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Concrete Now!
David Bellingham presents an
arrangement of 6” rulers, each dipped in black enamel paint from depths of
1” through to 6”. The size of ruler used suggests a quite delicate craft,
not rocket-science perhaps but still something skilled and precise, the
steel implies a proper technical quality. The strict arrangement, the
exact height to each hanging-nail (62”) and distance between each ruler
(1”) reinforce their seriousness, but there is also something toy-like in
the over-all scale; the rulers ‘dinkier’ than the more familiar 12” ruler,
and the whole piece, taken together, reflects something almost musical;
the measured paint, a scale of notes. The notes these rulers would sound
would be of a higher pitch than the 12” ruler; the gently sprung pins of a
music-box perhaps. This sense may be developed; the piece seems to work
from left to right, and, as with a piano keyboard, plays from a lower to a
higher note; an ascending scale. If we imagine filling a container, of
similar proportions to the rulers, with paint then we would expect to hear
an equivalent raising of pitch. Dipped Rules tinkers with our associations
with form and material, and gives space to reflections on the ‘how and
why’ of these processes.
Is the world potentially,
in all ways, measurable? Or |
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larger image) |
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are some things immeasurable?
Is the question how we measure, what scale we employ to translate things?
We may measure the wavelengths of notes, for example, but what of the
effects of music? To what degree does measuring lead to greater knowledge
and understanding of something in the world? In declaring the depths of
paint as increments of 1” the piece, at the same time, points up the
arbitrariness of this decision, (why not 1cm?) and highlights inches as
something makeshift; they are a ‘handy’ length, useful in human terms. Do
they relate to anything of more universal value? Dipped Rules explores
competing tendencies, between a human desire for more objective measure
(the rulers) and more ‘unruly’ stuff, which, slipping away from its mark,
(and, it would seem, having to be filled-in to the desired depth) paints a
different picture. |
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