DANGER MUSEUM NEWSLETTER #18: A CONVERSATION BETWEEN SIMON SHEIKH AND ALEX VILLAR ON THE OCCASION OF

THE SHOWING OF ‘UPWARD MOBILITY’ IN THE EXHIBITION ‘WALKING IN THE CITY’ AT APEXART WALKING IN THE CITY WAS

CURATED BY MELISSA BROOKHART AND JILL DAWSEY AND WILL BE ON VIEW AT APEXART FROM JANUARY 4 TO FEBRUARY 1, 2003

ALEX VILLAR: Let me start by re-stating a recurring criticism leveled against artistic practices that deal with the question of site. The rationale,

which is not a recent one, goes like this: once you move the piece to a different context, you change the meaning of the piece. It is said

that the work is de-contextualized; that is, it ceases to address the specific conditions of the site and audience it had initially engaged. The

implicit assumption is that the piece’s re-presentation in another context would necessarily neutralize its meaning; it is destined to become

a purely formal exercise. Undoubtedly, this idea is not irrelevant. It certainly addresses the current understanding that audiences are not

universally constituted. Gender, race and a variety of other formative experiences particularize audiences in their respective contexts. So,

to think that a piece could be received in the same way everywhere would be to

ignore these differences. But the fear of neutralization can prevent the possibility of

re-contextualization of a piece in a new critical context. Perhaps you could explore

this alternative while discussing your use of a project I did in the Czech Republic—it

initially dealt with a particular spatial situation found in Plasy—for an exhibition that

you curated for Overgaden in Denmark.

SIMON SHEIKH: I think that the notion of work as site-specific—that a work could

not be removed from its context has to be viewed in an historical context, as

pertaining to a particular moment in art history, which was post-minimalist, when

all of a sudden work was, arguably, more about the space than the object itself.

The space was the context, ‘the context devours the work’ as Brian Doherty formulated it in “Inside the White Cube”. And so, of course,

it related to the idea of the art space as neutral, or rather neutralizing of the content of the work, and site-specificity was engaged as

a critical tool towards this ‘cultural confinement’ of the art space, to use Robert Smithson’s words. However, returning to your idea of

context as something that involves the actuality, agencies or specificities, if you will, of the spectator, the interesting thing about

minimalism is how it didn’t really work with anything else than a very generalized and even idealized spectator in a strange confluence

of phenomenology and Kantianism. The spectator in minimalism never really had gender, never was of a particular class, never had

history, or agency. And so it’s interesting that now, when we obviously think in more expanded terms of what subjectivity is, and that

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you cannot have one generalized viewer, that grounding of the work contextually as belonging to a specific space, specific site

becomes both less and more important somehow. In a strange double-bind, on the one hand less so, because in a way what historical

post-minimalist work was saying is that identity was only in the space and not in the spectator, and of course we would say today that

it would be as much in the spectator as in the space. And then, on the other hand the specificity and siting of the spectator, culturally

and geographically (keeping in mind Harvey’s notion of uneven geographical developments in global capitalism and Documenta 11)

becomes more urgent. How subjects are formed through space, and how we must work not only with pointing out spaces, but also

partake in articulations within and around them. And I find it interesting that your work in a way thematizes this particular double-bind.

I find that on the one hand your videos are clearly connected to one particular space—you are physically interacting with one space,

pushing your body up against the very physicality of urban space and so on—but then again on the other hand it doesn’t really matter

which specific urban space is being depicted. Those urban spaces are really not important, they’re much more a kind of a signpost for

a certain urban condition; it doesn’t really matter if it’s New York or London. I mean you could do it anywhere, in any city. Maybe you

can find a local accent to the pieces of external, parasitic architectural devices that you employ (or perhaps even perform). In that

sense your work is as much about performativity as it is about space, meaning

space as actual historical sites. Your work can be seen as being both with and

against those spaces and how you relate to them.

And in that sense of course, in our exhibition, the exhibition that we did,

called Models of Resistance, we were actually trying to define that very moment

of how you, in everyday usages, have a kind of process of resistance to these

particular structures, be them physical or social and so on. So there was a whole

range of methods that we tried to produce and we had a sort of a soft focus, if

you will, on architecture and urbanism, and there was a de Certeau inspired

argument in there somewhere, and the whole exhibition was structured like a city

space that you had to move around in and relate to in very different ways with different flows and intensities: there was not one way

you could move in that exhibition, there was not one direction, there were many directions, so that you basically had to move around.

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So, in purely formal ways Plasy Windows fitted seamlessly into this idea, and because of the reading we were making, the focus we

were suggesting, your piece became part of that, it became complicit with our proposition, really. It was total coloring of your work, so

it was now seen as an act of resistance whether you could actually get in through this window, whether it could happen, so the image

took on another significance, which principally could have been vastly different from the original contextual setting of Plasy Window.

But this tension between presumably illegal and legal use of space

seems to be a concurrent theme in a lot of your work, also evident in Upward

Mobility, I think maybe the newest one from the World Financial Center is a slight

departure from that suggestion and use of suspense, as well as departing in the

sense that all the others are engaged in irrational behavior and functionality of

space. Plasy Window, Other Ways and Upward Mobility certainly don’t show the

proper usages and functions of their respective spaces, and, additionally, points

to a lot of the so-called interval spaces that don’t really have a function, but are

rather a sort of residues of other functions, they are kind of the negative or the

unconscious of these spaces, if you will. The leftover space of another use, of the

production of a functional space, and they are non-functional spaces that happen because of functions around them—a lot of the

spaces that you seem to map. But your performances in these spaces often also don’t really have a function; I mean you can’t really

say this person’s climbing is commiting a burglary. You can’t really say that this person’s running is doing exercise. The performative

aspect is too obvious, it’s too clear that it is parodic or reflective in some other manner. And, actually, the only one that somehow seems

to have made a departure from there is of course the recent one with the smoking because it really pertains to what you can actually

do and what you cannot do in public spaces much more clearly, especially these days, when obviously you cannot smoke in most

offices and you have to find spaces where you can smoke. And if you look out, for instance in Midtown Manhattan, you will see

people outside in something that isn’t really a balcony but simply a space outside the window where people are standing and

smoking. And now of course they are constructing spaces for people to smoke in parking lots and so on. So I don’t know if you would

agree but I think that maybe that video actually indicates a major departure.

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ALEX VILLAR: I understand the distinction that you are trying to establish in the

following way: While in other pieces that I did, there was no justification for my

actions, in ‘Irrational Intervals’ I am simply smoking. In other words, what was

previously a kind of behavior one couldn’t pin down to a single activity has, in the

case of the smoking piece, been narrowed down to a single possibility. Seen

through this framework, one could say that the insertion of the smoking body in the

type the leftover spaces I have isolated would have instrumentalized their articulation.

I think this is an interesting reading insofar as it identifies two distinct procedures

used in the work. While I agree that the procedure is diverse, I would contend that

smoking in this case is nothing but a trope. Instead of fulfilling with a single meaning

a gesture otherwise unfixed, what it provides is a disguise for a variety of mental activities. For me, the location of the smoking body in

those spaces proposes a double suspension of everyday codes of behavior. If only for a brief duration,

the smoker is suspended in a non-place between both the formal regulating codes of the workplace and

the informal code that informs pedestrian flows on the street. I believe this piece would appear to be less

of a departure if seen as the articulation of a tendency already present in the development of the work;

that is, the tendency to ground the actions performed in the pieces in everyday behavior. In a way, I have

been moving away from a gesture that is completely absurd to a gesture that arises from regular daily

activity. The subway piece, for example, shows a person in their regular use of the subway system. It is

only when this person takes a wrong turn that a deviation from regular behavior can be observed. Still,

the action itself remains the same, what ascribes to it a different meaning is the fact that the exact same

behavior is performed in the wrong place. From the beginning, I have been weary of the possible

reading of absurdity as a simple gesture of transgression and have tried not to render a heroic subject

or exemplary model. What I wanted to do was to move in the opposite direction, to be much less of a

model, much more mundane, much more everyday, much more anybody who, suddenly, almost by chance,

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would flip into another mode. This point is perhaps clearest if illustrated gradually as I did in ‘Temporary Occupations.’ In that piece, the

performer acts as a jogger who pursues a straight path on the sidewalk, ignoring all kinds of fences and other boundaries that appear in

the way. The obstacles are themselves privatized portions of public space. The

performer, who starts behaving exactly like any other jogger, gradually changes the

character of the actions and begins to move into forbidden territory. What starts as

mere resistance to arbitrary demarcation of public space, turns into an active act of

dissent that disregards the inviolability of private property. Be it in the automatic use

of a transitional space in the case of the subway piece, or in the obstinate pursuit

of a path as in the sidewalk piece, or even by making use of a pretense as is the

case in the smoking piece; what is at stake is the potentiality for dissent that exists

in the most mundane aspects of everyday life.

SIMON SHEIKH: Now, this raises very particular questions, actually, about the use of public space and the kind of delimitations that are

being set out, especially somewhere like New York or even Los Angeles with its very strict limitations on smoking. Obviously, and this

refers to the question of context, in a lot of other countries where you have very different cultures around smoking, it would have very

different meaning, because it would not be something that is not allowed in the workplace or in restaurants, in most of, say, East

European countries and African countries, where you can smoke anywhere, so the video would actually be more absurd, I mean, why

would you do it in this weird space. In the US, on the other hand, I think it’s interesting because it somehow politicizes smoking, makes

it an act of resistance in accordance to acts in your other videos: it connects smoking to ideas of dissent and the uses of public space.

I see strains that are connected to spatial practices, but where a spatial practice is one of the instruments that are involved in a process

of social discipline. And I see, really going back to earlier works like ‘Der Jasager’ that it has a lot to do with social discipline, but also

how that social discipline never becomes complete; there’s always residues in the body of resistance or inadequacy. There are flows

through the body that resist, and sometimes these resistances are irreverent or absurd, sometimes they become dissent, and at other

instances even manifested in political actions, but always there is an investigation into social discipline and indiscipline in your work.

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ALEX VILLAR: The question of social discipline raises a question that is rather important: How can agency be formulated from a non-binary

understanding of the socio-political realm? Obviously, we cannot return to the problematic idea of pure essence that has in the past

underlined so many theoretical formulations on matters of cultural and political resistance. A contemporary view on agency needs to

account for the subject’s implication in their very subjection. The question of countering social discipline then becomes not one of finding

a way outside of it but of engaging with it in an attempt to reformulate it from within.

SIMON SHEIKH: don’t know if you see your videos as a process of formulation, if it’s a process of formulation of subjectivity. It’s getting

hard to generalize about them, obviously, but sometimes they seem to be very schizoid in their relationship, or rather mediation

between subject-position and spatial practice: the very moment they transgress the structure, they are also all the more dependent on

it. It’s very difficult to make an accurate reading saying that it’s the space that defines the movement or the movement that brakes the

space, or re-defines, de-defines or de-stabilizes the space—there is a very contingent relationship at stake here, they are caught in this

kind of double-bind a lot. Although stylistically vastly different from your videos, I think you can find the same kind of dynamics in the

films of Stanley Kubrick where you always have the space as imposing a huge subjectivity on the subjects and they are trying to resist,

are trying to work with it—most obviously in the 2001: A Space Odyssey and The Shining, where the space is telling the protagonists

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what to do and they’re trying to resist it but then in the end they’re doing it and not doing it, and the whole dynamic of the film is not

so much about the relationship between the people, but rather between people and space, and the space becomes a superstructure

that totally defines the ability of formulation and action for the subject.

ALEX VILLAR: I think the schizoid character of the actions, as you described them, is originated in the

understanding that I outlined before. In other words, my formulation of agency also acknowledges the

agent’s participation in the process of its own subjectification. I am also, without a doubt, concerned

with the disciplinary mechanisms at work in social spaces. In attempting to understand my own work,

not simply in its development, but in terms of the relationship that one piece maintains with one

another, I have made use of two abstract notions: containers and thresholds. While the ‘container’

pieces concentrate more clearly on the articulation of the shaping mechanism present in space, the

‘threshold’ pieces pay more attention to the moment when the subject crosses a containing boundary.

I perceive the piece ‘Upward Mobility’ as a formulation of the moment, or the various instances, when

we cross intangible thresholds, those obstacles for which no visible barrier is present. The subway

piece, on the other hand, is more occupied with the field of containment. I remember that, when I first

showed that piece, someone complained that it represented a subject without agency. The exemplary

question was: Why wouldn’t the person trapped at the end of the fence jump over it? While I

understand this desire and have articulated it in other pieces, I feel that the quest in that piece was

not to demonstrate a transgression of containment. What is articulated in the piece is the possibility of resistance to structural containment

by finding what Deleuze described as an adjacency to power, rather than a way out. In other words, resistance is conceived in this case as

outright misuse of the given structure.

SIMON SHEIKH: Indeed! And obviously a metaphor for your work is of the notion of the walker from de Certeau, where simply not treading

the well trodden path, simply not following the designated flows and routes of the city is refusing to be totally subjugated by the

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structure that is supposed to subjugate you. And of course if that’s happening on a massive scale—subjects taking one of the side

streets rather than the main street you would have complete and utter chaos, chaos in the sense that you want the traffic to be

flowing, you want the city to be flowing and moving in one direction—that will not happen if its inhabitants use it differently, which is a

form of resistance that I see in a lot of these videos as well. They are trying to represent that moment and pictorialize the moment

when you are using structures not for what they were designed, but for something else, in a different way. And you can argue that

misuse or reuse will always have effects both on the space and on the subjectivity of the person. I can see the critique of the lack of

agency as well. You say that you don’t want it to be instructive, and when viewing the videos you are always unsure of any productive

outcome, which I think has to do with the employment of circulation and repetition. That’s why I also see that the smoking is

indicating a new kind of plateau not only because it’s engaged with a clear function, and because there is less sense of loop in it,

there’s a sense of finality about the smoking of each cigarette, and the possible, plausible returning to other spaces after that act.

ALEX VILLAR: When I began the smoking project, the main thing in my mind, prior to thinking about the spaces themselves, was the

relationship between the smoke break and the workflow. Especially intriguing to me was the fact that the law pushes the working body

outside the workflow. An unwritten rule certainly establishes a limit on how far the smoker can go and for how long. So, one could say that

this ‘being outside’ is still regulated by a code originated inside the workplace.

Nevertheless, a small space of interruption is created that can be articulated in

another direction. The other aspect that I observed was that smokers also push

themselves outside the flow of the street. They don’t do much more than smoking

with this bit of free time; there is no much time for interaction either, except with

other smokers. They are really in a state of suspension. But, ‘what is the nature of

this state of suspension’ is not so much the question I have dwelt upon in this work.

Instead, I have tried to suggest that the pertinent question is ‘how this state of

suspension’ can be conceived as a state of reflection. Now, between the piece, what

it attempts to articulate, and the audience that is presented with it, there remains an

open question about how this cognitive moment unfolds.

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SIMON SHEIKH: Well, I was actually wondering what your take would be on the fact that, on the one hand, I would say you follow de

Certeau’s model of resistance, that you’re walking through the city and utilizing it for your own means, you’re reusing the city and then

finding certain kinds of freedom or expression of resistance to structures in the way you change them; and on the other hand, you

are taking inspiration from Foucault’s politics of space, seeing resistance located in very specific spaces there are outside of

hegemonic space, if you will, that is, most famously, the notion of Heterotopia and Foucault’s mapping out of certain spaces as spaces

where another kind of subjectivity is possible and another kind of existence is plausible. I was wondering where you would

situate your work, because on the one hand you can say that it’s employing the city in a different way, but on the other hand you can

say it’s trying to seek out the Heterotopic spaces on a miniscule scale, and your work seems suspended in this contradiction, perhaps

purposefully and productively so.

ALEX VILLAR: I am not so sure that the two alternatives you sketch out are mutually

exclusive. There is certainly more of a stress on resistance as usage in De Certeau,

while Foucault focuses his attention in diagramming the mechanisms of subjectification

already present in space. But if you look at Foucault’s whole body of work, it

becomes clear that he understood the relationship between subject and context as

mutually reflexive. Foucault’s later work, as Deleuze points out, tries to find a way to

counter the maps that he, himself, help formulate. In other words, the later work does

something correlative to what you described as ‘utilizing a given structure for your

own means,’ it proposes a way in which the subject could undo the process of subjectivization by directly engaging in the crafting of the

self. Such articulation already points in the direction of a resistance that operates through a shift in everyday life. And that is not

conceptually different from De Certeau’s notion of walking as a tactical reading of the city. Nevertheless, the way in which you contrasted

the positions of these two thinkers is very useful for me because it isolates the two things that I have been doing in my work: on the one

hand, I have tried to find spaces that are ‘Heterotopic,’ and, on the other hand, I have stressed the potentiality of dissent through shifts in

usage of space. But the Heterotopia can describe more than actual historical examples like the ones Foucault mentioned. In his own

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theorization of the term, Foucault stressed its diametrical opposition to Utopia. In other words, the Heterotopia is not an imaginary

possibility; it is a state of potentiality in the actual field of lived experience. And that is what I have tried to describe in some of my pieces,

for example by isolating a corner which comes out of a building, a place where people might come to urinate, light up a cigarette, etc. It is

only in that instant, the moment in which the usage of that space was shifted from its original intention, that a Heterotopic space was

formed. I am clearly attempting to do both things at the same time. My sense is that it is necessary to seek both possibilities; that is, to

locate temporary spaces of resistance and to propose deviations in usage. Since subject and context are in constant flux it might be indeed

necessary to be suspended between two seemingly contradictory strategies.

SIMON SHEIKH: Also, as I suggested before, it may be seen as rendering the unconscious of the architecture, or as developing the

negative space, because often these spaces that you actually employ are, if you look at the plans of the building, the so-called

negative or impossible spaces.

ALEX VILLAR: Yes, absolutely. Brian McGrath, an architect and a fellow in the residency

at the World Financial Center, invited me to do a talk at his class at Columbia

University. It was a class for pos-graduate architects and they were dealing precisely

with the design of the kind of spaces we have been talking about, particularly the

ones located on the façade of a building. I learned from Brian that the main function

of those spaces is aesthetic; the objective is to add three-dimensionality to the

façade. They are, in principle, empty of any other function. Nothing is more ‘natural’

then, for those spaces, to come to be used in a different way.

SIMON SHEIKH: That brings me back to thinking about the World Financial Center, because that place in itself is a contradiction, or

perhaps even contraction! I was wondering about the World Financial Center as a place of multiple uses in comparison to the project

you did in High Bridge Park, because you could say that, obviously the World Financial Center is this kind of space, that you just

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described before, where you can no longer delimit the distinction between work space and leisure space. It is a completely internal

space, yet employs elements of park life. And it’s just a transitory space for people to move through, and a combination of work place

and a shopping mall, etc., which makes it a weird kind of place indeed. Your piece there seems to employ a sort of ‘exile on mainstreet’

strategy, because you seem like a kind of exiled person in the middle of the city, as opposed to Heterotopias which would always be

put, physically, on the margins of the city, or maybe you can see that mall as a heterotopic space in the middle of the city. And I was

wondering what made you decide not to actually work with that WFC site specifically, because you could see parallels and contrasts

in the site itself that relates to parallels and contrasts that you talked about before between the space and utilization, you could see

that as well between the High Bridge Park and the World Financial Center. I was wondering what your thoughts were on actually not

working specifically with that space.

ALEX VILLAR: High Bridge Park is a very good example against which we can

contrast the World Financial Center because both spaces claim to be part of

the public sphere. But while the park is a space for everyone, the corporate

atrium is reserved for a portion of the population. The disciplinary question is

very different in these two instances. At High Bridge Park the question is not

‘who’ gets in but ‘how’ people enter the park, at what time and though each

way. That was the specificity of that site that I tried to counter by mapping

alternative ways of accessing the park. At the World Financial Center, the

question of ‘who’ has access to the site is determined by the type of activity one performs there—one goes to work, one goes shopping or

one goes sightseeing. Once there, one takes part in the productive economy of the site. I chose the busiest transient space at the World

Financial Center to present a piece that depicts a series of unproductive situations, a pause that is often the result of the interruption of work.

If you see smoking as loitering in disguise, you can see the specificity of the critical position in this piece.

SIMON SHEIKH: It’s a private space in disguise of a public space, and my reading would be that, quite cynically, what it does is that it

provides, let’s say, the comforts of public space, but only for a certain public, only for a wanted public and gets rid of unwanted

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public, because it has its own rules and they can just say ‘get out of here, you bum’. What really scares me is the fact that the place is

so popular (and mentioned by architecture critics as a human use of corporate space) and that people are ever so willing to let

public spaces become privatized and corporatized.

ALEX VILLAR: Exactly. The World Financial Center functions like a city within a city. One can sense very well the almost ritualized passage

from the city at large to this other, smaller, city. One goes through a bridge, through several doors that close behind you. One feels as if

entering a palace. There, behind the walls of this other city, the rules are tighter.

Outside, on the streets that is still a certain amount of ‘freedom’ to improvise on your

actions. In the corporate atrium, that possibility has diminished substantially. In this

specific context, my attempt, not unlike what I have been doing in the street, was to

articulate a situation of potential dissent. But in order to do so within the confines of

this doubly regulated space, one needs a disguise. Smoking provides the pretext, an

excuse to actually do nothing when what is expected from you is that you should be

doing something. That is how I see this piece operating in that site, in dealing with

the very specific restrictions of a particular type of public sphere.

Produced by Simon Sheikh, Alex Villar, Melissa Brookhart, Jill Dawsey and Danger Museum, 2002/2003. Distributed by Online Printhouse. Cover image: Alex Villar in London by Diego Ferrari, September 2002. All other images by Alex Villar or Danger Museum. For more info visit: www.online-printhouse.com, www.de-tour.org, www.dangermuseum.com, www.apexart.org, www.iniva.org. Or email: dmuseum@online.no

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