Bad Space

Gregor Schneider’s domestic installation space Haus u r is space gone bad, space rendered alien. The processual installation, which defies easy categorization as an artwork, has since 1985 involved the obsessive deconstruction and reconstruction of the interiors of Schneider’s family home in Germany. Anchored by an interrogation of space as a form of mediated materiality, this article pursues the ways in which space can be languaged. By first arguing that conventional understandings of space reify a spatial anthropocentrism, it then explores the way in which Haus u r makes evident the potential for an autonomous spatial languaging beyond culturally imposed presuppositions relating to space. Through the symbolic disembodiment of its viewers and the repudiation of their perceptual agency, Schneider’s piece deposes the supremacy of the human as a perceiving and meaning-making subject, allowing for the conceptualization of other linguistic and spatial agencies outside of human paradigms of interpretation.

Dancing in the Darkroom

Russian émigré Alexey Brodovitch, best known for leading a radical shift in magazine design in the United States during his twenty-four-year tenure (1934–58) as art director of Harper’s Bazaar, also pursued innovative practices in other fields of art, design, and education. His ballet photography, made during rehearsals and performances of touring dance companies in New York City from 1935 to 1938, explored unusual methods of capturing dancers in motion. Brodovitch’s images would eventually come to be celebrated for their unconventional approach, but at the time, Brodovitch was not sure of his direction. Recent archival discoveries suggest that Brodovitch reframed this graphic “problem” into curriculum for his classes at the Pennsylvania Museum School of Industrial Art, inspiring students to delve into a number of experimental photographic techniques and pioneering the teaching of such practices in American classrooms.