Spatial Shifters: Sancho Silva and the Architecture of Perception
by Jennifer King, 2006

A shifter, according to linguistic theory, is a term whose referent changes according to the person using it. Words like “I” and “you” are considered shifters because their meaning is dependent on the situation in which they are articulated. In a conversation between two people, for example, both individuals can use the word “I” to refer to themselves. As a result, the person to whom “I” refers is constantly changing—or, to be more precise, it is constantly shifting.

Just as the linguistic shifter demonstrates the contingency of speech, the work of Sancho Silva demonstrates the contingency of space. For although each of Silva’s works is site-specific, and therefore unique, his projects all share one remarkable trait: the ability to reveal how a single environment can be perceived in multiple ways. By exploring the different (and often contradictory) “articulations” of a single space, Silva’s works function like shifters—they reorient the meanings attached to otherwise static locales.

An early case of such perceptual shifting can be found in Silva’s Attractor of 1999. For Attractor, a work executed at Ar.Co (Centro de Arte e Comunicação Visual) in Lisbon, Portugal, Silva constructed a plywood tunnel leading from a door of a room to its only window. Visitors entering the room through this door found themselves enclosed within the tunnel—a passageway offering access to the window (and to such features as sunlight, fresh air, and the view outside) but precluding any knowledge of the room in which it was situated. By contrast, visitors who entered the room through a different door encountered the exterior of the tunnel, which appeared as a closed, three-dimensional structure in a space devoid of natural light. From this second vantage point, the interior of the room could be seen, but the tunnel remained inaccessible. Silva’s bifurcation of the space thus created a series of binary oppositions—inside/outside, closed/open, natural/artificial, visible/hidden—in which the assignment of terms remained crucially unfixed. To take the last set of words as an example, what remained “visible” or “hidden” would have changed (or shifted) according to one’s position within the space.[1]

As one of several early projects to probe the nature of perceptual experience, Attractor marked an important turning point in Silva’s artistic production. Prior to Attractor, the artist had already begun to question the stability of perception. In Ladder of 1998, for example, viewers were encouraged to climb an outdoor ladder in order to look through what appeared to be a telescope pointing skywards. Upon peering through the eyehole, however, viewers found themselves presented not with a view of the sky, but with a view of the ground as seen from the top of the ladder. This visual reversal, created by the insertion of a photographic image into the viewing device (which was not, in fact, a telescope, but rather a make-shift slide-viewer), reflected Silva’s interest at the time in playing with viewers’ perceptual expectations. In this and other works involving optical manipulations, Silva strove to create representations which, in his words, “contradicted real perceptual data, thereby turning reality and the habitual workings of perception against themselves.”[2] With Attractor, however, Silva began to move away from an interest in perception per se, to an investigation of how perception is externally constituted. Leaving behind the use of tricks or techniques intended to deceive the eye, Silva subsequently undertook a series of works concerned with the physical and institutional structures of perception.

In order to appreciate the critical gesture performed by Silva’s architectural interventions, it is important to situate his projects along a historical trajectory of works that have sought to expose the ideological underpinnings of the museum’s supposedly neutral gallery space. As Brian O’Doherty described this concern in his now famous “white cube” essays of 1976: “The white wall’s apparent neutrality is an illusion. It stands for a community with common ideas and assumptions.”[3] For O’Doherty and other artists of his generation, the closed hermeticism of the white cube served both to mask and perpetuate the social and economic elitism intrinsic to the modern gallery space. “The spotless gallery wall,” O’Doherty observed, “subsumes commerce and esthetics, artist and audience, ethics and expediency. It is in the image of the society that supports it.”[4]

By the time O’Doherty’s essays first appeared in Artforum in 1976, artists like Michael Asher and Daniel Buren had already begun to create works that challenged the presumed autonomy of art and its institutions. In his 1970 installation at the Pomona College Art Gallery, for example, Asher constructed a continuous interior space in the shape of two converging triangles by constructing temporary walls and a false ceiling within the art center’s preexisting exhibition galleries. As part of this construction, Asher removed the gallery’s main doors and concealed the remaining doorjamb and hardware, thereby creating a seamless transition between inside and outside. In the absence of any doors, the space remained open to the public 24 hours a day—a further erosion of the gallery’s previous isolation from external effects. In Asher’s description, “Exterior light, sound, and air became a permanent part of the exhibition.”[5] Or in the words of art historian Thomas Crow, “Asher reproduced the classically pristine, white-walled gallery to the point of fetishism, but the very being of the gallery was cancelled by its space being perpetually exposed to the outside world.”[6]

In Silva’s Shortcut of 2002, one finds a similar rupturing of the boundary between the gallery space and its external site. For Shortcut, a project created at Inkijk, an art space run by SKOR (Foundation for Art in Open Spaces) in Amsterdam, Silva constructed a seemingly simple architectural intervention that produced a sophisticated set of critical and perceptual effects. Using the openings provided by two large windows located at 90 degrees from one another, Silva built a plywood tunnel cutting diagonally across the corner of the building at the intersection of two streets. The space of the tunnel was therefore continuous with the outside—a quality that was reinforced through the use of ramps extending from the tunnel to the streets on either side [figs. 9, 10]. As Silva explains, “This meant that it was possible to walk through the building, passing from one street to the other, without actually entering it.”[7]

What is important to note is that although Shortcut was carefully integrated into the preexisting structure of the building, it nevertheless punctured the integrity of the previously distinct interior space. Through its “cut,” the work excised a volume from the inside of the building and transferred it, temporarily, to the domain of the street. In so doing, Shortcut challenged the function typically assigned to the interior of the gallery. As Silva himself describes this intent:

By creating a zone of ambiguity (the space inside the tunnel belonging simultaneously to the gallery and to the street) Shortcut questioned the spatial and perceptual mechanisms through which the gallery and the street are differentiated. If, on a physical level, this differentiation is implemented first and foremost by the material walls of the gallery, on the level of pragmatics it is implemented through the different roles that are provided and presupposed for these spaces’ users: the street being designed essentially for circulation and the gallery being designed essentially for display. As an art project, the most apparent function of which was the facilitation of circulation, Shortcut reversed and dramatized the ways the perceptual mechanisms of the site attempted to impose determinate roles and behaviors on their users.[8]

Through his architectural intervention in the Inkijk building—what one might consider to be a “rearticulation” of the provided space—Silva shifted the viewer’s frame of reference from the false neutrality of the (previously insulated) gallery interior, to the contingent forces of the urban surroundings.[9] Building on the investigation of space first pursued in Attractor, Shortcut functioned to reorient both the physical and symbolic perception of the gallery and its external site.

In his recent work, Silva has radically expanded the possibilities of what it means to propose a spatial intervention. Working in collaboration with artist John Hawke, Silva has extended the scope of his perceptual investigations to explore the ambiguous definition of “public” space. In a series of projects grouped under the title Orange Works (begun in 2004), Silva and Hawke employ the ad hoc vocabulary of construction sites—plastic netting, rubber cones, security tape, cheap wood—to create subtle spatial demarcations. These quietly subversive works, interwoven into the gritty urban fabric of Brooklyn, New York, range from the unobtrusive arrangement of orange cones under a highway overpass to the (unauthorized) construction of multi-use shelters in low-income neighborhoods. By moving their practice outside the institutionally sanctioned space of the gallery, to what Silva has termed “spaces of ambiguous jurisdiction,” the artists continually test the limits of what it means to create “public” works. Situated in the most nominal of “public” spaces (locations that are often neglected or overlooked), and seen or used (or even destroyed) by an unmonitored—and therefore unknowable—“public” audience, Orange Works provoke a reconsideration of the very meaning of “public” art. 

Spatial practices,” wrote Michel de Certeau, “in fact secretly structure the determining conditions of social life. If de Certeau is right, then Silva’s works represent the always present possibility for resisting the externally imposed structures of spatial experience. Like the transient “I” of language, projects like Attractor, Shortcut, and Orange Works stand as evidence that the specific articulation of any space holds the ability to shift its meaning. And just as every speech act provides the opportunity to individualize language, Silva’s work reminds us that every structure holds the potential to reshape our perception.

“”[10]

---

[1] Silva himself has alluded to the mobility of spatial signification at work in Attractor, observing, “Within the mental maps that we inevitably construct of our spatial surroundings, the area inside the tunnel oscillated between being placed inside the room (to where it normally belonged) and being placed outside (to where it now, temporarily belonged.” Sancho Silva, A Record of Some Works of Sculpture with a Corollary Statement, (M.A. thesis, Pratt Institute, 2005), p. 4.

[2] Ibid.

[3] Brian O’Doherty, Inside the White Cube: The Ideology of the Gallery Space (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), p. 79. Originally published as a series of essays in Artforum in 1976.

[4] Ibid., p. 80.

[5] Michael Asher, Writings 1973-1983 on Works 1969-1979 (Halifax: Press of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design), p. 34.

[6] Thomas Crow, “Site-Specific Art: The Strong and the Weak,” in Modern Art in the Common Culture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996), p. 138.

[7] Silva, “Selection of Works,” (unpublished writings, n.d.), p. 7.

[8] Silva, A Record of Some Works of Sculpture with a Corollary Statement, pp. 23-24.

[9] This shift was perhaps most apparent in the fact that shortly after its construction, the work was used as a place to sleep by an anonymous squatter.

[10] Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (1974), trans. Steven Rendall (Berkeley, University of California Press, 1988), p. 96.