Encyclopaedia of Waiting: pages 5, 4, 2 & 1, 1993

A lost feeling, stares-that-are-stairs

Stares-that-are-stairs are made of felt on wood. In 1993, they sat on stage between the audience and solo and duet dance work by Shelley Lasica and Sandra Parker in Temporal at Anna Schwartz Gallery, Melbourne. 

A lost feeling, in adopting the past participle of the verb to feel — felt — the sculptural situation ‘A lost feeling’ is made of felt on wood. It is a space holder that sits on the border between the stares/stairs and the room into which they lead: the dance work on stage. 

The artwork begins on the back of the A4 performance program as a floor plan that measures the dance stage as 228.3 shifts wide and 17.5 moments long.

A legend accompanies the plan in which 12 shifts = one meaning, and 3 meanings = one moment. They echo an imperial not a metric scale (12 inches in a foot, three feet in a yard). 

The echo recognises forbearers in the 1960s Minimal art and, in this instance and more specifically, Mel Bochner’s Measurement Room — an artwork in which measurements of a room measure the room. By measuring a room’s wall surfaces and then drawing those measurements onto the wall surfaces they measure, Measurement Room creates a visual tautology. 

For if a room’s measurements represent that room; then, in Bochner’s artwork, instead of the representation being figurative — as, say, a painting of the room on canvas — the representation is the actual room. If Mel Bochner had instead represented the room as a painting, he could have walked out the door to hang it some distance away in another room. Instead, there is no distance between the representation of the room — its measurements — and the room. Measurement Room makes explicit what is implicit in Minimal art. Stares-that-are-stairs takes it a step further. A Lost Feeling measures a dancer’s stage in a movement’s shifts. 

A sculptural situation’s enchantment of physical space recognises that the exteriority of space has no content other than its own formation. 

I began working with stares-that-are-stairs over thirty years ago.

Gail Hastings
February 2024