WHY COLLECT RUBBLE
On Why Collect Rubble, Why Work Might (fit,work,hum,belong), How An Object Can Be Fixed
a 3 part essay/story
Pt1
WHY PICK UP THE SHINY PIECE OF METAL FROM THE FLOOR?
There’s a small shiny cylinder of steel in my pocket, found on the ground the walking home from tram. It’s cold and I warm it in my hand.
Luck: because the object has survived. Luck as a prescription, an object doesn’t need to create luck to be lucky, just assumed this narrative.
I pick up the object because I’ve decided on this collection. Decided to create a souvenir from a random unknowable event. Lucky because it has survived; moved from the event of fallen space to (the concept of) my collection.
The chance discovery of the object, the luck is instilled as it is transferred into an internal space (my pocket), romanced by the act of taking something and deciding that it is mine.
Internal: the steel piece becomes hot when I sit down and it presses close to my leg.
There is the act finding and the removal and then the possession. The public object becomes private and singular and personal and lucky in my pocket. This is the event that is collected and internalised. Perceived under the promise of my intent, this suggestion is at once the answer. The force that creates the importance (luck) is the exchange.
A collection creates its own time, but like a rat nest these shiny objects live outside of any kind of time, collected as intrinsic elements for this narrative I’ve created. The relationship with seriality dies and becomes a relationship with the sensory and the obsessive. Integrity is not formed by its origin but the exchange in its removal.
The steel beam is processed by my hand and by my pocket, its changed and given a subject as it is enveloped and warmed and moved by my body. It’s become singular and irreproducible; an abstract sign.
The accumulation is aesthetic, automatically abstracting the steel piece as physical a piece of luck, found on the side of the road. A souvenir of the event of finding becomes the premise for the collection.
Pt2
fit,work,hum,belong
everything as a material: work, space, time, architecture: acknowledgement of one another.
To make an artwork hum within a space it must sit in a visceral kind of logic enforced by its relations and interactions as an object within its structure. It must return the gallery to its most basic context as a building; as an architectural structure; re-establishing it as a site and therefore removing the state of the artwork as portable. The object exists without the viewer and the viewer must know this whilst perceiving it.
By interacting with physical conditions and inherent structures of space, the art acknowledges and integrates itself both within and outside of time. It no longer sits as a memorial of what is outside, just a shift. The act versus the agenda of a work is the flux between the representation and the acknowledgment of its physical structures.
The hum is created when the work and the building exist within an experience of each other, the object being both sensual and real. The visceral correctness of an artwork comes not through invested meaning; as that is created through context and structure, but through the agency of an object.
The hum is created through an interaction mediated by a relationship. If all objects are mutually exclusive to one another all at once, then everything must sit in a static loop; fixed and encapsulated within its form. This agency is inherently tense and circular; the hum arising when objects are allowed to theorise against one another.
Pt3
Fix/ Repair
Landscape: out of my control
Debris: relic from my own impact, formed by energy
I am building an archive of repairs.
To repair an object, it must be removed from fallen space and refrozen into reliance; function for the soul purpose of a purpose. Held up by their own relationship with each other, everything must speak to what it is, nothing can be hidden. Gravity is included in this.
This relies on the aforementioned logic. So logical that it must become sensual. This logic is enforced by its relationship to its own form and the form of its surroundings. Use this medium of energy to take the weight off– able to hold, collapse and hold a collapse. Similarly, each object is finite in terms of physical form and this must be both acknowledged and pushed.
The gallery consequently becomes implicated in this historical/geological repair, shifting the force of destruction into a re-contextualised force of being.
Notes
A shiny piece of rubble becomes lucky when its carried around in my pocket, there’s grit in my eye and a splinter in the wall
Solve the problem: with a holy relic, an artifact; architectural noise, re-presented as micro-history.
To fix is to find a solution, fit the noise not the signal