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.
