My Tent is My Castle

A different place, a different time: Norway, Autumn 1999. It is night-time in a forest clearing. Members of a Satanist order are meeting outside a black tent with a pointed pendentive dome that brings to mind Gothic flying buttresses. The Satanists draw a pentagram in the earth with long wooden staves and plant a circle of torches in the ground. A gentle, bleating lamb is dragged in. A butcher's knife flashes.

It is almost impossible to encounter one of Vincent Tavenne's tent sculptures without your culture-association machinery immediately whirring into action. He can strike camp and pitch his tents just as quickly as if they were real, functional, nomadic dwellings. Designed and stitched together by a self-taught architect, they run the gamut of an unstable and ephemeral typology. Tavenne's formal language ranges from the war tent of knightly chivalry (Tente Blanche, White Tent, 1998), or the temple of a Satanist ritual (Tente Noire, Black Tent, 1996), to a Californian hippie home (Tente Colorée, Coloured Tent, 1995) or a domed, Buckminster Fuller-style object (Tente Orange, Orange Tent, 1998). Tavenne brings freshness and topicality to a subject that has long been neglected by cultural history.

Tents, tepees, yurts and wigwams, amongst the oldest of all dwellings, are themselves cultural nomads of a kind - objects without a home in the realm of the historian because of their very impermanence. If we require more proof that art only becomes cultural history when it is placed in the museum, then here it is. It needed architectural Modernism - and architects like Otto Frei or Richard Rogers, with their predilection for floating halls vaulted with fabric like airship hangars, festival tents or stadiums stands - to rediscover the advantages of transparent membrane structures and modular building methods, and transport at least one aspect of nomadic accommodation into the late 20th and early 21st century.

Tents are usually erected when their occupants reject (or can't afford) more enclosed or stable accommodation. (Gordon Matta-Clark aired his craving for a more atmospheric way of life in a somewhat different way: in 1976, he shot out all the windows of the Institute of Architecture and Urban Studies with an air rifle.) Yet, Tavenne's sculptures do not emphasise the translucent element of tent architecture, its tendency to open things up, as demonstrated in 19th-century circus tents or their sedentary offshoots, the delicate, glazed pavilions found in landscape gardens. He prefers the opaque elements: you never know what you'll see when you go inside one of his tents. This closed quality, and the literally descriptive titles (if they are titled at all), create a sculptural effect, while the tents' domed shape evokes a whole retinue of architectural history. The octagon of Tente Blanche, for example, comprised of monochrome white linen, echoes the majestic form of Medieval citadel architecture. Likewise, an untitled tent work of 1994 evokes pavilions: the strips of tent fabric are gathered under the vault in such a way that they give an impression of soft columns, supporting the crown of the tent through round arches. But it is, in fact, suspended on a wooden device with eight radial arms, from which extend nylon cords that support the weight of the dome and hold its shape. This sculpture is startlingly similar to Leonardo da Vinci's famous sketch of a parachute, but attempting a jump with this utopian wood and linen construction would be a risky venture. The question of practical use can be answered quickly: Tavenne makes sculptures, not model dwellings for open-air campers - coarse linen has a markedly tactile structure and exudes a characteristic and comforting odour, but it is not weatherproof, and certainly does not conform to official Consumer Standards.

Tavenne plays with the infinite referential texture of architecture, deploying a rhetoric of border demarcation, and of autistic withdrawal behind emotional, defensive architectural gestures. Tents tend to give a clearly defined indication of human presence in not so clearly defined topographies, but without revealing the people themselves. The nomadic camps that have existed on the Agadir plateau in the Atlas mountains since primeval times comprise an apparently endless row of black goat's wool tents. This dead straight chain of black could be seen as either a welcoming gesture of human presence or as a daunting wall. Tavenne's sculptures have a comparable ambivalence: they are both sculpture and architecture. They represent abstract, spatial signs, and also, at least theoretically, functional buildings. Their semi-permeable membrane structure may make them appear lightweight, but they are, in fact, extremely substantial.

At the group exhibition 'Mondo Imagginario' at the Shedhalle in Zurich last year, Tavenne created a work that linked the rhetoric of the hermetic and private with the greatest possible abstraction of the tent form's ancient origins. Admittedly, the rubberised, almost spherical, protective space of Tente Orange is more like an extraterrestrial space ship than a refuge in which to spend the night, but its combination of symbolic withdrawal and futuristic aesthetic is comparable to Buckminster Fuller's geodesic domes - the cave itself can be transplanted, it can travel.

This undertone of imaginary roaming is often present; it makes sense that the tent sculptures are frequently accompanied by pictures and objects describing fictional worlds - not least to prevent the focus being restricted to architectural matters. For a recent one-person show in Berlin, Tavenne exhibited woodcuts and plaster disks with concave or convex surfaces painted a shiny black - like the black mirrors painters used to look at between painting sessions to ease the eye - to complement the fabric sculpture. The woodcuts were made on individual sheets of paper joined together to create the image of a blue sky with clouds (all works Untitled, 1999). The works anticipate the experience of entering the slit of the circular, beige jute tent. Inside, a spiral passageway leads into the centre, which, lined in blue material, opens up like a funnel towards the ceiling - an imaginary sky with a lightbulb as the sun. Two boundaries are thus imposed on the immaterial: one of fabric, that leaves open a symbolic flight to the utopian, and one that touches on the limits of the image as a clichéd representation of the sky. Can we really see the sky, or are we simply being deceived?

In the 1999 group exhibition 'Superca...' at the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, Tavenne made it clear that he would rather let different eras, dimensions and worlds collide in his work than keep them neatly separated. He placed an enlarged bronze copy of a champagne cork alongside one of his tent structures (both Untitled, 1998); it looked as if it had been abandoned by a giant Bacchus, for whom there would scarcely have been room in the three-metre high Tente Blanche which stood opposite. On the wall hung a woodcut of an archetypal Romantic subject: Berglandschaft (Mountain Landscape, 1998). It presented a motif steeped in longing; precisely because most Alpine travellers never actually reach the beckoning mountain peaks wrapped in the clouds. Tavenne's tents are both as real and evocative as this nebulous image, and you are willingly taken in by them, again and again.