Post 21: Distance + Al Taylor sculpture

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I often have the experience where someone asks me a question, I think about it, I really look deep into my mind, and then I conclude that, at least in that moment, I can’t find any piece of an answer (= “I have no idea”). When I was on the train home last night, I was thinking of one specific instance of this experience I had and I found myself picturing an abstract painting at the end of a long, dark hallway. I think the experience of not knowing how to answer a question feels like what this scenario looks like, but I was also starting to think that all of this is what looking at a painting feels like more generally--how when you’re standing right in front of a one, there are ways in which it’s not also all right there in front of you. I’m inclined to broadly say that a painting is often much closer to someone physically than it is conceptually. And conceptually, it’s always an unattainable distance away (distance that cannot be traveled, or possibly another kind of distance entirely). But maybe conceptual and physical distance can also be paired more equally? Maybe sometimes they align? (What is this like?)

I’ve been looking at this Al Taylor structure (major swoon), and in terms of distance, I'm thinking there are aspects that seem to pull it in closer ("closer" as more able to be thought about, talked about, emoted about; closer to words) as well as ways in which it maintains its faraway-ness. Maybe these are more like differences in the approach of looking.

In the spirit of continuing to enlarge this thought, perhaps this merely faraway grasp one can have on a painting is actually a strong example of what seeing feels like more generally. Is it that seeing is so immediate it makes anything that can result from it (a thought, feeling, question, sense of understanding) feel farther away in comparison? Each of these experiences (not knowing what to think about something, seeing artwork, seeing anything) seems to be about feeling far away from something while knowing at the same time that you're close up to it.

Al Taylor, Untitled (Thirds)

, 1993*

Closer: There are certainly some ways of conceptualizing the immediacy of what I see. I think the identifiability of the cans as cans and the connecting lines of steel and wire that run between them bring about a sense of these components contributing to a system--efficient A to B pathways that keep track of information, filing it in large-storage nodes. I'm almost suspicious of the really significant shadows that are created from this work that otherwise feels dependent on its own limited use of line. The ghost lines are exciting as sleepwalking reproductions of two of the system's parts, but their restating presence also feels vaguely ominous.

Farther: It's much harder to conceptualize the moments after the immediacy of seeing. The faraway-ness of this sculpture feels less like a quality of it and more like an attempt to think of it in its totality. To refrain from conceptualizing the components of something or things in relation to one another brings about a thoughtlessness that seems to sit on the same plane as wholeness. . . . I have a great curiosity about what this feeling is, and what to do with it.

Without being able to discuss something's part-ness, its wholeness keeps itself at arm's length. (This is starting to feel a little vorhanden/zuhanden [re Heidegger] . . . but I believe Heidegger uses closeness and distance in reverse ways, or almost reverse ways--for him, closeness comes from something carrying out the purpose it is meant to carry out [to me this is what the Al Taylor structure is doing when I feel far away from it], and distance is created through observation or analysis of something [what I've described as closeness that results from bringing something into the realm of language].) (I'll only mention Heidegger once every 20 posts.)

All in all, looking at this structure as a whole is like: [shouting across a room] "wait, what did you say?"


*I don’t think David Zwirner is coming after me for using their image here but this is just to say: this is not my image and it is their image.

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