Research Abstract 2005                                       

                    Á La Recherche des Espaces Perdus:

Photography, Melancholia and the Working of Interminable Time into Space

This research explores ways in which spatiality in the visual and literary arts can be understood as an act of refusal by the subject. It will investigate most directly the relationship between architectural space, philosophical doubt and abjection as manifested in the visual arts.

This research will intially take the Brunswick Centre in Central London as a meta-architectural model for practice. The practice will be illuminated in thesis by placing its issues in the context of the figures of the corner of the room and the cadaver from Maurice Blanchot’s Two Versions of the Imaginary, in The Space of Literature. The conceit of the proposal is that the Brunswick Centre is simultaneously the cadaver, a kind of dead elephant in the city centre, and the place of its death. This place will be linked through writing to develop existing theories of the photograph and melancholy. Research material for practice has been collected over a ten year period at the Brunswick Centre in the form of photographs, film, written notes and other short meta-fictions. The building is currently undergoing renovation. It is becoming what it was originally intended to be before funding ran out to finish the building work in 1972- the walls are being painted off-white rather than retaining a grey concrete appearance. This unfixed status of place and object will be evidenced through photographic practice. Maurice Blanchot’s technique of writing in a space between philosophy and literature, presenting a kind of negative position for the subject, will provide a working methodology for research.

The subject of ‘the double’ in photography and melancholy, formulated around Blanchot’s cadaver, will be read through the psychoanalytic ‘lost object’ in Freud’s essays Mourning and Melancholia and Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Lacan’s Objet Petit a. This doubling will be illuminated by serial pathological and creative enactments within space in the films of Robert Bresson and Samuel Beckett’s film, Film. The question of the cadaver as negative position par excellence for the subject will be analysed under the terms of the research as set out above, and through readings of the work of Lacan and Hegel and Jean Luc Nancy.

Visual artists and filmmakers who would exemplify this position will be examined. These include Bruce Nauman, Vito Acconci, Marcel Broodthaers Samuel Beckett and Robert Bresson.

This research will produce new visual ways of thinking about the architectural moments represented by the Brunswick Centre model and at the same develop a relationship between photography, the paradoxes of the still moving image and the architectural object. The thesis will add new writing to existing photographic theories in relation to melancholia and architecture.

                                                                                            ©Becky Beasley 2005

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