Thoughts towards a Thesis Proposal

1. I am interested in voids, organic or constructed, generative or empty, and the play between holes or space piercing objects and the space – womb or architecture – inside objects, rendering that space visible, a presence. In this regard, the trajectory I see myself working in begins with Barbara Hepworth and the pierced form. Hepworth introduced “the hole” into her stone and woodcarvings in the early 1930s, exploring the subtle play between the inside and outside of her transcendently beautiful abstract figures. By the 1960s, Jackie Winsor transformed Minimalist vocabulary into strange and rich explorations of the exteriors and interiors of cubes as well as finely punctured walls. Sarah Openheimer’s current work not only punctures the wall or floor, it pierces straight through to other rooms or the yard outside while the holes themselves, constructed out of beautifully crafted plywood, effectively become the sculpture. Ultimately, it is this kind of “turning inside out” that I am after.

2. My interest in voids clearly has a sexual dimension or, more precisely, a concern with the particularity of female anatomy as a space of creation, desire or violation depending on one lot’s in life at any particular moment. The void is often understood as “empty space.” For example, Home Bhabha’s essay on Anish Kapoor’s voids is subtitled “Creating Emptiness.” I am concerned with the opposite: I am interested in working with voids as presence, which for women, they clearly are.

3. I am interested in a kind of Minimalist vocabulary articulated by Eva Hesse, Ruth Vollmer, and Jackie Winsor. All three worked with voids in both a gendered inflection which also, at the same time, attains universality.

4. I am interested in “presencing” the space involved with an object. Rachel Whiteread casts the space in, under, around things, which are particularly beautiful and haunting. With Whiteread -- to borrow the language of painting -- the figure becomes the ground and the ground the figure or absence becomes presence, presence absence. In this sense, her Holocaust Memorial, a cast of the inside of a library, is a particularly effective way of memorializing loss. In a different way, Richard Serra’s most recent work at MoMA uses monumental curved “sheets” of steel to create a vaginal, vertiginous experience of space as one moves through them.

5. I am thinking a lot about the relation between multiple iterations of the same objects to one another. This is also represents an interest in Minimalist repetition, which heightens the awareness of slight differences in the same form and, perhaps, points to an awareness of the ideal form behind the iterations. I am also interested in thinking about the massing of large quantities identical elements or material such as Robert Morris’ felt pieces, Ann Hamilton’s dreamlike, glittering field of pennies (to name just one example) or Yayoi Kusama’s obsessively covered forms. In particular, how do different quantities of the same material “read”? When or how does a large quantity become something else? When does it become obsessive?

6. I am also thinking about the relation between different objects to one another within a particularly defined space; in other words, investigating the possibilities of installation as a form for “writing” or “composing” with sculptural elements as if they were, in fact, elements in or signs of some kind of lost language.

7. Like a void, the unsayable/unspeakable is a distinct realm, which is not empty but overburdened with too much “meaning”. I am investigating “asemic writing,” a kind of writing-like mark making that has no identifiable semantic content, as a way of visually pointing to the unsayable/unspeakable. Put another way, I am interested in a kind of sculptural graffiti -- an imaginary and, yes, also, confrontational “handwriting.”

8. In a sense, I am interested in institutional critique such as practiced by Marcel Broodthaers and Monique Wittig. The “institutions” I want to “critique” are: (1) the ongoing “practice” of rape and (2) the voids and silences of language. Yet, to my mind, most institutional critiques practiced in the realm of visual art have too little of the visual and too much bankrupt language. I am thinking about institutional critique that is strong on experiential presence, and vision. A possible analogy: Just as when one travels to a foreign country, the differences and thus the structures of one’s home begin to become visible.

9. I am also exploring an “imaginary narrative” that links many of the concerns I described above and which is more fully fleshed out in my annotated bibliography. Grid and alphabet.