Spectre
by Richard Dabek.

From Agenda Magazine, Australian Contemporary Art, No. 43, July 1995

Martin Sims's installation was made up of builder's scaffolding. The gallery was not so much occupied, as haunted by it, a latent realm of apparitions and strange occupations being evoked by its title, Spectre.

The yellow framework of scaffolding reached to just short of the ceiling and, laterally, to the walls. As such the installation encompassed the very space of the gallery. It was as though a sort of seepage existed between the object - the mass of scaffolding - and its environment, the scaffolding seemed to engulf, and be engulfed by, the gallery space. This internalising logic made the viewer acutely aware of the physical limits of the gallery.

It was permissable to walk into the installation, though a sign warning that climbing was forbidden demanded that futher interaction with the work remain at the level of contemplation. In considering Spectre, I was constantly aware of my position in relation to the object and within the gallery space. Walking around and through the scaffolding, my gaze was framed and reframed by its grid-like structure, but apart from the yellow framework of the scaffolding, there was nothing to look at. Rather, one looked through - the blankness of the gallery walls providing both a limit and a sense of legibility to one's gaze.

By involving the viewer in the apprehension of space, Spectre emphasised a coherence between visual and spatial orders. To be sure, the work-scarred builder's scaffolding remained just that, and produced the strange sense of disjuncture that all readymades carry. Rather than this working against the formal tension of the installation, the plainly utilitarian material gave it an air of heavy purposiveness.

Most obviously, the installation emphasised the symbiotic relationship between gallery and artwork. However, Spectre's accomplishment was in the manner in which this relationship was inscribed in space. For while the employment of the readymade as an artistic strategy overtly stresses the discursive nature of the gallery space, such discursive opportunities are rarely concerned with complex notions of space. Space is accounted for, as theorist Sue Best has described as "a specific material social product somehow in excess of, outside or beyond the geometric concept of space" (1). It seems that in courting notions of specifically geometric space, Spectre has attempted to extend the gallery's engagement with spatial considerations. Here, the space of the gallery is a place where things happen, and the nexus of a multiplicity of discourses in which the viewer is fully implicated.

It was in this desire to uncover the inextricable geometric relations embedded within the the social space of the gallery that Spectre was most meaningful. Rather than dismissing the certainties of geometry as irrelevant to the more subjective pleasures of aesthetic experience, Spectre presented them as visibly coincidental.

(1) Best, S., "Space for the Subject" in Macarthur, J (ed), Knowledge and/or/of Experience, Brisbane: Institute of Modern Art, 1993.