In March 2011 my exhibition Slipping forward, moving backward opened at Peloton Gallery in Chippendale. The work consisted of a precise reproduction of a readymade.
It is important to point out that the original was not staged in any way by the artist. The piece was exactly in this state on a building site where I encountered it, complete with the fastidious stack of timber noggins, and the incongruous silver picture frame sat jauntily on it ‘head’. The oddness of the arrangement made me pause and take note. The recreation started with precise measurements, from a series of photographs on site, and progressed to trial constructions in the studio, in order to reproduce the readymade with as much fidelity as possible.
Clearly there are choices being made. Not all elements in the original are selected and reproduced, and the final staging emphasises the object-ground relationship by placing the elements in two distinct planes, the plinth of stacked noggins standing before a ‘proscenium arch’ of pink Hardibrace. Putting the work within the gallery is the most transformative action, and serves to accentuate the theatricality of the piece.
The strategy behind the work is based on an hypothesis that, by confronting the viewer with an object that is commonplace and yet somehow not quite right, it may be possible to invoke a moment of pure seeing and thereby expose the processes of unthinking perception.
The necessary preconditions for this are minimising, to the greatest possible extent, the hand of the artist; and a certain ‘unfinished’ realisation that induces awkwardness and yet remains open to numerous possibilities. The work sits in an ‘in- between’ state. Is it a structure caught in the act of being constructed? Or is it moving towards a state of deconstruction? Despite its stillness, it is charged with these binary possibilities.
The work is what it is: simply a stack of cut lumber, a pad of poured concrete, a partial wall of pink board, a silver picture frame. Yet simple as it is, the observer must first work through the repertoire of conditioned responses – this is a building site, this is a conceptual piece, this is a metaphor – before coming to a moment of perceptual stillness and presence where things are simply what they are, and the viewer can experience them in an immediate visceral way.
katie louise williams 