work and the critic herself and for the writing to still ‘count’ as criticism.
Elsewhere I have outlined in more detail the conceptual framing of this project; xiv
here I will
briefly summarize these concerns before ending this chapter by presenting a piece of ‘site-
writing’.
Site-Writing
Feminists in visual and spatial culture have drawn extensively on psychoanalytic theory to further
understandings of subjectivity in relation to positionality, making connections between the spatial
9
politics of internal psychical figures and external cultural geographies.xv
I am interested in how
art criticism can engage with this work in order to investigate the spatial and often changing
positions we occupy as critics materially, conceptually, emotionally and ideologically.xvi
Such a
project involves rethinking the terms of criticism, specifically judgment, discrimination and
critical distance.xvii
‘Site-writing’ takes up this challenge and by repositioning the artwork as a
site, starts to investigate the spatiality of the critic’s relation to a work, adopting and adapting
both Howard Caygill’s notion of strategic critique,xviii
as well as Mieke Bal’s exploration of the
critic’s ‘engagement’ with art.xix
Current discussions concerning relational aestheticsxx
and
dialogic practicexxi
continue to position the critic ‘outside’ the artwork; I suggest instead that the
position the critic occupies needs to be made explicit through the process of writing criticism.
Rather than write about the artwork, I am interested in how the critic constructs his or her writing
in relation to and in dialogue with the artwork. The focus on the preposition here allows a direct
connection to be made between the positional and the relational.xxii
Theoretical explorations in literary criticism of the author’s different subject positions in relation
to the text, as multiple ‘I’s’ as well as ‘you’ and ‘s/he’ are of relevance here,xxiii
as are the writings
of post-colonial critics who have woven the autobiographical into the critical in their texts,
combining poetic practice with theoretical analysis to articulate hybrid voices.xxiv
To consider
questions of voice in criticism, in connection to relation, dialogue and encounter, involves
objective and subjective, as well as distant and intimate positions. From the close-up to the
glance, from the caress to the accidental brush, such an approach can draw on spaces as they are
remembered, dreamed and imagined, as well as observed, in order to position and re-position
critic and reader in relation to a work and challenge criticism as a form of knowledge with a
singular and static point of view located in the here and now.
‘Site-writing’ is what happens then, when discussions concerning site-specificity extend to
involve art criticism, and the spatial qualities of the writing become as important in conveying
meaning as the content of the criticism.xxv
My suggestion is that this kind of criticism or critical
spatial writing, in operating as mode of a practice in its own right, questions the terms of
reference that relate the critic to the artwork positioned ‘under’ critique. This is an active writing
that constructs as well as traces the sites between critic and writer, artist and artwork, viewer and
reader.
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An imagined place as the site of critical writing was something I had theorised but not fully
engaged with until I wrote ‘Everywhere Else’. xxvi
This catalogue essay written for the group show
Ausland develops my interest in imagining the spatial memories of others. Each of the three
artists included in the exhibition engages with forms of architectural and spatial representation –
Martina Schmid produces foreboding mountainous landscapes on folded paper from doodles
scribbled while daydreaming, Silke Schatz draws large scale architectural perspectives of places
she remembers in fine coloured pencil, while Jan Peters works in video presenting narratives of
his experiences in labyrinthine buildings. I describe the sites materially present and those places I
imagine the artists might have encountered and remembered in producing their work. The text is
written as a detailed empirical account, moving between the artworks and the sites they refer to,
as well as the location of the gallery itself. [fig. vi]
Everywhere else
The cat’s paw is large enough to cover the mountain crest; his tail is as long as the sunlit gully.
But look more closely you can see that the mountain top is the edge of a dense cluster of loops
drawn on a sheet of cartridge paper, folded many times. And the cat, having walked across the
mountain range, has been sent on his way, relieved that his paw did not leave a mark on the
paper.
Three figures sit cross-legged on the floor in a room whose function is unclear. Two windows
frame views onto a London street and the door in the wall opposite opens onto a kitchen that
stretches the width of the house. At the kitchen table a girl sits, her sulky head is bent over a
book. Mounted on the wall behind her is a piece of cartridge paper, folded many times, covered
in hundreds, thousands of tiny little loops, drawn in ink. Beside the drawing, on the mantelpiece
is another drawing, smaller, this time perched rather than hung. This one is made of tiny lines
drawn in pencil over a painted surface. A horizon line splits the canvas, creating on the
mantelpiece, in the foreground, a smoother profile, more hilly than the rugged mountain range
that lurks behind in the alcove.
As she draws, she daydreams, different voices weave in and out, stories on the television,
conversations in the room. She is in a state of almost mindless concentration, at any moment her
attention can wander. She slips to a summer meadow high up in the German countryside. Sitting
there in the afternoon sunlight, just before the shadows of the surrounding mountain peaks fall
across her lap. She wonders how she can feel a stranger in her own country. When the room
11
comes into focus again, she is in another place. The paper on her lap is covered in many patches
of tiny loops. How will they ever meet? When the joins are invisible, you can lose yourself in the
middle; when the upper edge is neat, you can journey along the horizon.
The walls in this room look like they are covered in loops too – but up close it is possible to see
that these are figures, lots and lots of small numbers. These are financial indices, specific
quantities with particular functions, which appear here as surface ornament. In the opposite
corner, two sofas are placed at right angles to one another. On the floor between them sit three
women, a cat and one half of a pair of shoes. On one sofa art catalogues and CVs spill across the
cushions. Behind the other sofa is a long box containing a large drawing, rolled up. This is a
drawing of another room, by another hand, drawn from memory.
This is a room that matters, but that she was never quite part of. It was his room really, a room
that he lived in before she entered his life, a room in which he may have loved others. To draw it
is to conjure it into existence, to try to hold it down, to remember it as it was for her. The lines
she draws are clear-headed and precise. She draws in a light hard pencil, sometimes in graphite,
sometimes in colour. She draws in perspective with the certainty of an architect. But the point of
convergence never holds still. From where she is looking, the room shifts in her memory, her
focus changes. Looking back into the past, there are many places where eyes might meet.
Between the two sofas, a second door leads out into the hallway, where an elegant staircase
winds its way upstairs, to a room overlooking the garden. This room will soon contain one of her
large perspective drawings. There is talk of a tent filled with her cushions to be placed in the
centre of the room, where you can lie back and watch him talk of his journey.
He travels hard, day after day, moving through corridor after corridor, to try and understand the
geometry of the place. But no one on the inside will tell him where he is. If he doesn’t know where
he is, how will he know who he is? So he draws himself a map on the palm of his hand to remind
him of where he has been, to remind him that ‘he is in the house’.
She too has been on many journeys, back from where she has come. Sometimes she uses the
folded paper as a diary, one square per day. To remember days and places, she makes marks, one
after another, slowly filling up the paper. Sometimes she records a now distant journey, marking
all the squares at once, with no sense of sequence. If you fold and unfold the paper you can read
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one place next to, rather than before or after, another. In the patches of light and shadow she has
made over time you can see the horizon of a mountain which you might have visited last summer.
In Hanover, this time, not London, three figures face a mirror. A man with wet hair is seated in
the foreground bending his head downwards, only half his face is visible in the mirror. Behind
him a woman leans forward with a pair of open scissors in her hand. She is cutting his hair.
(Years down the line, cross-legged in the room full of numerical figures, we will see her profile
again.) There is a third person, the face obscured by a camera, two hands adjust the lens; a
photograph is taken. The photograph shows three artists, who today live somewhere else.
The light from the window hits her face in profile. She sits next to me on the floor, cross-legged. A
third woman sits opposite, her back to a sofa. We talk of where we have come from. She was born
in Russia, or was it Poland, or perhaps she said Australia? It is hard for me to remember her
story, but it was also hard for her to tell. She comes from somewhere between fact and fiction. I
tell them I was born in Dubai, but have moved from place to place so many times that London is
my home, simply because it is not everywhere else.
My critical intention here has been to question the constitution of a legitimate subject or object
for art criticism, and to expand the possibilities of criticism by suggesting that the critic can move
beyond the works themselves to discuss the places imagined or remembered by the artists as well
as the gallery, or site of their economic exchange. The building in which the Domo Baal Gallery
is located, a Georgian terraced house in Bloomsbury, London, is also the curator’s home. As a
critic you have access to the administration spaces or rooms ‘supporting’ the gallery and also to
the private and domestic rooms of the house. Artworks can therefore be found in a number of
different settings, exhibited in the gallery, stored under sofas, propped up on the kitchen
mantelpiece, suggesting that as a critical spatial practice criticism needs to expand its si(gh)tes
figures
fig. i View of Strangely Familiar exhibition, (London: The RIBA Gallery, 1996). Photograph:
Iain Borden.
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fig. ii View of Material Intelligence exhibition showing the work of Neil Wenman in the
foreground and Caroline Butterworth in the background, Spatial Imagination, (London: The
Entwistle Gallery, 2003). Photograph: Matthew Bowles.
fig. iii View of Spatial Imagination exhibition showing the work of Peg Rawes to the left, Katja
Grillner to the right, and Rory Hamilton in the distance, Spatial Imagination, (London: The
Domo Baal Gallery, 2006). Photograph: David Cross of Cornford & Cross.
fig. iv Penelope Haralambidou, ‘3 John Street, 1:50’, Spatial Imagination, (London: The Domo
Baal Gallery, 2006). Photograph: David Cross of Cornford & Cross.
fig. v Jane Rendell, ‘An Embellishment: Purdah’, Spatial Imagination, (London: The Domo Baal
Gallery, 2006). Photograph: David Cross of Cornford & Cross.
fig. vi View of Ausland showing the work of Jan Peters in the foreground and Martine Schimd in
the background. Ausland, (London: The Domo Baal Gallery, 2003). Photograph: The Domo Baal
Gallery.
Notes
i
Julia Kristeva, 'Institutional Interdisciplinarity in Theory and Practice: an interview', Alex Coles
and Alexia Defert, eds. , The Anxiety of Interdisciplinarity, De-, Dis-, Ex-, v. 2, London: Black
Dog Publishing, 1997, pp. 3-21.
ii
See for example Jessica Benjamin, Shadow of the Other: Intersubjectivity and Gender in
Psychoanalysis, London: Routledge, 1998, p. 25 and Diane Fuss, Identification Papers,
London: Routledge, 1995, pp. 2-3.
iii
Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture, London: Routledge, 1994, pp. 163.
iv
Iain Borden, Joe Kerr, Alicia Pivaro, Jane Rendell, eds., Strangely Familiar, Narratives of
Architecture in the City, London: Routledge, 1996.
v
In Michel de Certeau’s discussion of practices, he uses the terms tactic and strategy. For de
Certeau, strategies seek to create places that conform to abstract models; tactics do not obey the
laws of places. See Michael de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1988, p. 29. For Henri Lefebvre, spatial practices, along with representations of
space and spaces of representation, form a trialectical model where space is produced through
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three inter-related modes. See Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, Oxford: Basil Blackwell,
1991. It is possible to draw connections between de Certeau’s strategies and Lefebvre’s
representations of space on the one hand, and de Certeau’s tactics and Lefebvres’s spaces of
representation on the other and suggest a distinction between those practices (strategies) that
operate to maintain and reinforce existing social and spatial orders, and those practices (tactics)
that seek to critique and question them. I favour such a distinction and call the latter critical
spatial practices, a term which serves to describe both everyday activities and art practices which
seek to resist the dominant social order to global corporate capitalism.
vi
Iain Borden, Jane Rendell, Joe Kerr with Alicia Pivaro eds., The Unknown City: Contesting
Architecture and Social Space, Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 2001.
vii
Jane Rendell, Barbara Penner and Iain Borden, eds. Gender, Space, Architecture: An
Interdisciplinary Introduction, London: Routledge, 1999 and Iain Borden and Jane Rendell, eds.,
InterSections: Architectural History and Critical Theory, London: Routledge, 2000.
viii
The feminist text was Luce Irigaray, ‘Women on the Market’, This Sex Which Is Not One,
(1977), (trans. Catherine Porter with Carolyn Burke), Ithaca: Cornell, 1985, pp. 170-91 and the
urban narrative, Pierce Egan, Life in London; or, the day and night scenes of Jerry Hawthorn,
Esq, and his elegant friend Corinthian Tom, accompanied by Bob Logic, the Oxonian, in their
Rambles and Sprees through the Metropolis, London: Sherwood, Neely and Jones, 1820-1. See
Jane Rendell, The Pursuit of Pleasure: Gender, Space and Architecture in Regency London,
London and New Brunswick: The Athlone Press, Continuum and Rutgers University Press, 2002.
ix
See Katherine Clarke of muf, ‘How to: a description of what it takes to make a relationship to
make a thing’, in Jane Rendell ed., ‘A Place Between’, Special Issue of The Public Art Journal,
issue 2, (October 1999), pp. 42–3 and Steve Pile, ‘Between city and dream’, in Jane Rendell (ed.)
‘A Place Between’, Special Issue of The Public Art Journal, issue 2, (October 1999), pp. 10–11.
x
Jane Rendell, Art and Architecture: A Place Between, London: IB Tauris, 2006.
xi
See Peg Rawes and Jane Rendell eds., Spatial Imagination, London: The Bartlett School of
Architecture, UCL, 2005. See also spatialimagination.org.uk.
xii
The conference was held in November 2005 at The Bartlett School of Architecture, University
College London, organised by Jane Rendell and Jonathan Hill of the Bartlett, in association with
AHRA (Architectural Humanities Research Association) represented by Murray Fraser of the
University of Westminster and Mark Dorrian of the University of Edinburgh. The conference was
part funded by the British Academy and part funded by The Bartlett School of Architecture. See
Jane Rendell ed., ‘Critical Architecture’, Special Issue of The Journal of Architecture, (June
2005), v. 10. n. 3 and Jane Rendell, Jonathan Hill, Murray Fraser and Mark Dorrian eds., Critical
Architecture, London: Routledge, forthcoming 2007.
xiii
See for example Alex Coles, ‘The Bathroom Critic’, Art Monthly, 263 (February 2003), pp. 7-
10; Michael Archer, ‘Crisis What Crisis?’, Art Monthly, 264 (March 2003), pp. 1-4; Rasheed
Araeen, letter in response to ‘Crisis what Crisis’, Art Monthly, 265 (April 2003), pp. 12-3;
Matthew Arnat, ‘The Middle Distance’, response to Michael Archer, Art Monthly, 265 (April
2003), p. 43; Peter Suchin, ‘The Critic never Sleeps’, Art Monthly, 266 (May 2003), p. 41;
Michael Archer, ‘Critical Task’, letter in response to ‘The Critic never Sleeps’, Art Monthly, 267
15
(June 2003), p. 9; Rasheed Araeen, ‘Opportunism’, letter in response to ‘Critical Task’, Art
Monthly, 268 ( Jul-Aug 2003), p. 14; J. J. Charlesworth, ‘The Dysfunction of Criticism’, Art
Monthly, 269 (September 2003), pp. 1-4. The debate then turned to the role of the artist/curator,
but has recently reverted to discussions of criticism in the form of artist Dave Beech’s attack on
critic Julian Stalleybrass. See Dave Beech, ‘Art’s Debunkers’, Art Monthly, 283 (February 2005),
pp. 2-4. See also Jane Rendell, letter, ‘Art Writing’, Art Monthly, 272 (December-January 2003-
4), p. 15.
xiv
See for example 'Architecture-Writing', in Jane Rendell ed., Critical Architecture, special issue
of The Journal of Architecture, (June 2005), v. 10. n. 3, pp. 255-64. See also ‘Travelling the
Distance: Encountering the Other’, David Blamey ed., Here, There, Elsewhere: Dialogues on
Location and Mobility, London: Open Editions, 2002, pp. 43-54; ‘Writing in place of speaking’,
Sharon Kivland and Lesley Sanderson eds., Transmission: Speaking and Listening, v. 1, Sheffield
Hallam University and the Site Gallery, 2002, pp. 15-28; ‘Site-Writing’, Sharon Kivland, Jaspar
Joseph?-Lester and Emma Cocker eds., Transmission: Speaking and Listening, v. 4, Sheffield
Hallam University and the Site Gallery, 2005, pp. 169-76; ‘From Austin, Texas to Santiago
Atitlan, and back again’, Felipe Hernandez, Mark Millington and Iain Borden eds., Architecture
and Transculturation in Latin America, Amsterdam and New York, Rodopi Press, 2006, pp. 43-
58 and ‘From Architectural History to Spatial Writing’, in Elvan Altan Ergut, Dana Arnold and
Belgin Turan Ozkaya, eds., Rethinking Architectural Historiography, London: Routledge, 2006.
xv
See for example, Susan Stanford Friedman, Mappings: Feminism and the Cultural
Geographies of Encounter, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998; Diane Fuss,
Identification Papers, London: Routledge, 1995; Elizabeth Grosz, Volatile Bodies, Indianapolis:
Indiana University Press, 1994; Irit Rogoff, Terra Infirma, London: Routledge, 2000 and Kaja
Silverman, The Threshold of the Visible World, London: Routledge, 1996.
xvi
See Jane Flax, Thinking Fragments: Psychoanalysis, Feminism and Postmodernism in the
Contemporary West, Berkeley, Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1991, p. 232; Donna
Haraway. ‘Situated Knowledges: the Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial
Knowledge’, Feminist Studies, v. 14, n. 3, (Fall 1988), pp. 575-603, especially, pp. 583-8 and
Elspeth Probyn, ‘Travels in the Postmodern: Making Sense of the Local’ in Linda Nicholson ed.,
Feminism/Postmodernism, London: Routledge, 1990, pp. 176-89, p. 178. See also Rosi Braidotti,
Nomadic Subjects, New York: Columbia University Press, 1994 and bell hooks, Yearnings: Race,
Gender, and Cultural Politics, London: Turnaround Press, 1989.
xvii
Howard Caygill, Walter Benjamin: The Colour of Experience, London: Routledge, 1998, p. 34
and pp. 64 and 79.
xviii
See Hal Foster’s discussion of critical distance and identification for example in Hal Foster,
The Return of the Real: The Avant-Garde at the End of the Century, Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT
Press, 2001, pp. 223-6.
xix
See Mieke Bal, Louise Bourgeois’ Spider: The Architecture of Art-Writing, London and
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001, p. xi. See also Norman Bryson, ‘Introduction: Art
and Intersubjectivity’, Mieke Bal, Looking in: The Art of Viewing, Amsterdam: G+B
International, 2001, pp. 1-39.
xx
See for example Nicholas Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics, (trans. Simon Pleasance and Fronza
Woods), Paris: Les Presses du Réel, 2002.
16
xxi
See for example Grant H. Kester, Conversation Pieces: Community and Communication in
Modern Art, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004.
xxii
The significance Trinh T. Minh-ha assigns to the shift from speaking ‘about’ to speaking ‘to’
has been stressed by Irit Rogoff who underscores how, instead of taking power relationships to
produce spatial locations, it is possible for a change in position to advance a change in
relationship. See Irit Rogoff’s discussion of Trinh T. Minh-ha’s assertion in Irit Rogoff,
‘Studying Visual Culture’, in Nicholas Mirzoeff, ed., The Visual Culture Reader, London:
Routledge, 1998, pp. 14-26.
xxiii
See for example Italo Calvino, Literature Machine, London: Vintage, 1997, p. 15 and Roland
Barthes, The Grain of the Voice: Interviews 1962-80. (trans. Linda Coverdale), Berkeley and Los
Angeles: University of California Press, 1991, pp. 215-6
xxiv
See Gloria Anzaldua. Borderlands/La Frontera: the New Mestiza, San Francisco: Lute Books,
1999 and Hélène Cixous. ‘Sorties’, (trans. Betsy Wing) from Susan Sellers ed. , The Hélène
Cixous Reader, London: Routledge, 1994.
xxv
On art and site-specificity see for example, Alex Coles. ed. Site Specificity: The Ethnographic
Turn, London: Black Dog Publishing, 2000; Nick Kaye, Site-Specific Art: Performance, Place
and Documentation, London: Routledge, 2000; Miwon Kwon, One Place After Another: Site
Specific Art and Locational Identity, Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 2002.
xxvi
Jane Rendell, ‘Everywhere Else’, Ausland, comprising artists Jan Peters, Martina Schmid and
Silke Schatz, (London: The Domo Baal Gallery, 2003).