Sampling the City: An investigation of space and place within the City

Abstract

This thesis examines ‘The City’ and its centrality to my artistic practice as a site for research, sampling and temporary intervention. It discusses the multiplicity of the city and reviews spatial theory through a section of urban theoreticians, particularly the relevant texts of Henri Leverbve, Marc Augé, Walter Benjamin and Michel de Certeau.

Lefebvre's post-Cartesian, relational spatiality envisaged space as a fluid, contingent relationship between people, culture and space. The thesis proposes an enrichment of this perspective through Augé's understanding of ‘non-place’ as the disconnected opposite of anthropologically connected ‘place’. Further, that the threshold or articulation between place and non-place is an artistically engaging site of spatial shift or tension. The thesis investigates Walter Benjamin's poetic interest in ‘thresholds’ and 'porosities' as an alternative spatial understanding and to posit that the articulation between place and non-space can be seen as an analogue continuum; a bi-directional threshold between the two states. Further, Benjamin offers theoretical support for the use of narrative and storytelling to describe the individual’s experience of contingent spatial relations in the city. Selected artworks by Gordon Matta-Clark, Rachel Whiteread and Jess MacNeil are evaluated in relation to urban spatial theory. In particular, consideration of the phenomenological tensions generated in Matta-Clark's cuts and MacNeil's present-absent spaces, and their relationship to my studio research.

The thesis concludes with review of the MFA studio research undertaken, which dealt with the spatial contradictions in the city; in particular the spaces offering narrative-based potential for propositional rupture or porosity in the fabric of urban reality, via photography, video and installation. The city is thus seen, through the theoretical and artistic considerations discussed in this thesis, to be a rich site for ongoing artistic research.