The Multiple Identities of Space
Yuanyi Fu
When will you realise fading away? When do you become aware of leaving? Is it the passing of the clock or the space that you no longer set foot in? Back in September 2023, on an afternoon when the sun still shines in London, it was the first time I arrived and entered Goldsmiths University. The black and white tiled, red brick, arched academic building that everyone enters first - the Richard Hoggart Building, the brightly lit Rutherford Building and Library, everyone's favourite College Green, and the campus buildings and studios that are dotted around the campus buildings and studios. Another experience that stood out to me on the first day was when, after meeting with professors and fellow students from the Visual Culture Department, we walked through a narrow (one-person only) path to visit the exhibition in the St James Hatcham Building, a converted church exhibition space. However, all the students and faculty, including myself, who were travelling around the campus at that time did not realise the fact that the "loss" was coming our way, in a sudden, forced, and powerful way, as the Senior Management Team (SMT) issued a notice to the campus unions -Transformation Programme, on 28 February 2024.
The St James Hatcham Building, one of the infrastructures of the Goldsmiths campus, is often overlooked, but like the CCA exhibition space at Goldsmiths, it serves as an exhibition and teaching space within the college. The St James Hatcham Building differs from the CCA's exhibition space in one important respect: the building was formerly a Catholic church. Unlike the CCA's white box exhibition space, the St James Hatcham Building retains the traditional pillars and stained glass windows of the original church. These features also add special visual and spatial attributes to the exhibition space. This is something that should not be overlooked when curating an exhibition at St James Hatcham Building. As a result, exhibitions in the St James Hatcham Building often offer performative, physical exhibitions and events. The 'space' I am discussing here is not just a physical space enclosed by four walls; the concept of space has different divisions in different contexts, and can be material, temporal, spiritual and so on. David Harvey, a geographer, revisits the nature of space in his research work. He divides the concept of space into three ways of understanding it: firstly, Namely Absolute Space, which is "the thing in itself" and has an existence independent of matter. The second is Relative Space, which exists as a relationship between objects, a relationship that exists only because of the existence and interrelationship of the objects. The third is Relational Space, which is contained in objects, i.e., an object exists only insofar as it is itself contained in relation to other objects. [1] And when the infrastructure framework of Goldsmiths University changed, the relationship between spaces changed. Therefore I argue that the definition of space as infrastructure is fluid and subject to the possibility of change in nature.The change in nature of the St James Hatcham Building has a non-negligible reason to do with its historical development. However, Harvey suggests in Space as a Keyword that he cannot situate politics and collective memory in some absolute space, nor can he make sense of their circulation according to the rules of relative space and time, and in this context his only way of thinking about the definition of space is in terms of relationships. In Harvey's view Relative space contains Namely Absolute Space, and Relational Space in turn contains Relative Space, i.e. Relational Space is the highest mother set within space. And I think that space also exists when relationships dissipate, such as when time and history run through two or more relationships, i.e. time and history run through space. The St James Hatcham Building within the University of Goldsmiths, before it became the St James Hatcham Building for the campus infrastructure of the University of Goldsmiths, was the St James Hatcham Church, which was built in 1854, long before the University of Goldsmiths was founded, and also oversaw the nearby St James' Hatcham Church of England Primary School. In the 1870s, St James Hatcham Church was the scene of a bitter religious controversy centred on Arthur Tooth (1839-1931), who was appointed vicar in 1868, Tooth was on the Anglo-Catholic wing of the Church of England. The cause In 1874 Archbishop Archibald Tait of Canterbury introduced a bill "to put down ritualism" in the House of Lords. With the support of Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli and Queen Victoria the bill passed and was signed into law. The Public Worship Regulation Act made disobedience of a bishop a criminal offence. Father Tooth fell foul of the Public Worship Regulation Act and became the first clergyman to be imprisoned for his infringements. The 19th-century church building was acquired by Goldsmiths University in 2011 and has been used ever since as an exhibition space within the college, providing faculty and students with the flexibility to use it for teaching, exhibitions, performances, and workshops.
One thing that has to be mentioned about the discussion of infrastructure variability. In the Goldsmiths for Palestine (G4P) protests, including those against the Transformation Programme, it was shown that schools are also socio-political sites. In the occupation of infrastructure on campus, and in political rallies, it is the human body that struggles, as Judith Butler states in Notes toward a performative theory of assembly, "We struggle in, from, and against precarity. Thus, it is not from pervasive love for humanity or a pure desire for peace that we strive to live together. We live together because we have no choice, and though we sometimes rail against that unchosen condition, we remain obligated to struggle to affirm the ultimate value of that unchosen social world, an affirmation that is not quite a choice, a struggle that makes itself known and felt precisely when we exercise freedom in a way that is necessarily committed to the equal value of lives".[2] And Ta argues that when rally-goers gather in public spaces to fight against infrastructure cuts, sometimes the fight is for the platform itself. [3] I agree with Butler that in the context of assembly struggles, the infrastructure is the space of fight, which at this point transforms into a political space. The fight is wielded for higher social values, such as the fight for freedom, equality, and peace. The space is no longer a space but a platform for realising values.
The value of the St James Hatcham Building has been changing from a religious space - a platform for fight - to an art and cultural space on the Goldsmiths campus. Jameson, in his questions about culture and realism, discusses this through Arnold Hauser's The Social History of Art. He argues that if one adheres to the older anthropological and philosophical tradition that religion determines the spirit of a given society, then the failure of Ikhnaton's attempts to replace monotheism speaks volumes. Hauser suggests that religious determinations in turn require further social determinations, the impact of business and money on socio-cultural life and new types of social relations. Jameson builds on this foundation by suggesting the history of perception itself and the emergence of new kinds of perception, both body perception and social perception, i.e. new ways of seeing, new ways of behaving. [4] This argument therefore suggests that the St James Hatcham Building now has a cultural and artistic value, in addition to its original religious attributes and its multiple identities as an exhibition space within the University, and that they are interacting rather than contradicting each other.
St James Hatcham Building serves as an art space within the University and also has a social responsibility. The academic research and curatorial objects of university museums have always been oriented firstly to the groups of teachers and students, and the museums, as a kind of knowledge supplement, can not only display the works of teachers and students in the college, but also benefit the neighbourhood of the community as well as the public at large, which is the main difference between university museums and museums in the society, and then to the international level. In addition, the academic advantages of university museums are also one of the reasons why social museums outside the university cannot be compared with them. Universities are covered by various disciplines, and university museums are growing in such a cross-disciplinary context. The earliest public museums were born in universities. The Ashmolean Museum at Oxford University, founded in 1683, is the largest and richest university museum in the world, combining archaeology and art. The university's art space has become a very important public cultural institution, not only showcasing the university's cultural and academic achievements, but also documenting and collecting important works for the future. Therefore it is especially important as an archival record of the Academy Art Museum. Exhibitions and public education are both one of the manifestations of the results of academic research. Exhibitions visualise the content of academic research, while public education transmits the academic language to the public in an easy-to-understand form. As the field of academic research transforms, so does the focus of exhibitions and public research. The St James Hatcham Building, as an exhibition space with multiple identities, is constructed over two floors, with high building heights and a composite layout with accessibility features. The building has hosted a number of performative exhibitions and events. The most recent exhibition was 'Idle Hands are the Devils Plaything', an exhibition of pranks and mischief, which showcased the films, performances, paintings, sculptures, installations and sound works of 17 visual artists and their pranks. The St James Hatcham Building invariably provides the basis and collision between the content of the exhibition and the attributes of the space in a distant temporal dialogue.
Hopefully, it's here to stay
References
[1] Butler, Judith. Notes toward a performative theory of assembly. harvard university Press, 2015.
[2] Harvey, David. Space as a keyword. na, 2006.
[3] lbid
[4] Jameson, Fredric. "Culture and finance capital." Critical Inquiry 24, no. 1 (1997): 246-265.