Space Practising Tools

Description

The above pages from Space Practising Tools show either a block or blocks of space around which Gail Hastings has built a space practising tool. Instead of wood housing determining a resulting space inside, a block of space instead determines the resulting measurements of its wood housing.

For space is the main character in Space Practising Tools. In the beginning, we fear space. As life goes on, we learn to ignore our fear by learning to ignore space. This makes it difficult to see space and, as a consequence, to see a sculptural situation in which space is central. In Space Practising Tools, Hastings develops a practical way to see and to work with actual space. Through photographs, watercolours, and diagrams, Hastings documents a range of spatial contradictions that separates the tridimensional space a sculptural situation creates from everyday space. In doing so, Space Practising Tools calls on Josef Albers’ Interaction of Color of 1966 as a precedent in its experimental approach to studio observational procedures. However, unlike colour, space has instead to engage a process of contradiction inherent in thought, in language, to materialise. Otherwise, space remains invisible.

Jon Roffe’s more historical introduction unleashes a twist in aesthetic adventures that speaks to a commitment to the everyday process of being in Space Practising Tools.

Jon Roffe is a Deleuzian scholar and considered one of Deleuze’s best interpreters (Daniel W. Smith, Purdue University). He is the author of The Works of Gilles Deleuze I: 1953-1969 (re.press 2019) — a ‘[w]itty, unpretentious, yet rigorous, erudite and illuminating‘, and a ‘truly remarkable book—compelling, provocative and original’ (Ronald Bogue, University of Georgia). He is also the author of Gilles Deleuze’s Empiricism and Subjectivity (Edinburgh University Press, 2017). Roffe teaches philosophy at the Melbourne School of Continental Philosophy.