Michel Foucault on Heterotopias

Heterotopias

First there are the utopias. Utopias are sites with no real place. They are sites that have a general relation of direct or inverted analogy with the real space of Society. They present society itself in a perfected form, or else society turned upside down, but in any case these utopias are fundamentally unreal spaces.

There are also, probably in every culture, in every civilization, real places - places that do exist and that are formed in the very founding of society - which are something like counter-sites, a kind of effectively enacted utopia in which the real sites, all the other real sites that can be found within the culture, are simultaneously represented, contested, and inverted. Places of this kind are outside of all places, even though it may be possible to indicate their location in reality. Because these places are absolutely different from all the sites that they reflect and speak about, I shall call them, by way of contrast to utopias, heterotopias. I believe that between utopias and these quite other sites, these heterotopias, there might be a sort of mixed, joint experience, which would be the mirror. The mirror is, after all, a utopia, since it is a placeless place. In the mirror, I see myself there where I am not, in an unreal, virtual space that opens up behind the surface; I am over there, there where I am not, a sort of shadow that gives my own visibility to myself, that enables me to see myself there where I am absent: such is the utopia of the mirror. But it is also a heterotopia in so far as the mirror does exist in reality, where it exerts a sort of counteraction on the position that I occupy. From the standpoint of the mirror I discover my absence from the place where I am since I see myself over there. Starting from this gaze that is, as it were, directed toward me, from the ground of this virtual space that is on the other side of the glass, I come back toward myself; I begin again to direct my eyes toward myself and to reconstitute myself there where I am. The mirror functions as a heterotopia in this respect: it makes this place that I occupy at the moment when I look at myself in the glass at once absolutely real, connected with all the space that surrounds it, and absolutely unreal, since in order to be perceived it has to pass through this virtual point which is over there.

Taken from Of Other Spaces 1967. Full text here.

Michelangelo Pistoletto - Seventeen One Less

Michelangelo Pistoletto - Seventeen One Less

(2009, Installation & Performance at the 53rd Venice Biennale)

Pistoletto has regularly used mirrors in his work to symbolize his search for his own identity. As well as a sort of self-portrait the mirrors also address division, multiplicity and universality. 

The performance 'Seventeen One Less' presents an evolving situation where 22 opposing mirrors are smashed, until only two facing mirrors are left intact. According to Pistoletto, their reciprocal reflection represents the infinite generation of light and life. Even the smallest of the broken mirrors, however, retains the same properties of the whole mirrors, multiplying their reflective power. The moment of destruction remains impressed in the mirror picture as the memory of a past event imprinted on the present.

Dan Graham - Performance/Audience/Mirror

Dan Graham Performance/Audience/Mirror
1975 23 Minutes

Dennis McNulty - Displaced Strata / Great Expectations

Dennis McNulty - Displaced Strata / Great Expectations (2008)
Site specific installation at Newman House in Dublin. Mirrors were placed in the back garden of the house, so when viewed from the bay window in the Iveagh room each one reflected an element of the facade of the building.

Robert Smithson - Ithaca Mirror Trail

Robert Smithson Ithaca Mirror Trail 1969

Smithson's Ithaca Mirror Trail is a series of photographs documenting a walk with a mirror outside the city of Ithaca, New York. Moving from the Andrew Dickson White Museum at Cornell University in Ithaca, the artist carried the mirror north to the Cayuga Salt Works. The map marks the 8 locations where he stopped and photographed the mirror in the landscape. 

detail

Fred Lebain - A Spring in New York

Fred Lebain - 'A Spring in New York'

2009

Series of large format photographs taken in New York, printed in the exact same size, arranged in the exact places in which they were orriginally taken and re-photographed.

Adam Chodzko - Better Scenery

 Adam Chodzko Better Scenery 2002

Top:
Islington, London, UK

Text reads:
Go North down 10th St and turn west onto 12th Avenue. Continue west on 12th out of Fargo until you see the big Supervalu warehouse on your right. Take that exit onto Interstate 29, heading North towards Grand Forks and Canada. After about 30 minutes (maybe 28 miles) you want to look out for the Gardner exit, which comes soon after you see four big silver grain bins on the right hand side of the road. Turn east and go about a quarter of a mile until you see a stop sign. Then turn left going north - you're now in Kinyon Township - for maybe three miles. That would get you to a crossroads. Then turn east again. (In the distance you’ll see a tree line running along the horizon. The Red River runs behind it). One half a mile further on you’ll come to a farmstead on the south side of the road. This is the Pratt farm. Come into the yard, pass by the machine shed and at the shelter belt turn left into the soybean field. Standing facing you is a sign. It describes the location of the sign you have just finished reading.
 

Bottom:

Fargo, North Dakota, USA
Text reads:
Turning left immediately outside the entrance to Angel tube station you need to go down the hill a bit until you reach the traffic lights at this big, chaotic cross roads. There’s a Co-op bank on the other side of the road - but still on the Islington side - so cross over towards that, then pass it, walking along Pentonville Road. Maybe 15 yards along this in the middle of the pavement is a large shrub right in front of the Family Planning Association, which is in the dark glass and bronze-coloured rectangular block of a building on your right. A brown railing runs across the pavement at the point where Angel Mews begins. Stand in the entrance of this little street with Whittles House to your left. Following the line of black bollards which run along the pavement of the mews you’ll see, facing you, in a corner next to a broken concrete lamp post a single ash tree. In its branches about 8ft off the ground you’ll see a sign. It describes the location of the sign you have just finished reading.

Aram Bartholl - Map

Aram Bartholl - Map

Public Intervention - 2006-2010

In Bartholl's 'Map' series he places a physical model of the virtual Google icon in the exact spot where Google Maps suggests the center of the city to be.

Punctuating the urban environment with symbols taken from the virtual world of the internet, Bartholl raises questions about our perception of a city and the influence of geolocation devices such as Google Maps.

Fiona Banner - Full Stops

Fiona Banner Full Stops

Installation shot, 2007



Memento 2005

An artist preoccupied with text, Fiona Banner has blurred the boundaries between words and images throughout her career. She began producing Full Stops for  her Art Now show at Tate Britain in 1998.

Banner here makes tangible not words, but a nothingness: silence rendered solid. Banner's full stops span across many type-faces and their differences become manifest in their juxtaposition: some are round, some square and some elliptical, some are big, some small. Rendering the stoppages in speech and text into solid three-dimensional objects has become an on-going concern for Banner; and the stops seem to have become progressively weighty; beginning in neon (below) and progressing to more recent works in steel (above).

Neon Full Stop 1997