Surveying the Territory

“There must be no doubt about the dangerous essence of the everyday, nor about this uneasiness that seizes us each time that, by an unforeseeable leap, we stand back from it and facing it, we discover that precisely nothing faces us; ‘What?’ ‘Is this my everyday life?’ Not only must one not doubt it, but one must not dread it; rather one ought to seek to recapture the secret destructive capacity that is to play in it, the corrosive force of human anonymity, the infinite wearing away.” -Maurice Blanchot

Territory is a monument; an interjection of story and strangeness into the forgettable-ness of the too familiar. It is the myth of the dangerous wild set against the drudgery of the living room, the bedroom and the bath. It is a remembrance of harder times that haven’t been directly experienced but which oppose contemporary civilized and cultured life as hand me downs of a lifestyle forgotten, a whisper of a wild, adventurous and unfettered temperament full of conquest and desire to dominate the natural world.

The re-instilled historicism in the installaion is a marker of the reality by which a 21st century American could occupy one floor of a 19th century house separated from the elements by glass and brick and vinyl siding, with running water in several forms, toilet, sinks and shower and an electrical system to simulate the sun. Mimicking a historical narrative is one way to reinject content into the every day.Territory also places aestheticized objects alongside of the objects of the every day. These objects are the recognizable parts of the everyday that we see everyday, and forget everyday, the rote parts existence that are worth noting when the foundations are lost and the map has been misplaced.

The monster is danger, the fox is ecstatic desire, the wrecked schooner is the promise of another golden land that is wilder than muskets, the cabin is our utero-lust for comfort and our elemental need for shelter from deterministic nature. The campfire is our desire for community and food. With each vignette we re-invigorate and re-cast each room in our apartment, its shape, its architecture and its function and re-imagine their use as art and simultaneously as living space. Each interjection of “art” into the apartment’s environment places attention on the objects outside of that moniker, making them indistinguishable.

This is the ultimate use value of Territory, re imagining a living space thus re-animating the possibilities of ways of living in that space that have the seeds of personality and agency and purpose. The function and behavior within the room is changed by the historical narrative and by the actual physical presence of the objects yet ultimately the installation eventually fades from view into the ghostly realm of the everyday. Except for continual transformation and re-purposing of the most usual artifacts of lived existence every element will cease to be art.

-Gunnatowski