*

Sculpture will have already entered into a complex relation with space.
With sculpture the difficulty that emerges concerns how that already
present relation is to be understood. While the necessary generality of
this opening will need to be maintained, the specific here will emerge from
the recognition that with these sculptures another form of spacing is at
work. It is a spacing in which the internality of sculpture will be
fundamental to the work of spacing. With the work of Christine Boshier
space is enclosed within the works, as part of their work; there is more
here therefore than a simple projection outwards. Perhaps, then, when it is
time to start a beginning can be made with spacing understood as projecting
an outside as well as an inside. As such these works will need to be
understood as doubly spaced. A double movement that occurs at one and the
same time. Time is equally implicated.

*

And yet it is not as though sculpture simply occurs in space. What had
been empty is not filled, partially or otherwise, by the arrival of a
sculptural presence. Accepting this as a point of departure will mean that
sculpture's relation to space will involve a more complex determination
than that which would have been given by viewing space as an empty, neutral
and thus as a static site that comes to incorporate the presence of
sculpture. Recognising the singularity of the sculptural will entail having
to show greater patience in working with space and thus in detailing its
presence. Presence here is the activity of space. Being patient however may
mean moving slowly. Speed will always have been too easy.

*

What is most striking about the presence of sculpture is almost
pedestrian. Sculpture is there. It fills an area. The way in which it is
present is at once elemental - it is there, it is given - even while
holding itself apart from any quick reduction to natural necessity.
Sculpture is not identical with the presence of rock, stone or metal for
example. Sculpture is not just sheer presence. And yet when it is a
question of taking up sculpture's relation to space it is often understood
as if it were no more than sheer presence. This shows itself in at least
two forms each with its own consequence. In the first instance, the way in
which sculpture works to space is not pursued. It is as if sculpture were
just assumed to be in space. As such what ever it is that makes sculpture
unique is either neglected or denied. And yet, secondly, simply opting for
the necessary three dimensionality of sculpture takes the spacing of the
object as given and thus has to insist on the neutrality of the site in
which the three dimensions are taken to figure. (This site would be space,
though in it being named it takes on the quality of a place. Space and
place would articulate the same neutrality. It is the neutrality of this
construal of space and place it demands that will have to be shown to be
there in name alone. What will emerge is neutrality's feint.)

*

While these two restrictions will be developed, the sculpture of
Christine Boshier can be located not at their denial but within the
affirmation of the complexity of space. This affirmation will demand the
abeyance of those modes of thinking that seek refuge in the interplay of
simplicity and neutrality. Affirmation works by its having loosened the
hold of negation.

*

What is it to accept the presence of sculpture? Even in allowing that it
is there, how is its being there to be understood? These question do not
obfuscate. On the contrary they are central to taking up sculpture's
presence. They could however been taken as doing no more than hindering
clarity if it were assumed that sculpture was just another object of
interpretation; if, that is, that what ever sculpture did that was unique
to it were left out of consideration and that as a consequence all that
came to be evoked in the interpretive was a certain textual quality. If
this is the case then another questioning will have to insist. After all,
what is it with sculpture?

*

The immediate response to the question of sculpture is three
dimensionality. In other words, it is a response occurring within a
repetition of what has been taken to be sculpture's own necessity. A way of
forcing this response to move further forward is to link it to space. And
yet the tiresome oscillation between an object being in space and the space
in which it finds itself, works to preclude the object's own work. While it
may seem to twist language what has to be allowed is the possibility that
sculpture works to space. In other words that instead of being a site
marked by its own substantive presence, space has a verbal quality that
will come to define the object's own activity. Sculpture spaces. What is
the activity of spacing?

*

Answering the question will have to involve moving between general
considerations and the actual detail of particular works. However this
movement should not be understood as taking place between the pure and the
applied. That would be case only if the claim that sculpture spaced had a
generality that rendered all works the same; i.e. all works became an
instance of the general claim. It would be from within that set up that not
only would space be neutral and thus only have a singular determination, it
would force a type of neutrality and singularity onto the object. Objects
would be marked by the necessary absence of particularity. In
contradistinction to this set up the position being maintained here
involves two elements which when taken together serve to reposition the
claims that are to be made about tracing the work of the object. The first
involves working within the recognition that while it is possible to make
general claim about spacing there is no essence of spacing and thus of the
activity of spacing and that therefore, secondly, it is only possible to
trace the work of spacing by looking at particularity. It should be added
immediately however that there will always be a division between works that
seek to affirm this set and those that seek to extrude it from their
undertakings. This division will operate as much within art practices as it
will within the activity of interpretation.

*

Arena (1993) presents what could be taken as one of the dominant motifs
in Boshier's work. Here steel is used rather than the more habitual
concrete or stone and yet what marks this work out is that a solid form,
that is itself the result of a process of construction, comes to encircle
and thus mark out an area. It marks it out as part of its presence. The
encircling of an area constructs that area. Whatever power it may have it
is been given by the sculpture. It works to create a space neither
artificially nor as the consequence of a projection. How is the internal to
be understood? This question opens up the problem of spacing. Again, to
start with the most straightforward, a work in space constructs within it
another space. The second space depends upon its exclusion from any form of
generalised space. Minimally, what is at work is the construction of an
internal space. The construction of that space by a work of sculpture will
mean that the sculpture works to space. And yet this is not enough. The
internal world created by the work - created by it as an integral part of
its work - in being part of the whole indicates that the external world in
which the work is positioned must in some sense have been created by the
work. It cannot be that spacing only pertains to the work's internal realm.
Equally spacing must be present in its other projections. In fact noting
that this is the case will necessitate overcoming any easy divide between
the work's internality and its exterior projection. Dividing the work in
this way would be to overlook the other element which is central to the
complexity of space, namely, time.

*

With Arena (1994) not only is there the creation of an internal space, it
is also that the creation of that site cannot be separated from the work's
own outside. Here it is an outside that works to create the inside. This
should not be seen as a purely semantic play concerns the opposition
inside/outside. It is rather that what is a work here is the impossibility
on the one the hand of effecting any absolute separation of one from the
other, while on the of having to allow for the presence of two different
activities of spacing. The outward projection gives the work its presence
as a spacing in which what is enacted is the continuity of that which is to
be experienced. As discontinuous activities - discontinuous in the sense
that they are irreducible - spacing involves opening places that are
themselves marked by an ineliminable complexity. What allows the complexity
is that the discontinuous instead of taking place over time takes place at
one and the same time. As such time has a material presence since it exists
as part of the work's own time.

*

The specific nature of the work will mean that what it allows for is
recognition that complexity will have already worked against neutrality by
showing it to have been a feint, and consequently as an imposition after
the event that would serve to deny the event of sculpture. Allowing for the
activity of spacing means that the work's own project becomes the creation
of space. The space that has been created here only works because of an
irreducibility in which the complexity of space figures because it has been
created by spacing's own complexity.

*

Part of the interpretive difficulty posed by a number of the works
exhibited here is that they involve what amounts to an investigation of
sculpture's relation - a relation set up within the activity of sculpture -
to painting. Setting up this relation is, of course, not taking place here
for the first time. And yet there is an inevitable specificity with these
works. Straightforwardly, it resides in the works not lending themselves to
an interpretation that begins with the surface. It is not difficult to
envisage that part of what characterises certain works by Rauschenberg and
Schnabel, for example, is a productive concern with a disruption of the
surface and thus with an attempt to unsettle what could be described as the
hegemony of the surface. (As such they would be responses from with
painting to modernism's own interpretive programme.) Despite the acuity of
these moves the surface - though perhaps more accurately the question of
the surface - is maintained as the point of departure. In so doing the
question of depth and thus the presence of the opposition between surface
and depth, even the reworking of that opposition become activities that can
only be played out on and with the surface. To the extent that there is an
sculptural dimension it occurs because of a differentiation from within the
purity of the surface's dimensionality. Despite an encroachment in which
the surface is raised, such that it is possible to locate in the raising of
the surface painting's relation to sculpture, the centrality of the surface
is maintained nonetheless. In the case of Rauschenberg this is due, in
part, to the over application of paint, and in the case of Schnabel because
the surface is retained as the site of investigation. The surface becomes,
quite literally, a place of application.

*

The question that arises with works such as 3 Graces Revisited (1994)
After Departure: Before (1994) Untitled (1994) and The Mirror of Bacchus
(1994) is, how are they sculptural? While there is an inevitable
difficulty with a question of this nature it should already be clear that
it cannot be answered by simple recourse to that which is thought to be
essential to sculpture. It must involve spacing understood as an activity
that is proper to the sculptural. These works all present what, at its most
elementary, is framed space. However the use of term frame while accurate
may serve to mislead. The interesting problem that emerges is, how to
describe these works? At one level it is possible to describe them as
though they were paintings, and at another as though they were sculptures.
Untitled (1994), presents the challenge in an uncompromising way. At the
back is a photograph. In front of the photograph are pieces of broken
concrete massed at the bottom of the framed area. Over the top of the
concrete is steel wire. It criss-crosses apparently holding the rock in
place and providing a frame for that which takes place beneath it. The work
includes a surrounding frame. There are two of these "panels". Taken
together they comprise the work that bears the title Untitled (1994). What
here is at work?

*

In itself the mere presence of two objects does no more than create a
relation. In the case of some of the other works they are made up of a
larger number of objects. A relation does not automatically comprise a work
of sculpture. Even within an installation spacing, in the specific sense
adumbrated thus far, need not be present. With installations spacing could
be purely relational. Here however the internality of the object will be
central to any response that would be given to the work's work. In this
instance the surface that comes to insist is neither open nor closed. The
surface becomes an arbitrary moment that is given by the presence of the
sculpture in the conventional site of painting. Despite the work of
convention, once the specificity of the work is addressed, considerations
that would only pertain to painting necessarily come to be displaced.

*

Taking up the problem of coherence and thus the question of how the work
belongs together mean that what would have to be described are a series of
internal relations which taken one with the other become the creation of
space. In other words even in describing what is present the inevitable
result is a description of the particularity of space; spacing as the
work's activity. Furthermore the detail of the space, and here the detail
would not be secondary as though it were an attribution of meaning that was
in some way parasitic upon a more fundamental description of what is
present, would inscribe space's own particularity with any attempt to think
space. It would dispense with the possibility of thinking it as an abstract
generality. The layers of activity within these works work in different
ways. The retention of gestures that incorporate retention and destruction,
holding and displaying create an effect in which the layering of times and
the sedimentation of the past rushing into while abutting the present
enable a confrontation with time's own insistent and ineliminable spacing.
Here with this form spacing stages not its own history but its place in
the presence of time. Time and spacing are present as necessarily
interarticulated. Part of their interarticulated presence is the
identification - again as the work's work and thus as its activity - of the
inherent complexity of both.

*

Field is a work whose classificatory difficulty is harboured within its
experiential complexity. What comes to be experienced is the copresence of
objects that work to space, and which comprise, perhaps simultaneously,
part of an installation and are thus implicated in another type of spacing.
This latter form will be the purely relational. What is meant by the
copresence of the two works to create a different field of experience.

*

Christine Boshier's work therefore works within an opening made within a
metaphysics of spacing in which having worked through the feint of
neutrality (revealing it to have been feigned) and the desire for
simplicity, there emerges the complexity of space. It not a complexity that
is harboured in space nor is it a complexity that remains hidden in
objects. It is the complexity that space is. It is affirmed by sculpture's
activity; the activity of spacing.

*