Space holder lost when one day relocating its half-cylinder space, 2023

A page from the Encyclopaedia of Stares that are Stairs, 2024, is an extended page from an encyclopaedia between opposite rooms. In one, chairs facing the door allow those seated to anticipate a friend’s return. In the other, chairs similarly arranged allow those seated to anticipate a friend’s arrival.

From the first room’s door, stares take us through real space along their passage, before becoming stairs that lead to the opposite door.

Shadowing this movement across the extended page, the encyclopaedia reads:
‘They a-

[real space, which our eyes bridge]

wait their

[real space our eyes again bridge]

friend’s re-’,
at which point we reach the opposite room.

To read further, we stare through real space as we seek the new line and return to the first room, whereupon by returning, we discover we are, in reality, the friend whose return is so patiently awaited.

The circular movement our stares make through three-dimensional space to return to the first room creates the encyclopaedic form of a sculptural situation — a circle. It also completes the form by filling it with the movement’s content — the work’s much anticipated meaning — before everyone involved takes their leave.

An all-round staring at the work echoes the all-round knowledge of an extended encyclopaedic page.

Gail Hastings
September 2024

A dress, ‘page 28’ from a thirty-two page novel, watercolour and lead pencil on cotton, hangs in a hotel room under refurbishment — Room 32.

Studio Gail Hastings

Art Journal
Vol. 77, No. 3
Fall 2018

The Power of Inclusion in Donald Judd’s Art

by Gail Hastings

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 2016

The first two of a twelve page artist’s project in Art Journal, 2018.

Space, in pictorial representations, is traditionally treated as a window — a transparent medium we look through to see the objects beyond it. Similarly, the surface of a picture plane becomes transparent and disappears when we look through it to see the scene its depicts. The twelve-pages artist’s project published in Art Journal starts with this notion. The photographic image on the left of each spread has us look beyond the page’s surface to see the scene depicted in the photograph. A facing watercolour on the right mirrors the photograph. This time, though, the watercolour pigment clogs the page’s surface grain and hinders us from looking through the surface to see, instead, its surface.

In these first two pages, the window is part of a room with space in front of the window: the space inside the room, which is also the space in front of the pigment-clogged watercolour page.