[Introduction][Programme][Exhibition]

Art 'after landscape': memory, place and identity

Chasing after the ghost of its own grace Lily Markiewicz 2004

Some Thoughts on Feeling-at-Home

Lily Markiewicz (AHRB CentreCATH, University of Leeds)..

Abstract

This presentation takes place at the intersection of theoretical discourse and practice-oriented research. It follows recent propositions claiming artistic practice as an invaluable space for the formulation of new insights and theories. Indeed, it is artistic practice itself and with it the reception of a thus created work that I propose to engage with in this presentation. It is what I want to term an exploration of the landscape of admission and disavowal.

I start with the proposition that artistic practice can be understood as ‘dwelling’, and that to make art is to ‘make home’. Calling on certain historical and post-structural arguments about the inescapable condition of fragmentation and de-centeredness to pose a challenge to what may be termed a romantic wish for completeness and belonging, I opt for an approach that positions ‘dwelling’ as an activity that is neither bound to a specific topography, nor to a sense of belonging. Rather, I want to focus on some of the instances of making and viewing in particular that engender not a ‘home-coming/making’ but a way to lose oneself, to become unaccommodated. Central to this experience are the often-evoked binaries of remembering and forgetting, presence and absence, involvement and disengagement. In this presentation I will approach them as a necessary unity, remembering a long-held wisdom that reminds us that we know one thing by its opposite, know night only through day, isolation through inclusion/connection and depth through the shallow. Put this way, however, these categories still function as discrete entities, separated by, amongst other characteristics, a temporal or spatial linearity. This too is a construction I want to shift away from towards a position of simultaneity, in kinship with both Benjamin’s Gleichzeitigkeit (of past in present) and to what has been called traumatic memory (a remembering that is not located in a past but is experienced non-chronologically and non-territorially as of and in the present). What this shift also describes is a peculiar dissolution of boundaries.

One way to approach work, both as a practitioner and a viewer, is to seek, in the first instance, an understanding through experience rather than analysis. The setting for this, I will argue, presents itself best in work that creates a space of affect, in which the viewer is drawn into a direct experience. In a way then, what happens is a kind of dissolution of existing boundaries, may they be temporal, spatial or physical. A time/space environment is created that ‘affects’ us and in doing so literally displaces us, thus instigating a process of becoming unaccommodated, though not disassociated.

Admission and disavowal hold multi-layered references to various disciplines and discourses, which inform both my work and personal life. They are particularly resonant for me because of the ways in which they can describe psychological (internal) processes as well as more socio-politically (externally) determined conditions. Both terms speak to me about personal as much as civic responsibilities and the need to think oneself in relationship. Since I think of my work and the activity of viewing as engagements beyond the merely aesthetic/formal/material, the question of responsibility is central. Admission and disavowal then are linked to the development of consciousness and response-ability, which I claim in turn for both the making and viewing of work.

In keeping with the theme of duality, my presentation will oscillate between two positions. On the one hand, a narration of my own installation and video work will focus on the ways in which a material construction may express a psychology of admission and disavowal. On the other hand, reframing this narrative as an ethical space, constituted in order to rethink the notion of belonging, the function of artwork and the faculty of human agency, I will speculate about boundaries, the possibilities for, and implications of, embodied experiences and the activity of viewing work, one’s own and/or someone else’s, as a primary site for engagement, in relationship to one self and with others.

Biography

Lily Markiewicz grew up in post-war Germany and moved to England where she studied History of Art and Fine Art at Reading (1981-85) and Experimental Media at the Slade School in London (1985-87).

Over the past 10 years she has mainly concentrated on large-scale photo-based installations, which often include elements of video and sound. On occasion she has ventured into the world of performance and Artists books. Her recent solo exhibitions include Promise II, at Mount St.Vincent Gallery, Halifax, Canada (2002) and Places AHRB CentreCATH Inaugural Exhibition at the University Gallery Leeds, England (2001). Her single-screen videos have been shown extensively at festivals in Europe and Canada.

Her works are often designed with inherent spatial and sensory qualities that implicate the viewer in subtle ways. Through them Markiewicz negotiates a territory of uncertainty and investigates concepts of history and belonging and the dialectic of distance and proximity. She is particularly interested in questions of ethics pertaining to artistic practice and spectatorship.

She lives in London and lectures at the University of East London, Camberwell College of Art and Birkbeck College. She is also currently a Visiting Research Fellow at Leeds University.

Publications include: The Pool, Artists Book, Gefn (Paupers) Press, London 2000; THE PRICE OF WORDS, Artists Book, Bookworks, London 1992.

[Introduction][Programme][Exhibition]