Tag: Behind you

  • Making space for the invisible architecture of the social

    Making space for the invisible architecture of the social

    Gail Hastings professes to be a sculptor, but she is an unusual one. Her works often consist of such unfamiliar sculptural media as watercolours or pencil drawings. Her subject matter is equally unusual. It often features pages that look as if they have been transplanted from some esoteric encyclopaedia or otherwise may contain snippets of an overheard conversation. These tantalising elements are in turn ‘housed’ within Hastings’s finely constructed abstract, geometric spaces.

    The effect is like walking into an abstract painting, except to say that one may also encounter text, specially devised furniture or intricate floor plans that actively shape the space of the work. Hastings regards her works as ‘sculptural situations’ rather than as paintings or installations, or even sculptures. Rather than adhering to a pre-existing location, Hastings seeks to craft space – in particular, she seeks to craft an inter-subjective space, a social space of conversation and communication. This is at once a remarkably fraught, ambitious and fascinating enterprise. It is also one reason why the experience of Hastings’s evocative situations is like confronting something vaguely familiar, yet weirdly opaque.

    Hastings thinks of our inter-subjective space as a kind of invisible architecture comprised of both intersecting and dissecting personal and public-social trajectories. Think of how conversations in cafes are usually private, sometimes intimate, although they are conducted in a highly public forum and thus often easily overheard. Or think of how mobile phone conversations connect two people in quite separate places, while at one end a participant may carry on the conversation quite audibly and unselfconsciously as if ensconced in some imaginary private booth. Once the speakers hang up, it is as though they have been transported back to the formal composure of public space.

    We are constantly reminded that we are social beings, but our shared space is often the arena of our greatest anxieties as much as of our greatest joys and satisfactions. The ideal of public space and of conversation is the perfect accord: every voice heard and the coming together of contrasting elements in the golden glow of harmonization. Our anxieties intrude when we feel that this ideal evades us or when we are left to negotiate less than satisfactory social transactions. The ideals of art were once very similar – the perfect accord, the ideal narrative – yet today contemporary art addresses different ambitions by focusing upon the peculiar in the familiar and giving the readily familiar a peculiar outlook.

    Hastings is very contemporary in this sense. She professes her frustration at the struggle ‘to make actual space perceivable in a work of contemporary art’ even though it is the great ambition of her work. This is perhaps why the superbly crafted spaces of Hastings’s work convey an air of serenity or of determined order, while at the same time leave the lasting impression of some kind of riddle or mystery. The visual-textual cues invariably deposited around her elegant, abstract spaces hint at some undisclosed plot. These cues actually constitute a set of disparate spatial-temporal markers delineating the seemingly tangible, but elusive ‘architecture’ of inter-subjective space. The works thereby hinge upon an ambiguous aspiration: they strive to present the most composed and tightly unified work possible, while devising a space sufficiently evocative that it is open to vivid and at times unaccountable inter-subjective projections.

    Hastings’s sculptural situations often interweave disparate clues suggesting a transit in time and space. The employment of spatial and temporal cues is one of the distinctive features of Hastings’s art. In an earlier work, Encyclopaedia of a moment’s evidence 1993, each fastidiously designed and hand-rendered page – purportedly from this cryptic encyclopaedia – looks like some arcane activity sheet recording a mysterious quest for knowledge. The passage of time is surreptitiously inscribed in Times font, yet the page numbers do not reveal a sequence at all but simply repeat page five each time. They appear like pages from an unfathomably stalled text because the sequence goes nowhere, except spatially from room to room. We encounter a busy, episodic circuit signalling a pursuit or a quest, as if striving to render significance, although barely registering in time.

    Plate 3: Moment 12.00pm
    At 12.01, she hurriedly enters room A
    in urgent search for the evidence of mo-
    ment 12.00pm. She finds it. [5]

    Plate 4: Moment 12.00pm
    At 12.01, assured that the evidence of
    moment 12.00pm was in room B, she
    entered, but too late. The evidence had
    been wiped away. [5]

    Plate 5: Moment 12.00pm
    If evidence of the moment 12.00pm ex-
    isted, it would be found in room C. She
    enters room C at 12.01 and she finds no evi-
    dence of moment 12.00pm. [5]

    The clipped syntax mimics the text inscribed by an old typewriter, which harshly ‘justifies’ the lines by abruptly breaking words in two (even though every line of the work is carefully delineated by hand). Breaks too occur in the flow of ‘evidence’. Is a case building, or evaporating?

    A different example of such temporal-spatial puzzles is found in Room for love 1990, which contains a conversational or ‘tête-à-tête’ chair, an S-shaped two-seater sofa, sometimes called a ‘love chair’. In such a chair, two people sit in close proximity facing in opposite directions, although they can also converse face-to-face. For Hastings, the analogy alludes to the often-fraught dynamics of social interaction as well as to the reception of art: ‘the chair was intended as a conversation with oneself when one looks at a work of art – where two opposing views are struck – literally –while there is also this third, reconciliatory view of turning halfway toward the opposite view’.1  [See a detail image of Room for love above]

    The analogy is highly suggestive. For instance, this piece of writing aims to explicate the work for a reader who may have already experienced it, but like the ‘tête-à-tête’ chair it aims to turn the viewer around again to face the work, although differently. It may even extend the understanding of the work beyond conceptions ordinarily entertained by the artist. The analogy also recalls the puzzled status of art in the wake of post-minimalist art, which prompts questions such as: what is the ordinary, quotidian object and what is the artwork? What does it do? As the art historian Thierry de Duve notes of the minimalists, ‘far from freeing themselves “from the increasing ascetic geometry of pure painting”, the minimalists claimed it and projected it into real space’.2 This is what Hastings does, except that she stage-manages this extended state of puzzlement over the status of art.

    With her latest work, referencing Walter Burley Griffin and Marion Mahoney Griffin’s partially realised plan for Canberra, Hastings shifts attention from puzzlement over the confounding qualities of post-minimalist art to the earlier aspirations of such abstract, geometric visual languages associated with the urge to forge a common, equitable social space. This ideal was typified by the Griffins’ thwarted plan to place a library at the apex of Capitol Hill just above Parliament House. Hence, the aim was to erect a space for knowledge and reflection at the apex of its social-symbolic space, a place devoted not only to historical memory but to the on-going articulation and re-articulation of the shared space of a nation. The Griffins are perfect for Hastings’s purposes because they intertwine the aspirations of an abstract visual language with a similar concern for social space – and this has tempted some to interpret secret or esoteric meanings behind their elaborate designs.3

    Hastings perhaps recalls an ideal space for art, but one that has escaped it throughout modernity. Her persistent and distinct art practice attempts to yield an inter-subjective space, which defies her as well as art in general, but which also eludes each and every one of us daily. Yet such an irrevocably intangible space is regularly experienced in keenly felt ways and this is what Hastings magically aims to manifest. The Griffins once aimed to make the ‘invisible architecture’ of a nation explicit whereas today (ironically) it lies buried within the confines of parliament. In striving to make that invisible architecture of intersubjective space perceivable, Hastings’s art rearticulates that vision for a contemporary audience. Hers is an art, however, that evokes the formal composure of the original Griffin plan – with its ideal apex now buried and remote – and we soon realise that it is attuned to what may just as readily escape us in conjuring this formal composure.

    1. Gail Hastings, private communication with author. [↩]
    2.  Thierry de Duve, Kant after Duchamp, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA 1996, p 218. [↩]
    3. James Weirick, ‘Spirituality and symbolism in the work of the Griffins’ in Anne Watson (ed), Beyond architecture: Marion Mahony and Walter Burley Griffin in America, Australia and India, Powerhouse Publishing, Sydney 1998, pp 56–85. [↩]
  • Why I make editions: A space for possibilities

    Why I make editions: A space for possibilities

    A ‘limited edition’ is a term we generally associate with printmaking or photography in contemporary art. Both involve the reproduction of an artwork a number of times. If the ‘number of times’ is limited to, say, 100 prints, then the artwork is an edition of 100.

    There is a problem here, however, with the word ‘reproduction’. For the word suggests it is an original artwork that is copied. The ‘original’, however, from which a contemporary print is pulled is not, in fact, an artwork but a block of wood, piece of lino or etched metal plate. While in photography, if digital, it is a raw image file of electronic signals turned into 0’s and 1’s.

    Technically speaking, then, each print is not a ‘copy’ of an artwork, but an artwork in itself. As ‘originality’ is one of the most persisting measures of a work of art, the question therefore arises as to how a contemporary print can be original and a reproduction at the same time.

    If originality rests on difference, we can find difference within printmaking by the fact a source degenerates, through wear and tear, each time a print is taken. As a result, each print is particular in its departure from the ‘whole’. If, however, its departure is too original, the print loses its value as part of a whole. Originality, as such, takes on certain parameters within which any shift too great breaks the context that defines it.

    The relation between the whole and its parts, the prints, is therefore interesting. In certain ways it is not unlike the relation between the ancient philosopher Plato’s pure forms — ideas — and the objects derived from them. A pure form, for instance, could be a bed. If we think of all the beds built throughout time, each and every bed is but a reproduction of the one true bed, the absolute bed, the idea of a bed.

    Yet this idea of a bed is not something we can actually pull back the covers of and sleep in. Its reproductions, however, as the concrete objects that populate our bedrooms, are.

    Similarly, although the abiding image of a contemporary print edition is reproduced by each print, it — as an object itself — does not exist.

    Accordingly, there cannot be two (or more) ideas of a bed, only one ideal bed from which others are derived. An original cannot be a copy at the same time. For ‘if there had been two’, writes Plato in The Republic, ‘there would always have been a third — more absolute and abstract than either, under which they would have been included’. The third, therefore, would be the original and the other two its copies.

    This, though, flies in the face of a contemporary print being an original as well as a copy. There is nevertheless still a similarity. An Ideal form is a whole that includes its reproductions, just as a print edition’s abiding image, the conglomerate of all that is common in each print, is a whole that includes each print’s similarities.

    This parallel between Plato’s pure forms and a limited edition is, however, an awkward one to make today. Any Platonic notion of a pure Idea or absolute Ideal has been permanently besmirched for any artist working on this side of minimalism.

    A non-material form we cannot physically experience (the idea of a bed) is no longer more ‘real’, as in Plato’s day, than a material object we can physically experience (a concrete bed). The real is no longer God given (Plato’s forms), but earth bound (minimalism’s objects). Experience no longer confounds understanding (Plato) but is its foundation (minimalism). Minimalism is the ‘art of the real’. ((The art of the real; USA, 1948-1968 was the title of the 1968 exhibition curated by E.C. Goossen that included works by the minimalists and which travelled to Europe.))

    Post modernism, of course, took anti-Platonism further to obliterate the ‘pure’ entirely.  In this way ‘particularity’, in all its cultural, social, sexual and technological difference, is here to stay. Difference is defiance. Under such sway, the ‘whole’ is secularised blasphemy.

    This, for me at least, is a problem. I consider the ‘whole’ — albeit generally unrecognised — integral to minimalism, and I love minimalism. With everyone busy burning the ‘pure’ to much applause, no one appears to realise they have used the ‘whole’ as kindle. No art history lecture or essay have identified this. It has been a problem without words for me, for so long. Until, that is, I began to make editions.

    The first edition I made was during a six-month Power Institute studio residency at the Cité Internationale des Arts, Paris, in 1995. Not that I thought of or called the art I subsequently made an edition at the time. It was, rather, a nameless urge inspired by a purchase I made from the lower floor hardware section of the Bazar de l’Hôtel de Ville department store.

    The Bazar de l’Hôtel de Ville, as some will recall, is where in 1914 Marcel Duchamp purchased the first ‘unassisted’ readymade – the Bottle Rack (1914). ((See Thierry de Duve, ‘Kant after Duchamp’, An October Book, The MIT Press, p. 250.))

    Now treated with the conservator’s white gloves of art history as one of its most precious contemporary art objects, at the time this first unassisted readymade was unceremoniously dumped in the rubbish by Marcel Duchamp’s sister when tasked with clearing his studio after his departure for New York. Not until 1921 was a replacement purchased. ((See the National Gallery of Australia‘s notes. ))

    With this we have another parallel with a Platonic pure form. While many replicas have since ensured this first unassisted readymade retains its place in history, we only know this bottle rack through its replicas since it, itself, like a pure form, does not materially exist. ((Based on notes from the National Gallery of Australia‘s website, in 1921 Marcel Duchamp purchased a replacement (collection: Robert Lebel, Paris); in 1945 Man Ray purchased a third replica; in 1960 Robert Rauschenberg purchased a fourth replica in New York; and in 1963 a fifth was made for the Moderna Museet, Stockholm. In addition to which, in 1964, an edition of eight was made by Galleria Schwarz, Milan — of which the National Gallery of Australia has one. See picture.))

    It was not this, admittedly, that had me repeatedly traipse up Rue de Rivoli to ransack the basement floor of the Bazar de l’Hôtel de Ville to see, embarrassing as it is to admit, if they might perchance still sell the same bottle rack. They do not. Yet, in seeking it, I was captivated by how Duchamp’s 1914 bottle rack was but one of an unintentional limited edition. Each bottle rack was a reproduction of an Ideal bottle rack, the bottle rack each customer thought they had purchased before they discovered the idiosyncrasies, the faults, the particularities, of the one they actually purchased. Having signed an idiosyncratically ridden bottle rack, Marcel Duchamp effectively replaced the ‘Ideal’ in art that is pure and original, with a ‘particular’ that is impure and banal. He replaced the ‘whole’ with a ‘part’.

    If only I could make the same retrospectively inspired, though at the time ‘disinterested’, purchase. I tried, but failed.

    No matter on how many days I searched the basement, I had finally to realise I was no Marcel Duchamp (how arrogant, I know, to have even presumed otherwise). I accepted failure, then found something. Not a readymade, but a vacuum pack of brass circles arrayed in a geometric flower pattern, on a hot magenta and lime green board.

    Each pack of five rings reproduces the same pattern, differently. Each represents a possibility within a certain set of circumstances that delimit a whole space. I bought quite a few packs, took them back to the Power studio at the Cité and made the same work over and over — enamoured by a ‘whole’ from which each possibility derived.

    I took these with me to Düsseldorf, as I was about to have an exhibition there. The gallery director — Thomas Taubert — suggested we sell them as a limited edition. ((Encyclopaedia of possibilities, 1995, a limited edition of three, each of three parts, was exhibited in To make a work of thoughtful art, Ausstellungsraum Thomas Taubert, Düsseldorf, in 1995.)) I have made numerous editions since.

     

Gail Hastings