The Room
An art studio, a dance studio, a study, an orchestra rehearsal space have in common the principle that “form follows function”; the physical space and its accoutrements enhance, reinforce, and further the activity that occurs there. They encourage a singular focus with space for unhindered meditation upon it. In one sense, the studio repeats “in a finer tone” the desired experience of “home,” a place in which the presence of the exigencies of the world can be titrated, controlled, as one wishes.
At first glance, the arthur+martha workspace at the Booth Centre only barely approximates the studio; it does not appear to anticipate the needs of the participants making A Book of Ours and is porous to the mayhem at its borders. But we must look more closely. Phil Davenport calls the workspace itself a “scriptorium,” invoking a medieval site of manuscript production with poets, artists, calligraphers, and musicians collectively labouring on the artwork. The Booth Centre, which nests this workspace, encourages art practice as part of the process of finding oneself again in the midst of a life of chaos and vulnerability (which takes many diverse, often contradictory, shapes).
On the second floor of the Centre, the art room provides space for distraction from troubled environments. The arthur+martha projects spread out and occupy the art room, taking distraction to a new level by promoting reflection, singly and collectively among participants, about one’s life. The room itself is C-shaped, with the actual workspace in the long back of the C. I open the doors from the stairwell into a room without the feeling of shape or containment or purpose at all. At one end of the C is the loo, along with the door to an office. The participants have already gathered around four trestle tables shoved together to make one long work area. Each person keeps his or her coat and pack right where they sit; because of the nature of their lives, the pack may contain most of what they possess in the world. Only trust, built up over time, will allow them to leave coat and pack in the nearby office when they go downstairs to the noisy cafeteria. Papers, paints, pencils, brushes, markers, rulers cover the table surface, and people are talking and moving around as they work on their pages. The far end of the C opens to a large less inhabited space where people sometimes go to quieten themselves down on one of the sofas. It is here where on one visit I peeled off from the group with Lawrence (Riff Raff) and then J for “interviews.” The room itself has almost no atmosphere even though here and their in empty spaces on the walls between stacked-up chairs are pieces of the participants’ art work and photos, often with a caption of something essential to the person: “My name is Matthew and I like making art.” On the other side of the tables stands a big rack that slots in the tables folded up and stored at the end of the session. More art works are on the walls. A “bite” is taken out of those racks into a space that holds musical instruments and other items for the activities.
Early on, Phil and Lois struggled hard to keep out people who wanted to sell drugs to the makers of art; someone tried to destroy some of their work. Vigilance is constantly required to keep the space free of other people, which is difficult because the space doesn’t feel truly separate, at times more like a thoroughfare, and more of a storage space. Phil and Lois want to nurture a place and occasion for meditation and artistic practice, where the mayhem of their lives is suspended for the sake of the “play drive.” Yet the participants inevitably bring that other life into the room, and so Phil and Lois have tried to incorporate it into artwork. The noise made by Booth Centre staff members, for example, who from time to time disrupt the activities through a lack or refusal of awareness, is nonetheless allowed into the recording of songs. They emphasize again and again that, while the experience of their activities may certainly be therapeutic, the intention and the goal is not with “self” and “process” but with product: they come there to make art works and to compose and perform songs, all of which has its trajectory beyond the walls of the Booth Centre, into larger versions of the public sphere. They are making their own, previously unacknowledged and undocumented history. So, this room, at once protected from yet porous to the world of their daily lives, architecturally indifferent to their work here, oddly suits the purpose and content of their art. They occupy this space—with their trestle tables and art scattered on the walls, the patter or hum of conversation, just as A Book of Ours occupies The Book of Hours.
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