A lecture to expand and extend the contents of “Plec Elàstic”, a show in the year-long cycle entitled “The more we know about them, the stranger they become”.

When Dan Graham first encountered Bruce Nauman’s pliable pieces made from sheets of latex rubber in 1968, he quickly realized the need for a descriptive vocabulary other than the volumetric terms of formal analysis generally applied to sculpture.1 Graham was drawn to one work in particular. Placed on the floor and approximately knee-high, the rubber sheet was folded back on itself and then lifted in the middle to create a self-supporting, arched structure. The informal arrangement of the flexible material registered its handling by the artist while slowly deforming under the force of gravity. Less a molded object than a modulated surface, this work has no fixed contours, no definite relation of parts to whole. What Graham experienced was a dynamic field of opposing forces that was conducive to a constant process of spatial warp rather than an objective space conceived as an empty continuum populated by sculptural volumes of a fixed contour and shape. A different geometry was needed to map this multidirectional, intensive experience of space, and thus Graham decided to introduce the notion of topology into art criticism.

(Eric de Bruyn, ‘Topological Pathways of Post-Minimalism’)

Activiy included in the exhibition Elastic Fold. Acid mereotopology on hole complexion.

Olaf Metzel, “112 : 104”, 1991.

Organizes

Arts Santa Mònica