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. It carries a tone of criticism that corrects a false impression. As a correction, it occurs after the utterance to consider the utterance.

When working with ‘space’, however, in a sculptural situation, contradiction is key to making space into a substantial form, a visible entity. Not, however, to correct an utterance, but as the utterance.

The difference is that in a sculptural situation, contradiction is self-refutation. The work refutes itself to become itself. 

It therefore involves a double action where the second action turns back to face the first. This is opposite to art as expression, which is a single action. It is an art critic who might at first look in the same direction as the expression before turning to look back at the expression. Contradiction is the act, the movement of thought, the turning to look back, the revolving, the returning. Unlike an art critic who turns back, however, in most circumstance to negate the artwork’s credibility, a sculptuation’s negation is a self-refutation that makes space credible, as a something to see. The self-generating negation is, therefore, a positive activity. Its negation is a process, not a product, plugged into the constant mediation of being in the world.

A sculptural situation has first, therefore, to surrender to its immateriality to posit itself, to substantiate itself, as a material 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 itself 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 on the floor by pronouncing its own contents as the sculpture, the thing to see. A plinth is a big arrow that says this is art. The plinth, in its very nature, contradicts the actual sculpture in the room.

Upon opening the magazine, however, its pages are empty except at the centre. This turns the sculpture on the floor into a pattern that it repeats, but in revers — as the opposite. The sculpture has an empty centre, whereas the magazine’s content in the centre is surrounded by emptiness. 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 it can be photographed, documented, archived — represented — the representation is secondary to the artwork. Yet, in this instance, by being on the plinth, the representation takes precedence over the artwork as primary, not secondary.

In a variety of ways, the work undoes space as ‘the’ thing to see. It reddens itself asunder.

Coincidence

Left at that, the actual space of the artwork would remain sublated into its opposite, its reproduction. Except, the sublation and reproduction coincide — they face each other, alongside each other. By coinciding, they shift between 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 when the representation surrenders. The plinth is the size for a closed, no open magazine. Once flipped through then closed, again, to fit the plinth, 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 anew, pinned down by four corners 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, through the process of its differentiation, the differentiation becomes the content of the artwork’s form. The form of a space — through art action, its formation — is it’s 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 as if thought is interwoven into space’s fabric. For whose thought would that be? Not mine. God’s? I don’t think so.

Instead, space — the Aether — is the first ‘other’ to thought when thought, my own thought, is not yet thought before it meets its other when I am born. Without space existing before thought, there would be no thought.

Our first encounter with space is the first contradiction 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.

A sculptural situation embraces that movement.

Gail Hastings
November 2022