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Steven Warwick

NEUTRAL

Robin Mackay: Figuring ‘Space’

I’m betting you can’t remember a time before ‘space’, although it’s a fairly recent abstraction—
not space as transcendental form of experience, but the space that is the condition for the
intertwined operations of the architecture–retail–real-estate–contemporary art complex. The light
and airy expanse of daytime TV property porn, with its clean architectural lines—as homes
become ‘property’, rooms become ‘spaces’, open receptacles for self-realization—and the layout
grid for retail outlets and corporate campuses, it is also that tranquil three-dimensional support
for arty action in all its hysterically multifarious forms—project space, research space, gallery
space, club space as armature for indeterminate creative potencies.

A metaphysical ersatz whose costly, energy-intensive processing and refinement feeds the
supply chain of the creative self, ‘space’ is the indifferent corridor through which whitewashed
scenes of violence communicate; it both satisfies a demand for the realisation of subjective
freedom and incites that same demand. For it is also disseminated as image, a dream-image
saturated with the hi-res allure of self-creation, the promise of fusing one’s gestures with the
space that enfolds them, in a serene streamlined integration.

This dream is the only place the cybernetic nomad really feels at home. All the better if there is
grit in the workings, the off-white residue of another violence clinging to the walls. Energising
spatters of local colour activate its latent tracts: There is nothing that Berlin really stands for,
except being cheap and cool, and drunk and druggie…it’s the potential to shape
something, says a tech pioneer of his proposed ‘startup campus’ in the city. Despite its ex nihilo
veneer, ‘space’ is always overtly parasitical upon prior conditions. (Unless maybe it was this
monster of blank inscription that created the prior conditions, in order to ensure its
emergence….)

NEUTRAL’s museum of contemporary spatiology involutes the artisanal violence that constructs
‘space’, tapping Berlin’s clotted semio-sump to distil and precipitate poor-but-sexy into a few
sparse crystals of depleted cultural energy that operate as basic orientation points: ribbons of
scat and squalor applied directly from the semiotic palette onto the white-overpainted surfaces of
a dilapidated urban infrastructure whose use-value flaked away to reveal a blank canvas onto
which were daubed non-scenes that became scenes that became photopathological simulacra
laminated onto their own re-re-re-representation.

These rooms are endgames where the imposition of containment, the pure hard fact of being in
a room, condenses a generalized claustrophobia: that of free space and absolute fluidity become
a fatiguing institution of subjectivation, a festive confinement for a New Hanse: that hard-living
superfood-guzzling grindr-swiping concept-hungry pitch-shifting multi-desking gentry for whom
every glancing encounter is a creative opportunity; the last human generation to be able to
derive some privileged enjoyment from its assimilation into a hysterical machinism. You know the
score. You probably are the score.

Remember how, along with the forlorn call for an authentic return to place as a counter to the
deracination of international styles and the serial homogenization of franchised units, the
contemporary laundering of space also provoked a turn to the specificity of site? Under
interrogation, works were forced to renounce their autonomy, to recuse anonymous space, and
to swallow the circulatory systems that produced them, so as to glue them to where they were,
as if this adhesion would enable a critical separation. But now the site is mobile: it’s you who are
glued to it, carrying it on your back like a snail’s airbnb, stowing it as hand luggage on Easyjet,
necking it as you wait in line at the club, putting it aside for later in the nth browser tab…. The
site has exploded, the blank mask of space has peeled off to reveal the machinic death’s head
beneath: an ever-present gigantic bit-switching global exchange; the walls have become selfconscious,
or at least possessed of some cryptic cybernetic intent; everything’s as superfluid as
a T1000; there’s no separation, no room.

You try to hold on to some vestige, to keep the lines clean; you alternate between reckless
affirmation and the guilty pleasures of cosy self-security. Create, possess, reflect, enjoy. But do
you really have anything to add? The open space you tried to make for yourself is closing in. At
this point, isn’t n+1 just n again? In which case, maybe the best response is—can’t be arsed.