*House Down [1]
By CÉDRIC FAUQ*

There is an expression in theatre, ‘breaking the fourth wall’, which is a device understood as the violation of a convention: one that wants any stage to not recognise the presence of the audience as a site where the plot develops, to maintain the closed artificiality of fiction. The idea of the ‘fourth wall’, I have learned, comes from English critics Leigh Hunt and Henry Irving’s expansion of French Enlightenment writer and critic Denis Diderot’s concept of ‘the great wall’ [un grand mur]: ‘Don’t think about the spectator anymore, act as if he doesn’t even exist. Imagine there is a big wall at the edge of the stage separating you from the parterre. Act as if the curtain was never raised.’ [2]

If I was asked to give an example of ‘a break’, I would mention a set of comedy series such as The Office (2005–2013), Modern Family (2009–2020), Parks and Recreation (2009–2015) and Fleabag (2016–2019), where characters often address the viewers directly, looking straight into the camera, enhancing the absurdity of a situation and making us feel as if we were ‘in the scene’ with them. But French Nouvelle Vague director Jean-Luc Godard is also known for using this device in several of his films like A bout de souffle (1960) and Pierrot le fou (1965), to name but a few. And we could even trace back the existence of the break before the fourth wall was even defined as such, since theatre in ancient Greece was already making use of this strategy.

Oddly enough, the concept of the fourth wall was theorised at a time when theatre was busy with real- ism, which means the artificial enclosure was erected to make fiction feel more truthful and closer to reality. In other words, so theatre wouldn’t be experienced as theatre. That very wall was erected during a time we refer to as Le Siècle des Lumières [The Age of Enlightenment], the values of which still form the foundation of most of our contemporary societies: education, rationalism, criticality, progress and equality. One could innocently ask how the thirst for knowledge and hunger for ‘the truth’ gave birth to the fourth wall?

This seemingly evident contradiction becomes less surprising when understanding that what comes hand in hand with erudition and objectivism is a process of segmentation, division and compartmentalisation, one that is most palpable when looking at the development of the Encyclopedia, or a Systematic Dictionary of the Sciences, Arts and Crafts, edited by Jean Le Rond d’Alembert and none other than Denis Diderot himself, and more specifically their organisation of virtually all knowledge, in the form of a tree graph.

Back in 2023 at the Warwick Arts Centre’s Mead Gallery—housed within the University of Warwick in Coventry, the United Kingdom—Katrina Palmer built and arranged partition walls. Entering her solo exhibition, titled What’s already going on?, you first stepped into a long corridor that was the 1:1 scale reproduction of another one you could find on campus, in the Philosophy Departement. Except that, within the exhibition space, doors were not leading to classrooms nor offices: where you would usually find room numbers and the names of professors on the door, you could only see blurred and distorted information. The signs of recognition had been erased to give space to ‘potential matter’.

Almost all of the doors in the corridor were closed. Only a few would open and lead you to different rooms which were mostly empty. One space was filled with nothing but a stack of chairs and tables up against a wall, some of them draped in a see-through fabric, as if left behind after an event or before a move. The action wasn’t taking place inside, but in the transitional space that is the corridor. Loud noises were echoing through- out the entire space, but information needed to locate the source of the sound, or what produced it, wasn’t made readily available.

The ‘content’ only unveiled gradually. A large photograph of an undefined earthy mass. A set of abstract drawings—or exercises—on lined sheets of paper. A video wall made out of eight monitors documenting the artist in the process of learning to throw knives at clay agregates at night. The same agregates which you could find, later on, as target-sculptures, exhibited behind air vents: making them partially available to the eye and inaccessible to touch. Thus, in What’s already going on?, Katrina Palmer played with wall-building to re-arrange the hierarchy of what’s considered ‘the work’. The ‘result’—a.k.a. the sculptures—came last and were ‘unreachable’, while the process of making them, and their ‘echoes’, hit you first. In a sense, you could say that the arrangement of partition walls was a way to ‘break the fourth wall’ of the artwork’s production.

Katrina Palmer’s wishful intervention at A Tale of A Tub for Four-story, Flat-roofed Complex in a Somewhat Expressionist Style, and more specifically her desire to ‘remove the front wall’, is therefore another experiment in architectural reorientation leading to a shift in the hierarchy of values. Within the Justus van Effencomplex estate, her fiction of destruction holds the power to question access and visibility on multiple levels: how public is an institution or an art space if you have to push its doors? How private is art? What has the implementation of an art space within the estate erased? What can it reveal?

As the destruction isn’t realistically possible—yet— the artist has instead removed the entrance doors to replace them with metal sheets on top of which a sign reads ‘Another Way is Possible’. The kind of message that could be used as political slogan—which maybe it is, just much more humble and actually ‘possible’. It’s an obstruction quickly turned into an invitation. In the main space, one can find the removed doors laying on the ground on top of removal blankets. Their position and scale recalls recumbent effigies that can be seen in cathedrals and other sacred spaces. Institutional corpses.

[1] I borrow this expression from drag slang, ‘to bring the house down’ originally meaning ‘to garner enthusiastic or wild applause or laughter.’ It can also be used as an adverb, as an intensifier.
[2] Denis Diderot, Discours sur la poésie dramatique, 1771.