Gschnas #04: Chi
Solo Exhibition
Location - Project Space, RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia
Date - 2000
Collaborators - Marcus Fajl, Paul Carter
Gschnas 04 sought to develop a notion of ‘spacing’ via engagement with temporal processes and deployment of movement-forms, and to meditate further on the notion of place as produced within a network of intersecting movements.
Initially this work was to be entitled The (W)hole Idea. As well as a reference to the Warner Brothers cartoon of the same name, this was an intentional play and complication of the hole as negative space, with the idea of hole as the gap which gathers, connects, spaces and situates.
Gschnas 04 emphasises this intersection, this ceaseless crossing and re-crossing as being constitutive of the chora. In this regard then, the notion of the ‘(w)hole idea’ transformed into something like ‘X marks the spot’. From this the title Chi was born an as an expression of a ‘chiasmatic chasm’ as ‘the incubating movement form of the chora’
Chi is the English pronunciation of the ancient Greek letter for ‘X’. It is not the Chinese ‘chi’. Chi is a particularly interesting letter – forming such words as chaos, chora, chasm, and the various words translating as gap, void, space and related concepts to do with crossing or bridging. It could be said that the Chi articulates the very notion of chora. Under the sign of Chi, Gschnas 04 becomes a staging of the event understood as a happening, gathering/belonging, and revealing/disclosing.
This happening of place through intersection, as a crossing ‘point’, necessitated a conjuring of holing rather than a making of an object. Consequently, Gschnas 04 became a presencing of the hole by showing the locale of its making a la Mandalstam: by exhibiting the remains of the donut and the process of its eating, the ‘hole’ appears. As with the other works in the Gschnas sequence, Gschnas 04: chi commenced with the modelling of a new movement form from another in the series of body stains. This movement form was then scaled and aligned to a specific space: in this instance this was the Project Space gallery of RMIT University. The movement-form was then rotated through the gallery space. The intention at the beginning of this process was to again, in some way, ‘build’ one felicitous ‘moment’ of the intersecting. However, what became immediately apparent in this particular case was that the dynamic of the animation seemed to be much more ‘revealing’ of the opening and closing of a space within the intersection of the moving forms, than the physical forms themselves. It was this evolution of a space through a continuous transformational cleaving that became the ‘subject’ of the work.
What is more, it seemed that this ‘cleaving of space’ demanded an almost glacial tempo, the slowness of geological time, something akin to the pace and rhythm of duration itself. This could be called a presenting of the experience of change itself wherein change is so slow and proceeds by such infinitesimal aggregations and increments that it is only perceptible as a kind of sudden change after the fact.
How is one to ‘make’ this ‘pregnant pause’ and this time approaching duration? Representation, which can only calibrate and hence spatialise time through segmentation fails before both. Chi then refuses to build the work (i.e. represent it) and instead presents or stages it.
Thus instead of building the chiasmatic chasm itself, it ‘made sense’ to configure the gallery space as a place ‘under-construction’ by populating it with the attendant forms common to a construction site: a makeshift plywood shed with a make shift awning, a rubber mat and cheap plastic chairs, accompanied by an odd assortment of tools and off-cuts of its own making, variously leant or stacked. Within the dark interior of the shed, the animation, projected on the rear wall, looped continuously, slowly evolving and devolving the space that outside was either about to be built or had just been demolished.
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