The video sculptures of Joan Brassil
'A Space is something that has been made room for.' This strange phrase from Heidegger has haunted me for some time. To make room for space seems tautological; surely one says: 'make room for something' or 'make space for something', not 'make room for something which is space'. What on earth could this eccentric phraseology mean?
The phrase appears in 'Building, Dwelling, Thinking' in a discussion of the creation of boundaries. The passage continues: space is 'something that is cleared and free, namely within a boundary'.[1] In a strange incantatory manner, Heidegger reiterates this same point later in the same paragraph: 'Space' he says 'is in essence that for which room has been made, that which is let into its bounds'.[2] Clearly, a very unusual sense of space is being conjured here; space is figured as what moves, fills or flows into a framework or limits, not, as is more usually the case, as the already existing container for our actions. Space, then, is the result of our actions (most particularly our building) and some corresponding force which comes into its own, if, and when, these actions are appropriate.
This puzzling account of space, which seems so utterly counter-intuitive, makes perfect sense when applied to the video sculptures of Joan Brassil. These works are well described as an armature or framework for the manufacture of space. In fact, they make room for what feels like an infinite viewing space. The expansive nature of viewing, and the space which makes this vision possible, are my first concerns in this article. The final section will examine how Joan Brassil's work illuminates some of the limitations of Heidegger' s account of... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline