Relationships and the Aesthetics of Space

Painting exists in two dimensions, sculpture more or less in three, theatre, dance, installation, all play out in space. Artists have always worked with the question of space because the physical objects they create take up space and the bodies that carry us around exist in it. Artistic space embraces emptiness- the aesthetics of space left between marks on a flat plane or between forms or shapes in sculpture or dance is essential to the works themselves. This ‘empty’ space carries the meaning, creating the formal relationship between the elements in the art.

For the past decades my work has been about the space between things, the relationships themselves. As I became interested in things and their materiality, I realized that objects, whether manufactured, ‘found’ or created by an artist, held meaning by virtue of where they have been. A thing re-presents something, it relates-tells a story, and that story is by definition a history, a telling of relationships. There can and I believe should be many many possible tellings and retellings available from a collection of things. In its purest forms, painting and sculpture deliver very specific, usually predetermined relationships. But I have never been a purist- to me purism has always seemed an unappealing act of reduction. I prefer the messy involvement with things as they co-exist in time and space, and the multiplicity of relationships they spawn.

We use language and ideas to describe those relationships, and the word idea itself comes to us from the root to look. Being that I have been looking at these relationships for some time, I have been called a ‘conceptual’ artist, one that deals with concepts and ideas. On the face of it, this label seems contradictory- here’s an artist who travels the globe following the connections between things- making physical trails, investigating interpersonal networks, and it said of him that he deals with abstractions such as ideas. I do. And I don’t. I deal with the relationships between people places and things- which I articulate by way of narration. I tell stories and unravel histories. The stories often involve props and settings, sometimes one or the other or both, which accumulate from sources I come to know, or which I come to have made. I have used all manner of ‘media’ to tell those stories, but I do not consider myself a ‘media artist’.

I believe that we relate to things as extensions and stand-ins for relating to one another. Since I view the things as go-betweens, I have gone and put myself between the people who make the objects, and those who consume them, between those who get or produce the raw material that turns into the things that others buy. It seems logical enough to me that some bit of those person-al relationships stick to the material- that when you get something at Costco Made in China, that something of the Chinese go-down is still part of it. Somehow. It might not be a something you or I can see or feel. But it must, I believe be there. So I try and figure what the essence of that relationship residue might be, and how I might portray it. I make art about the space between and around things. And in the process of making this art, I expose levels of history that created the space where the history took place.

One of the ways I uncover the relationships surrounding things is to examine, and then describe the network of people that has caused it to come into the world. There is no reason to assume that making visible the hands, hearts and minds that have touched an object will in fact make clear what the object means. But if I am correct that the object exists in relationship to us, in extension making visible its connections to us might describe its contours and the way it touches us.

Seeing our connections to a particular thing, perhaps we can see ourselves being changed by it, even ever so slightly. Most of us, most of the time, are completely ignorant of those relationships, and how far back they reach into the on-going world. Yet the links to things describe our life- our ever-changing relationships to our surroundings in small fluid, dynamic ways that shape us. If we are able to catch glimpses of ourselves in relation to the things of our lives, perhaps we can see ourselves as we actually occupy space and time. Offering such a privileged point of view seems a noble activity for an artist.