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AnyaGallaccio

Camden Arts Centre July August 2008File Note #33 Anya Gallaccio that open space within

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Angus Cook

TWIGS, SUGAR,ACORNS,BLOOD AND

CHOCOLATE are some o the raw materials Anya Gallaccio has used to make art. Just

one primary material is used per sculpture, and this singularity o ocus

lends the chosen material an elemental quality: essence o carpet; the

prototypical ower; pure ice; an urcandle. Always the material is drawn

rom the world o the ordinary. Not passion ruit or carambola, but apples

and oranges and, on this occasion, a horse-chestnut.

Trees are places to play. You can hide in them, eat rom them, turn

into them. And they have been turned into everything rom boats,

bridges and arrows, to ladders, maypoles and fre. Gallaccio is attracted

to the volatile. The stu she works with is endlessly various in the

interests it gives rise to. Its power o evocation corresponds with the

materials capacity to change both in its orm and unction, in subtle anddramatic ways.

This protean character, together with our realisation that the material

Gallaccio has worked with is a amiliar part o everyday lie, allows a

strangely normal substance to become rich in association. Its strange

normalcy allows an overlooked substance and the overlooked world it

comes rom to be seen in any number o new and surprising ways.

This flls the sculpture, and the viewer, and the world, ull o potential.

Through the imposition o a ew simple rules, Gallaccio structures

things into a tightly regulated arrangement. The eect o this is a

serialism, which recalls the language o minimalist art an interesting

but improbable allusion, given the idiosyncrasy o her strategy, which is

distinct rom less wayward artists like Donald Judd, Dan Flavin and

Carl Andre. The relationship o her work to theirs is all the more resonant

or that dissonance.

The rules governingthat open space within required that the crown

o the tree be separated rom its trunk, then the crown be cut into

modular components o predetermined length, and transported to the

museum a certain kind o open space within. Steel pins were to be

driven at regular intervals into the tree-sections, and climbing ropes

threaded through the pins, to return it to its ormer glory, whole again

and upright.

But the conspicuousness o the illusion betrays itsel. Its barely a

tree, more o a ragment, o barely held-together ragments. Its ragilitybears witness to the violence done to it, and to a vulnerability beyond

itsel. Other losses come to mind. While its support system o steel and

rope may compensate or the trees structural defcit, that armature can

also be read as the instrument o its own downall.

Perhaps because they can grow so much bigger and live so much

longer than us, trees and wisdom are close to each other. The tree

o knowledge was a tree, because the incredible intricacy and logic o a

trees branching patterns were noticed and admired. The taxonomies

scientists create, to journey beneath the surace o the world, could not

have come into existence without the special shape o trees, on which

they are modeled.

thatopenspacewithin2008

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ndyKeate

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Almost anything animate objects, inanimate objects,

places, concepts, events, properties, and relationships

may be classifed according to some taxonomic scheme.

Perhaps its little wonder then that trees are themselves so hard to

classiy. Trees are a microcosm o almost anything, except themselves.

At the fnal stage o her working method, Gallaccio orces a

transormation on the primary material, by applying to its arrangement

a secondary material, procedure or orce. Fire, oxygen, yeast, salt,

sunlight, seawater and the processes o distillation and casting are just

some o the catalysts Gallaccio has previously employed to accelerate,

subvert or apprehend the course o time.

Gravity and pressure rom the rope-tension are the main

transormative orces operating on that open space within. Between them,they threaten to compromise the structural integrity o the tree

a structure whose integrity has already been compromised by the rules

systematically imposed upon it. The tree was cut down and cut up,

then reconstructed, and is in decline again. This process parallels and

extends an earlier phase in the trees history, when year by year, the

tree would die back, come back and die back again, in a kind o death-ater-

lie-ater-death knot.

The downward pull is not simply o-set and balanced by a reverse

thrust upwards. Each is the necessary and sufcient condition o the

other. Not creation as subordinate to destruction, or destruction as

incidental to creation, but negative and positive all tangled up. Both are

acets o the all-encompassing phenomenon that is change.

Movements o declining and emergent orm elide into and react to

each other not as contrary impulses, or opposite ends o a cycle, but as

two sides o the same coin. That coin is, as all coins are, change.

Certain Gallaccio sculptures are anti-ux. They are caught in the acto becoming. With these works, the process o change is not celebrated

and perormed, but arrested and denied. They resist development almost

successully while, in a perpetual state o working themselves out,

retain the trace o a ormer instability. These works are not concerned

with the passage o time, but its momentary lapse.

The tension between physical and psychic states is an organising

principle behind much o Gallaccios work. In this respect, that open

space within is no dierent rom anything else she has made. The title

seems to hint that the tree and the museum space it inhabits may

correspond more closely with the worlds o thinking and eeling, than

with any surace reality out there. thatopenspacewithin2008

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Anya Gallaccio was born in Paisley, Scotland 1963 and lives and works

in London. She studied at Kingston Polytechnic (19841985) and then

at Goldsmiths College, University o London (19851988). Ater

graduating she exhibited in Damien Hirsts Freeze, the exhibition

that brought together a generation o Young British Artists or the

frst time. She has had a number o solo shows both in the UK and

internationally. Recent solo shows include Three Sheets to the Wind,

Thomas Dane Gallery, London (2007); Galeria Leme, So Paulo (2006);

One Art, Sculpture Center, New York (2005); Shadow on the things

you know, Blum and Poe, Los Angeles (2005); Silver Seed,

Mount Stuart Trust, Isle o Bute, Scotland (2005); The Look o

Things, Palazzo delle Papesse, Siena, Italy (2005); love is

only a eeling, Lehmann Maupin Gallery, New York, (2004) and Anya

Gallaccio, IKON, Birmingham (2003). She has also exhibited in

numerous group shows including Wood or the Trees and Falling

Leaves, Gimpel Fils, London (2007); Core, Illuminated Productions,

Union Works, London (2006); Sad Songs, University Galleries,Illinois State University, Illinois (2005) and Monuments or

the USA CCA Wattis Institute or Contemporary Arts, San Francisco

(2005). Gallaccio was nominated or the Turner Prize in 2003.

Reading Viewing Listening List

Dave Hickey Earthscapes, Landworks and Oz published in

Art in America, September October (1971)

Dave Hickey Anthony Caro: The Economies o Surprise published

in Anthony Caro Paul Moorhouse (ed.), Tate Publishing (2005)

Robert Smithson A Sedimentation o the Mind: Earth Projects

published in Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings, University o

Caliornia Press (1996)

Briony Fer The Infinite Line: Re-Making Art after Modernism

Yale University Press (2004)

Briony Fer The Works o Salvage: Eva Hesses Latex Workshop

published in Eva Hesse Elizabeth Sussman (ed.), SFMOMA (2002)

Simon Schama Landscape and Memory Harper Collins (1995)

Sara Wheeler Terra Incognita: Travels in Antarctica Jonathan Cape (1996)

Elizabeth Bishop One Art (Poem)

Wallace Stevens Table Talk (Poem)

Ralph Warren Andrews Timber: Toil and Trouble in the Big Woods Outlet (1977)

Werner Herzog (dir.) Fitzcarraldo (1982)

Robert Altman (dir.) 3 Women (1977)

Lost Series 14, Buena Vista Home Entertainment (2008)

Terry Allen Lubbock (On Everything) Sugarhill (1979)

The Mountain Goats The Sunset Tree 4AD (2005)

Neil Young Zuma Reprise/WEA (1975)

Published to accompany the exhibition Anya Gallaccio

that open space within at Camden Arts Centre 11 July 14 September 2008Design:JamesGoggin,SaraDeBondt

&RgisTosettiPractise

Trees can change their appearance, spectacularly and slowly, rom

season to season. They are things to paint or carve. When turned into

paper and charcoal, a tree provides us with the means to reproduce it. that

open space within contributes to and may comment on the tradition o

trees and reexivity in art.

People like and value trees, but understand them as something other

than benign. No one wants to shelter under a tree in a storm or get lost in

a orest at night. A solitary tree, like the one in Samuel Becketts play

Waiting for Godot, makes or a desolate scene. The leaessness othat open

space within may be understood as dormancy, or decline, or an imitation,

i not o death, then o our anticipation o that condition.

Perhaps the biggest dierence, between a cut-ower sculpture and a

cut-tree sculpture, is the rate o transition. The tree could disintegrate

soon or suddenly or slowly or way o in the uture; the onset and durationo the owers transmogrifcation is less variable. Time is experienced

dierently in each case, but both call to our attention the uses o adversity.

Exhilaration may be elt at the recognition that the physical

disintegration o the work is an ongoing one, the inevitability o its loss

being an integral part o the sculptures poignancy and elegance. With

the prospect o its physical annihilation increasingly elt, as its material

end becomes reality, the sculpture turns into something truly real in our

imagination whole again, open and fnal.

Angus Cook is a contributing editor to Q+A

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Cover:thatopenspacewithin2008

Photo:Andy

Keate

The aspects of things that are mostimportant for us are hidden becauseof their simplicity and familiarity.

(One is unable to notice somethingbecause it is always before oneseyes.) The real foundations of hisenquiry do not strike a man at all.

Unless that fact has at some timestruck him.And this means: wefail to be struck by what, once seen,is most striking and most powerful.

Ludwig WittgensteinAll images the artist; courtesy Thomas Dane Gallery, London

Exhibition supported by

With thanks to Cormack and Franklin Tree Care Limited

ISBN 978 1 900470 84 5