LONDON.- Project/Number presents COVERED BY CLOUDS, a project by Simon Liddiment and Lawrence Weiner. For his solo exhibition at P/N, Liddiment was invited to use a work submitted by Weiner, COVERED BY CLOUDS, as the title for the show. To accompany the exhibition there is an essay, Things Pushed Down to the Bottom, by writer and critic Jonathan P Watts.
THINGS PUSHED DOWN TO THE BOTTOM
Threshold (FALLOW) is a work introduced from another context. Eight years ago, on the occasion of his first exhibition in ten years, at OUTPOST gallery, Norwich, Simon Liddiment employed a professional road marker to execute this particular piece of work. The word FALLOW incongruently spanned the gallery space, finishing just inside the foyer. It was an anxious architectural intervention. The thickness of the paint - a flattened, industrial impasto - enabled it to ‘do’ things: hold open the gallery doors, trip people up. Functionally, the word connected two discrete species of spaces - the foyer (in-between inside and outside where drinks are sold, flyers distributed, the office is entered) and the white cube gallery space (where artworks can be artworks). FALLOW was intent on the architecture re-organising around it. Jamming open the door was a whimsical attempt at asserting some vestige of function in a space that always takes it away.
In the late 1950s Jock Kinneir and Margaret Calvert developed British road signage according to UN protocol. Their typeface, ‘Transport’, still in use today, is a vehicle for communication of simple meaning with maximum legibility. Transport self-effaces to deliver concrete meaning. On the road, these texts are not poetic fragments. SLOW is SLOW. Its function denies ornament. Can its form and matter imbue any word with concreteness? Lawrence Weiner says that a stone is a stone. FALLOW refers to no concrete object in the world, but it asserts object-ness. ‘My intuition,’ Liddiment explains ‘is to use language physically. Language is something that is felt but language is also a form to be sculpted, and also has a relationship to the visual.’ Under foot, the reiteration of the word ‘SLOW’ written in successive layers of street marking paint can be raised enough to cause problems. The potential awkwardness of that fascinates me. FALLOW was a positive sculptural image of a text. A figure in the shape of writing; an object in the shape of writing.
For Project/Number both the works Lawrence Weiner and Simon Liddiment are showing were conceived some years earlier, 1989 and 2005 respectively. The lightbox, COVERED BY CLOUDS, has been produced following exact (or as close as possible) directions from Weiner’s studio. It is installed on the threshold of the gallery above the door. Weiner programmatically defines language as a material object. It is not bound up with any specific context or manifestation. In each specific instance of the work it builds a relationship with the cultural context. ‘The work,’ writes Gregor Stemmrich, ‘draws together diverse cultural ideas, experiences, and modes of observation; and, instead of merely reflecting these “aesthetically”, it objectifies them and throws them back at the material entity of the context itself.’
Liddiment has left the gallery space empty - a resistance to being drawn together, perhaps, and certainly an acknowledgement of its spatial eccentricities. Instead, he has lifted trapdoors in the gallery floor to reveal the architectural underpinnings. FALLOW, painted in road-marking paint, spans the width of the basement space. Distanced from the viewer by this upstairs-downstairs configuration, it can make no whimsical attempt at functionality - no holding of doors, no tripping up. The partial view down to this now lower-than-low object emphasises the act of vision. FALLOW in an obvious double sense - fallen low or dormant - is a dead or sleeping idea. Here, FALLOW becomes the image of a text. At its very surface a reflection of itself.
Jonathan P Watts, April 2013.
1 Simon Liddiment at OUTPOST Gallery, Norwich, 2-21 November 2005. See: www.norwichoutpost.org/artist_pages/13_simon_liddiment/simon_liddiment.html.
2 Gregor Stemmrich, ‘Lawrence Weiner - Material and Methodology’ in HAVING BEEN SAID: WRITINGS & INTERVIEWS OF LAWRENCE WEINER 1968-2003, Edited by Gerti Fietzek and Gregor Stemmrich, Hatje Cantz Verlag, 2004, p.437.
