ten.

Joe Watling – Placing on Stage

Joe talks about how once he finishes installing a show the point of it is close to being reached and, after the last people leave the opening event, the exhibition has almost entirely lost its pull. I wonder if people on their way to the gallery this Saturday will realise the critical incidence of their coming along, their complicity even? The sculpture has been installed for a year and has held within it nine different shows curated by Paul & Kirsty of SHIFT. But now the support structure has turned to allow us to see its edges and for the shapes and people it contains to be tilted on their axis, appearing to fall towards one corner. The rules of the space have changed prompting the viewer to question the facts rather than re-learn new rules. These facts - the ‘functional’ simplicity of a wall as a support, the ‘distance’ between bodies and things, the ‘grounding’ effect of gravity – outline the way we produce space through language. Joe is effectively throwing the grammar of fixed objects in space up in the air, re-imagining them occurring as events on a temporal map.

Abandoning its form and content as a support in itself, this new stage in the life of the work emphasises the double meaning of a ‘framework’; both the physical structure that supports the support, and the timeframe spanning the before and after of the moment of the reveal. The space now has windows, the original wallpaper and Artex on the ceiling are exposed and the noise from the builders outside is raised. The sculpture effectively frames itself through the dimensions of the original room it had kept concealed for exactly a year. It treats the space and the pattern of people visiting each of the shows as a discrete history, as a found object detached from its original surroundings, turned inside-out and replaced facing an entirely new direction.

The ‘event’ of the work happens every time you enter the space of the sculpture. One corner has been left as it has been for the last year - if you stand there you can imagine the space lifting up and around however many degrees on a protractor. The centrifugal force of this movement causes the doorway and the people outside to seem huge. Whilst the people stood outside the sculpture inhabit the space as it is, a living room in a council flat, made unliveable by this huge vehicular shape caught in motion passing through the walls.

Joe uses the term ‘flipping’ to describe this re-contextualisation within an original context. But what is it to have perspective on a support system which normally remains contained and therefore invisible? Is it to attack it for its deception of being there silently influencing our behaviour? Or to imagine a dual reality of temporal-permanence where the ground sometimes becomes the foreground? Or perhaps to make new floating histories in the roaming architecture of people, as destinations in themselves, as the necessary factors that make a stage a stage.

Shama Khanna