Gschnas #03: Trailing
Solo Exhibition / Site specific installation
Location - Victoria Ministry of the Arts, Melbourne, Australia
Date - 2000
Collaborators - Jan van Schaik
Gschnas 03 proposes a non-tectonics of the line: a gathering of place by the making of a performative line. As a way of acting in concert with, rather than interceding in space, Gschnas 03 draws out or make manifest ‘other’ spaces and times that are simultaneously present, that are always already here … and there.
Gschnas 03 is a further iteration of the operations and generational procedures developed in the previous two Gschnas works. In Trailing, a computer modelling of another in the series of body stains was rescaled to become equivalent in volume to that of the middle light-well in the offices of Arts Victoria. The Gschnas was then ‘poured into’ the volume of the light well. Given the different shapes of the two equivalent volumes, part of the Gschnas was seen to be contained within the light well while some portions seemed to ‘spill over’ (exceed) the boundaries of the light well.
‘Filling’ the light well, the Gschnas was then ‘stirred’ through a series of rotations governed by a Fibonacci number series. In this swirling vortex, the light-well seemed to ‘thicken’ as the succession of places where the surfaces of two volumes intersected was traced, in the process generating an outline of a third interstitial volume.
Using standard signage adhesive tape, each of the twelve intersecting rotations was intended to be progressively drawn over the course of a three week exhibition period. This process instituted a daily performance of the work which would unfold via accretion overtime. However, due to the disturbance to office procedure that this entailed, only the first rotation was drawn. The complete ‘nest’ or woven space was, however, produced as a series of construction drawings in the foyer, accompanied by a computer animation of the space as viewed from the tracking path of the line itself.
Gschnas 03: Trailing, by definition a process work, can be seen as a drawing of ecstatic temporality. Enacting the dynamic encounter of spaces and tracing the forms emerging from within this movement is a reminder of the intertwining of the flesh of the body and the flesh of the world, and of the thickening which constitutes the happening of place.
The nesting line-work In Gschnas 03: Trailing is more than an organizing device. It is a line marking which, rather than constituting enclosure, can be seen to make space happen. Such a gathering, nesting, and thickening of space approaches the practice of ‘binding’ or ‘shime’ found in the Japanese Shintoism. Shime is the practice of opening a space for appearance (of the divine) by the gathering and roping together of space. In this manner space is fundamentally constructed, it is that which has been made room for, something that has been freed, paradoxically, within a boundary. And as it finds resonance in the western tradition, this institution of boundary is not the “boundary at which something stops, but ... the boundary ... that from which something begins its essential unfolding.”
Thus, the trace of the Gschnas, like the rope of the shime, the line of the boundary, by enclosing space makes an opening. By marking that which moves on, the trailing allows it to take place.
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