Essay for space, inside, outside Carmel Buckley & Robert Strati Curated by Jeff Howe Prologue: / /

space, inside, outside The best essay for this show would have no words. Words harry, track, and finally affix in a futile and abusive hunt to reconcile the irreconcilable. The visual does not meet the verbal because language can only transgress upon perception. Having found the difficulties in writing something without writing anything somewhat problematic, I settled for introducing this show and these words with an ellipse. The ellipse (especially when caught in the atomizing mechanism of the slash) conjoins seemingly oppositional meanings. It signifies at once the presence and the absence of language. Words are here, it says, and in the same space, words are not here. The ellipse neatly communicates the understanding that language will come before and after, ad infinitum. The ellipse is a ciphera buoy marking the string of beads that stretches beyond comprehension, each bead dependent on the next and the first for its ever changing form. Again and again we fill in the ellipseboth as individual reader and as the collective social engine producing meaning The two bodies of work presented here possess a function similar to the ellipse. They mark the existence of much more. They begin (but only begin) to construct an alternative ontology where the objects (importantly, not Objects, neither Post-Sculptural, nor PostMinimal, nor ---) in this space ultimately serve some utilitarian function; Kants purposiveness without purpose has transmogrified purpose existsbut outside of the matrix of reception systems we have previously imposed on the Objects we view in the culturally-determined exhibition space. The burden of imagination has shifted. We as readers provide the raison detre. All is text and all text equally a palimpsest. Like the ellipse, these bodies of work point in tow directions: inside and out. Eschewing reductivist formal strategy, they embrace internal relationships without sacrificing extrinsic realities: Our ellipse is temporally-specific; no longer 1966, you know just Where You Are and your relationship to What You Confront. Acknowledging the site, the viewer, themselves and the implicit terms of presentation, the work requests a humble, radically-revised autonomy: simply, to exist, stripped of aura and authority and fixed meaning. Not as Object, but as object. There are, of course, inevitable art historical topographies at play, thought such limiting locations are thankfully elusive. Lets take Hesse for Forms and Rayman for Support and Puryear for Pathos and Lippard for Concept and hell, Robert Kusher, because look, a male artist (The Man) is sewing and painting. But all this can only be, at best, equivalent to any number of inept, linear metafictions we might drawdiscourse we might impose. As I watch R Strati drape a wire over my head I see the line through the filter of Marden,

yet still more through that of Pynchons Benny Profane, eternally perched on the verge of Great Things, lacking only the belief that Great Things can still exist. The project is not to bring the world into artart can only be in the world, no matter how white the cubebut to recognize the world in the art. The bicycle wheel points not only into the cultural space of the exhibition room, but much further; to the bicycle from whence it came, to the road the bicycle once traveled., to the town that road achieves, and beyond. R. Strati and C. Buckley have here provided an ellipse. We will each invest it with what we see fit. And we will all be right. / / Jeff Howe is a writer and curator and designer living in DUMBO