Event Type: Book Release
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The Missing Space Project: Six Interviews
Gail Hastings’ collection of interviews seeks to counter narrow interpretations of Minimal art, especially those claiming that Minimal art, which emerged in the mid 1960s, is a reductive practice. That misunderstanding dates to its earliest critics, but it neither fits her own experiences nor what she thinks the artists proclaimed. Minimal art is spring loaded with creative energy, and what that force creates is space.
The central issues debated by Hastings and the six scholars, curators and collectors she interviewed in 2015 determine whether Minimal art is a subtractive formal practice or an expansive sensual one and, also, whether it was a short-lived American movement or a widespread tendency in Western art and culture that spanned the twentieth century. For readers new to Minimal art, this volume is a good introduction to historical practices and changing understandings. For artists and art historians, these conversations hold fresh insights into prominent figures, from Kazimir Malevich to Sol LeWitt, while also engage in many who are little known or largely forgotten, such as Charlotte Posenenske and George Ortman. For scholars, there are remarks that invite further research, such as the names of adventurous gallerists in Europe in the 1960s who first showed this art.
Excerpt from David Raskin, ‘Introduction’, The Missing Space Project: Six Interviews, Pigment Publisher, Sydney, 2015, p.8.
This project has been assisted by the Australian Government through the Australia Council, its arts funding and advisory body.
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Missing: four sculptuations by Gail Hastings
A REVIEW
by Annabel Crabb
When Charles Saatchi’s gallery opened in South Bank, with its notorious list of headliners (chunks of frozen human blood, sump oil lagoons and rooms full of chopped-up cattle), one small corner was devoted to a collection of newspaper cartoons lampooning the works.
My favourite was one in which an Eskimo, gazing at Damien Hirst’s pickled tiger shark, turned to a fellow visitor with the remark: “My five-year-old son could’ve done that.”
Interaction with art can be an occasion for hilariously multi-directional anxiety. The artist, observing someone observing her work, feels an unbearable cocktail of solicitude and vulnerability. The observer, knowing she is observed, frets that she’s missing something.
Is loud art — sledgehammer art — trying to abolish this moment of tender confusion? A message delivered by means of a decomposing rattlesnake chained to a chocolate wheel may still prove confounding to some viewers, but at least there’s something to talk about in the interim. No awkwardness need ensue, when the spectacle itself fills the silence.
Quiet art, like the work of Gail Hastings, chooses instead to inhabit that moment and furnish it with humour.
Am I missing something? — the timeless fretful self-interrogation of the enthusiastic but apprehensive gallery-creeper — becomes, in Missing, the shape of the artwork itself.
It’s funny, because everyone recognizes this tendency in the civilian art-lover; this scrupulous and obedient hunt for scraps of meaning hidden here and there by the artist, failure to spot any of which might constitute a serious inadequacy.
It’s courageous, because of all the compulsions that I imagine might grip an artist in the act of creation, the temptation to spell it out must surely be one of the hardest to resist.
And it’s generous, because the greatest expression of faith and trust an artist can possibly articulate in the unknown person who will — somewhere down the track — pause in front of her work is to invite them in to it. To allow them the run of the place. To give them the thrill of being in on the joke.
Gail Hastings’ work achieves quite a remarkable state of grace. Taut control in design and execution, coupled with an exhilarating and generous capacity to turn things over, at exactly the right time, to the viewer.
This project has been assisted by the Australian Government through the Australia Council, its arts funding and advisory body.
