Monday, February 6, 2017

Core Post 2: Week 5, Non-Space

As I delved into Margaret Morse's piece on the Ontology of Everyday Distraction, I was distracted from the piece as a whole by how she explains what the Spiral Getty represents. Morse, as well as Smithson represents the piece of work as a site sculpture that is then represented in a non-site, a gallery. But if non-space is  "the very haunt for creatures of habit" where practice and skill can be "performed semiautomatically in a distracted space" (Morse 196), I would have to disagree with using the Spiral Getty as an example of that. Firstly, I do not see a gallery as a place where people perform in a distracted space, and I think photographs and images of the spiral jetty are calls to action, especially when they are ephemeral pieces, which is often the type of art Smithson makes. Last summer I took a day trip to the Spiral Getty from Salt Lake City because I heard about it in my AP Art History class 5 years ago and finally had the opportunity to see it. It I had never heard about the piece, I would not be going there. However, since I was taught about the reasoning behind it's placement and how the art is every changing based on the level of water of the Salt Lake and the erosion of time, I felt compelled to visit. While the art in itself may have been meant to look critically about how human beings are falling into the trap of "projection to some otherplace by rejecting where one actually is" (Hobbs 15), in actuality of showing the underwhelming simulacra of the actual space, it demands those interested in the piece to pursue it in person. This is usually not the case with television, which seeks to create a representation so strong and captivating that viewing the experience/place is satisfying enough for the audience, as Bachelard explains with the descriptions of miniaturization of the screen:"miniaturization is an attempt to master and control the world, which one can then enter in one's imagination by making oneself very small" (Morse 211).

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