Replacing Home

From Primordial Hut to Digital Network in Contemporary Art

2011
Author:

Jennifer Johung

How constructions of home in contemporary art reveal new ways of staying in place

In a world in which notions of place are constantly changing, Jennifer Johung looks at new constructions of staying in place—in contemporary site-specific art, digital media, portable architecture, and various other imaginable shelters and sites. Replacing Home introduces a new framework for reconceptualizing spatial situation and presents a new way to experience being and belonging within our globally expanded environments.

The study of architecture and installation from a performance studies perspective is an exciting and emerging research area, and Replacing Home is a provocative book that discusses a rich set of artists and artworks. Jennifer Johung breaks important ground by addressing more recent, under-researched developments such as mobile architecture, body architecture, and ‘relational architecture.’

John McKenzie, University of Wisconsin, Madison

From property deeds to shipping containers to wearable shelters to virtual spaces: what does it mean to draw a spatial boundary? To be at home? In a world in which notions of place are constantly changing, Jennifer Johung looks at new constructions of staying in place—in contemporary site-specific art, digital media, portable architecture, and various other imaginable shelters and sites.

Replacing Home suggests that while “place” may no longer be a sustainable category, being in place and belonging at home are nonetheless possible. By emphasizing reusability rather than fixed constructions, art and architecture together propose various systems of replacing home in which sites can be revisited, material structures can be renewed, and dwellers can come back into contact over time. Bringing together a range of objects and events, Johung considers the structural replacements of home as evident in artistic analogies of the prehistoric hut, modular homes, transformable garments, and digitally networked sites.

In charting these intersections between contemporary art and architecture, Replacing Home introduces a new framework for reconceptualizing spatial situation; at the same time, it presents a new way to experience being and belonging within our globally expanded environments.

Jennifer Johung is assistant professor of art history and director of the Art History Gallery at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee.

The study of architecture and installation from a performance studies perspective is an exciting and emerging research area, and Replacing Home is a provocative book that discusses a rich set of artists and artworks. Jennifer Johung breaks important ground by addressing more recent, under-researched developments such as mobile architecture, body architecture, and ‘relational architecture.’

John McKenzie, University of Wisconsin, Madison

Theoretical language employed throughout the text makes this an appropriate read for advanced students and scholars.

ARLIS/NA Reviews

Contents


Introduction: Replacing Home

1. Returning to the Hut: Dan Graham’s Two Way Mirror Cylinder Inside Cube
2. Reusable Sites: Gordon Matta-Clark’s Fake Estates and the Odd Lots Exhibition
3. In and out of Place: Modular Architecture and Reintegration
4. Visibly Skinned: Body Architecture and Transformable Clothing
5. Networked Dependencies: Rafael Lozano-Hemmer’s Relational Architecture

Epilogue: Almost Home


Acknowledgments
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Jennifer Johung Projects

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UMP blog - On Home: Writing, performing, curating, replacing

With snow tracing the frozen ground, it is the first week of February in Milwaukee, WI – a high of 15 degrees and a low of -5 (give or take a few) – and I am standing on a rock along the edge of Lake Michigan, wearing my book. Or rather, pages of my manuscript painstakingly printed on blush-colored tissue paper, then sewn and sculpted onto a short slip. Almost a year ago, Milwaukee-based photographer Jessica Kaminski launched The Home Project, an ongoing series of conceptual garments and images that examine specific embodied experiences of belonging in and out of place. I had just finished writing Replacing Home, and had moved from Berkeley, CA, to Milwaukee. She asked me what I brought with me to my newly adopted city; I said mainly my books. So there I am, standing with arms outstretched, vulnerably encased in my own words – about the possibility of being in place, of coming together with and apart from others over time, of reusing and resituating structures of belonging – as rematerialized so delicately into my only protection against the elements. It is not enough, and it is everything.

Read the full article.