Gail Hastings places the process of perceiving, understanding and taking action at the centre of her space-related constellations of texts, objects, colours, material and formal guiding systems. Her sculptures or “sculptural situations” (Hastings) create spaces intended to appeal to and involve people as physically, intellectually and aesthetically competent beings. Her formal language is shaped by the Minimal and Conceptual Art of the 60s, but even more by the utopian view of life and art taken by Russian Constructivism in the early years of the century. Viewers coming into the exhibition space, seeing the individual elements and relating them to each other is always a physical and mental component of the work as well. We can see her work as abstract pictorial compositions tending to the three-dimensional, but we can also step into them, use them and accept the possibilities of action. Both real, architectural, and aesthetic space are activated as they fade into each other.

Gail Hastings has developed a multi-partite, sculptural and architectural situation for the Esslingen exhibition The Space Here is Everywhere. It attempts to show that our “imaginary museum” is structured both as a reality in time and space and as the result of the memory, interpretation and transformation of images. The front wall of her exhibition space in Esslingen is dominated by a picture with a magenta border — a colour that Hastings remembers from a work by Liubov Popova in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York and that moved her very much. The image broadens out into a three-dimensional situation with couch and bookshelves containing catalogues of all the artists involved in The Space Here is Everywhere. There is an empty space on the shelves for the “Lost Book”; this is found again in the same space in a glass showcase and turns out to be a book of writing down memories of works of art (“a record of remembered art”). The book is linked formally to the sculptural space-situation by a strip on its jacket that is the same width as the frame of the picture on the wall; but this strip is green, and not pink. A water-colour page from the “Encyclopaedia of an Art Opinion” hangs on the wall in a frame and explains that the colour green, when looked at long and hard, appears pink as an afterimage on the retina; in other words a physiologically explicable removal of the difference but — as we learn when we read on in the encyclopaedia — an idea that triggers arguments among art experts and viewers about whether an ‘afterimage’ can be a ‘real’ image — or, more broadly speaking, whether our memories of works or art that we have seen are ‘real’ or false’.

If a piece of knowledge is explained to us in something called an encyclopaedia, then we can assume that we are looking at a work that collects together knowledge as it stands at the time, or a section of that knowledge, arranges it in an understandable way and structures it systematically. Gail Hastings has worked through various encyclopaedias now, and they — or least that is what their position in the work suggests — categorize the ‘total stock’ of art form the point of view of production or the aesthetics of reception and arranges it into an ideal system that is logical in its own terms: encyclopaedias of ‘words’, of ‘waiting’ and of ‘chance’, encyclopaedias of a ‘thoughtful’, ‘timeless’, ‘spontaneous’ or ‘silent’ art that come forward with a power of definition that is apparently the last court of appeal, whereas in fact they follow on from each other with every newly conceived sculptural situation and thus acquire a temporary validity that is strictly dependent on its context.

The inaccessibility of the glass case in Hastings’ work for Esslingen draws the viewer’s attention to the openness of the picture-space-architecture in which he or she can settle down and flick through the catalogues that are waiting for them: ‘I this manner it becomes possible to see that the space of a contemporary art situation — in this case of the magenta border painting and its extension — is inseparable to the space of our actions, of our deliberations and our memories (whether our memories be of art or other things). It is a space that we can enter and leave at will, both physically and imaginatively, while at the same time being a space that delineates, as does architecture, the shapes that these passages might take. And yet it is a space that not only contains us but which we also contain — through the coincidental remembrance of its parts, through its chance.” (Gail Hastings)