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Pointform
Leslie
Eastman and Natasha Johns-Messenger
Conical Contemporary Art Space Inc.
5 20 November 2004
by Kit Wise Un Magazine Issue 3
Pointform,
a collaborative spatial installation by Leslie Eastman and Natasha
Johns-Messenger, proposed that the space of the gallery itself was
both the subject and the spectacle of the work. Pointform seemed to present a philosophical problem, perhaps a variation on
the seminal essay by Rosalind Krauss, ‘Sculpture in the Expanded
field’, concerning how the site of an art work and the work in that
site is seen to ‘collaborate’ in the perception of the viewer. In
addition to focusing on the remarkably beautiful gallery, a central
concern was the impossibility of registering the space of the work
in isolation from the active viewer. That much-vexed notion of perception
was given a thorough going over. Not only was the perceptive act
of individual viewers deconstructed; there was the experience of
observing other people in that space the perceiving of the perceivers.
Subtle shifts
in the reading of the architecture of Conical were overpowered by
the seemingly fragmented bodies of the other viewers floating
hand gestures, disembodied heads, absent torsos caused by a deceptively
simple device. A mirrored wall bisected the gallery, with the middle
band removed and placed across an adjacent corner. The mirror was
a highly reflective membrane, stretched over a triangulated steel
frame and heated with blowtorches to be pulled absolutely taught.
The material suggested the infinitely sensitive chemical surface
of a photographic negative or cine-film. Perhaps solarisation, the
lower-tech forerunner of such processes, where the negative or shadow
of an object is recorded through sunlight falling over it and onto
specially treated paper, more accurately described the interplay
of presence, absence and light in the installation. Curious moments
of mise en scène proliferated, often reminiscent of the 1933
film adaptation of H.G. Wells’ The Invisible Man (1897),
as the field of our peripheral vision became a mutable and fluctuating
zone, a blind spot in our experience of the gallery.
The revolutionary
illusionism of James Whales‘ early special effects seemed to resonate
throughout the installation. Voids in perception were encountered
in the locations where the reflective surface of the work and the
fabric of the architecture met. Too intimate to be disrupted by
the reflected image of the viewer, these small sites created Rorschach-like
patterns, an effect emphasized by the mottled texture of the distressed
walls of the gallery. As intended with the original psychometric
tests, these quieter instances in the installation where the imagination
of the viewer projected through the perception of an image represented
unformed absences. Capable of registering the act of perception
alone, they excluded the absolutes of both the space and the viewer.
Assume that any
notion of space can be taken as an absolute in the advent of quantum
mechanics and string theory; in which space bends under gravity
and the three dimensions are reconciled with another seven (if not
twenty three...). In this context, Eastman and Johns-Messenger could
be said to have introduced a ‘singularity’ into the gallery: a unique
point (or point-form) such as a black hole, which answers only to
its own rules of physics and in doing so poses profound questions
about the medium that has created it.
Perhaps it is
not the answers provided by science but its hypotheses that were
of real interest to the artists. The pictorial systems of classical
perspective and analytical cubism were both interrogated by the
installation. The dependence on vanishing points and horizon lines
on the one hand; and refracted, unfolding multiple-views of objects
(viewers) in space on the other. Perhaps the work operated as Einstein
predicted, by deforming vision and the perception of space, through
the ‘gravity’ of the installation. Rather like a diffraction grating,
which is capable of bending light into curving, converging trajectories, Pointform conflated figure and ground, content and context,
revealing perception as the glue or gamut of the two conditions.
In doing this, the work accelerated a familiar aspect of current
Melbourne practice via a collaborative methodology, both in the
partnership of Eastman and Johns-Messenger, and within the scope
of the project itself. This very timely ambition harnessed the potential
of relational aesthetics with the best of post-Minimalist abstraction:
able ‘to boldly go and seek out new life…’
Kit Wise is an
artist and occasional art writer.
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