Yasmin Brain

Final configuration for the degree show. 

By having ‘Glocon’ split into two sections and the do-decagon shapes closely touching, it echoes the form and narrative of ‘Cake Tins’. Therefore I have finally managed to link the two pieces in terms of configuration for the show.

They also have very domestic references, specifically when viewed in a kitchen environment. The form of Glocon echoes either a whisk or ladle. 

More experimenting and configuring.

‘Cake Tins’ definitely works better with more space and ‘Glocon’ works better where ‘Cake Tins’ was originally. However, I haven’t reached a configuration that I am both pleased with and links the two pieces together. 

Degree show configuration.

Intially, I thought ‘Glocon’ would require a vast amount of space (first image). However, I am not pleased with the current form, it is too flat. It looks nothing like the configurations from the installation room. I am not sure if the other components (the supports, sheet steel and bent flat bar) work. Feel the do-decagons speak for themselves and are very ambiguous, which I like.

I also thought ‘Cake Tins’ would require less space. But, in reality it requires more as a vast amount of space is required for the reading of it. 

Katarzyna Kobro (26 Jan 1898, Moscow – 21 Feb 1951, Łódź) was a Polish sculptor of Russian, Latvian and German origin. Under the influence of Constructivism she rejected individualism, subjectivism and expressionism, and instead postulated the absolute objectivism of form. Her main aim was to build an abstract work of art, based on universal and objective rules discovered through experimentation and analysis. Her sculpture conceptualized infinite space, which was to be seen as uniform and without focal or reference points (such as the origin of a coordinate system). Therefore, she strove to organize space in such a way that it would not be divided into space enclosed within form and excluded from it, but instead for the work to coexist with space and to allow space to penetrate it.

She spent her early years in Riga, then moved with her family to Moscow in 1915. From 1917 to 1920 she studied at the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture. She was a member of the Moscow Union of Artists with Casimir Malevich, Olga Rozanova,Vladimir Tatlin and Alexander Rodchenko, among others.

In 1920 Kobro married Polish artist Władysław Strzemiński (1893-1952). In the beginning of 1922, she fled to Poland and in 1924 obtained Polish citizenship.

German artist and landscape architect Herbert Dreiseitl, who specializes in incorporating themes of water into his designs, is the recipient of the 2011 Urban Edge Award given by the School of Architecture and Urban Planning (SARUP) at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee (UWM). This $50,000 award recognizes excellence in urban design and the ability of individuals to create major, positive change in the public realm. It honors an internationally recognized design professional who brings fresh and effective thinking to urban design.

Originally trained as a sculptor, Dreiseitl has created a name for himself by designing interactive water sculptures for children. His firm, Atelier Dreiseitl, now has a 30-year track record of innovative, ecologically revelatory work with water in the built environment, from public sculpture and fountains to public plaza and landscape designs incorporating water, to urban and regional plans for storm water management. All of this work is informed by an elemental reverence for water as a basis for life, and the deep cultural and experiential bonds that water evokes. Atelier Dreiseitl now has offices in Shanghai and Beijing, China; Portland, Ore.; and Überlingen, Germany.

One of the recurring themes that characterises the art of the Camden Town Group is that of women and the domestic interior. Most evident in paintings by Walter Sickert, Harold Gilman, Spencer Gore, Malcolm Drummond and William Ratcliffe, the Camden Town ‘house style’ includes a compendium of familiar and homely items such as iron bedsteads, heavy floral furnishings, crockery, pianos, hats and mantelpiece bric-a-brac, as well as numerous female models, wives, lovers, friends, relatives and employees. None of these motifs readily suggest the iconography of a modernist movement entirely composed of men. Yet for the core members of the group, a significant part of the experience of modern life was explored and articulated through the depiction of this traditionally non-male domain. Paintings of female subjects, especially within working or lower middle class settings, defined a particular kind of contemporary urban existence which by virtue of its everyday normality was perceived to be authentically ‘real’. This sustained focus on the realm of the domestic bucked the dominant gendering of space that underpinned Victorian and Edwardian society; the notion of the masculine sphere of public life, as opposed to the private feminine world of home and family.

However, the ironic paradox embedded within Camden Town paintings is that, although women and the domestic sphere feature prominently as subject matter, female artists were expressly excluded from membership of the group. This essay introduces the social and historical context for the theme of domesticity and the domestic interior, and contrasts images by the Camden Town circle with those of two contemporary women artists, Ethel Sands and Vanessa Bell.

Women in Edwardian England

The Camden Town Group’s interest in the domestic interior reflects a wider awareness of the condition of women during the Edwardian period. The early twentieth century witnessed the growing visibility of women as an active social force, and factors such as a drop in the national birth rate, the reform of the marriage laws and improvements in the education system led to general improvements in health and status. The most obvious example of women’s greater profile in public life is the campaign for women’s suffrage, but there was also escalating female representation within the workplace. The census of 1901, for example, reveals that seventy-seven per cent of women aged fifteen to thirty-four did some sort of paid work. Most of these were in domestic service but many were secretaries, typists, teachers and nurses. By 1903 women had their own school of medicine, the London (Royal Free Hospital) School of Medicine, and their own newspaper, the Daily Mirror, which was initially run by an all-female staff. There were also instances of women breaking into traditionally male professions, such as veterinary science, architecture and accountancy, although these were still rare, isolated exceptions, and only men could practise law.

 Women also became the increased focus of attention within contemporary culture. There was a general fascination with modern life as experienced by ‘the fairer sex’, and writers concerned with portraying the state of Edwardian England wrote realist novels about female characters from across the social spectrum. The eponymous heroine of Somerset Maugham’s Liza of Lambeth (1897), for example, is a factory worker in London, while Arnold Bennett’s Anna of the Five Towns (1902) concerns a middle class girl from the Potteries, Staffordshire. J.M. Barrie’s play What Every Woman Knows (1908), meanwhile, is a humorous but incisive commentary on the role played by women in upper middle class society, and the novelAnn Veronica (1909) by H.G. Wells focuses on the feminist struggle to achieve political, social and personal emancipation. The most popular novel of 1914 was Chance by Joseph Conrad. The author himself said that it was ‘All of it about a girl and with a steady run of references to women in general. It ought to go down.’ Although it was not the figure of the ‘New Woman’ that featured in paintings by the Camden Town Group, this type of socially orientated literature certainly found a parallel within their art, particularly through their images of working or lower middle class women pictured within the cluttered, commonplace spaces of daily domestic life.

A marked shift in women’s roles occurred during the Edwardian era, particularly within the domestic sphere. For the art critic John Ruskin in 1865, the man was the ‘doer, the creator, the discoverer, the defender’, while the woman’s intellect was for ‘sweet ordering, arrangement and decision’. Yet although the house was traditionally seen as a feminine space, the business of furnishing it was often understood as a male preserve. Women had no property rights and limited earning power, and therefore historically it had been the man of the house who had economic control over the domestic interior. By the end of the nineteenth century, however, this situation had changed. The growth in suburban living meant that husbands commuted to their workplace leaving their wives in charge of household affairs and a growing number of women became involved in decorating their homes. Women were increasingly perceived to be the principal consumers and arbiters of domestic design and a wealth of popular literature offering advice on home furnishing was aimed at a predominantly female audience. For some, the domestic interior emerged as a symbol of feminist independence and a link was forged between creative expression and personal identity.

The Camden Town Group: a ‘one sex club’

Just as they were trying to break into other walks of life, so women were struggling to gain recognition within the professional art world. According to the census for 1901 there were 3,699 women with the occupation of artist, rising to 4,202 in 1911 (as opposed to 10,250 men in 1901 and 7,417 in 1911). The intake of female students in artistic education was much higher during the Edwardian than the Victorian era, particularly in establishments such as the Slade and the Westminster School of Art, yet they still had to overcome the patriarchal stereotype of the mediocre ‘amateur’ lady, dabbling before marriage.

Despite the fact that the Fitzroy Street Group had included women, the Camden Town Group, as noted earlier, firmly declared itself a ‘male club’ where ‘women are not eligible’.According to Charles Ginner this ban was devised by Gilman and Sickert to avoid the inclusion of wives or lady friends who ‘might not quite come up to the standard aimed at by the group’. Available correspondence also suggests that they had specific individuals in mind. In response to a request from Esther Pissarro that her friend Diana White be elected, James Bolivar Manson explained that the policy had ‘no malicious intention’ but arose from the ‘disinclination of the group to include Miss S[ands] & Miss H[udson] of Fitzroy Street in the list of members’. This was probably a politic spin on the truth since Sickert appears to have disliked Esther Pissarro. Furthermore, although Lucien supported his wife’s friend’s cause, he himself was later to accuse Sickert of swamping Fitzroy Street with a ‘sea of amateurs and pupils’, most of whom were undoubtedly female students from Sickert’s private art school, such as Renée Finch and Jean McIntyre. Whatever the truth, the single-sex ruling excluded a number of talented women whose work shared stylistic and thematic preoccupations with the core members of the Camden Town Group, particularly Sylvia Gosse, Stanislawa de Karlowska (Mrs Robert Bevan), Nan Hudson and Ethel Sands. It also denied an exhibiting platform to artists from the wider modern London milieu, such as Vanessa Bell, who was overlooked, whereas her Bloomsbury counterpart, Duncan Grant, was invited to join the group.

An overriding reason for the single-sex stricture appears to have been the persistent antipathy towards the notion of the female ‘amateur’. Fundamental to the Camden Town ethos was the desire to sell work within an open marketplace, and there seems to have been an underlying prejudice against artists who were not under any necessity to make a living from their work or who did not fully commit their time to the progress of their art. The mark of the professional artist, therefore, was the sale of work. For many female artists, however, the opportunity to pursue artistic studies in the first place depended upon economic stability and social position. The attendant privileges of background and class often reduced their need to earn money but frequently engendered a host of other duties and distractions which competed for creative time and energies. Sickert was constantly berating Sands and Hudson for neglecting their artistic development in favour of social and domestic activities, and on one occasion threatened to oust them from Fitzroy Street. He chided Hudson:

I am a little cross with you both. I thought you were both going to work daily & produce & improve. Otherwise what do you get out of helping to pay for our studio? I meant you to improve by leaps & bounds! What in heaven’s name do you do? ... Of course women are – there is no doubt – we all know what they are je lache le mot – ‘aesthetes’. Pour moi c’est le plus gros mot que je connaisse. [I release the word – ‘aesthetes’. For me it is the coarsest word I know.]

By ‘aesthetes’ Sickert implied those excessively concerned with stylish furnishings and decorations, as opposed to the ‘real’ and ‘natural’ beauty found in a ‘common little lodging room’.‘Taste’, he maintained, was ‘the death of a painter’ and he believed that true poetry in art arose from the ‘interpretation of ready-made life’, achieved through dispassionate observation of the subject, unencumbered by emotion or personal preference. While creativity flourished in ‘the scullery, or on the dunghill’, it faded ‘at a breath from the drawing-room’. Sickert described the tendency of Sands and Hudson to produce paintings of their own interiors, still lifes and flower paintings as ‘something amateurish’, adding ‘Your own tastes in dress & your personalities should be banished as much as possible from your oeuvre. “Parler de soi c’est ce qu’il y a de moins fort” Flaubert says [To speak of oneself is of the least significance] ... There is a constant snare in painting what is part of your life.’ His famous doctrine that ‘The plastic arts are gross arts, dealing joyously with gross material facts’ and that serious art should ‘avoid the drawing-room and stick to the kitchen’ disparaged paintings of genteel, feminine subjects as lightweight and superficial.

The kitchen versus the drawing room

Although Camden Town artists frequently represented the domestic interior, many of their paintings follow Sickert’s principles, eschewing upper class refinement in favour of the lower class and workaday. Their images depict female subjects as urban ‘types’, generic characters who could be socially codified through the specific details of their clothing and surroundings.25Furthermore, these glimpses into the domestic arena are presented from the viewpoint of a detached male observer, characterising a world to which he assuredly does not belong.

Harold Gilman, Shopping List 1912 

Spencer Gore, The Flowered Hat or Someone Who Waits c.1907 

In images such as Shopping List 1912, Girl with a Teacup c.1914–15 (private collection),26 or Tea in the Bedsitter 1916 (Huddersfield Art Gallery),Gilman, described as the ‘great painter of tea-pots’, created private, insular spaces inhabited by pensive women preoccupied by menial activities or so lost in reverie that they appear unaware of being viewed. Spencer Gore underlined the sense of separation in his painting, The Flowered Hat or Someone Who Waits c.1907, which juxtaposes a female sitter confined indoors (even though she has her hat on) with the bowler-hatted flâneur character in the street beyond. Sickert’s own figures in interiors, meanwhile, have been described as ‘anti-domestic’. Pictures such as Ennuic.1914, Off to the Pub 1911 or the Camden Town Murder series of 1907–9, reinforce middle class prejudices about working class existence, presenting dingy urban rooms as the stage-set for drama, dysfunction, drunkenness and violence. 

Walter Richard Sickert, Off to the Pub 1911 

Ethel Sands, The Chintz Couch c.1910–11 

Contemporary female artists, however, portrayed domestic interiors from an entirely different perspective. In defiance of Sickert’s dictum to ‘avoid the drawing-room and stick to the kitchen’, Sands resolutely drew inspiration from her own everyday environment: the comfortable living spaces of a wealthy and cultured Edwardian woman. A characteristic example, The Chintz Couch c.1910–11, depicts a tastefully arranged room in her Belgravia townhouse. For Sands the home was not a place of introspection, confinement or angst, but somewhere she felt free and at ease. The care with which she decorated and then pictorially represented her home is evidence, not of repressive conformity, but of individual expression and a confident modern interest in the domestic sphere. An independent woman of considerable private means, she owned properties which reflected not only her material prosperity but also her flair for colour, beauty and texture. Her presence as the owner and occupier of these spaces is explicitly evident through the feminine fabrics and artfully arranged arum lilies.

The Chintz Couch finds a visual parallel in a photograph from 1905 that records Vanessa Bell (then Vanessa Stephen) at work on her first commission, a portrait of her friend, Lady Robert Cecil. The picture was taken in the drawing room at 46 Gordon Square, the house where Vanessa and her sister, Virginia, first found the freedom to live and work beyond conventional social constraints. They had moved to the property after the death of their father in 1904, and Bell, released from an existence circumscribed by ‘the tea-table duties of a young Victorian woman’,later wrote ‘All that seemed to matter was that at last we were free, had rooms of our own and space in which to be alone or to work or to see our friends’. As the photograph demonstrates, the house was home and workplace, subject and studio. The artist standing with her palette and easel is surrounded by the comforts of her domestic environment, while simultaneously immortalising precisely the same background corner of the room on the canvas directly in front of her. A chintz-covered chair in the background contains the sitter, Eleanor (Nelly) Cecil. Prominent in the foreground is another of the ubiquitous armchairs, but this time it stands empty, as though the artist has just vacated her natural position as its occupant in order to take up her paintbrushes. 

Vanessa Stephen Painting Lady Robert Cecil 1905 

The domestic interior is therefore both the site and theme of female creativity. This is further evident within one of the few early surviving oil paintings by Bell, 46 Gordon Square c.1908–9, which shows a corner of her home with its furnishings and fruit bowl, and a glimpse of the ordered Bloomsbury square through the window beyond. The artist’s use of modern devices such as the stippled application of paint, strong compositional vertical and abruptly truncated view demonstrates that she saw domestic living as a viable subject for work of a modern character. It also reveals a stylistic and thematic connection at this time to the work of Fitzroy Street (and later Camden Town Group) artists such as Sickert’s Girl at a Window, Little Rachel 1907 and Gore’s The Flowered Hat 1907.

Vanessa Bell, 46 Gordon Square c.1908–9 

Walter Richard SickertGirl at a Window, Little Rachel 1907

Rooms of their own

It was partly through their careful manipulation of the domestic interior that Sands and Bell asserted their right to be a part of cultured society. Both women were interested in interior design and in engendering surroundings which professed their artistic modernity. Sands invested much of her time perfecting decorative schemes at her London homes, her country home in Newington, near Oxford, and later with Nan Hudson in the aesthetic refurbishment of the seventeenth-century Château d’Auppegard near Dieppe. In addition to her careful personal selection of fixtures and fittings, she invited contemporary artists to create bespoke pieces, such as Boris Anrep’s murals and mosaics for her house in the Vale, Chelsea, and Sickert’s unfinished New Bedford mural decorations for the dining room there. In 1927 she and Hudson commissioned Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant to decorate the walls of the loggia at Auppegard, while she herself completed some trompe l’oeildecorations for the bathroom and lavatory.

Bell, meanwhile, was a co-director and key contributor of designs to the Omega Workshops (1913–19), an enterprise initiated by Roger Fry for the production of household furnishings and clothes. Although the group was accused in an infamous open letter by former member Wyndham Lewis of being the ‘curtain and pincushion factory of Fitzroy Square’ that perpetuated the effeminacy of Victorian prettiness, its aim was to synthesise recent developments in French painting with the decorative arts. Among Bell’s Omega output were bold and colourful abstract designs for fabrics, hand-painted furniture and complete room schemes, as well as mural decorations for Charleston, her farmhouse in East Sussex.

Although she is known to have disliked Sands’s preference for the ‘fatal prettiness’ of eighteenth-century style floral furnishings, their shared interest in interior decoration should be understood as mutual recognition of the importance of environment and the expression of personal identity, and a commitment to the values of modern living.They both created a domestic milieu which they felt represented their artistic objectives, while simultaneously nurturing their creative inspiration. A distillation of their individual styles can be best illustrated through two images, Bell’s Still Life on Corner of a Mantelpiece1914 , and Sands’s Flowers in a Jug ?1920s. While Sands’s naturalistic painting depicts the delicate elegance of an interior at Auppegard, the ornaments on Bell’s mantelpiece include some handmade paper flowers from the Omega Workshops, and the entire painting is an essay in abstract form and post-impressionist colour.

Vanessa BellStill Life on Corner of a Mantelpiece 1914 

Ethel SandsFlowers in a Jug ?1920s 

Both Sands and Bell used their carefully constructed domestic environments as social contexts where they could participate in intelligent discourse more usually conducted in the male-dominated public sphere. Bell hosted the weekly ‘Friday Club’ gatherings of writers, artists and other intellectuals, which would eventually coalesce into the Bloomsbury Group. Sands’s homes in Oxford and London, meanwhile, were the setting for some of the most interesting and artistic gatherings of the period, the Edwardian equivalent of the French salon, including among her regular guests Vanessa Bell, Roger Fry and Walter Sickert. Paintings of interiors by these two women, therefore, also reflect the domestic interior as a microcosm of a wider social and cultural experience. Rather than the self-contained sequestered environment frequently portrayed by men, the domestic domicile is the location for conversation and the exchange of ideas. Sands’s painting, Tea with Sickert c.1911–12, for example, represents an instance of cross-gender social interaction. The suited figure of Sickert is seated opposite an unknown female (probably Sands’s companion, Nan Hudson) with the empty chair in between them denoting the presence of the artist herself. Despite the self-assured, somewhat proprietary manner of Sickert’s pose, he is thoroughly assimilated within the feminine trappings of chintz furnishings and the afternoon tea tray, and although his body language suggests that he may be dominating the conversation, he is not dominating the pictorial space. He appears as part of Sands’s world.

Ethel Sands, Tea with Sickert c.1911–12

Vanessa Bell, Conversation Piece at Asheham 1912

 Vanessa Bell also painted an ‘at home’ meeting of minds in her 1912 picture, Conversation Piece at Asheham. The setting is Asheham House, near Lewes in Sussex, a rural holiday home rented by Leonard and Virginia Woolf from 1911. Sitting at ease around the fire in vibrantly coloured high-backed winged armchairs are three figures. Despite their featureless visages, the trio have been identified as Vanessa’s husband, Clive Bell (wearing blue socks), Leonard Woolf in the centre, and the lanky figure on the left is Vanessa’s brother, Adrian Stephen. He leans forward as though engaged in intense and animated discussion. Although the three conversationalists are all men, the empty armchair on the left suggests that a fourth member has momentarily stepped away. The intimate atmosphere and domestic informality creates a sense that the artist (and by association the viewer) is looking in without being excluded, and is therefore an equal participant in the proceedings. 

Vanessa Bell, Conversation 1913–16 

In another painting, Conversation 1913–16, Bell again depicts an interior with three people, but in this instance the triumvirate is an all-female one. Unlike many Camden Town paintings where women appear in solitary activities such as reading, playing the piano, or simply sitting in reverie, Bell’s sitters are here rendered in intense and active conference. This is most explicitly represented by the expressive pose of the figure on the left, reminiscent of a more engaged version of Rodin’s The Thinker, but the women’s solid, monumental forms and closely focused attention, along with the quizzical tilt of the head on the right, all underscore the dynamic import of the discussion. Bell worked on the painting across a time span of four years. An interesting biographical fact during the picture’s evolution is that the artist altered the appearance of the background, toning down the decorative detail on the curtains to create a less feminine, more neutral backdrop. Nevertheless, it is still the private home which is seen to be the crucible for powerful and meaningful discourse.

Conclusion

When discussing the domestic, it is important to deal with the myths derived from high modernism and its negation of domesticity. Domestic sphere, namely its activities, objects and interests became associated with political conservatism, intellectual apathy and aesthetic traditionalism. Walter Benjamin furthered this perception in his writings by separating the type of experience offered by private space of bourgeois interior (interiorised impressions of ‘Erfahrung’), as opposed to modern street (the effect of shock in ‘Erlebnis’). Artists responded through denial of decoration in favour of ascetic focus on art. Architects, such as Adolf Loos or Le Corbusier, put forward designs that replaced the desire for domestic comfort with ‘machines for living’ The postmodern era has started re-evaluating the home through two different approaches, treating the domestic as a site of ongoing repression (postmodernism of reaction) but also as space of rising autonomy and empowerment (postmodernism of resistance). How can therefore the contemporary artist relate to the home?

Domestic vs. Institution 

In 2003 a Dublin show Superbia was funded through a council regeneration programme to develop contemporary art that would enrich the lives of local communities. The curators responded to the social impact of the Irish construction boom that led to reframing home as a commodity. In Superbia an ordinary family home becomes a gallery. The familiarity of domestic environment is challenged and the meaning of home reframed, private-domestic is transformed into public-receptive. Visitors are made up from local neighbours as well as typical art viewers. Domestic here is a challenge to the art institution and the concept of the ‘white cube’.

Superbia, The Coultry Estate , Ballymun Road. Dublin, 2003 

This challenge could be analysed through the essay of Boris Groys ‘The Logic of Equal Aesthetic Rights’, who poses a question why one would need an intermediary of an art system, curators and art critics to appreciate art. However, Groys promptly reminds us that the museum strength is in ability to ‘resist the dictatorship of contemporary taste’. The mass media (and other unmediated channels) the sell an illusion of the new: different, innovative, challenging and authentic. The function of institution, according to Groys, is to re-assess ‘the fundamental aesthetic equality of all the images in a historically given context’. In response to this traditional argument, one could propose that the site of Superbia has become a ‘domestic third space’ that is positioned between the art world and the ‘everyday’. Geographer Edward Soja propositions the concept of ‘thirdspace’ as another space where the conventional dualism can be broken and projected. Thirdspace is neither inherently positive nor negative, but rather that of chaotic experience; it is where difference is achieved through a subversion of the existing power structures. This is what is at the core of Superbia exhibition: a real space that provides a bridging between the art institution and the open market. 

Home vs. Mobility 

The anthropologist Shirley Ardener proposes that space and behaviour are interlinked – so called multidimensional ‘social maps’ are formed of structural relationships, hierarchies and patterns etc. Increased physical mobility renders these maps changeable and temporal.Mobility and ‘social maps’ are at the core of the practice of Andrea Zittel. Zittel combines art with industrial design to provide service. She created for herself a corporate identity of A-Z Administrative Services that offers bespoke models of ‘life management’ to individuals. One of the concepts was a series Carpet Furniture designed to optimise a small living space and replace different furniture units. The carpet would normally hang on the wall and set down when needed to fulfil a specific activity like sleeping or eating. Ideally, the carpet could become the only hardware required to fulfil typical needs. 

Andrea Zittel, A-Z Carpet Furniture: Bed with 2 Nightstands, Small Desk and Chair, Chair withTable, 1993. 

This reduction of living concerns’ is a theme obsessively reconsidered in Zittel’s other works like Living Units (compact structure systems to facilitate living in small spaces), Escape Vehicles (capsules reminiscent of camper vans) or Homestead Units (cabins avoiding building permits of San Bernardino County). Zittel perceives her life as the perfect site for testing her ideas and her house performs both a function of home and laboratory. Domestic problems that require solutions lead to new works and her home becomes the site of ongoing performance. The work only becomes separated from the artist’s life through the corporate identity of A to Z Administrative Service. Andrea Zittel finds it interesting what people do with her works once in their possession, what it reveals about their values. It is her intention to disrupt the relationship with the consumer system through empowering; she proposes that individuals should examine their own goals, talents and options, and then begin to invent new models or roles to fulfil own needs’.It is a question of a 'citizen' versus a 'consumer’. Consumerism allows us to only choose from options presented but ‘we need to remember O that there's a whole other world of possibilities beyond what we're being offered.’ 

Re-housing Undesirables

There is a need for more temporary solutions to the idea of home, especially one that addresses dislocation. Home-space or home-nonplace. 16 Spread across the mediums of art, fashion and architecture are projects of the British artist Lucy Orta who aims to re-situate the body in space. The series Refuge Wear (1992-1999) would zip over the head to form a protective sack and was designed for use in shelters, railway stations and squats. Weather resistant and microporous fabric is supposed to mimic the property of the skin becoming architectural second skin.  

Lucy Orta, Refuge Wear, 2011.

Orta’s skin-like solutions go beyond the concept of unfixing architecture as they attempt to re-situate and rehouse those that have been systematically excluded from cultural/economic/political infrastructures. Orta’s works are ‘a form of re-socialization‘. Her garments re-instate the bodies that were marked as social outsiders; make them palpable, haptic and visible. They offer their wearers an opportunity for survival in an urban environment. Lucy Orta’s community projects of shared garments are equally effective in their re-mapping social relations within public space. Body Architecture – Collective Wear connects individual Refuge Wear into a larger inhabitable structures (domes, cabins, foyers, tents) resembling a temporary family unit. This transformation is reversible and replaceable. Garments, though individual, can be removed and reattached, effectively creating mobile communities. These wearable shelters provide a proposition for public housing that is contingent and temporarily, specific to the situation, visible and individualized.

Housework or Artwork 

The other domestic sphere that has historically been removed from the power structures including art institutions is housework. Housework has not and is not really viewed as work (not regulated or contracted) but rather a repetition of ordinary and endless effort. It was important to Marxist politics as an example of labour requiring equal contract between the employer and employee. Then domestic work became modernised through space-improving ergonomics, labour-saving appliances and Taylorist work routine. Modernism saw it as liberation of the housewife while Socialism viewed it as an abolition of the wage. It is a tension that continues to persist today. Housework should be viewed as a political site similar to artistic work, where both seem to remain outside of the social relationship of value-labour. Both housework and artwork cannot be economically valorised as they do not really produce anything and therefore reject commodification of human activities. These parallels were drawn by conceptual artists in 60s and 70s who performed housework as art (resulting in works such as Marta Rosler’s Semiotics of the Kitchen). An architect Elisabeth Diller mimics such ideas in her architectural project Bad Press. A series of origami-like instructions are set out to fold and iron a number of shirts into useless structural forms. Ironing skill is not treated within the early feminist framework (housework as art), but is re-appropriated for a new (architectural) function and becomes a form of aesthetics of efficiency.

Elisabeth Diller, Bad Press: Dissident Housework Series, 1993-1996. Custom ironed shirts, two single-channel videos. Dimensions variable.

‘After the revolution, who’s going to pick up the garbage on Monday morning?’ 

The housework is not a matter of the past. In high-technology sectors, over 90% of scientists and technologists are men. Working long hours in environments that require flexibility in response to organizational requests poses a question: who does the domestic labour? This is the question that is picked up by Mierle Lederman Ukeles. The concept for Ukeles’ work started when she became pregnant as an art student. Faced with impossibility to connect the new position with traditional art perception, Ukeles devised ‘The Manifesto for Maintenance Art, 1969’. She defined herself as a mother, wife and artist who has responsibility for numerous activities maintaining domestic life and allowed herself an artistic freedom to decide what value these actions have. In her own words ‘Now, I will simply do these maintenance everyday things, and flush them up to consciousness, exhibit them, as Art.’ In 1973 Ukeles decided to carry out the cleaning works in the Hartford Museum (Hartford Wash. Washing Tracks, Maintenance Outside and Hartford Wash. Washing Tracks, Maintenance Inside). She spent eight hours on her hands and knees polishing, scrubbing and washing the entry steps and inside space of the gallery - a miniscule figure engaged in a futile attempt. Instead of a direct act to oppose the repression of an institution, it was a subversive action drawing attention to the work that is invisible and is made to stay invisible in order for the ‘real’ work of arts to be appreciated by the viewer. Through her action, the viewer becomes aware not only of the labour that maintains the pristine and timeless fantasy, but also of the countless workers that are providing it on a daily basis. 

Mierle Laderman Ukeles, Touch Sanitation, 1978-80. City-wide performance with 8,500 NYC Sanitation workers. Courtesy Ronald Feldman Fine Arts, New York. 

What also differentiates the approach of Mielre Ukeles a directness her acts. Afterwards, Ukeles self-appointed herself as a resident artist for The City of New York Sanitation Department. In Touch Sanitation (1979 – 1980), Ukeles spent 11 months following garbage trucks in every borough in New York and personally sought out and greeted each of the 8,500 sanitation workers with a salutation ‘Thank you for keeping New York City alive.’  Mierle Ukeles’ work presents us with some existential questions: How do we value different kinds of work in our society? and Which are the most important tasks to be taken care of? 

The Grand Project

In 2009, Casco – Office for Art, Design and Theory initiated a long-term research project to ‘question and challenge the very notion of social design’. It was titled The Grand Domestic Revolution (GDR) after the 90s essay by an architectural historian Dolores Hayden. Hayden aimed to challenge a division existing both physically between public and private domains, as well as financially between the domestic and political economies. She proposed a creation of new kind of spaces where these separations are addressed, including communal kitchens or housewives’ co-ops. Inspired by these methods GDR aims to investigate how re-framing of the domestic can drive change in local communities and the society at large.

GDR invited artists, designers, architects, theorist, union workers, local residents and activists to collaborate in a ‘living research’ that included residencies, workshops, publications, townhall meetings, commissions and a programme of exhibitions. Exhibitions (like the one in The Showroom, London last would reflect the vastness of the scope. Included in the show were historical paradigms like scanned copies from Mary Kelly’s 1975 catalogue ‘Women & Work: A Document on the Division of Labour in Industry’, which flags up wage disparities between men and women working in a metal-box factory in Bermondsey and the domestic labour. There were also nods to the Occupy movement, and the exhibition picks apart the word ‘occupation’ to explore its related meanings as tenure of space as well as the labour that ensures that tenure. A ‘cooperative sitcom’ OUR AUTONOMOUS LIFE? followed the interpersonal relationships of a fictional group of squatters. A Dutch artist Matthijs de Bruijne collaborated with Domestic Workers Netherlands to create a Brechtian operetta of four parts, where the characters come together at the end of each narrative to sing about their concerns. There was also an extensive library and research of theorists and students.

Although GDR residency site has been closed, the scope of the initiative is sprawling and GDR continues to collaborate internationally as a ‘travelling project’ to be undertaken at different scales, locations and languages. Methods used by GDR would be a demonstration of art occupying the spaces that have up till now been neglected or omitted. Hito Steyerl, a filmmaker and art theorist, proposes that in many areas of work-life-art, the category of ‘labour’ (focus on the outcome) is increasingly replaced by ‘occupation’ (the process of ongoing mediation). ‘At the end of the day, people might have to leave the site of occupation in order to go home to do the thing formerly called labor: wipe off the tear gas, go pick up their kids from child care, and otherwise get on with their lives. Because these lives happen in the vast and unpredictable territory of occupation, and this is also where lives are being occupied. I am suggesting that we occupy this space.’

Conclusion:

Home is place no more

This paper has hopefully shown though that the potential of home as art territory goes much further than the phenomological and semiotic discussions. The ‘thirdspace’ of the domestic is fluid and porous and the overlapping of the work/play/home creates interchangeable meanings. It can deterritorialize art-site and art-institution relationships as in Superbia and performances of Diane Borsato. Through its examination and paring down to essential needs, it offers an opportunity to challenge a commodity system (Zittel). When dealing with the invisible/undesirable bodies, it may inspire a form of resocialization as in Lucy Orta’s garments or Ukeles’ maintenance art. Simultaneously, it poses a site for occupation (mediation) which is explored though collaborative projects like The Grand Domestic Revolution. Home is place no more but a ‘temporalized’ transient space. Extension of contemporary art into such spaces creates opportunities for new debates. As Jacques Ranciere confirms: ‘Politics in general is O about the visibilities of the places and abilities of the body in those places, about the partition of private and public spaces, about the very configuration of the visible and the relation of the visible to what can be said about it.’

MILTON, W.Va. — Milton Mayor Tom Canterbury admits annexing homes and businesses into the city limits will increase the property taxes on those property owners. However, he points out the move also increases the value of the property by lying within city limits.

The town is looking to expand its borders. Canterbury said it’s more of a move to correct some boundary problems the city currently experiences.

“The boundaries here now are really messed up. I was just trying to true-up the corners,” he said. “Also, in the city right now there’s a big doughnut hole in the middle that is not in the city limits, but all the way around it is.”

The Mayor said that doughnut hole is likely the result of political gamesmanship from many decades ago as the city was founded and grew. Still he thinks those lying in an unincorporated area within the boundaries of the city limits makes for poor municipal management.

“If a guy has a business and a guy has a business right across the road from him,” he said. “One’s in and one’s out, how do you explain that.”

The other area the city is looking to annex is east to within about 300 yards of the boundary of the unincorporated community of Culloden. Many in that part of the area are against the idea, but the Mayor said 75 percent of those who have raised a fuss about it won’t be part of it to begin with. The proposed annexation would also give the city jurisdiction for the road only on Route 60 al the way to the Cabell/Putnam County line.

“Ninety percent of the people over there already have our city water and city sewer. They have all the city service,” he said. “What can we offer them today? Not very much because they already have it.”

He did point out the residents would enjoy city police protection, city garbage service, and a spring cleanup. The Mayor said the annexation would add just over 1,000 residents and approximately 450 properties to the city. As for the cost of annexation he said a dollar a month municipal fee would be leveled and property taxes would increase.

Reuters , Wednesday 29 Apr 2015

Greece will launch consultations with Egypt and Cyprus to establish maritime boundaries in the eastern Mediterranean, Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras said on Wednesday.

Tsipras, who was visiting Cyprus, said those boundaries - which are normally a precursor to a state licensing for offshore oil and gas exploration - would be defined in areas where consent of "third countries" was not required.

Turkey and Greece have been at loggerheads for decades over land, air, sea and sea-floor borders in parts of the Aegean sea.

Cyprus, which was split in a Turkish invasion in 1974 after a brief Greek inspired coup, found gas offshore in 2011, in a move which has also been challenged by Ankara.

After talks with Egyptian President Abdel Fattah El-Sisi and Cypriot President Nicos Anastasiades, Tsipras said: "We agreed on further consultations for defining our sea zones wherever that is deemed necessary, and obviously there where it does not require an understanding and cooperation with third countries."

Maritime zones claimed by countries for commercial research, known as economic exploitation zones, are normally governed by the United Nations law of the sea, or bilateral agreements between neighbouring states which normally settle on an equidistant boundary.

Ankara, which is not a signatory to that convention, questions the jurisdiction of Cyprus's internationally-recognized Greek Cypriot government in exploring for oil and gas.

April 29, 2015 1:18 pm

By Naomi Shragai

One of the most striking changes in the world of work in recent decades has been the switch from small, often individual offices to large, open-plan layouts.

The aim was to enhance innovation and productivity by creating collaborative places in which people interact more. Such a design was also cost efficient because it saved space and enabled managers to more easily spot potential problems among their teams.

What was not considered, however, was the effect on individuals, who often need private space in which to think and to hold private conversations, both personal and professional.

The dismantling of walls and physical boundaries between people meant that individuals became responsible for setting their own limits on how much they could intrude on each other’s working lives, with little protocol to guide them.

Transparency took primacy over privacy, often resulting in constant interruptions and distractions. And over the past year there has been increasing use of sensors, particularly in the US, to monitor workers’ activity, productivity; even in some cases, conversations.

Has the pendulum from individual-office privacy to open-plan transparency swung too far?

Steelcase, a leading company in the office furniture industry, which also makes monitoring sensors, accepts that it has. Melanie Redman, the company’s senior design researcher, says the company’s studies have shown that privacy has become a growing concern over the past decade.

Several factors have contributed, among them the pressure to collaborate. “When people are pushed to collaborate all the time you lose the benefit of individual thinking, which is often necessary for innovation,” Ms Redman says.

The lack of space for personal and private conversations also plays a part. Employees lose control over who can see their computer screen, who can hear their conversations, and who can watch them eat cake when they’re on a diet,” she says. “We heard many stories of people being eavesdropped on by colleagues, and having their [work] calendars reviewed without permission.”

As a result, managing psychological boundaries has become a necessary skill at work. Such boundaries — limits we set on acceptable behaviour — operate in two directions, protecting us from being intruded on or harmed by others, and protecting others from our insensitive intrusions on them.

When boundaries are too rigid, people can become isolated and even withdrawn. Where they are inadequate, employees can feel exposed and vulnerable. Those with heightened sensitivity might wrongly interpret events around them and create unnecessary conflicts with colleagues.

One example comes from a young solicitor who came to see me for psychotherapy. He suffers constant anxiety, and as a result puts a negative spin on the glances and comments from nearby colleagues, believing they are judging him badly. The mental pressure resulting from these thoughts makes the office an intolerable place for him.

A woman in finance, meanwhile, told me about feeling excluded and paranoid when colleagues in her open-plan office, who did not want to be overheard, whispered within view of her desk.

“This can make you feel either paranoid as you believe that they are talking about you, or excluded in that they are clearly having a conversation they do not want you to be part of.”

Certain personality types can be adversely affected by the constant presence of colleagues. In Quiet, a book about introverts, the writer Susan Cain explains how such people struggle in open-plan offices because they tend to have greater sensitivity to noise and distraction. While extroverts thrive in the stimulation and community of open plan, introverts become most creative and productive in solitude.

Ethan Bernstein, assistant professor of leadership and organisational behaviour at Harvard Business School, believes that open plan may produce less interaction and collaboration. He also questions the assumption that it produces more open discussion.

In one company that switched from a closed to open-plan office, he measured face-to-face interactions among staff. Interactions of individuals who did not work on teams together increased 47 per cent, while those between people who worked on the same team actually fell 45 per cent, he says.

The effect of being overly observed in open environments may leave people feeling so exposed and anxious that they do not risk doing anything out of the ordinary.

KUALA LUMPUR, April 29 (Bernama) -- Malaysia should seek opportunities beyond its geo-political boundaries to expand growth potential in the face of a small, limited domestic market.

HSBC Bank Malaysia Bhd Head of Commercial Banking, Mahbub Ur Rahman, said new growth opportunities would be in the services sector, particularly in financial services. He said progress would be faster and more stable if the country could draw on a regional rather than a national talent pool. "Frictionless cross-border banking will facilitate the growth of supply chains, both in terms of geographic breadth and skills depth, and allow the pooling of assets for vital investments in the next phase of growth," he said in a statement Wednesday.

Boundaries

A physical boundary is a naturally occurring barrier between two areas. Rivers, mountain ranges, oceans, and deserts can all serve as physical boundaries. Many times, political boundaries between countries or states form along physical boundaries.

Borders

Borders are geographic boundaries of political entities or legal jurisdictions, such as governments, sovereign states, federated states, and other subnational entities. Some borders—such as a state's internal administrative border, or inter-state borders within the Schengen Area—are open and completely unguarded. Other borders are partially or fully controlled, and may be crossed legally only at designated border checkpoints and border zones may be controlled. Some, mostly contentious, borders may even foster the setting up of buffer zones.

Definitions

In the past, many borders were not clearly defined lines, but were neutral zones called marchlands. This has been reflected in recent times with the neutral zones that were set up along part of Saudi Arabia's borders with Kuwait and Iraq (however, these zones no longer exist)[citation needed]. In modern times, the concept of a marchland has been replaced by that of the clearly defined and demarcated border. For the purposes of border control, airports and seaports are also classed as borders. Most countries have some form of border control to regulate or limit the movement of people, animals, plants, and goods into or out of the country. Under international law, each country is generally permitted to define the conditions that have to be met by a person to legally cross its borders by its own laws, and to prevent persons from crossing its border when this happens in violation of those laws.

Some borders require presentation of legal paperwork like passports and visas, or other identity documents to cross borders. To stay or work within a country's borders aliens (foreign persons) may need special immigration documents or permits that authorise them to do so. Having such documents (i.e., visa and passport) however does not automatically guarantee that the alien will be allowed to cross to the other side of the border.

Moving goods across a border often requires the payment of excise tax, often collected by customs officials. Animals (and occasionally humans) moving across borders may need to go into quarantine to prevent the spread of exotic or infectious diseases. Most countries prohibit carrying illegal drugs or endangered animals across their borders. Moving goods, animals, or people illegally across a border, without declaring them, seeking permission, or deliberately evading official inspection constitutes smuggling.

In regions where smuggling, migration, and infiltration are a problem, many countries fortify borders with fences and barriers and institute formal border control procedures. Some borders are only signposted. This is common in countries within the European Schengen Area and on rural sections of the Canada–United States border. Borders may even be completely unmarked, typically in remote or forested regions; such borders are often described as "porous". Migration within territorial borders, and outside of them, represented an old and established pattern of movement by people in African countries, in seeking work and food, and to maintain ties with kin who had moved across the previously porous borders of their homelands. When the colonial frontiers were drawn, Western countries attempted to obtain a monopoly on the recruitment of labor in many African countries, which altered the practical and institutional context in which the old migration patterns had been followed, and some might argue, are still followed today. The frontiers were particularly porous from the point of view of the physical movement of migrants, and people living in borderland communities easily maintained transnational cultural and social networks.

Classification of Borders

Political borders are nonphysical fiat boundaries imposed on the world through human agency. This means that, although a political border may follow a river or mountain range, such a feature is not itself the border. Nevertheless, borders are often classified by whether or not they follow conspicuous physical features on the earth.

Natural Borders

A photograph of the France–Italy border at night. The southwestern end of the Alps separates the two countries.

Natural borders are geographical features that present natural obstacles to communication and transport. Existing political borders are often a formalization of these historical, natural obstacles.

Some geographical features that often constitute natural borders are:

Oceans: oceans create very costly natural borders. Very few nation-states     span more than one continent. Only very large and resource-rich states are able to sustain the     costs of governance across oceans for longer periods of time.

Rivers: some political borders have been formalized along natural borders     formed by rivers. Some examples are; the Niagara     River border (Canada–USA), the Rio     Grande border (Mexico–USA), the Rhine border (France–Germany), and the Mekong border (Thailand–Laos). Where a precise line is desired, it is     often drawn along the Thalweg, the deepest line along the river.

Lakes: larger lakes create natural borders. One example is the natural     border created by Lake     Tanganyika, with DR Congo and     Zambia on its west shore and Tanzania and Burundi on the east.

Forests: denser jungles or forests can create strong natural borders. One     example of a natural forest border is the Amazon rainforest, separating Brazil and Bolivia from Peru, Colombia, Venezuela and     Guyana.

Mountain     ranges: research on borders suggests that mountains have especially     strong effects as natural borders. Many nations in Europe and Asia have     had their political borders defined along mountain ranges, often along a drainage     divide.

Throughout history, technological advances have reduced the costs of transport and communication across these natural borders. This has reduced the significance of natural borders over time. As a result, political borders that have been formalized more recently — such as those in Africa or Americas — typically conform less to natural borders than very old borders — such as those in Europe or Asia — do.

Geometric borders

Geometric boundaries are formed by arcs or lines (such as lines of latitude or longitude) regardless of the physical and culture features of the earth. Political boundaries of this kind can often be found around the states that developed out of African colonial holdings.

Relict borders

A relict border is one that no longer functions and therefore may no longer be a legal boundary at all. However, the former presence of the boundary can still be seen in the landscape. For instance, the boundary between East and West Germany no longer has any legal existence, but can still be seen because of historical markers on the landscape and continues to be a cultural and economic division in Germany today.

Maritime borders

A maritime border is a division enclosing an area in the ocean where a nation has exclusive rights over the mineral and biological resources, encompassing maritime features, limits and zones. Maritime borders represent the jurisdictional borders of a maritime nation and are recognized by the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea.

Maritime borders exist in the context of territorial waters, contiguous zones, and exclusive economic zones; however, the terminology does not encompass lake or river boundaries, which are considered within the context of land boundaries.

Some maritime borders have remained indeterminate despite efforts to clarify them. This is explained by an array of factors, some of which illustrate regional problems.

Border economics

The border USA–Mexico: San Diego–Tijuana.

The presence of borders often fosters certain economic features or anomalies. Wherever two jurisdictions come into contact, special economic opportunities arise for border trade. Smuggling provides a classic case; contrariwise, a border region may flourish on the provision of excise or of import–export services — legal or quasi-legal, corrupt or legitimate. Different regulations on either side of a border may encourage services to position themselves at or near that border: thus the provision of pornography, of prostitution, of alcohol and/or of narcotics may cluster around borders, city limits, county lines, ports and airports. In a more planned and official context, Special Economic Zones (SEZs) often tend to cluster near borders or ports.

Even if the goods are not perceived to be undesirable, states will still seek to document and regulate the cross-border trade in order to collect tariffs and benefit from foreign currency exchange revenues. Thus, there is the concept unofficial trade in goods otherwise legal; for example, the cross-border trade in livestock by pastoralists in the Horn of Africa. Ethiopia sells an estimated $250 to $300 million of livestock to Somalia, Kenya and Djibouti every year unofficially, over 100 times the official estimate.

Human economic traffic across borders (apart from kidnapping) may involve mass commuting between workplaces and residential settlements. The removal of internal barriers to commerce, as in France after the French Revolution or in Europe since the 1940s, de-emphasises border-based economic activity and fosters free trade. Euroregions are similar official structures built around commuting across boundary.

Politics

Borders between Israel, Syria and Lebanon in Mount Hermon region. The (+++) Line between Israel and Lebanon – marked by black asterisk. Disengagement Israeli front line with Syria (1974) - marked by blue asterisk. Disengagement Syrian front line with Israel (1974) - marked by red asterisk.

Political borders have a variety of meanings for those whom they affect. Many borders in the world have checkpoints where border control agents inspect those crossing the boundary.

In much of Europe, such controls were abolished by the Schengen Agreement and subsequent European Union legislation. Since the Treaty of Amsterdam, the competence to pass laws on crossing internal and external borders within the European Union and the associated Schengen States (Iceland, Norway, Switzerland, and Liechtenstein) lies exclusively within the jurisdiction of the European Union, except where states have used a specific right to opt out (United Kingdom and Ireland, which maintain a common travel area amongst themselves)..

The United States has notably increased measures taken in border control on the Canada–United States border and the United States–Mexico border during its War on Terrorism (See Shantz 2010). One American writer has said that the 3,600 km (2,200 mi) US-Mexico border is probably "the world's longest boundary between a First World and Third World country".

Italy–Switzerland border is the most ancient in the world

Historic borders such as the Great Wall of China, the Maginot Line, and Hadrian's Wall have played a great many roles and been marked in different ways. While the stone walls, the Great Wall of China and the Roman Hadrian's Wall in Britain had military functions, the entirety of the Roman borders were very porous, which encouraged Roman economic activity with neighbors. On the other hand, a border like the Maginot Line was entirely military and was meant to prevent any access in what was to be World War II to France by its neighbor, Germany. Germany ended up going around the Maginot Line through Belgium just as it had done in World War I.

Cross-border regions

Macro-regional integration initiatives, such as the European Union and NAFTA, have spurred the establishment of cross-border regions. These are initiatives driven by local or regional authorities, aimed at dealing with local border-transcending problems such as transport and environmental degradation. Many cross-border regions are also active in encouraging intercultural communication and dialogue as well as cross-border economic development strategies.

In Europe, the European Union provides financial support to cross-border regions via its Interreg programme. The Council of Europe has issued the Outline Convention on Transfrontier Co-operation, providing a legal framework for cross-border co-operation even though it is in practice rarely used by Euroregions.

Border studies