Marciu's area
Today, for the first time, I’m seeing a picture of Marcius Galan’s studio, printed on a magazine page. The space is flooded by natural light and is relatively wide. It looks more like a drawing room than a sculptor’s workshop – a room for testing, calculation, and delicate operations such as the pinning of map tacks and the friction of tinier and tinier erasers. The scene is worth describing for many reasons, most of them intrinsic to the artist’s work. They may also justify calling this picture a group portrait. Tools – and that will be my claim – are characters, actors in a geometric ballet we can identify the work with. Referring to them as “inanimate” would be a terrible simplification.
A first look at the studio view finds a row of plants in their pots near the large window; sketches hanging on the walls; and tools – most of them also hung, rhythmically classified, as if in progression. Below the counter that runs along the window, one sees a modest brush, followed by the hacksaw, rip saw, crosscut saw, a pair of drills, and a pair of things that look like jigsaws or sanding machines. The rest of this arrangement is either out of the frame or obstructed by chairs that seem to pose for the camera. On the upper part of the wall, there is an array of lighter tools: hammers (one up and the other down as if they wanted to hit each other); and various framing squares, rulers, and instruments of similar species. Atop and along the window frame, there is a fascinating T-shaped thing that, were it to fall into other hands, would easily become a readymade. This giant is surrounded by objects too small to be identified. All of them are patient and dormant on their nails.
These are object sequences, in sum: phrases made of functions, verbs waiting (a tool, be it drill or hammer or saw, is essentially a tangible verb). A remembrance of some of Marcius’s works makes me observe them so minutely. Works such as Concentric [2014] also cling to walls – gallery walls; they are rudimentary and mysterious and behave as tools, caught in the middle of an operation. Other examples – Eclipse [2013]; The Sculptor [2010] – even include complex mechanical devices such as sanders or sharpeners that perform for the viewer. The work makes work. The tools are set in the process of tracing, dividing, thinking space.
In most cases, these devices draw their own lines. As they demarcate space and / or alter a surface, they make their own movement visible. Now accidental, now interrupted, marking is their vocation. But these marks aren’t graphs, or signs of an autotelic expressivity. Rather, they enunciate the movement of a certain body as one of its properties. Just as someone once said that language is the only poet, one can say that tools are the only artists.
Drawing is demarcation, and the purpose of demarcation is the mysterious act of division and definition of space. Perhaps for this reason many of Marcius’s circles and areas are not finished: to emphasize the process of completion of a line – perimeter as thought, not as thing. Donald Judd declared in 1983: “Process is the beginning but the beginning always steps backwards so that rather than simply beginning, the beginning is a search for the beginning”.1 Tracking down the operations of Marcius’s works, one finds the artist’s studio as a depository of gestures embodied in tools. Patient and dormant, they wait to be taken from the wall, or long to go back on their nail.
Although proportion is key to the aforementioned activities, it seems to disregard numerical measure. This doesn’t mean that measuring is excluded from the operation, quite on the contrary: measuring objects – a number of erasers of varying sizes; the shapes of a flag folded again and again – by their comparative proportions to others, instead of using numbers, seems to be quite a generalized procedure in Marcius’s work. The undeniable presence of a proportional rather than a numerical intelligence results in the no-less undeniable, instant inscription of the work in the exhibition space as if it naturally belonged there. Proportionality overcomes all foreignness. Judd, again, stated:
Proportion is very important to us, both in our minds and lives and as objectified visually, since it is thought and feeling undivided, since it is unity and harmony, easy or difficult, and often peace and quiet. Proportion is specific and identifiable in art and architecture and creates our space and time.2
A second look at the picture of the studio can hardly fail to notice the group of chairs scattered pretty much in all directions. Some of them seem set for a discussion between interlocutors that are out of the frame. In their absence, the chairs themselves seem to converse amiably. As I mentioned before, all the chairs seem to be posing for the camera. There aren’t any objects more coquettish, photogenic, and flirtatious than chairs.
Now, a coincidence has emerged while scrutinizing this photo. There is a chair in the studio, a nice example of Arne Jacobsen’s Series 7. The model appeared in 1955 and has been massively produced by the Fritz Hansen bentwood factory ever since. There are thousands of them around the world, and many more copies in the residences and offices of the global middle class. I happen to have one of them in my New York apartment, and I am sitting on it right now. The coincidence is almost trivial and by no means uncanny, but its occurrence is instrumental to underline another connection – a triangle, so to speak, that links Marcius’s studio and my living room with a third instance, a work from 2007 titled Insulator (Chairs).
This work presents a jumble of chairs lying on the floor. They are arranged disorderly against each other, so nearly all their legs are in the air. These are held – one would never know whether they need the help – by something that looks like caution tape, a material thicker than vinyl, something elastic-looking in any case. This material is simulated by yellow enameled iron, an illusion forcing us to consider its appearance as twofold: what it is versus what it looks like. And the distance between these terms is at the same time so bold and so little that it is difficult to describe. However, there is another detail that deserves attention. This deceptive iron imitation of vinyl evokes the kind of tape that is used to separate spaces, most commonly public works and crime scenes. It is demarcation tape, and again, we find ourselves speaking about drawing.
Marcius’s series of “Insulators” expresses his concern with the essence of drawing in space. The tension and elasticity of the idea of drawing itself is commented upon by the ambiguous materiality of each work. And it seems pertinent to ask oneself, what are the “Insulators” isolating exactly? What is the content of their demarcation in variations such as the said Chairs and others like Rest, from 2008 and, especially, Insulator (Area), from 2009? The latter consists of four nails defining a square on the wall. The yellow tape is tied around the two upper ones. The area, alleged theme of the work, is not there and, yet, it is there twice.
In order to approach this matter, let me once again quote another artist rather than a scholar. In one of his strategically scarce statements, Fred Sandback said:
I’m interested in working in that area in which the mind can no longer hold on to things. (…) A line of string isn’t a line, it’s a thing, and as a thing it doesn’t define a plane but everything else outside of its boundaries. It’s an ‘aggregate of experiences’.3
If we agree that Marcius’s works are in a number of cases developments of that area that Sandback once referred to, we nonetheless have to imply that such an area is a movable, pivotal space that communicates the specific, native language of the gallery space or white cube and the specific language of the studio.
The studio is the space where the sequence of gestures, executed by the body and its tools, cannot find a standstill unless it is transferred to another space. But the operating conditions of the studio cannot be reproduced easily. Thus, when material and gesture are finally brought out of the space of experience and experimentation into, say, the gallery, the fixity of the works not only expresses the performance of objects (the illusion of tools expressing themselves) but also the incompleteness of their area of work.
The area has no name, no number, but it exists. Its being is relative, deceiving, nonobjectal. The simplicity of an act of demarcation reveals the complexity of space. Illusion and mirage are properties of space and examples of its intelligence. This intelligence is partly blocked by the omnipresence of numerical measuring standards (weight, length) that prevent bodies to measure other bodies in space against one another and themselves. Realizing that there is no absolute measure, that everything is relative and only measured against others, echoes the experience of vacuity as expressed by the Tibetan Buddhist philosopher Nagarjuna: there is no individual essence, only relations.
Tools, domestic things, modest building parts, and dull pieces of paperwork appear as characters in a play of immobile gestures that is set up in the exhibition space. But Marcius’s area is very much an intangible one. The rigid tape in the “Insulators” – just like the wax layers that seriously and imperturbably simulate a glass curtain in another master series, the “Diagonal Sections” – is the trickster or Harlequin in that spatial drama. The relationships between objects / tools are measurements of proportion: games of positions and non-metric gestures. At the speed of things, time gets confused. But there is no stillness nor arrest nor freeze.
Once again, I look at all those objects resting in Marcius’s studio. They are silent and almost smiling.
notes
1 Donald Judd, “Art and architecture”, in Complete Writings 1975-1986. Eindhoven / Holland: Stedelijk van Abbemuseum, 1987, p. 25.
2 Id., ibid., p. 33.
3 Fred Sandback, in Fred Sandback (catalog). New York: Zwirner & Wirth, 2004, pp. 8-9.