Journey around the studio : exploring the aesthetics of contingency

Since the late nineteenth century, contingency has been dealt with in an ideologically oppositional fashion. Though scrupulously avoided by the notorious doctrine of'process management', contingency was valued in the emerging realm of photography for its ontological connection to the present.1 Long after early photography made a virtue of capturing contingency on film, the experiments ofland and site-specific art in the 196os and 1970s sought to figure it sculpturally, using the existing contextual, material and spatial aspects of a site to inform their responses. The following exegesis seeks to explore the aesthetics of contingency: the unavoidable and potentially unmanageable presence of multiple potentialities that both shape and interrupt our relationship to place, and open up new spaces for reflection and inquiry. This exegesis serves as a reflective inventory and travelogue that traces both theoretical and practice- based explorations in my studio over the course of one year.