Of Measure and Material Masters Thesis Presented in Partial

Of Measure and Material

Masters Thesis

Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Master of Fine Arts Degree In the Graduate School of the Ohio State University

Nicole Langille

Graduate Program in Art

Ohio State University

2009

Thesis Committee:

Suzanne Silver, Advisor

Laura Lisbon

Alison Crocetta

Robert Derr

Abstract

Measure and material are both the physical and conceptual components of my work. Using the body and other substances, the intangible elements of space, time, movement and gravity are made palpable. Through objects and performances, videos and drawings, the invisible is made rigorously and subtlety visible.

This work is dedicated to Gerald DiBona.

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Acknowledgements

My research and achievement would not have been possible without the mentorship of my advisor, Suzanne Silver, and committee members Laura Lisbon,

Alison Crocetta, and Robert Derr. Each constantly extended themselves and most critically, asked the right questions when they were most needed. I would like to acknowledge the entire Painting and Drawing Area for providing a stimulating and diverse environment for inquiry, and in particular, my wonderful colleagues for the constant rigor and challenge they brought to the studio.

I would also like to thank the Department of Art and The Ohio State University for giving me the opportunity and support to study here. The experience obtained during these last two years has brought me to a new chapter in my career as an artist and educator, and it is with a debt of gratitude that I move with confidence towards the future.

Vita

Education

2009 Master of Fine Arts, Painting and Drawing, The Ohio State University, Columbus OH

2000 Bachelor of Fine Arts, Sculpture Boston University, Boston MA

Professional Experience

2007- Present Instructor of Record, The Ohio State University, Columbus OH Drawing I, Time Arts (including sound, video and performance)

2005-2007 Instructor of Record, The Evergreen State College, Olympia WA Installation Art, Sculpture, Professional Practices, and Figurative Sculpture

2004-2007 Visual Art Instructional Technician II, The Evergreen State College, Olympia WA

1998- 2000 Studio Technician (Ceramics), Boston University, Boston, MA

Selected Exhibition History

2009 2009 Master of Fine Arts Exhibition: Begged, Borrowed and Stolen, The Ohio State University, Urban Arts Space, Columbus OH

Something About Nothing, Wayne and Geraldine Kuhn Fine Arts Gallery, The Ohio State University at Marion, Marion OH

Resisting Distance, ROYGBIV, Columbus OH Jim Voorhies and Mark Harris, Curators

2008 The Ohio Art League Annual Fall Juried Exhibition, The Ohio Cultural Arts Center, Columbus OH. Richard Roth, Juror.

From Painting, Wayne and Geraldine Kuhn Fine Arts Gallery,The Ohio State University at Marion, Marion OH

Shift F7, Hopkins Hall Gallery, The Ohio State University, Columbus OH

2007 Convergence: 14 Emerging Artists from the Northwest, Burien Center for the Arts, Burien WA

2006 Showcase, The Basement Gallery, Knoxville TN Black and White, South Puget Sound Community College, Olympia WA

2005 Tiny Visions, Lake Washington United Methodist Church, Kirkland WA

2004 New Year, Evergreen State College, Olympia WA

Recognition and Awards

2009 The Graduate School Alumni Grant for Graduate Research The Ohio State University, Columbus OH

The Fergus- Gilmore Foundation Award The Ohio State University, Columbus OH

2008 The Ohio Art Foundation Award The Ohio Art League, Columbus OH

Art all Around, One of five award-winning finalists in an international public art competition, The Maine Center for Creativity, Portland ME

2000 William Randolph Hearst Scholarship, The Anderson Ranch Art Center, Snowmass CO

Bibliography

Starker, Melissa. “TOUCHY subject”, The Columbus Alive, 26 November 2008.

Beem, Edgar Allen. “Tank Farm as Work of Art, Art All Around gives new meaning to “oil painting””, posted on 20 August 2008, http://www.yankeemagazine.com/blogs/art/tanks

Cronenweth, Scott. “Judging aTank by It’s Cover”, Port City Life, October 2008.

Keyes, Bob. “Tank Project Goes Very Public”, The Portland Press Herald, 17 August 2008.

Keyes, Bob. “Artists compete to show tank farms true colors”, The Portland Press Herald, 13 August 2008.

Robinson, Jerry. Artists Converging in Burien, Highline Times 6 February 2007.

Curatorial Experience

2009 Locomotion, The Ohio Art League, Columbus OH

Fields of Study

Major Field: Art

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Table of Contents

Abstract ……………………………………………………………………………………………..……ii

Dedication………………………………………………………………………………………….……iii

Acknowledgements…………………………………………………………………………….…..iv

Vita……………………………………………………………………………………………………….…v

List of Images…………………………………………………………………………………….…..ix

Preface………………………………………………………………………………………….………..1

Chapter I………………………………………………………………………………………………...4

Chapter 2………………………………………………………………………………………………..8

Chapter 3...…………………………………………………………………………………….……..15

Chapter 4……………………………………………………………………………………………...23

Chapter 5………………………………………………………………………………………….…..28

Afterword………………………………………………………………………………………….……33

Works Cited……………………………………………………………………………………….….34

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List of Images

1. Lift……………………………………………….……………………………………………………...7

2. Support………………………………………………………………………………………………12

3. Fold…………………………………………………………………………………………….……..13

4. Fold II…………………………………………………………………………………………………14

5. Puncture…………………………………………………………………………………………....20

6. A Page From the Book of Inventions III…………………………………….………..21

7. A Page from the Book of Inventions III (detail)……………………………….…..22

8. Collapse…………………………………………………………………………….……………….26

9. Standing…………………………………………………………………………………………....27

10.Transnavigation………………………………………………………………………….……..32

Preface

“One should be light like a bird, and not like a feather.”

-Paul Valery

It’s a cold day in December when I leave the hotel and head for the National

Mall. I stand on the sidewalk, preparing for the task that I’ve given myself: to touch each person that passes within arm’s reach. Once I depart for my first encounter, there is no time to think, I can only seize the moment as it presents itself to me. I reach out my arm and touch the gentleman as he passes by. I repeat the action again and again, each time transgressing a new boundary.

Touching Strangers represents a specific but revealing aspect of my practice.

It draws together my interests in the body, space, movement and time. It also points to the small and silent revolution that I am enacting in this work. It is one that is distinct from our daily experience of speed and sound, distance and spectacle. It is a counterpoint, a breath, a pause.

This work engages many strategies and approaches to making, some of them with physical form and others without. Yet each demonstrates a meeting of substance with something else, something intangible yet palpable. It becomes visible through the body or material, and it is everywhere: in the force of gravity pressing on

a surface, in the space between one thing and the next. It is what is pointed to, embodied, or demonstrated through the visible.

In Touching Strangers, the material is the body, but the subject is the removal of space that occurs between myself and the stranger; it is the touch and the impossibility of touch. In the following, I discuss a range of work where despite many distinctions, a constant concern persists- how the intangible may be made manifest through substance or activity. Each investigation, regardless of discipline, resonates with the same question- how do I find a means for the material to become fully itself?

Restraint is evident in every work. They are laid bare, made plain, and in that plainness reveal a truth about themselves. It is a quality that Brecht called the

Verfremdungseffekt, or distancing effect, which he employed to produce a state of recognition in the audience. He claimed that if they were too emotionally tied to the characters, they could miss the meaning of the play, so he created emotional distance through a variety of strategies. One of these was through lighting: by suffusing the stage with light, he would make the actors completely visible. These pieces recall the plainness of the Verfremdungseffekt, they suffuse themselves with exactly what they are (91).

Craft is dismissed in favor of an immediacy that comes with directness of execution. To maintain a quality of animation, works are constructed at the speed of thought. As such, a strange physicality is evidenced, moving from form to formless, delicate to dumb, and direct to oblique. Most take a position between these attributes, seeking out places of overlap and contradiction in the search for the poetic between material and means. Similarly, the works themselves defy easy disciplinary categorization, instead preferring an interstitial space between the practices of performance and video, painting, drawing and sculpture.

In the following, I will identify some of the sources and strategies that have directed distinct lines of investigation, while acknowledging that much, if not all of my work, crosses those lines as a matter of course. In The Blurring of Art and Life, The

Education of the Un-Artist Part III, Allan Kaprow introduces us to 5 models of artworks, with a disclaimer that, “A number of them do not fit neatly into their assigned categories, but can belong in two or three at once...” (130). I issue the same warning for the following, for, as I discuss the relationship of various works within the frame of specific terms, each inevitably contains elements of the rest.

1. Substance

In my practice, the substance is the agent that makes visible what is beyond the reach of the eye. It enables us to understand weight and lightness, and gives shape to space. The properties or behavior of a material give it a language, and in my work, give rise to the way it is used. Transparency and opacity, fragility and durability are qualities that give substances their role. In much of this work, the elements are familiar: paper, wood, wire, and cloth. They are the constituents of both painting and drawing, revealed in their plainest state.

1.2

The page is complete and whole, its lines perfectly taut across the surface.

With scalpel in hand, I begin to trace the edges of the grid. Once flawless, it begins to separate from the page, and square by square becomes its own form, divorced from the surface that gave it purpose. Space presses into the vacancies left by the paper and it is reduced to a web. A breath would blow it away.

1.2.1

Lift (p.7) is a grid composed of four smaller grids, its form predicated on the size of the store bought graph paper. The 1” x 1” squares have been excised from the page, revealing a nearly weightless infrastructure. They float beside one another

without touching; the viewer must close the gaps between them. Hanging away from the wall on the heads of tiny pins, they emerge from white and coalesce into a form.

1.3

Lacking substance, the grids have little in the way of structural integrity. They are so reduced that they drape between their pins, surfaces curving this way and that. As a symbol of order, structure, and the built environment, the grids in Lift are quiet failures; they can hardly support themselves let alone a single additional line.

The sagging surface could not map, design, or chart with so little of it remaining. One is left with an impotent form that references the grid so heavily investigated by minimalists like Sol LeWitt, Eva Hesse, and Agnes Martin, yet it operates under a different set of circumstances.

Those circumstances include a conceptual collaboration with the substance. In this case, the graph paper has an existing structure, a pre-determined purpose that presents an opportunity for undermining: removing the space of the page reveals the space in the grid. It is called forth by cutting away and exposing the grid as a failing framework, a device on the verge of disappearing. Yet despite that fragile state, the language of the substance is released to operate beyond the utility associated with the original surface.

1.4

Collaboration is a strategy that joins one element with another. It is egalitarian and presumes that each part is equal to and necessary for the investigation of a problem. These works have a particularly collaborative structure, relying on both

concept and material. The interdependent nature of this approach leads to the wide range of work included here. From installation and site-specific pieces to public performances, there is a quality of bringing the conceptual into a proper alignment with a substance, the result of which is the form. While the substance may be selected, a form never is, it emerges through the process of investigation as constraints are gradually built up around a conceptual structure.

The material has content. Without the grids on the surface, the paper would be just like any other, a blank white field. The grid provides a structure, both conceptually and physically. On another piece of paper, the decision to cut a grid would be arbitrary, yet in Lift it is called for. Rather than imposing order on the page, order is deduced. In a process of collaboration between concept and material, a strategy emerges.

Image 1: Lift, graph paper, 17” x 22”, 2009

2. Gravity

Gravity exerts its force upon everything. It is that universal quality that makes it compelling as material, it gives weight to gesture and makes lightness, light.

Modern art and dance both recognized the operations of gravity in the world, and each explored, through their respective materials, a means of making it visible. It is this last point that is the most salient for the purposes of the following discussion, that there is something important in using the invisible as material.

Gravity is the constant companion of this work; things that would command if appearing in larger numbers or scales do their best to assert themselves against the force upon them. Their tenuous existence gives them a strange quality, becoming a

"theater for one” (Hatch, 130). There is an act of defiance in things that resist so poorly but resist just the same, and yet they do not try hard enough, they are failing, slowly letting go, deteriorating.

2.1

The materials are plain, the wood unfinished and the paper a cheap variety used by architects. The paper is layered and pinned roughly over itself; creased and torn, it has clearly been used before. The wood is bound together at two corners, making an open frame that rests its top edge against the paper and extends its legs precariously into space.

Support (p. 13) reveals its history of error and repeated display. With three pins and two lengths of wire forming its only structure, the work is provisional at best; what we see is no more than a passing form given to the substance (Krauss, 90). Its lack of integrity and failing structure suggest Robert Morris’s Anti-Form, which he described as the effect of gravity on soft materials. In writing about his felt works,

Rosalind Krauss says, “The horizontal field as the domain of gravity is also the operator of entropy, in which the energy necessary to maintain the separateness and distinctness of form drains out of a system and in place of the differentiations between things, one arrives at “de-differentiation” of the formless” (97). The force of gravity and the domain of the horizontal is a material to work both with and against.

2.1.1

Entropy and its resistance are subjects in many additional works, namely the

Fold series (pp. 14-15), where two points loosely secure the substance to the wall.

Like the grids in Lift, they drape between those points, revealing their lack in the creases that mark their surfaces and the folding back of the substance upon itself, making it a skin that “…not only layers and peels but also folds and unfolds in ways that make the relation between surface and depth or interiority and exteriority irreducibly complex (com, together + plectere, to twine, braid)” (Taylor, 32). That skin takes its form from the force that works on it, doubling back with the inability to support its own weight.

2.2

Weight is a counterpoint to the weightlessness and speed of the information

age, and these works would have little resonance without that context. With slowness and subtlety, they demand a moment of pause and recognition of weight as material. Their simplicity is not a naive or romantic rumination on the earlier part of the 20th century, but rather a strategy that sutures them indelibly to the present.

While their appearance may suggest otherwise, they are not formal statements or strict material investigations, they are an embodiment, a demonstration. They are not literal or figurative, nor are they abstract or representational, they are between and amongst all of these.

That position of in-between, of being neither this nor that or perhaps being both, is a quality that contributes to the strangeness of these works. Reinforced by their lack of treatment, they occupy an interstitial space, one that is simply being

(rather than becoming) and behaving (rather than performing). In this they share in the methods that Peter Weibel uses to describe Erwin Wurm’s sculpture, namely those of “contiguity (tangibility, jointure and metonymy).” He goes on to write that,

“Sculpture as a behavioral form replaces abstract sculpture and the sculpture as object” (663).

2.2.1

Jointure is a key concept in the conversation regarding gravity. It is a necessary component that bears the responsibility of maintaining the relationship of a material to the wall or ground. Jointure brings together, and the manner by which it is accomplished has implications for the way a work makes gravity visible. The canvas and vinyl that fold over the support conceal the point of attachment either visually or conceptually, yet in both we are able to see is its effect on the soft

surfaces. These works have, as one aspect of their subject, this connectivity that binds them to their environment.

2.3

The elements of Support define a series of spaces, some that we can enter and some that we can’t. They partake in the language, if not the form, of architecture, particularly that which Paul Virilio describes when he writes, “The first window is the door-window, no building exists without a door. By definition, if there’s no door, it’s not architecture, not a human habitat…The second window, which appears very late, which gives us day-light only – a window though which one doesn’t enter” (qtd. in

Blauvet,132). The frame both appears and behaves as a threshold, a physical space that opens to us and to the floor. It is not the frame of painting or of the traditional support, it tears away from the wall, entering the space of the body. The paper functions as that second window, that through which we may not enter.

These layers of space, while resilient, are physically challenged. They partake in the language and substance of architecture yet lack the structural support to be properly architectural. While they draw us into their forms, they fail to deliver a tangible relationship with anything but the wall, which, under the circumstances, seems to also be merely propped by a hidden support.

It is gravity that allows that conclusion to be drawn- that everything rests upon everything else. A hallmark of the Anti-form and Anti-Aesthetic, it is a force that continues to be relevant, recognizing that weight is still part of our fleeting and digital world. These works resist, with the barest possible means, a complete fall to the floor. They make a stand even as they fail, allowing gravity to seize but not end, pull but not tear.

Image 2: Support, paper, wire, and wood, 74” x 58” x 8”, 2009.

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Image 4: Fold II, vinyl, 32” x 26”, 2009.

3. Space

Space inserts time into an environment, be that the surface of the page or a landscape. It fills, pushing down, out, and around, but it can also compress, marginalize, and suck away. Space is at work between surfaces, as in the Folds, and between bodies, as in Touching Strangers. It is also the material that differentiates a discrete sculptural work, self-contained and circuit-like, to many of these works, which function in tandem with their environment. As Madeline

Grynsztejn remarks about Richard Tuttle’s rope pieces, “It is in the interaction with the environment that Tuttle’s art comes to full fruition, not only formally but in terms of “content”- in the tension and energy that the works release in installation”

(Grynsztejn, 43).

3.1

Puncture (p. 20) consists of 10 lengths of wire piercing the wall at right angles, and is particularly relevant to this environmental dimension of space.

Positioned at eye level, the wires form a line of assault on the surface of the wall.

Acting as their ground, that surface expands outward to compress them to near invisibility. Yet the wires push back the space of the room. They resist its advance even while they depend on it. Absenting the space would annihilate them: it is the material that makes them meaningful. They punctuate not only the literal surface of the wall, but also the viewer’s experience of the room. Space enables them to disrupt both the two-dimensional and the three-dimensional environment they inhabit.

3.2

The disruption is also a perceptual one. The wires function at a visual threshold: they are nearly invisible in space of the gallery. It this respect the work is subversive, it momentarily upsets a viewer’s expectations. Closer inspection makes the wires visible, and what was empty is now clearly marked by space and line. One step closer and the lines are recognized as shadows cast from the tiny wires, the space between them invoking the distance between words, notes on sheet music, and other forms of visual communication.

The interaction of minimal means and material invokes a kind of sublimnity, as

Susan Stewart remarks in her essay, At the Threshold of the Visible, "When Kant wrote "'Sublime' is the name given to what is absolutely great," he was not interested in greatness as it might be known through sensual apprehension or logical deduction. In fact, he contended that sublimnity resides in our experience of the object, and not in the object itself" (74). The demand that this work places on the viewer invokes that greatness of experience. It requires consideration for the quiet and the fragile, for the futility and necessity of resistance. The greatness comes in the seeing, the act of perceiving both what is there and what is not there.

3.2.1

Years ago I went to an exhibition at the Guggenheim. I don't remember which show it was, but I remember distinctly two works that made an impression on me: one of Richard Long's rock circles and Lygia Clark's Diálogo: Óculos. Is it coincidental that these two works use distance so critically? On the one hand are

Long’s stones excised from the landscape, the rocks estranged on the polished

gallery floor, and on the other, Clark's goggles, which made visible, as people put them on and stood or sat face to face, the tiny distance which separated them.

In these extremes, a push and pull of proximity is both physical and abstract.

A device such as Clark's goggles seeks a corporeal engagement that removes distance and brings two bodies together. In Long's stone sculptures, the distance is conceptual, it is distance wrapped in distance. When recognized, either scale of performs a kind of transport, re-situating us in particular physical or conceptual context.

3.3

The window is a rendezvous, a site of mingling between inside and outside.

This window, to recall Virilio, gives the daylight only- no passage but the visual occurs here (qtd. in Blauvet,132). Yet there is something in that visual passage that increases distance between inside and outside, a tremendous crossing over occurs in that space of the window: a world-view shifts upon its reversal. The insider and outsider are fundamental perspectives from which we experience art and life; they speak to complex issues of identity, culture, and privilege.

3.3.1

450 sheets of gold leaf are sealed to the gallery windows with the condensation of the breath on the glass. The resulting grid is loose, from outside the gallery a screen and from inside, a shedding skin over the surface of the glass. It appears differently depending on the light or the position from which it is viewed. In any case, is animated, alive, and responding to the changing qualities of both the inside and outside of the gallery. 17

3.5

Duchamp's term, the infra-thin, is the place where one thing meets another, the impossible thing that “happens everywhere and everywhere in between” (Tucker,

67). It is this margin between surface and surface that A Page from the Book of

Inventions (pp. 21-22) hopes to address. This occurs in two distinct but related ways.

First, the infra-thin is the window, a conceptual meeting between inside and outside made physical by glass. It is the threshold through which we do not pass but may partially perceive. In this meeting comes a flurry of associations, between insider and outsider, viewer and participant. When the gold is applied, another distance is added- that between it and the glass. In the places where the gold meets the condensation of the breath, it is drawn tightly to the window, the distance between the two is all but drawn out. Yet there it must it remain, an infinitely small distance which holds them apart.

These layers of distance from gold to glass and inside to outside are all called forth by the application of the material. In covering the windows, the transition between the two is highlighted even as it is obliterated. On the one hand, the gold makes great the distance between the street and the gallery, what would usually be a seamless visual transition has become a shield, an extension of the architecture.

From inside, one becomes more aware of what cannot be seen, and from outside, one becomes aware of the concealed space. At the window itself, the gold on glass is the zero distance, the infra-thin. It is that infinitely small place where one element meets another.

3.6

In each of these works, a relationship with space highlights an aspect of the environment that the work inhabits- the wall and window of the gallery. Space is respectively pushed back or obliterated, drawn out or advancing forward. What is at stake is the similar to the works of Clark and Long, where one expands the distance and the other reduces it to the thinnest margin. Both succeed in drawing together and pushing apart.

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Image 6: A Page from the Book of Inventions III, gold leaf, breath, 84” x 130”, 2009.

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4. Time

Why are walking trails always represented with dotted lines and highways with solid ones? This relationship of speed to mark raises questions about the experience of time and distance, and about the ways that those experiences may be altered.

Like the grid, a line suggests something that continues, unseen. It emerges from the invisible only momentarily to define a form. A line is always a fragment, defining a space or movement excerpted from a larger field. It navigates the space of the page or the environment, mapping intangible distances into notations that can be read with the eye or the body. In doing so, it has a peculiar relationship to time, not only in the act of drawing or inscribing, but in the experience of viewing. In reading a line, we traverse it in real time.

4.1

The spiral rests on a broad plinth. It has no defining features upon first glance, it is simply a length of canvas wound imperfectly around itself. Suggesting an object with a function - a measuring tape with no marks - it is the scale of the hand.

Along its length it becomes thinner and thicker, and seams can be discerned upon closer inspection. It is a broken line that has been mended, a dotted line made whole. Yet it is only a fragment. It is a path that winds into a center, a timeline of an unknown event. It is a compacted distance.

That distance is a measure of time. Collapse (p. 26) is not the mythical or mystical spiral of Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty or Bruce Nauman’s neon. Inert on a pedestal, it is a zero point. Piero Manzoni explains, “Time is something different from what the hands of the clock measure, and it (the Linea) does not measure meters or kilometers, but is zero, not zero as the end, but as the beginning of an infinite series.”

(qtd. in Fer, 36) The infinitude of form, space and time are indelibly linked to one another. Collapse, is a fragment emerging from the endless, and one is left to wonder if it is an end or a beginning. In truth, is must be both.

4.1.1

It is reminiscent of Calvino when he writes, of his "...fondness for exactitude, for geometrical forms, for symmetries, for numerical series, for all that is combinatory in proportions; I wanted to explain", he says, "the things that I had written in terms of my fidelity to the idea of limits, of measure... But perhaps it is precisely this ideas of forms that evokes the idea of the endless” (68). The idea of the infinite is always present in finite forms. And in the case of the line whose path is circular, one is easily led to an idea of the endless. The straight line already suggests its own continuation, but the line which circles back on itself becomes a circuit. That circularity of time becomes a circularity of experience for the viewer, arresting its forward flow.

4.2

In a performance called Standing (p. 27), a different resistance to time is demonstrated along a busy city street. In silence, a figure stands, rooted to the spot.

Cars and people pass by, the day moves on. Yet there the person stands, arms crossed behind their back. We do not know how long they remain for; when the video

fades to black they are still in place.

4.2.1

Each movement of the street becomes a relationship to the body. The entire world can be felt, moving, yet my body, is awake and alive, a still center. It becomes a coordinate among coordinates, and a strange transition takes place as I become another obstacle in the landscape. I feel my relationship to each passing person, to each car that stops at the adjacent stoplight. I feel the wind blowing up 1st Avenue; it lifts my shirt. Time moves all around me, it forces everything in the environment onward, yet I am apart from it, I am still.

4.3

The simple act of standing is a counterpoint to the situation of the street, resisting the movement that “distinguishes time and space” (Tucker, 40). In so doing, it inserts a pause in the environment, an interruption in the expected course of events. My body becomes the difference that Derrida describes as a “play between absence and presence” (Tucker, 40). By opposing movement through physical demonstration, it also opposes the way that time is experienced.

Time has no fixed measure, it is experienced differently for each person in each circumstance. Even while we necessarily measure it, we know that we are only measuring the known time, the understood time; we cannot measure the experience of it. These works invoke the individual experience of time, they attempt to make it visible and adjust its flow.

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5. Movement

We move through the world to understand it, accumulating multiple perspectives to locate ourselves in space and time. We move to know rather than see, to apprehend with all of the senses. A friend once remarked, "If you've only seen it, you haven't been there." Being there means experiencing the particulars of place through the body.

Scales of time and space are sutured to our understanding of motion and the faculties of the body. Through movement, space is made physical, inscribed on the body even as that body is inscribed upon the space. We apprehend, in moving through time, both where we have come from and where we are going, and that information is taken up by the body and indexed. Amelia Jones, reflecting on

Merleau-Ponty, writes, “my body is neither a thing or an idea but ‘the measurement of the things…’”(49). Movement is the body's fundamental tool for that measure.

5.1

Walking is the primary way that we arrive at this understanding. In the movement through space, a line is drawn between shifting coordinates; through those points, time and space are mutually inscribed on the body and the environment. Perhaps no artist has explored this material as thoroughly as Richard

Long. During his walks, usually through countryside and wilderness areas, he creates a residue of presence, often marking the landscape literally as he moves

through it- kicking stones into lines or wearing paths in the earth. Though much of his practice is presented through photographic documentation of a trace, there are also larger concerns at stake. "Each walk,” he says, “though not by definition conceptual, realized a particular idea. Thus walking - as art - provided an ideal means for me to explore relationships between time, distance, geography and measurement" (Artist home page). Sharing in this interest, I wonder about the desire for charting, inscribing, and measuring the landscape: why does it have meaning? Is it to look forward or backward, to remember or anticipate?

5.2

Two torn slips of paper float at the end of curved lines emerging from the wall, one filled with a moving image of the blue sky and the other with a patch of desert floor. There are no features, only the constancy of the sky and the rolling retreat of the ground. The work reveals no trace, but instead points to the line as “an extension in time; but not in the sense of a finite period or duration; time, rather, that just goes on ad infinitum. “ (Fer, 36). Transnavigation (p. 32) extends indefinitely, there is no beginning or end to the movement.

5.2.1

I cross the desert floor with one camera on the front and one on the back of my head. I am between the lenses; my body is the meeting point of the future and past. Seeing only the sky and feeling only the ground, I cannot fully perceive either. Caught between them, I am a point pushing forward, dragging the earth behind me. There is no sound, I am the only thing that interrupts the stillness.

5.3

The movement of the body through space produces time. It is equal to it, as if time may cease to exist without it. It is a specific kind of time, however, it is human time. It is equal to the length of my legs, the quickness or fatigue of my body.

Transnavigation reveals no external bearings or boundaries that a destination would provide, yet its action is not wandering. It is a line, a mark experienced in a vast and limitless space. It is embodied time.

The body acts as a surface punctured by what is before and behind it. As one views the split video screens, this experience is extended, they are now the punctured body moving back and forth between the ground and sky. That body, like gold on the windows of the gallery, is now an infra-thin, a “space (that is) both physical and abstract” (Fer, 37). The viewer is torn between the two screens, moving laterally between them. It is the place where front and back, future and past continually meet, woven into the line between two opposing fields of vision.

The body is employed as a device for experiencing space and time, like the camera, it measures, absorbs, and records the place. It makes from the nothing of walking something that accumulates between moments and footsteps. The movement is a material, the force of the body projected through space. Like gravity and time, it is everywhere, pushing forward the experience of being, knowing and understanding through the only vehicle we really possess.

5.4

Movement is the writing of the body, through the simple way we navigate an environment, meaning is produced. In this work, the camera is a tool for that navigation, reducing the body to the moving point that marks the meeting of future

and past. The camera is an extension of the body, a tool for recording information in a constant drawing-in. It continuously consumes, moment after moment, the advancing sky and receding ground. The camera becomes a prosthesis through which to view movement, to perceive sound, and to understand time.

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Afterword

The intersection of material and means is where meaning resides. It is drawn out of a substance and mingles with the intangible. That coalescing of physical and ephemeral, of lightness and weight, is a concern that directs these investigations, it is what allows the material to become material. But what makes this question important for me, and for art?

My work provides a counterpoint to the pervasion of speed and distance that characterizes the age in which we live. It does this by presenting itself with clarity and plainness, making meaning through its lack. In a world crowded with calls for attention, these works do not seem demanding enough to compete, they are quiet, subtle, and simple. While they may not overwhelm a viewer physically, they are rigorous, challenging the viewer to find meaning between the visible and invisible and between the means and material. A grid with all of the space removed, a wall with 10 lengths of wire pushing out into space; these are not the familiar, safe or spectacular forms of art. They are the failing and fleeting, yet they ask big questions with their minimal means.

These questions are made manifest in works that reveal and refute the measure of time, space, and distance. They suggest through their subtlety and fragility the small victories and failures of the systems that we rely on, and in their own strange way, critically reflect upon the way that we live.

Works Cited

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Ed. Douglas Fogle. Minneapolis, Walker Art Center, 2001.

Brecht, Bertold. Brecht on Theatre, ed. and trans. John Willett (New York: Hill and

Wang, 1964.

Calvino, Italo. Six Memos for a New Millenium. New York, Vintage Books, 1993. 68

Fer, Briony. The Infinite Line, New York, Yale University Press, 2004.

Grynstejn, Madeline. The Art of Richard Tuttle. San Francisco, San Francisco

Museum of Modern Art, 2005.

Hatch, Kevin. “”It has to do with theater”: Bruce Conner’s Ratbastards”. October, 127

(2009): 109-132.

Jones, Amelia. Performing the Body, Performing the Text. Ed: by Amelia Jones and

Andrew Stephenson. London: Routledge, 1999.

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Calif. : University of California Press, 2003.

Krauss Rosalind. Robert Morris: Recent Felt Pieces and Drawings, 1996-1997

Hannover : Kunstverein Hannover, 1997.

Long, Richard. Artist home page, 2000. April 10, 2009. http://www.richardlong.org/

Stewart, Susan. At the threshold of the visible : miniscule and small-scale art 1964-

1996 / essays by guest curator Ralph Rugoff and Susan Stewart. New York ,

Independent Curators Incorporated, 1997.

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Present. New York, Guggenheim Museum Publications, 2004.

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Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2009.

Weibel, Peter and Bruno LaTour. Iconoclash. Karlsruhe : ZKM : London : MIT

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