Contradiction & Coincidence
Contradiction in everyday parlance is akin to a refutation. If I state it is nighttime when daytime, then I need only open my eyes to refute my statement.
When working with ‘space’, however, in a sculptural situation, contradiction is instead key to making space a substantial form, a visible entity.
The difference is that in a sculptural situation, the contradiction is a self-refutation. The work has first, therefore, to refute itself to become itself.
This is opposite to the practice of art as expression. It is an art critic who might refute that expression, not the expression itself. An art critic’s negativity differs from that of a sculptural situation’s self-refutation since an art critic negates an artwork’s credibility. Whereas a sculptuation’s negation is a self-refutation that posits space as an entity instead, as a something to see. The self-generating negation is a positive activity.
A sculptural situation has first, therefore, to surrender itself to posit itself, to substantiate itself, as a spatial entity. It has first to lose in the conquest of being. Made asunder as part of its own process, space then looks back upon its dissolution to render itself anew.
A simple version of this can be seen in ‘untitled with magazine’, 1989, at Store 5, Maples Lane, Prahran.
Upon entering the room, four wax blocks demarcate an ‘empty’ centre. The empty space is the sculpture, the thing to see, except we cannot see it. It is too alike the space outside the blocks to differentiate as separate. There is no delineation.
Contradiction
To the left is a plinth (pedestal, platform) for an art magazine of the same size and stock as Art Forum. The effect of the plinth is to denounce the actual sculpture alongside by pronouncing its own contents as the sculpture, the thing to see. The plinth contradicts the actual sculpture in the room.
Upon opening the magazine, its pages are empty except at the centre in opposition to the sculpture’s empty centre. The magazine’s layout contradicts the actual space of the artwork in the room. The two are at odds.
The magazine’s central page depicts a part of the artwork, not the whole artwork. The representation contradicts the artwork’s presentation. The representation is also of a solid part of the artwork, not its space. Again, the representation contradicts the artwork.
Since an artwork has first to be made before its representation, the representation is secondary to the artwork. Yet, in this instance, by being on the plinth, the representation takes precedence over the artwork to become primary instead.
In a variety of ways, the work undoes space as ‘the’ thing to see.
Coincidence
Left at that, the actual space of the artwork would remain sublated into its opposite, its reproduction. Except, the sublation and reproduction coincide in their shifting primary and secondary roles. The coincidence is a collision between opposites within the same occurrence.
The coincidence is a turning point at which the process now folds back upon itself. The reverse begins as the representation surrenders when the magazine is closed to fit the plinth once more. The representation becomes a memory secondary to the actual presentation of the artwork’s space.
Made asunder at first, we now return to the space pinned down by four corners rendered anew as the ‘thing’ to see in all its emptiness. The space of the artwork is now differentiated from the space of the room. The difference is gentle. Yet, it is the difference that forms the artwork’s space its own content.
Years after I made this artwork, I read the German philosopher G. W. F. Hegel. In his Preface to the Phenomenology of Sprit of 1807 he writes:
Pure self-recognition is absolute otherness, this Aether as such, is the ground and soil of Science or knowledge in general. The beginning of philosophy presupposes or requires that consciousness should dwell in this element.
(A.V. Miller translation, p. 14)
It’s not that space is a substance of mind where thought interwoven through the fabric of space. For whose thought would that be? Not mine.
Instead, space — the Aether — is the first ‘other’ to thought. So much so that without space existing before thought, there would be no thought.
Our first encounter with space at birth is the first difference we experience that jettisons us into the synapsis of difference at the foundation of language. That first moment is a surrender to space as other before we ‘know’ there is anything other. Our relationship with space continues from that day, unavowed. Thought’s movement through ‘absolute otherness’, through space, to return as ‘thought’ is thought’s livelihood.
Gail Hastings
November 2022
space Tendency: Contradiction and Coincidence
Afternoon Tea at 4:00pm 2022
The two watercolour floorplans in this sculptuation are mirror reversals. Each contradicts the other.
— On the left, the upper room is filled with coloured rectangles; except for a black gap where four rectangles are missing.
— On the right, the previous rectangles are scaled down to fit the missing section. It is a rug based on the design of Sophie Taeuber-Arp’s tearoom from 1928 in Paris.
— On the left, space filled words that say ‘Afternoon Tea at 4:00pm’ on circular signs fill the walls of the room except for a missing sign.
— On the right the reversal of that same room finds the walls empty of circular signs, except for one sign: the missing sign.
— On the left, the inner room has two floorplans of here, now, viewed from nowhere above. Lining its curve is a bookshelf with a gap in the middle, which is empty except for one book about this moment here, now.
— On the right, the opposite bookshelf fits the previous gap on the one hand, but doesn’t fit on the other since it is a full bookshelf except for one missing book — the opposite. On the wall, instead of floorplans from nowhere above, there is a collection of five corners from the spaces stored on the 4:00pm tea trolley. This is actually in the room in which one stands to look at the work.
The two opposing floorplans complete each other in the combination of all their features except for one moment that remains missing. It is a moment of coincidence at 4:00pm when a tea trolley is wheeled into the room to serve tea — just as the sign states. At that moment the five missing corners coincide with the place from which they are missing.
It is a moment that completes the artwork’s space by being, nevertheless, forever in the throes of incompleteness.
Floor Plan: Spilt Milk 1990
The occasion: A Sculpture Triennial Forum at Town Hall, Melbourne.
The situation: The lower Town Hall with a raised stage at the far end opposite the entrance. Blue plastic chairs in rows in front. Vacant space on the audience’s left and right flanks.
The sculptuation: On the right flank the situation comprises of half a square room demarcated on the floor, a circular table, a circular chair at the table, and an open book on the table. The open book is full of empty pages except for a central image. The image is of the lower town hall’s floor plan with a cup of spilt milk on top. The caption reads ‘object: Spilt Milk’.
The situation on the left flank repeats the first, but as a mirror reflection. The floor demarcations, table, and chair are not coated in acrylic paint as is the first, but white wax. The book is similarly full of empty pages except for the central image that reverses the opposite books image. This time, though, the caption reads ‘objectively spilling’.
The forum’s audience is at the centre of these two opposites. The common understanding of the phrase ‘don’t cry over spilt milk’ is it is pointless to cry over a regrettable circumstance that has already happened.
The contradiction: The painted situation on the right of the audience is reflected as coated in wax on the left. The set object on the right of the audience — spilt milk — becomes fluid on the left, in the act of spilling.
The coincidence: The discussion of sculpture at the centre of the two opposites is a fluid movement of thought that each speaker activate. The subject of the forum ‘sculpture’ in Melbourne at that time was, conversely, static with little thought breaching its limits.
Floor plan: Empty, except 1990
The announcement posted to gallery visitors comprised of a floor plan with a square room on one end, a Room of Remembered Mistakes, and a circular room on the other end, a Room of Mistakes About to be.
The sculptural situation visitors then entered comprised of a waxed square propped on one end of a long passageway, and a waxed circle propped on the other.
The floor plans legend stencilled onto the wall lists the floor plans measurements, where:
12 inconsequences = 1 thought, and
3 thoughts = 1 conversation.
The length of the actual passageway is stencilled as 10Cs, 10 conversations, which equals 30 thoughts or 360 inconsequences.
