University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses

The poetics of home

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The poetics of home

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Content The Poetics of Home
by
Rietje (Reed) van Brunschot
A Thesis Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC ROSKI SCHOOL OF ART AND DESIGN
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree
MASTER OF FINE ARTS
A ugust 2019
ii
ABSTRACT

Through the investigation and comparison of various artworks that utilize a similar method to
my own, I hope to understand my decision making in art in a more historical and theoretical
way. Concentrating on researching theoretical texts and artists that often utilize domestic or
quotidian objects in their art, or who consider space in relation to the viewer by manipulation
of scale, as well as artists who tactically re-materialize known objects into something else, I
hope to build a critical artistic genealogy.

What is the power of communication behind the quotidian object in art? What is the effect
when amplifying or reducing space in correlation to the viewer?

I will focus specifically (but not exclusively) on the use of the table, the chair, and the bed in art
that often define and decorate domestic space. Surveying texts by Susan Stewart, Gaston
Bachelard, Mieke Bal, Ana Chave, Edward Saïd, I aim to investigate the artworks and practice of
artists I feel a close kinship with, such as Mona Hatoum, Rachel Whiteread, and Doris Salcedo.

iii
DEDICATION

This thesis is dedicated to all my mentors. Andrew Campbell, for being not only an outstanding
example of what a good teacher should be, tough but fair, but a friend that can talk straight and
sit crooked. To Suzanne Lacy for reminding me that this cushy position I am in as a woman took
so much work and sacrifice from so many other women before me, but there is still so much
work to be done, thank you for being what I love the most, a powerful badass woman. To Keith
Mayerson, thank you for being the ever-encouraging supporter, and thoughtful advisor. You
help me believe in what I am doing, and best of all, make me excited about it. Lastly, thanks to
my parents Kees and Rosita van Brunschot, the artwork I make would not be possible without
the kind of upbringing you gave me, one that is staunchly focused around the home no matter
where in the world home was.

iv
TABLE OF CONTENTS

COVER_____________________________________________________________________i
ABSTRACT __________________________________________________________________ii
DEDICATION ________________________________________________________________iii
TABLE OF CONTENTS _________________________________________________________iv

INTRODUCTION: A Table, a Chair, and a Bed ______________________________________1
CHAPTER 1: THE ICON ________________________________________________________6

CHAPTER 2: POETICS OF OBJECTS ______________________________________________12

CHAPTER 3: THE BODY IN SPACE_______________________________________________16

CHAPTER 4: THE CHAIR, THE TABLE AND THE BED_________________________________ 23
The Chair
The Table
The Bed

CONCLUSION: _____________________________________________________________36

LIST OF FIGURES: __________________________________________________________ 40

WORKS CITED: ____________________________________________________________ 50

1
INTRODUCTION: A Table, a Chair, and a Bed.

At 5 years old, I moved from Peru to the United States. Being half-Peruvian and half-Dutch, I
spoke no English, only Spanish, but it did not take long for me to pick up English. In fact, I
learned the language well before my mother did, and was her interpreter in places like banks
and doctors’ offices. A tall order for an incredibly shy, newly immigrated young child. My father,
a Dutchman, moved our whole family to the United States because the airline company he
worked for relocated him. He worked there for a few more years before the company filed for
bankruptcy and he lost his pension after twenty-seven years of working with them.

We moved many more times after this, usually due to jobs my father would get. Each time
there would be new walls, but the same furniture in different arrangements. To help with the
finances, my mother started cleaning houses, and because finding a babysitter while she
worked was not an option, I would go with her to other homes while my mother cleaned, I
would play on grand pianos and jump on trampolines, things I dreamed of and knew we could
never have. I would go into the color coordinated rooms of little rich girls, where beds had
skirts that perfectly matched hanging curtains, and themed collections of dolls and toys laid out
in excess. And for an afternoon, they were mine, even though I had to be incredibly careful to
remember to return them to the exact same position that I got them from to show no trace
that I was there.

2
Although my parents forbade me, at eighteen I wanted to study art in New York City. Their
reasons were because they couldn’t afford it and but because they said there would be no
money in art. Our compromise was that I study at a university in the Netherlands where I could
get subsidy from the government. The plan was that I would not pursue art, but fashion, a more
business-driven path with an increased chance for jobs. At age nineteen, I moved to
Amsterdam to go to school. I thought that my half Dutch heritage would make things easy for
me there, only to find that integrating into yet another new country, culture, and language
would be extremely challenging.

Amsterdam is a tiny 700-year-old city; one built for thousands of people, not millions. Housing
is in constant demand. Finding a home there was be one of my biggest battles. I moved over
nine times in my decade there—a common experience for those without financial means. In
short, I had no stable sense of home. Home was in the objects that I accumulated over the
years and especially all those nick knacks and books that I meticulously hunted in markets all
over Europe and in between.

Befriending squatters in my twenties in Amsterdam was a life changing experience.
Squatters, being tied to the leftist/ anarchist politics and radical youth subculture, were a
community comprised of political activists, immigrants, students, punks and artists who would
take over empty buildings or public spaces and use them for housing and cultural hubs. Some
would host political gatherings, musical concerts, art exhibitions, educational workshops, or
parties in their squats. And often they would find pretty magical abandoned places, like old

3
schools, brothels, or churches. Over many decades Amsterdam’s squatters have saved
hundreds of historical buildings from demolition.

The main goal of a squatter, especially in Amsterdam, is to occupy an empty space. The rule is:
if a place is abandoned for more than a year, one can legally occupy it. In the essay, “Myth and
Reality in the Amsterdam Squatters Movement. 1975-2012,” former Amsterdam squatter and
anthropologist Nazima Kadir writes how to squat a space in Amsterdam. First a squatter must
thoroughly research to see that a space is indeed uninhabited. Kadir specifies that once the
squatter has determined that the house is empty, then the squatter organizes a squatting
“action” with a large group of people. Further, “S/he should assemble a ‘squatting kit,’
consisting of a table, a chair, and a bed to establish occupancy.”
1
She adds that you should also
have some sort of barricading material, and an attorney. Essentially, once the police arrive, and
you have set up the table, chair and bed, you meet the legal requirements for squatter’s rights
of occupancy.

Even though this occupancy is rarely permanent, given that eventually squatters are usually
evicted and have to find a new space, what always stuck with me was that the established rule
of “the table, the chair and the bed” as the agreed upon signifiers for occupancy—that these
three objects could provide a universal rule for habitation (albeit temporary) remains an
important aspect of this law. When I parallel it to my own transient life, through planned

1
Nazima Kadir, “Myth and Reality in the Amsterdam Squatters Movement. 1975-2012,”in The City is Ours, ed. Bas
van der Steen (Oakland: PM Press 2014), 41.

4
movement and / or displacement, it is always these simple household objects that I carried with
me that create my idea of my “home.”

After studying fashion and working, I was unhappy because I was not doing what I really
wanted to do--art. I applied and got into the Gerrit Rietveld Academie of Art in Amsterdam, an
internationally acclaimed art academy founded in 1924 with similar foundations as the Bauhaus
School. While creating artworks during my studies, I came to understand that all these
influences of my youth--my constant migration and search for space, my multiculturalism, and
the need to communicate in a manner which many cultures could understand, would create the
basis of my artistic practice.

I am interested in the language of accessibility that comes from displacement. Meaning when
we are no longer in our comfort zones, the place of known language and culture we have to
resort to a simplified means of communication. When traveling and approaching new cultures
and languages, I find it most interesting to note what we have in common instead of all the
things that make us different. At times when language is a barrier, we are reliant on simple
facial expressions or awkward body movements to communicate. We connect in similar lived
experiences such as a first kiss, or a loss of a parent, or shared associations with objects or
spaces we encounter--like the soft sheets of a bed, a favorite cup, the chair that breaks under
you, or like the hilarity of an unexpected fart at the dinner table.

5
In my sculptures, and installations, I often use the language of accessible domestic quotidian
objects, rematerializing them, and sometimes resizing them into miniature or gigantic forms.
Through these actions, I hope to evoke memories or associations that I believe many can
connect to in some way. Still I like to leave the artworks open ended enough that they might
allow viewers to fill in with their own narratives.

Although I have my own concepts and ideas behind the works that I have made, I did not truly
understand the theoretical meanings behind these shifts in material and scale until I started to
investigate how other artists like Mona Hatoum or Rachel Whiteread used similar tactics.
Space, size, material and its relationship to human and its phenomenological powers are
fascinating to me and suffuse my practice.

In this thesis, I will investigate the use of the domestic icon, the way we receive it, the visual
strategies of abstraction in art, and compare my work with a select handful of artists. Through
investigation I will provide a better foundation for my own practice, in addition to be able to
gain a better vocabulary both in written and visual communication.

6
CHAPTER 1: THE ICON

Stylistically and conceptually, there are some recurring themes, tools, methods, and mediums I
use throughout my own artistic practice, namely, the repetitive use of quotidian objects,
sometimes rematerialized, sometimes animated, and often resized in scale in relation to the
viewer’s body. Although, I always place thought into what I create, I have never thoroughly
explored the phenomenological and psychological meanings behind my own work and process.
Therefore, through the dissection of various theoretical texts and fellow artists’ practices, I will
attempt to explore and extrapolate what these reoccurring themes mean in hopes to truly
understand the tools I use in my art making, as well as to allow room to question these various
interpretations of these themes.

In my introduction, I mentioned that the reason why I am so attracted to using simple
iconography, despite speaking four languages, is because I am most interested in the unsaid, in
body-language, and in the connective power of the language of simple inanimate objects. I
mention it may have to do with my own upbringing, of being a displaced-multi cultural and
coming from a working-class background. I have a strong need to want to make things
accessible in order to communicate to many, not just some. By using a simplified language in
my art, I feel that many viewers can find a space to enter and relate to the work. My task is to
avoid making works too literal, but instead create a perceptual shift that complicates their
common meanings adding dimension, traction, or pause.

7
Through my thesis I would like to look at our attraction to basic symbols or “icons” of
domesticity, our relationships to these known objects, as well as our associations with them in
space and scaled. My notion of the icon comes from the book Understanding Comics by comic
artist and theorist, Scott McCloud. In it, McCloud reminds us of some of the earliest examples
of human’s pictorial storytelling such as the Pre-Columbian picture manuscripts, or the French
Bayeux Tapestry
2
. He mentions that although Egyptian hieroglyphics seem to be telling a story
with images, the images on the walls are often only “representing sounds- not the subjects
themselves.”
3

McCloud explains that “Pictures are received information. We need no formal education to get
‘the message’, the message is instantaneous."
4
He proposes this is in opposition to “writing,
which is perceived information that takes time and specialized knowledge to decode the
abstract symbols of language.”
5
However, “When pictures are more abstracted from reality
they require greater levels of perception, more like words.”
6

The icon is the noun of the pictorial world according to McCloud, and it means “any image used
to represent a person, place, thing or idea.”
7
He goes on to divide the icon into three types of
categories: “There are the icons we call pictures: Images actually designed to resemble their

2
Scot McCloud, Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art (New York: Harper Perennial, 1995), 14.
3
Ibid., 14.
4
Ibid., 49.
5
Ibid., 49.
6
Ibid., 49.
7
Ibid., 27.

8
subjects.”
8
One can think of examples like a cow, a flag, a happy face. Then there are symbols, a
more loaded form of an icon where “images we use represent concepts, ideas, and
philosophies.”
9
Examples of this would be the yin yang, the swastika, the poison sign, or the
peace sign. Lastly “there are icons of language, science and communication.”
10
By this McCloud
means the alphabet, numerical symbols, arrow signs. They can be considered more practical
icons, even as they are abstract and bear no resemblance to anything.

Mc Cloud says “The non-pictorial icon’s meaning is fixed and absolute. Their appearance
doesn’t affect their meaning because they represent invisible ideas.”
11
Like the using the letter
“M” written in various typographies and scripts, no matter how it is drawn, it means the
phoneme “EM.” In picture icons, however “the meaning is fluid and variable according to
appearance. They differ from “real-life” appearance to varying degrees of abstraction.”
12
So for
example, imagine a very realistic drawing of a face versus a simple face comprised of a circle,
two dots and a line. This is when we McCloud’s theory of “non-visual self-awareness” arises. He
says, “The fact that your mind is able of taking a circle, two dots and a line and turning them
into a face is nothing short of incredible! We humans are self-centered race. We see ourselves
in everything. We assign identities and emotions where none exist. And we make the world
over in our image.
13

8
Ibid.
9
Ibid.
10
Ibid.
11
Ibid., 28.
12
Ibid., 28.
13
Ibid., 32.

9
In his book, McCloud searches for the secret of the icon and wondering, why we are we so
involved or attracted to it? Why would anyone respond to a simplified image much or more
than a realistic image? A cartoon is essentially amplification through simplification thus, “When
we abstract an image we are not so much eliminating the details as are focusing on specific
details. By stripping down an image to its essential “meaning” an artist can amplify that
meaning in a way that realistic art can’t.”
14
Additionally, the more abstract the representation
the more leeway it gives the viewer to project their own meanings. McCloud explains:

When two people interact they usually look directly at one another, seeing their
partners features in vivid detail, each one also sustains a constant awareness of
his or her own face but the mind picture (of your own face) is not nearly so vivid,
just a sketchy arrangement… a sense of shape, a sense of general placement. Thus,
when we look at a realistic drawing – you see it as a face of another. But when
you enter the world of the (simplified) cartoon, you see yourself. We don’t just
observe the cartoons we become them.
15

When McCloud drew himself in a realistic way in his book under a caption, he deduced that you
would be focused more on the messenger than the message, as opposed to having a simple
figure under a caption. A simple figure, functions as a kind of blank slate. You would not wonder
about the politics of the figure or what they had for lunch, such a picture would represent the
concept of a “figure” or “person”, just a concept, therefore more acceptable. You project them.

14
Ibid., 30.
15
Ibid., 32.

10
Canadian philosopher Marshall McLuhan, observed a similar form of non-visual awareness
when people interact with inanimate objects.
16
For example, when driving, the vehicle becomes
an extension of our body and it absorbs our sense of identity. We therefore become the car. If
one car hits another car, the driver most likely takes it personal and says “Hey! He hit me!”
Another example of when our identities and awareness are invested in an inanimate object is
our clothes, they can trigger numerous transformations in the way that others see us and how
we see ourselves. McCloud adds, “Our ability to extend our identities into inanimate objects
can cause pieces of wood to become legs (like crutches), metal to become hands (like a fork), or
plastic to become ears (like a phone).
17
In most cases, our constant awareness of self, flows
outward to include the object that we identify with. Furthermore, “objects of the physical world
can also cross over and possess identities of their own.”
18

According to McCloud, the theory of “non-visual self-awareness,” recognition of the self does
extend out towards objects as well. Just like finding ourselves in simplified drawing, we also find
ways of imbedding an idea of ourselves within inanimate objects, with the consideration that
the object is a simplified version of itself. In her book On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature,
the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection, Susan Stewart argues that objects become extensions
of the self. She later adds that we like to anthropomorphize and gender objects as well, writing,
“we continually project the body into the world in order that its image might return to us…”
19

16
Ibid., 38
17
Ibid.
18
Ibid.
19
Susan Stewart, On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection (Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984), 133.

11
What fascinates me then, is our psychological attraction to empathize or to become these
simplified figures that we see. I am interested as an artist in the viewer’s ability to associate
themselves with simple iconographic inanimate objects.

Earlier this year I created a large scale kinetic sculptural artwork called Little Houses (fig. 1),
comprised of over thirty miniaturized suburban house models moving randomly in a room.
These houses would all move powered by a hidden robotic element underneath and once they
hit something like a wall, or some roads I created on the floor, or each other, they would
change direction. This animation given to these normally inanimate objects, plus the fact that
they were simple architectural house models devoid of any indicative coloration, was enough to
allow numerous viewers to interpret the houses as being “alive” or having a “personality.”
Some said, “Oh, look they are kissing,” others said “Oh, these are fighting,” even though in both
instances, the movements of the small houses were the same, a cluster of houses were just
mechanically bumping into each other. So, whether cognizant or not, interestingly, these
physical objects obviously lacking consciousness evoked a kind of narrative or empathy from
the viewers. For the viewer, they became anthropomorphized.

12
CHAPTER 2: POETICS OF OBJECTS
The evening lamp in the family table is the center of the world, in fact the lamp lighted table is the world in itself.
G.Bachelard

I’d like to know what types of inanimate iconographic objects do we seem to have an innate
connection to, and why? What do they represent? In Gaston Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space,
he writes, “All great, simple images reveal a psychic state. The house, even more than the
landscape, is a “psychic state”, and even when reproduced as it appears from the outside, it
bespeaks intimacy.
20
In his essays, he reveals several interpretations of meanings towards our
connections with many inanimate objects within a home. But he starts with “the entity that is
most firmly fixed on our memories: the childhood home.”
21

I have always moved around, so for me the idea of the home is even more important as it has
been something I have always longed for, embodying a sense of stability. It is a funny
coincidence then, when reflecting on my artwork Little Houses, the moving houses representing
this instability I grew up with. However, despite this aspect of locomotion in my own
upbringing, my understanding of home is much like what Bachelard describes, “For our house is
our corner of the world. As it has been said, it is our first universe, a real cosmos in every sense
of the word.”
22
Bachelard describes, the house to represent “the topography of our intimate
being,”
23
meaning many of the signifiers in a house can be emblematic ourselves.

20
Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space (New York: Orion Press, 1964), 72.
21
Ibid., 30.
22
Ibid., 4.
23
Ibid., xxxii.

13
Bachelard adds, “I must show that a house is one of the greatest powers of integration for the
thoughts, memories and dreams of mankind.”
24
Through Bachelard’s passionate interpretations
of the home, we can see how loaded the home and all of its contents can be and represent.

The idea of focusing on the home or the domestic in art was something that came natural to
me, because I felt, no matter what type of upbringing many people individually had, be it good
or bad, that we can all in some way relate to the idea of “home.” We all grew from something
small to large, and often in a space that had a chair, a table and a bed. For me this is a
wonderfully-charged yet relatable territory for art making. By utilizing the iconography of
domestic items and re-contextualizing them or bringing them from private to public arenas,
new narratives can be created.

When we think back to the iconic picture, as I have discussed in the last chapter, and how
through varying degrees of abstraction we can change their meanings, it reminds us also of
metaphors, and how icons can just as well represent things other than what they are. When
objects function in this way, they give credit to an idea to symbolize some other idea, like
expressed by writer and semiotician, Umberto Eco, how money for example stands for
something else. Eco once said ''Nothing expresses the final truth but everything is a symbol for
something else and for something else and for something else.''
25

24
Ibid., 6.
25
Marshall Blonsky, “A Literary High-Wire Act,” New York Times Magazine, Dec 10, 1989, 6006042.
https://www.nytimes.com/1989/12/10/magazine/a-literary-high-wire-act.html

14
Bachelard describes various interpretations of objects depicted in the arts, writing and poetry,
associating a lamp in a window with a house’s “eye,” locks and keys representing sexuality, and
stairs signifying ascension. He says that the semi open door insinuates “an entire cosmos is half-
open,” while a locked door or chest represents secrets.
26
But a door can also, quite dramatically
represent the “temptation to open up the ultimate depths of being, the desire to conquer all
reticent beings.”
27
Bachelard, even genders basic shapes such as “a curve being warm feminine
and an angle is cold masculine.”
28

Despite all that Bachelard tells us these objects can represent, I can’t help but think these
examples are ultimately subjective to his own, or only one point of view. Susan Stewart writes
“Point of view is particularly a narrative gesture…it offers two possibilities: partial and
complete.”
29
The interpretation with a common symbiosis is always colored by the subjective,
my art is no different. Although my associations with home for example, can be an idea of a
“warm comforting space,” it may not be the same sentiment for everyone. There are always
exceptions to keep in mind when using visual communication.

Another way to think through this problem of meaning making of subjectivity is via semiotics. In
the book “On Meaning-Making: Essays in Semiotics” written by Dutch cultural theorist Mieke
Bal, she discusses signs and the gaps we fill when “we can say that a sign is not a thing but a

26
Bachelard, Gaston. The Poetics of Space, 72.
27
Ibid., 222.
28
Ibid., 171.
29
Stewart, On Longing, 3.

15
function, an event.”
30
She further discusses that “The interpretation of signs requires the
activation of various rules of correlation between signs and meanings.”
31
Allowing us to “fill the
gaps. Interpretation is a subject bound activity.”
32

When we think about it in relation to art, things are defined equally by what they are not as
what they are. This makes us consider the idea of a two-way conversation, and although in art
objects presented are seemingly one-sided, it always requires the viewer to complete the work.
Whether an artwork trigger a memory, or suggests the creation of new narrative, or demands
that the viewer embody or empathize with what is shown, it can be said, it is ultimately up to
the receiver to complete the work in their own unique interpretation.

In summary, the use of common iconography such as the things found in a home, can become
tools for new meanings and metaphors that can potentially speak to many. We as viewers
naturally fill the gaps with our own interpretations. But these objects tend to push for, or
describe certain common associated sentiments as discussed by Bachelard. And, as I previously
discussed, we can find ways of association or even embodying to these objects if they are
simply or generically interpreted. This goes back to the phenomenon of non-visual self-
awareness. But what happens when these objects are abstracted?

30
Mieke Bal, “Semiotics for Beginners,” in On Meaning-making: Essays in Semiotics (Sonoma, CA: Polebridge Press,
1994), 9.
31
Ibid., 17.
32
Ibid., 5.

16
CHAPTER 3: THE BODY IN SPACE
In the essay “All that is solid… An Introduction to the work of Mona Hatoum” curator Michelle
White writes about Mona Hatoum’s artistic practice, as one that subverts personal space as a
means of creating awareness of the world’s instabilities.
33
In Mona Hatoum’s practice she takes
familiar objects as a starting point. Then alters their scale or plays with discordant materials in
order to create works of great menace. What initially seems familiar and stable to the viewer,
becomes threatening, altering perceptions and overturning expectations.

There is a wonderful duality that exists when you take something very darling, such as nostalgic
elements of the home and reconfigure them slightly. The new object perverse our memories.
This duality creates a shift in thinking by engaging something familiar and then poking you with
its unrecognized abnormality thereby shifting your associations with it.

I made an artwork like this during my M.F.A study reflecting my time of being both pregnant
and bedridden during summertime, Fan (fig. 2) . It was a kinetic sculptural piece, a remake of a
slice of a common white ceiling hung sideways to look like a painting. It included a ceiling fan
with light, and a white wall covered with the small popcorn acoustic texture often found in
many homes or apartments. What made this scene become menacing, was its simple shift from
being at a safe distance horizontally above our heads to now being hung vertically on the wall
head on.

33
Michelle White “All that is solid… An Introduction to the Work of Mona Hatoum,” in Mona Hatoum and Michelle
White, Mona Hatoum: Terra Infirma (Houston: The Menil Collection, 2017), 13.

17
This shift of positioning the fan in direct proximity to the body created a new danger in our
relationship to the moving propeller blades. Yet, at the same time allowed for someone
standing, to think back to those comforting moments of meditation of lying in bed staring at the
hypnotic revolving movement of the ceiling fan. It is these dualities that interest me, the
uncanny shift of something comforting and well known, to something newly uncomfortable and
still linger between the two ideas.

According to Susan Stewart you cannot compare anything without relating it to the body.
Stewart explains:
The body is our mode of perceiving scale and, as the body of another, becomes
our antithetical mode of stating conventions of symmetry and balance on the one
hand, and the grotesque and disproportionate on the other hand. We can see the
body as taking the place of the origin for exaggeration and, more significantly, as
taking the place of origin for our understanding of metonymy (the incorporated
bodies of the self and lover) and metaphor (the body of the other).
34

Curiously, Stewart says “It is clear that in order for the body to exist as a standard of
measurement, it must itself be exaggerated into abstraction of an ideal.”
35
The point is that
there is nothing “natural” about the way the body is represented or comes to be metonymic,
either. This leads back to McCloud’s notion of iconicity, that we are not able to truly see

34
Susan Stewart, On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection, xi.
35
Ibid, 133.

18
ourselves as clearly and fully as others see us, but only have an idea of our shapes and
proportions. In other words, this vague idea of ourselves is our basis for measurement. We are
fascinated with comparing ourselves to the world.

Mona Hatoum mentions a similar idea, that for her the body is the axis of our perceptions--so
how can we afford not to make this our starting point? This can be seen in many of her works,
specifically in the 1999 artwork, La Grande Broyeuse (The Large Grinder), a food grinder
rescaled to seventeen times its height. Hatoum mentions that she made it large enough to fit
the idea of a body in the fetal position in the grinder. This is the menace that can be created
with simple scale shifts of the familiar combined with our natural ways of perceiving by using
our own bodies.

This shift is reminiscent of Freud’s theory on the uncanny. The uncanny, (or unheimlich in
German, derived from heimlich, or “home like”). An important concept highlighting the
sensation of discomfort and stress that can be induced when there is a disruption of everyday
experience.
36
It occurs when things that are deeply familiar suddenly become unfamiliar. This
often happens in art when common known objects or signifiers are manipulated to portray
other ideas that the artist may wish to communicate. Mona Hatoum’s shifting of scale, or my
own artwork in repositioning of the common ceiling fan can be examples of using the sensation
of the uncanny through our way of interpreting objects to our bodies.

36
Michelle White “All that is solid… An Introduction to the Work of Mona Hatoum,” in Mona Hatoum and Michelle
White, Mona Hatoum: Terra Infirma (Houston: The Menil Collection, 2017), 21.

19
Stewart gives a thorough assessment on the miniature and the gigantic in her book On Longing.
It was very important for me to cover this because of my own use of scale shifts in my artwork.
Throughout her text, Stewart gives many comparisons of the miniature and the gigantic,
specifically stating that “the miniature represents closure, interiority, the domestic, and the
overly cultural, the gigantic represents infinity, exteriority, the public, and the overly natural.”
37

This duality rhymes with generalized and radicalized dualities women as belonging to the
domestic versus men belonging to the public sphere.

The miniature in her book is considered a metaphor for interior space and time of the
“bourgeois subject” (think well-crafted dollhouses). On the other hand, the gigantic is
considered “a metaphor for the abstract authority of the state and the collective, public, life,”
(here think of gigantic public political sculptures).
38

Funny enough, I have instinctually used these ideas of the miniature and gigantic often,
unknowing of these prescribed metaphors that Stewart points out. When I created my Thank
You Bag Series in 2013 (fig. 3), a giant replica collection of generic thank you bags commonly
found in every city of America. I hand sewed and hand drew something that was mechanically
reproduced and discarded daily, only to amplify it and its message. These bags are given freely
for take-out or groceries have become a staple of the American society and their messages, like

37
Stewart, On Longing, 60.
38
Ibid., xi.

20
the repetitive “Thank You” or “Thank You for shopping here!” could be seen as a positive
message or inversely negative capitalistic encouragement to buy more.
The Thank You Bags, series were indeed a metaphor as Stewart points out of the “abstract
authority of the state and the collective, public, life
39
.”

Stewart goes on to define some of the limitations of these exaggerations in scale: “The
miniature allows us only visual access to surface and texture; it does not allow movement
through space. Inversely, gigantic envelopes us, but is inaccessible to lived experience. Both
modes of exaggeration tend toward abstraction in proportion to the degree of exaggeration
they allow.”
40
This makes us realize that with something like a dollhouse there is room for play
and narration although, it is only outside-looking-in, we cannot really enter it. And conversely
with the gigantic, say a monument, the object is so large that we can only take it in fragments
at time and we equally cannot grasp it whole, instead it can grasp us. Stewart adds,
“Interestingly, there may be an actual phenomenological correlation between the experience of
scale and the experience of duration.” For example, “Whereas speech unfolds time, the
miniature unfolds in space.”
41

“Amid such transformations of scale, the exaggeration of the miniature must continually assert
a principle of balance and equivalence, or the narrative will become grotesque,”
42
says Stewart.

39
Ibid., xi.
40
Ibid., 102.
41
Ibid., 66.
42
Ibid., 46.

21
This relates to proportion, so if you were to imagine a cute puppy where everything is miniature
except one gigantic arm, because of its disproportion it becomes “grotesque.” The same also
applies to the gigantic, as long as things are in proportion however scaled, they will remain
within the realm of the acceptable. In relation to our bodies, the miniature has a way to make
the body gigantic, and the gigantic transforms the body into miniature, or as Stewart puts it,
“especially pointing to the body’s “toylike” of insignificant aspects.”
43

Stewart states that, “the miniature, linked to nostalgic version of childhood and history,
presents a diminutive, and thereby manipulatable, version of experience, a version which is
domesticated and protected from contamination.”
44
So, there is an element of idealized control
which exists in miniatures versus the opposite to a kind of loss of control with the giant.

Stewart states that our most fundamental relationship to the gigantic is articulated in our
relationship with landscape, and since nature surrounds us, we are in essence enveloped by the
gigantic. We find miniature at the origin of private, individual history, but we find the gigantic at
the origin of the public and natural history. That is why there are the “foot-hills or “the mouth
of the river”, “the heartlands”, or “elbow of the stream” and so on, because we relate nature to
the body.
45
The idea of the gigantic’s association with nature however shifts with the onset of
the industrial revolution and mass production.

43
Ibid., 77.
44
Ibid., 69.
45
Ibid., 77.

22
By existing in the abstract space of mass production, and its primary qualities of signification
and novelty, its obsession with the mechanical possibilities of exaggeration, and its
anticlassicism, Pop Art is a modern expression that uses qualities of gigantification. It is a
spectacle with an articulation of quantity over quality, of “façade” over “content”, and
materiality and movement over mediation and transcendence.
Pop Art celebrates the proliferation of the new. Public sculptures--like other forms of
architecture from above, such as the billboard or the neon sign, and the Oldenburg’s Batcolumn
(1977) and Clothespin (1976) --have become topographical mascots for their cities, Chicago and
Phildelphia, respectively. The sculptures, both in content and scale function to both
memorialize and call into question our relation to the system of commodities.

23
CHAPTER 4: THE CHAIR, THE TABLE AND THE BED.

In this chapter I would like to review some artworks made by artists who commonly use some
of the artistic strategies relating to scale and iconicity. Specifically, contemporary artists who
use the domestic subject matter as material aesthetical elements in their work. For the sake of
the theme of the domestic (also, in honor of the squatters of Amsterdam), I decided only to
focus on artworks that examine the chair, the table, and the bed, so as to compare them with
my own practice. The artists I chose to highlight because of their similarities to my own work
are Doris Salcedo, Rachel Whiteread, and Mona Hatoum.

THE CHAIR

Although she utilizes various everyday objects in her artwork, we cannot think about Colombian
artist Doris Salcedo’s art and not think about a chair, or many chairs for that matter. In an
untitled Installation completed for the 8
th
annual Istanbul Biennale (fig.4), Salcedo stacked
1,550 wooden chairs between two buildings, occupying a space of a building that was
previously demolished, and creating a wall of chairs in its place.

Curator Mary Schneider Enriquez explains Salcedo’s artistic practice in the book, Doris Salcedo:
The Materiality of Mourning:

24
While Salcedo’s incorporation of everyday objects invites comparison to
Duchamp’s theory of the readymade, her approach differs from the Duchampian
idea of turning anonymous, every day, manufactured objects into art,
incongruously installed on pedestals in gallery spaces. Salcedo instead selects
common domestic objects that are particularly worn and personal; they bear
traces of those harmed by political violence. She fills, scrapes and melds them,
interesting fragments of buttons and bones in order to create specific, hand-
wrought works- the antitheses of the banal, mass produced readymade that
Duchamp preferred.
46

Schneider Enriquez also breaks down a set of six visual strategies that Salcedo uses: space, the
uncanny, materiality of surface, times as material, correspondence to the scale of the body, and
disjunction or disorientation. Each of these is used to greater or lesser degrees in Salcedo’s
work.
47
The reason I highlight Schneider Enriquez’ interpretation of Doris Salcedo’s work, is to
reveal the core similarities in strategies I found to have to my own practice, while coincidently
reiterating many themes which we have covered. However, our use of chairs varies, and yet still
hold some of the same principles.

46
Mary Schneider Enriquez, Doris Salcedo, and Narayan Khandekar, Doris Salcedo: The Materiality of Mourning
(Cambridge, Mass: Harvard Art Museums, 2016), 5.
47
Ibid., 6.

25
Doris Salcedo’s work with the chairs in Istanbul is said to reference “the ethnic conflict that
marks Turkey’s history during and after World War I, the massacre of hundreds of thousands of
Armenian’s and Greeks, and the ensuing tensions between these groups with the Turks.”
48

In the site chosen, Salcedo highlights this negative and forgotten space with a mass of used
chairs to form a complicated accumulation, by the way they are stacked in all different
directions they are no longer useful, and perhaps from sheer scale they imitate a violence or
danger reminiscent to the leftover debris after a war. On the street side of the wall, however,
the chairs are so carefully placed they seem to form a flat wall, that creates, what Mieke Bal
calls a theatrical “fourth wall.” Bal says the fourth wall “guarantees the spectator’s comfort and
safety from the diegetic events on stage,” and that it “presents itself as fiction, remind us of its
own impossibility … the sheer number of chairs makes any illusion that there is a wall-imaginary
as in theater.”
49
In this work, Salcedo plays with this fine line of comfort in spectacle, and
discomfort from the gigantic scale in relation to the body.

Bal says, “These chairs are just what they are: pieces of ordinary household furniture- the
material, or medium that Salcedo has used so frequently, always in conjunction with a sense of
memory, trace or real, human use.”
50
Further, “These chairs are not exactly traces. But they do
bear witness; they propose evidence of something, a violence that happened in the past. They
do this by embodying the statement of absence.”
51

48
Ibid., 83.
49
Mieke Bal, Of What One Cannot Speak: Doris Salcedo’s Political Art (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010),
218.
50
Ibid., 200.
51
Ibid., 200.

26

In my own practice, I have made several artworks utilizing chairs. I would like to compare
Salcedo’s use of chair with the very first two artworks I made using a chair in theme.
In 2009 on my bachelor’s international exchange to the School of Visual Arts in New York, I built
a replica of a La-Z-Boy Recliner Chair (fig. 5) made completely out of hollow white paper and
glue. Even though the chair I built was stark white and smooth, from a distance it looked
deceivingly real. I made it a personal challenge to create the soft plush curves out of hard flat
paper plus carefully add every small detail. I placed the chair in my studio questioning our uses
of filling empty spaces, about the idea of it representing a lazy person, the ways the softness of
this object was so inviting, but the hollowness of the chair was also something visceral,
uncomfortable and felt. This chair had an element of delicacy, and, if one sat on it, of danger.

On the day of our open studios somebody came in and without thinking twice, sat on “The Lay-
z-boy” sculpture (fig. 6), throwing themselves on it. They were so confident that this chair was
real and it would catch their fall, but it didn’t; They fell backwards, legs in the air, and onto the
floor. They ruined my artwork and yet I realized it was a happy accident. A beautiful impression
of the weight of a human was left on this chair. A human stain.

This idea of a human stain opened up a second version of this work in Amsterdam in 2010.
Where I deliberately made five paper chairs, based on a very generic Dutch wooden kitchen
chair (fig. 7). This time only four were hollow and one contained a real chair inside of the paper.
I had instructed one person sit on the real chair and others to follow sitting on the other four

27
paper chairs, only to have people deliberately collapse onto the floor. The work then became
about the leftover remains of this crumpled idea of the chair on the ground, The Human Stain
(fig. 8).

In both my work and Salcedo’s work, although vastly different as a whole, the chairs represent
a kind of extension of the human body--something to support and supplement it. And by their
various manipulations, they create placeholders for the body that are no longer there. In the
The Human Stain the participants, by flattening the chairs, somehow also miniaturized them,
making one think back to Susan Stewart and her ideas of control we have over the miniaturized
object. We have a control over this chair made miniature, but at the same time- it has control
over us in its collapse. Similar to both Salcedo’s work and in my chair sculptures, the chairs are
rendered useless, a frustrating contrast to what they usually provide--rest and repose.

The “failed” project of making a sculptural chair revealed all the possibilities and potentialities
of the chair. As the absence of a body allows for narratives to be created, a viewer is left to fill
those gaps. The chair is then a proposal. Depending on what it looks like, and how it’s placed,
it’s already charged. It is not, in other words, just a chair but rather a proxy for thinking about
the body, social need and care. And those possibilities multiplied even more so when
manipulated, rematerialized or resized.

28
THE TABLE:

The British artist, Rachel Whiteread has been casts from everyday objects like furniture
sculptures since the 1980s. In the essay “Material Culture,” curator Ann Gallagher describes
Rachel Whiteread’s practice as “that of fusing everyday vernacular forms with the personal as
well as the universally human experience and memories. The artists’ exploration of the
potential of furniture and other domestic objects… tables, chairs, sinks, and bathtubs- all
recognizable in everyday human existence.”
52

Whiteread, like Doris Salcedo, works with the themes of the domestic. However, her work
differs in that Salcedo’s is heavily based on the ideas of the biography and specificity, and in
contrast, Whiteread has a “lack of interest in the biography of the inhabitants and biography
that returns, its social-historical specificity and the chance circumstances of it making, the
logical autonomy of the minimalist object and the open association of the surrealist object.”
53

Whiteread’s works are thus interpreted in a more autonomous way, somehow personal yet
vague and open to anyone. Whiteread is often associated with Minimalist sculptors, but unlike
the uniformity that many minimalists have, Whiteread’s sculptures are often imperfect,
irregularly shaped and have traces of the original object. Thus, counter Minimalism’s claims to a
lack of overt content. Unlike Salcedo, Whiteread deals with the construction of the work itself-
and through her sculptures highlights their flaws, hidden qualities, and inconsistencies.

52
Rachel Whiteread, Ann Gallagher, and Molly Donovan, Rachel Whiteread (London: Tate Publishing, 2017), 10.
53
Ibid., 47.

29
Whiteread has made many iterations of tables, most famously she is known for, as Ann
Gallagher writes, taking the “‘negative space’ or the void within or surrounding the objects and
architectural structures.”
54
In her first work with resin in 1994, Table and Chair (Clear) (fig. 9),
Whiteread casted the space underneath the table and chair creating new objects. Many say this
work is an homage to Bruce Nauman’s A cast of the space under my chair (1965), which in a
way was considered to be a commentary or reaction to minimalism. The choice to use matte
opaque resin instead of plaster allows light to suffuse the sculpture, perhaps emphasizing that
its materiality and its relation to notions of presence and absence is neither here nor there a
solid, but another idea of a liminal space.

By the simple and poetic act of highlighting the typically un-regarded space underneath a table,
Whiteread is triggering ideas of memories, be it of childhood and hiding underneath the
furniture, or creating narratives, such as what kind of table and chair stood above this space?
Who did it belong to? What happened here?

Whiteread and I share this love and exploration of craft and how things are made through
construction. Like Whiteread, I am rematerializing and utilizing the potential narrative abilities
of the inanimate object set in space. And I am equally interested in the neutrality found when
you leave something colorless, pale, opaque, or monotone, allowing us to focus less on color
details, and meanings but more on content, form, light and shadow. But unlike Whiteread and

54
Ibid., 17.

30
her static installations, I am interested in the idea of inanimate made animate sculpture via the
movement of the viewer or the object.

For my very first (and thus far only) table artwork that I have made, I used a semi-transparent
matte plastic that I meticulously sewed together. I created a scene of a table, three chairs, and
various birthday party paraphernalia (balloons, a cake, a banner, potato chips, and soda). The
whole sculpture was connected and would periodically inflate and deflate via an electric pump.
My sculpture The Birthday Party (figs.10 & 11) was made in 2011 in Amsterdam for my
EindExam Show at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie. Through its movement, this work was about
the idea of expectation and disillusionment and the amount of pressure we put on our growth
and reaching milestones in life. As the piece would inflate quickly to a nearly bursting, bulbous,
erected state and then suddenly deflate slowly, almost painfully, making the work contort and
lie nearly flat. The scene would continuously disappear and reappear. The table and party
paraphernalia more or less legible depending on how inflated the form was.

Although signaling a birthday celebration, it was important to me that the party scene created
was open and generic enough to be anyone’s table, anyone’s birthday. This reminds me of what
Scott McCloud referred to with the phenomenon of self-awareness, and how by simplifying
something we can make it more universal, ready to be embodied by many. I wanted this clear
scene to be anyone’s scene and anyone’s moment to put their own baggage in it. I wanted to
set the parameters. I also thought to strip away the color from the archetypal colorful laden
birthday party, would mute the visual noise that color can sometimes provide, allowing the

31
viewer to concentrate more on the form and movement. The sculpture’s semi-transparency
was related to memory and its ephemerality and sometimes lack of clarity. But it also allowed
for a more melancholic idea of this usually very happy occasion. I enjoy playing with
overlapping these dualities, positive and negatives, happy and sad, because I feel that often in
life things are never one hundred percent one way but always nuanced.

The Birthday Table created an illusion similar to Whiteread’s past work, in the making and
unmaking of the construction – much like Whiteread’s well known major work “House” in 1993,
where she cast the inside of a whole house in London. Her work stood for nine months in an
empty lot until it got torn down. Even though it was monumental in scale and permanent in
materiality (concrete), it was still ephemeral like my table. This opens up the idea of time and
performativity (inanimate objects with people). If you can catch this moment of absurdity in
everyday life.

THE BED

It’s not often you come across artworks that you feel a deep connection to. I only discovered
Mona Hatoum’s work recently when I visited her retrospective, Terra Infirma, at the Menil
collection in Houston, Texas in 2018. In the catalogue of the show curator Michelle White
writes, “Throughout her work, Hatoum addresses the paradox found in places of comfort and
support associated with furniture and tools typically found in the home. Chairs, benches, cribs,
and beds frequently undergo transformation through materials and gestures that upset the

32
normative functions. Hatoum uses this strategy as a means of connecting the idea of
inhospitality to much broader political structures that contain of physically limit the movement
of an individual.”
55

The connection I felt with Hatoum’s work went beyond the artworks potential messages, and to
a connection to the maker of the work. I think the reason I felt so strongly was because I sensed
a kinship to the visual language she was using. I understood it well. There is a neutrality, or
fairness to her work in its accessibility, even in its exaggerations--and yet a specificity regarding
Middle Eastern politics. There is a sense of masculinity and violence alongside femininity and
care, and there is a wittiness, a sense of humor that is both light and dark. Hatoum’s work is
riddled with a duality that I can relate to, and as I read more about her biography, much of her
language in art comes from displacement. A hybrid of many countries and languages. I felt a
camaraderie in this displacement, although hers was a product of exile.

Edward Saïd wrote about displacement in his book Reflections on Exile and other Essays,
remarking that “Exile is heartbreaking and also hopeful because it occupies a liminal position.”
56

This is referring to of course to the dichotomy of being both an outsider to a country (or
multiple countries) and yet being somewhat included by mere presence. You are never quite
part of it. Saïd adds, “Exile becomes that space for “something else to form.”
57
It is not only a

55
Michelle White and Mona Hatoum, Mona Hatoum: Terra Infirma (Houston: The Menil Collection, 2017), 78.
56
Edward W. Saïd, “Reflections of Exile”, in Reflections of Exile and other Essays (Cambridge: Harvard University,
2001), 186.
57
Edward W. Saïd, “The Art of Displacement: Mona Hatoum’s Logic of Irreconcilables,” in Mona Hatoum: The
Entire World as a Foreign Land (London: Tate Gallery Publishing, 2000), 7.

33
condition of being in between a physical places or countries, but a means of occupying in
between ways of seeing an accommodating disparate and even conflicting ideas.” Saïd says
displaced people, have a “plurality of vision” or an expanded way of understanding that is only
possible when one has been “pushed out of one’s home.”
58
It is in this plurality of perspectives I
also carry myself, being from so many places, but also not being able to truly call any one of
them my home.

One of Mona Hatoum’s most famous works is her interpretation of a bed, a giant, sharp, metal
vegetable grater called Dormiente (2008) (fig. 12). White writes that “Hatoum has transformed
these handheld cooking devices into inhospitable even dangerous pieces of furniture.”
59
The
work was scaled to fit the full length of the sleeping body, as per the title, but it fails to fulfill its
function as place of support and rest. Strangely empty and devoid of human presence,
Hatoum’s work (like Dormiente) evokes the absent body.

Hatoum utilizes our established relationship with objects that we encounter in our everyday life
and says, “They can refer to the body even when it’s absent.”
60
She also says she likes “to
implicate the viewer in a phenomenological situation, in which the experience is more physical
and direct.”
61
In my interpretation, Dormiente can be a reminder of how our bodies can take a
beating as we grow in life. It speaks to the domestic and the antiquated ideas of the woman in
the kitchen being both loving and frustrating. And by being an object resembling a bed, the

58
Ibid., 17.
59
Michelle White and Mona Hatoum, Mona Hatoum,77.
60
Ibid., 55.
61
Ibid., 54.

34
paradox of rest and un-restfulness. But the size of it-- like Susan Stewart has compared often in
her book--with its gigantic nature, is a tool used to make this item become more powerful than
us and thus it can’t help but be menacing to some degree.

In the Poetics of Space, Gaston Bachelard writes, “The casket contains things that are
unforgettable, unforgettable for us, but also unforgettable for those to whom we are going to
give our treasures. Here the past, the present, and the future are condensed. Thus, the casket is
the memory of what is immemorial.”
62
Although in my artistic career, I have yet to make a bed
per se, I did make a casket.

In 2012, I created an installation for a solo show I had in Amsterdam called The Living Room (fig.
13). In it, I created a replica of a funeral space, with all the accoutrements needed for a funeral;
a casket, a frilly bed skirt, flowers, long candles, Greek pillars, a podium, and curtains.
But instead of finding the items readymade and assembling them, I recreated them all in a life
size scale with white paper and glue. Similar to my La-Z-Boy Chair, I wanted to get soft three-
dimensional shapes out of the hard flatness of a paper, and similar to my Birthday Table, I
wanted it to be a space devoid of color so that we can focus only on form, shapes, shadows and
light. The casket would even open and close, although there was nothing in it except a soft
pillow and decorative lining made also of paper.

62
Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, 84.

35
The funeral for me had been a scene I was seeing often around that period of making this work,
I attended over five funerals at the time. In them, I was most fascinated by the pomp and
circumstance surrounding the procession of laying someone “to rest”, did we really need so
many curtains? Flowers? Ribbons? It felt like the theatricality of the “last act” was both
beautiful and absurd. The idea to replicate this pageantry in paper allowed for the person
standing in the space to viscerally feel the hollowness of this space, and to perhaps get an idea
of the temporality of material things, and of our time on earth. They could imagine themselves
lying in this space. Like Hatoum, I made an unusable place to lay down, but one that hopefully
opened up many narratives in the viewers mind.

I called this show the Living Room because in Victorian times there was no living room in a
family home, but a “mourning room” towards the entrance of the house where they would
house the dead several days before burial. When this practice stopped, the mourning room
became the living room we know today. This work was not so much a celebration of death as
much as it was about life.

In comparison to Hatoum, by making a space comprised of many sculptural elements all in the
same white matte paper, I created a uniformity in the installation. Hence, even though it was
life sized scene, I made a single giant sculpture. And like Hatoum, when you have such a giant
work before you it gains a power over the viewer. The viewer can only take it in in fragments,
thereby creating a feeling of unease and curiosity towards it.

36
CONCLUSION

At the beginning of this thesis, I mentioned the reason I wanted to investigate the various
artistic strategies of using simplified objects, shifts in scale, or material manipulations, was to
understand my own practice better. Although I had been using all of these strategies already I
did not fully understand their positioning in theory and historical practice. My choices were
more instinctual than calculated. Now I understand the significance of the use of icons and how
we are unconsciously more attracted to simplified images to be more relatable than well-
defined images. In all the times that I looked at something and saw a face or a body, I never
thought that it was my subconscious putting myself in the place of that object.

Through studying Bachalard’s Poetics of Space and Stewarts On Longing among the many
readings, I feel more equipped with the visual and written language needed to approach new
works and how to regard space in relation to the body. Exaggerations are forms of spatial
power plays. And using iconography of domesticity with exaggeration makes up a large
component of my artistic language. In her essay “Crossing Over” Rebecca Solnit says, “Scale is a
form of orientation; changing it generates disorientation that reawakens the eyes.”
63
I feel that
we have not fully explored our relationships to scale or orientation yet, and I hope to continue
exploring it in my practice.

63
Rebecca Solnit, “Crossing Over” in Mona Hatoum: Terra Infirma (Houston: The Menil Collection, 2017), 175.

37
Throughout the last two years of my time at the University of Southern California’s Roski School
of Art and Design Graduate program, I’ve created several new works. Many still dealing with
the domestic and utilization of quotidian iconography such as my Fan (fig. 2) artwork that I
described in Chapter 3, a piece that was situated in my studio in concert with a few other works
such as the Floor (fig. 14) sculpture, a vinyl wood floor and molding that fit perfectly in the
space and would undulate or bend softly underneath your weight as you walked on it as
opposed to offering what we would expect, a hard surface we can trust to hold us. Lastly as
part of that installation, I had a video of breast lactating on a nonstop loop called Mother’s Milk.
(fig. 15) A portrait of my final days of this pyshical change in my body.

These three works, although considered individual artworks came together to create an
installation whole, one I hoped would be open enough for an individual viewer’s own
interpretation and narratives, even though for me these works represented a kind of self
portrait of my newfound introduction to motherhood and the profound sense of uncertainty
that it created in my life. I started the master’s program with a fellowship and a newborn six-
week-old son in tow, still shell shocked from my altered situation. Therefore, it was only natural
that my artworks shifted too, away from the usual humor into a darker place of uncertainty,
and due to time and capacity, to a place of austerity.

Although slightly, my practice evolved during my study. The master’s program being a place
housed by both a cohort and faculty deeply entrenched in social practice in their art, I could not
help but have this influence my own artistic practice. I started asking ‘What am I really saying

38
through my art? And what more can I say through this platform?’ Through these questions, I’ve
come to have a better understanding of the level of responsibility that comes with this privilege
of making art and to who you are speaking to.

This has led to a series of new works looking more outward than in, thinking about labor, and
the ideas of injustice in the flaws in design of governance (which is something close to
unavoidable in this current political climate), yet still speaking through the lens that is very
much my own. A lens that utilizes known iconography, rematerializes it, holds ideas of
domesticity, uses scale shifts, wit, and minimally reiterates something back to the viewer that
needs more time to be ingested and re-evaluated or felt through presence or interaction.

My grandfather, although I never met him, was a politician and a congressman in Lima, Peru for
many years. Before this, he was a mayor of a town up in the Andes mountains where he fought
for equal rights, education for all, and had schools named after him. I imagine if I am anything
like him, that he was a very passionate person that got fired up about injustices. The difference
is, language and field. I am coming to understand that I will never be overtly political, that art is
my field and that I communicate through visual language something hopefully larger than
myself and most of all in a fair and accessible way to many, not just an elite few that
understand art and its histories. I have also found a strength that has come with age that my
own ideas have merit and to keep doing what I’m doing.

39
My solo thesis show is titled, People Say Congrats, Because They Can’t Spell Conrajulashins. It
will focus on the idea of growing up in America at this time, in this flawed political climate. The
title, although humorous is also dark because it primarily has to do with the de-emphasis on
education in America. My show also has to do with my own experience of being a bridge, at the
transitional age and at a time of having an aging parent in a turbulent health system, and caring
for my new son, unsure if I could cover his future education and unsure that he will ever make
enough income to own his own home. There is humor and sadness to this all. And I will keep
making these ridiculous objects and installations in the hopes to emphasize these personal
struggles and moments and make them relatable to many. There is always much more work
that needs to be done. I can only hope that some of my work may have an impact.

40
Figure 1: Reed van Brunschot Little Houses, 2018.

Figure 2: Reed van Brunschot Fan 2017.

41

Figure 3: Reed van Brunschot Thank You Bag, 2018

42
Figure 4: Doris Salcedo. Istanbul Project 2003.

43
Figure 5: Reed van Brunschot The La-Z-Boy (up) 2009.

Figure 6: Reed van Brunschot The La-Z-Boy (down) 2009.

44
Figure 7: Reed van Brunschot The Human Stain (up) 2010.

Figure 8: Reed van Brunschot The Human Stain (down) 2010.

45
Fig 9: Rachel Whiteread Table and Chair (Clear) 1994

46
Figure 10 : Reed van Brunschot The Birthday Table (up) 2011.

Fig 11: Reed van Brunschot The Birthday Table (down) 2011.

47
Figure 12: Mona Hatoum Dormiente, 2008.

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Figure 13: Reed van Brunschot The Living Room 2012

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Figure 14: Reed van Brunschot The Floor 2017

Figure 15: Reed van Brunschot Mothers Milk 2017

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WORKS CITED:
Bal, Mieke. Of What One Cannot Speak: Doris Salcedo’s Political Art Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 2010.

Bal, Mieke. “Semiotics for Beginners,” in On Meaning-making: Essays in Semiotics Sonoma, CA:
Polebridge Press, 1994.

Bachelard, Gaston. The poetics of space. New York: Orion Press, 1964.

Blonsky, Marshall. “A Literary High-Wire Act.” New York Times, December 10, 1989.
https://www.nytimes.com/1989/12/10/magazine/a-literary-high-wire-act.html

McCloud, Scott. Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art 1st HarperPerennial ed. New York:
HarperPerennial, 1995.

Nazima Kadir, “Myth and Reality in the Amsterdam Squatters Movement. 1975-2012,”in The
City is Ours, ed. Bas van der Steen (Oakland: PM Press 2014), 41.

Ngai, Sianne. Our Aesthetic Categories: Zany, Cute, Interesting Cambridge, Mass: Harvard
University Press, 2012.

Said, Edward W. Reflections on Exile and Other Essays Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University
Press, 2000.

Said, Edward W. “The Art of Displacement: Mona Hatoum’s Logic of Irreconcilables,” in Mona
Hatoum: The Entire World as a Foreign Land, London: Tate Gallery Publishing, 2000.

Schneider Enriquez, Mary, Salcedo, Doris, and Khandekar, Narayan. Doris Salcedo: The
Materiality of Mourning Cambridge, Mass: Harvard Art Museums, 2016.

Stewart, Susan. On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the
Collection Baltimore: JohnsHopkins University Press, 1984.

White, Michelle, and Hatoum, Mona. Mona Hatoum: Terra Infirma Houston: The Menil
Collection, 2017.

Whiteread, Rachel, Gallagher, Ann, and Donovan, Molly. Rachel Whiteread London: Tate
Publishing, 2017.

Abstract (if available)

Abstract Through the investigation and comparison of various artworks that utilize a similar method to my own, I hope to understand my decision making in art in a more historical and theoretical way. Concentrating on researching theoretical texts and artists that often utilize domestic or quotidian objects in their art, or who consider space in relation to the viewer by manipulation of scale, as well as artists who tactically re-materialize known objects into something else, I hope to build a critical artistic genealogy. ❧ What is the power of communication behind the quotidian object in art? What is the effect when amplifying or reducing space in correlation to the viewer? ❧ I will focus specifically (but not exclusively) on the use of the table, the chair, and the bed in art that often define and decorate domestic space. Surveying texts by Susan Stewart, Gaston Bachelard, Mieke Bal, Ana Chave, Edward Saïd, I aim to investigate the artworks and practice of artists I feel a close kinship with, such as Mona Hatoum, Rachel Whiteread, and Doris Salcedo.

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Asset Metadata

Creator van Brunschot, Rietje (Reed) T. (author)

Core Title The poetics of home

School Roski School of Art and Design

Degree Master of Fine Arts

Degree Program Fine Arts

Publication Date 07/29/2019

Defense Date 07/25/2019

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag Amsterdam,Art,giant,miniature,OAI-PMH Harvest,Reed van Brunschot,space

Format application/pdf (imt)

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor Campbell, Andrew (committee chair), Lacy, Suzanne (committee member), Mayerson, Keith (committee member)

Creator Email reedvanbee@gmail.com,vanbruns@usc.edu

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-c89-197553

Unique identifier UC11663390

Identifier etd-vanBrunsch-7668.pdf (filename),usctheses-c89-197553 (legacy record id)

Legacy Identifier etd-vanBrunsch-7668.pdf

Dmrecord 197553

Document Type Thesis

Format application/pdf (imt)

Rights van Brunschot, Rietje (Reed) T.

Type texts

Source University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Access Conditions The author retains rights to his/her dissertation, thesis or other graduate work according to U.S. copyright law. Electronic access is being provided by the USC Libraries in agreement with the a...

Repository Name University of Southern California Digital Library

Repository Location USC Digital Library, University of Southern California, University Park Campus MC 2810, 3434 South Grand Avenue, 2nd Floor, Los Angeles, California 90089-2810, USA