Jay Slyce

About

“The world is full of objects, more or less interesting; I do not wish to add any more.”

Douglas Huebler (1968)

The RCA plywood walls hung on timber frames that reached above the walls. There were no myths to construct how the panels came together to make a wall. The floor between, a place to stand, to sit and so think and to make. This world was not full of objects, bare, requesting a mark, a scoring, collecting, and then materialisation to construct meaning to its recently built frame. Evidence of last year’s making remained–as ruins do–in fragments, to be pieced together, to construct narratives of the past. Bricolage, assemblage, a chain reaction occurred, attempts to make sculpture. A progression of time, objects accumulate. This world was now full of objects.

I, Angelus Novus.

“A Klee drawing named ‘Angelus Novus’ shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the Angel of History. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe that keeps piling ruin upon ruin and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.”

Walter Benjamin, Theses on the Philosophy of History (1940)

A commute from East London to Battersea: walk, tube, tube, bus and walk.

Walk, along a row of high street shops. One of these shops had retired from the setting. Empty floors and walls without activity. The only sign was a square removed from the wall. An action becoming an image. Walking into the studio that day I drew out the proposition of a square to be removed from the plywood walls. I labelled it ‘remove’. After being told I wasn’t allowed to remove the square from that panel, I removed the panel and replaced it with another. I re-enacted the action I assumed of the image I saw in that empty shop. Draw a square, cut the line and remove the square from the panel.

Tube, underground–either central line reds or Victoria line blues–made up the unvaried pallet. Occasional signs of work punctuated this monochrome landscapes. Panels had been removed from the ceiling, ‘redundant cabling’ exposed and labelled using a black felt pen on duct tape. The walls of ads that are put one on top of the other, build surfaces, paintings. Posters, selling life insurance, festival tickets, dog food, various crypto currencies, online banking services, the balloon museum, I could go on… In one of the advertising boards was an A4 piece of paper barely managing to occupy the large surface that was there to promote what I previously listed. On the paper was printed: ‘Poster On Order’– a proposition, a place holder, a redundant poster itself. The language performed to give narrative to a form, a frame, a work. The texts I saw on the underground gave instructions for actions and images to come. Texts as propositions, drawings as alluding to interventions.

A square removed from a wall.

The re-enaction had become reproduction of an image. A painting, a sculpture, a frame. Or the lack of those made material.

The square performed: painting – a painting without ‘used paint’ there was an image, collated forms, pencil markings from the construction of these walls.

The square performed: frame – suggested a place to look through, a suggestion of where to place your feet.

The square performed: sculpture – between the removed and the panel behind became a lack of material, something to walk around.

Exposed the support beam behind and the wood grain of the panel on the other side of the wall.

A natural history.

The light that reflects carries on forever.

The moments of these actions to images are finite periods of time that gather to become history. The light reflected carries these moments to an infinite. A hypothetical witness, one lightyear away, would see this moment in one year.

The square removed was a re-enactment of an action, image and therefore moment. The aura of that image multiples through the witnesses it now collects.

A camera obscura: a way of reproducing that image again, using light and a dark room. Attempt to allow a space for a hypothetical witness – an Angelus Novus. The image of the square is always in the room, your eyes take time to adjust to that darkness. A slowing down, a wasting of time, resisting a construct of accelerated time felt through modernity.

The images you see or don’t see collects serval moments in time, or even becomes a removed space to witness these fleeting moments of time.

The RCA plywood wall with a square removed – a year.