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2008
drawing:installation
wall drawing, mixed media on paper and aluminum
3.5 x 26 m
Galerie Krinzinger, Vienna, AT
SPIEL took place in the spacious rooms at Galerie Krinzinger. Entering the gallery, the visitor finds himself or herself in a rotunda. A door to the right leads to a suite of two rooms. Mounted on the left-hand-side wall of the first room are drawings of jungle gyms and a swing set in yellow, red, and blue. They face a rectangular arrangement of drawings showing children pulling faces in trompe-l’oeil frames. This programmatic opening statement is followed, in the main room, by an installation: playground equipment drawn almost to actual size on large sheets of paper. Other drawings—fence elements, sets of children’s faces, and sets of empty picture frames in varying oblique views—take up most of the wall between these works. Yellow is used throughout the left wall; red in the end wall; and blue in the right wall, where, however, this color is used not in the pictorial elements themselves (which are executed in shades of gray) but on the wall and in the pictures’ backgrounds.
The drawings of playground equipment—there are swing sets, jungle gyms, a sandbox, a seesaw, a tree house—are in formats chosen to resonate with the space in which the beholder moves. The elements they depict, the jungle gyms in particular, are structures that explicitly occupy space. They transform empty space into a space the body can experience in play. The lines of these spatial drawings, the posts, bars, and crossbeams, sustain in reality not the gaze but the body. The body’s weight, and the ways in which it can be overcome and sublated, are central aspects of the forms of play each piece of equipment enables. This body-space, otherwise an object of ‘athletic’ experience, has been translated into a space exclusively for the eye. The structures are depicted in accordance with the rules of parallel and vanishing-point perspective projection, but never in uniform and correct construction. They address varying viewpoints and partially collapse back into the plane as the viewing subject moves around. The front faces of the structures are depicted undistorted, docking the—however distorted—space of the equipment to the planar ground. The wire mesh fence elements, used to fill up otherwise unused parts of the walls, likewise emphasize the pictorial plane as the site of the genesis of the pictorial illusion. With the trompe-l’oeil picture frames, tilted at forever different angles and empty or framing children’s faces, the space on this side of this plane is shot through with additional viewpoints no beholder can occupy at the same time. This actively relates the space of the equipment among which the gaze climbs up and down, losing orientation, to the space on this side of the pictorial plane, the space of the beholder’s body. The swing sets are deserted, but the swing is shown in flight, as though someone had just jumped out of the pictorial space and into the real space.