You are invited

Visual art enthusiasts one day in 1990, opened their old fashioned mailboxes out on the street to find, inside, a page torn from a love story fashioned into an invitation to Room for Love about to debut on exhibition.

Built thirty-five years ago with a handheld jigsaw in a studio at what was then 200 Gertrude Street, Room for Love is again on exhibition in the group exhibition A Fictional Retrospective: Gertrude’s First Decade 1985-1995 at Gertrude Contemporary in Naarm Melbourne.

While the above page, digitally represented, doesn’t quite replicate the earlier experience of physically receiving a page from Room for Love in the post, it is nevertheless torn from the same love story thirty-five years later to invite you, once again, to take a seat and share a tête-à-tête in Room for Love on exhibition until 23 March 2025.

Just as an inside page was originally torn from a romance novel and sent outside its covers as an invitation, Room for Love turns sculpture inside out. Sculpture, with a privileged centre a viewer typically circles on the outside periphery, is made void and replaced by a viewer’s tête-à-tête. Roland Barthes’ 1967 essay The Death of the Author finds its sculptural rendition in Room for Love twenty-three years later in 1990.

No longer is the artist’s intention, autobiography or a meaning held to be central to the work of art. No longer is the sculptural content central to its form. Instead, the form — the situation — takes centre stage as interlocutors step beyond its boundary to face each other in opposing directions, in conversation, as central to the work of art.

Sculptural situations – Gail Hastings

Presently on view

Please take a seat in Room for Love‘s tête-à-tête. In that, yes, when visiting the exhibition, please enter Room for Love and take a seat.

photo: Christian Capurro

Editorial work involves listening, opening one’s sense to silenced voices, to the quiet whispering at the porous edges of our consciousness. Gail Hastings notes that sometimes artworks seem to be reticent teachers, “muttering a lesson,” which we have to pry out of them. As both an artist and scholar reading the material and spatial in Donald Judd’s sculpture Untitled (DSS 33), Hastings rejects this metaphor, stating with and through Judd’s works and words that “The knowledge we therefore seek of DSS 33’s space cannot be found as a critically apt, well-packaged utterance detachable from the work. It is found, instead, in the reciprocal movement of the work’s self-determination, the ‘living force of its existence,’ forever in process of creating space while perpetually wading through the ‘natural confusion’ of life this embroils.” (A pause, here, to agree wholeheartedly with Hastings’s formulation while recognising it as, indeed, a well-packaged utterance of the highest caliber, one that does not deliver a didactic lesson.)
Rebecca M. Brown
Editor-in-Chief
Art Journal
Summer 2018