Fargo is a Place in the Space of South Dakota…

This week I wanted to start my post for the week with a portion of a paper I wrote for Critical Theory 2 about “Place” which I titled “Fargo is a Place in the Space of South Dakota…”

Yi-Fu Tuan, author of Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience, argues that space requires movement from place to place and that place requires space to exist in order to be a place.  He discusses how ethological studies show that all animals, “have a sense of territory and a sense of place” (Tuan).  Animals defend spaces from intruders and recognize places that are relevant for sustaining life such as sources of water, food, and procreation.  We behave in very similar fashion among the territory of our homes with places designated for sources of life; the refrigerator or grocery store.  We are required to move among space in order to interact with places.

Searching around for philosophical discussions of place and space I came across a forum post titled, “Places”.  On July 7, 2009, James Garvey was having trouble finding philosophical discussions about places and so he decided to ask the internet.  He was concerned with what makes a place a “place” as we know it.  Many individuals discuss the Proustian reaction that physical places have on them when visiting an old friend's childhood home or travelling to a favorite location for example.  These individuals discussed the effect of experiencing familiar places had on them psychologically.  Other individuals explored the idea of place with respect to video games and books, seeing them as experiences with many places to be traversed and explored.  This brings to mind the idea that a place doesn’t have to physically exist.  

We can all agree that a place can exist in fictional space but how is it that we group these places with those of the physical non-fictional world? Are they the same? If so, what makes a place a “place”.  It comes down to a simple pattern.  As we read books we often put them down to take breaks or do other activities and in order to remember where we are in the book we insert a marker between the pages we stop at in order to save our “place”.  A place is like a bookmark, a reference point in a space and in the case of a book the space that exists is the pages from start to finish.  Like a bear scrapes the bark off of a tree to mark a territory we mark our location in our journey through pages of words with a business card or a receipt to remember where we are.  

The relationship between place and space is a semiotic relationship.  Signifier is to place as signified is to space.  In algebra a point is an undefined term which is represented by the letter “x”.  “X” is a solvable point on a number line and when we solve for point “y” can be combined with in order to solve for the location of a point on a graph.  This point on a graph is defined as point “x, y” and can be for example “1, 2”.  The dot that represents “1, 2” is a specific place on a graph and when either of the numbers changes the location of the point changes and the previous place ceases to exist as it moves to a newly defined location.  A places is a reference point in space that holds its relevance based on how it is defined and when details in that definition change the place becomes something new.  Just a as a place requires space to exist, it must require location in space to exist as well.  You can now say that the place we call home is a point in space defined the same way in which the answer to an algebra problem is derived.

With my interest in James Turrell and further understanding of the man’s work, I realize that his work succeeds in making us see ourselves seeing by removing reference from our visual perception.  Without the contrast of the observable world the Ganzfeld effect takes over and allows us to ponder what our brains and eyes are actually capable of doing and are doing.  The lack of reference causes us to lose our sense of place.  While we may understand where the work of art exist (what gallery it is present in) we have a hard time determining the boundaries of the space that the installation is comprised of.  

What is key in his work that I am relating to in my current installation is that “reference” in the form of visual signals is important to place and in particular the place of an object.  What characteristics about a defined place determine our understanding of an object in space and what happens when those characteristics exist in multiple locations in a space.

Installation photos will be posted shortly.  Below is a slideshow of my adventure throughout the last week displaying process:

Photo credit: Carmen Fultz and Me