| Ivana Franke
by Igor Siddiqui
Ivana Franke’s temporary installation full empty
space at P.S.1 brings into question the relationship between perception and
materiality. Full empty space is a record of a particular spatial discipline in
which light is modulated, filtered, reflected and transformed into a set of seemingly
ephemeral images. As suggested in the title and evident from its construction, the
installation probes the conditions of visibility/invisibility, presence/absence, and the
interior/exterior. The tectonic aspect of it, in particular, mediates between some of the
issues that arise from these conditions.
In his book Words of Light: Theses on the Photography
of History, Eduardo Cadava writes, "Light can in fact only give way to an image
when its path is impeded, when it is turned away from its course. In other words, to be
what it is, to be revealed, light must be interrupted" (93). Referencing Henri
Bergson’s discussion regarding the relationship between light and perception in Matter
and Memory, Cadava critically frames a way to conceptualize Franke’s
intervention at P.S.1. In full empty space, the material construction that interrupts the
light and renders it visible is in itself invisible. This invisibility, although partially
a physical property, is also, and to an important degree, a cultural construct.
Franke stretched lines of nylon thread vertically,
according to a set of corresponding grids, ceiling to floor. She then constructed a
three-dimensional system, within the field of the grid, attaching strips of clear adhesive
tape from thread to thread and expanding them in x, y and z directions. The resulting
matrix is set against a wall of evenly dispersed light, occupying all but a swath of space
at the room’s entrance, enough for a row of spectators.
Nylon thread is a material conventionally associated with
invisible structure. For example, it provides a marionette with its life and at the same
time secures that the fantasies of an inanimate object’s coming to life remain
uninterrupted. This invisibility, of course, is not entirely physical. One can see the
lines of thread, but as they are the mechanism of operation and not the object, their
materiality is repressed and rendered absent.
Clear adhesive tape, as with most glue-based materials, in
its typical use provides a joint to at least two disconnected elements without visibility.
Its clear body functions as a line of implied seamlessness, its surface and edges visible,
but deniable. The development of numerous kinds of adhesive tapes available on the market
points to the desire to force the material and its properties to disappear. Adhesive tape
with a matte surface is made to match certain paper products; the tape that does not turn
yellow over time in order to never give itself away; the double-stick tape which has the
ability to hide itself under the surface for which it provides a joint. These are just a
few of the examples that illustrate the desire and the market demand for the material to
operate efficiently, but invisibly.
The tectonic system assembled with the components that are
conventionally considered invisible is here given a double role. On the one hand, the
thread and the tape are made to give light its shape, not focusing the attention to
themselves, but to light’s gradation, filtration and reflection. On the other hand,
the obsessive craft of the installation gives away the materials’ properties,
strengths and weaknesses, allowing the material to resist the abstraction of the matrix,
its details coming to the foreground of the visual field. The experience of the
installation, then, is a constant movement between the immaterial rendering of the light
and the material field of threads and ribbons, sticky, messy and shivering in the air, in
front of a packed row of viewers.
The use of familiar materials in unfamiliar applications,
referencing the ordinary and exposing its strangeness is a strategy in spatial production
with a cohesive lineage. The deployment of transparency - material and cultural - and its
effects on perception is a modern convention. Ivana Franke has taken on both and managed
to construct a space between fullness and emptiness, presence and absence, and between the
interior and the exterior. She constructed an empty room that one can look at but not
occupy, filled up a space that one remembers as a set of hallucinatory images, but has
never touched, and has obsessively crafted a system that one is so compelled to describe
as minimal. Full empty space is an interstitial space between oppositions, contradictions
and paradoxes.
Igor Siddiqui was born and raised in Croatia. He is an
architect and designer practicing in New York City. He has earned a degree in architecture
from Tulane University in New Orleans and is currently enrolled in a post-professional
program in architecture at Yale University. |
