The origins of this work might lie partially in the development of certain ideas pertaining to public sculpture which converge with the inherent tendency of certain minimalist works to “relocate the origins of a sculpture’s meaning to the outside, no longer modelling its structure on the privacy of psychological space but on the public, conventional nature of what might be called cultural space” (Krauss). (1) A model of meaning dependant on the public experience of forms rather than the “legitimising claims of a private self” was, Krauss argues, a primary concern of American sculpture in the 60’s, but most apparent in the often controversial public commissions of Smith, Morris, Bladen and of course Serra. Minimalism, she maintains, seems more orientated to a notion of collective audience than the individual spectator constituted — within the modernism of Greenberg, Fried, et al — in pure recognition of the work, subordinate to the inherent formal relationships in the work.

Krauss re-reads minimalism according to the ideas of Merleau-Ponty whose phenomenology of perception constitutes the individual in relation to one or several of an infinite number of possible orientations towards a specific object. She argues that minimalist works imply the same multiplicity of vantage points, from which viewers may perceive themselves in relation to the work in  space. Thus the spectator within minimalism is constituted as one of many comprising a public audience for the work which, abstractly, represents the multiplicity of views possible within the determining phenomenological perspective.

This is evident in the documentation of large-scale minimalist (and also earth) works, in which an aerial or elevated view is often the best vantage point to perceive the integral role of the audience in the work. But it is not a view afforded the participant. It is a view provided as documentation, or as evidence, of the work, (images of Serra’s work are exemplary: “There is one condition that I want, a density of traffic flow”.) (2) The point remains despite the protestations of Serra — who denouncers the surrogate consumption of sculpture through photography — since this view point is not incorporated into the experience of the work. Though it is evident in the private working drawings of the artist and the construction engineer’s plans, it only emerges for the viewer afterwards in the orientation of the camera towards the work, in a series of photographs documenting the work’s effect; a certain repetition which can be related to the claims of Krauss.

In issuing the map or plan of her work — indeed, in this particular piece the plan is materialised in the work – Gail Hastings presupposes a difficulty in negotiating cultural terrain or space. The plan suggests a possible reading of the space and the objects within it according to a legend, combining the immediacy of the forms with a forewarning of the encounter. It does not lessen the encounter but explicitly links the experience to the larger claim of sculpture-since-minimalism to engage an external public world. The outermost boundary of the work is clearly indicated. Therein the quality of the space is cartographic, resembling rather than simply corresponding to the plan. It is the relation of the plan to the forms which construes the idea of a public in relation to the space, regardless of who might see this work, since the plan, and by close association the work, embody a democratic point of view.

The genesis of graphic language used in architectural and engineering drawing is often taken for granted. It derives from a system of orthographic projection in which any form might be mapped onto a place according to a series of parallel projections from any point on the surface of the form, providing elevations and plans of the form in space. It is a system or model of representation which presumes an infinitely distant point of sight so that the projections are parallel and perpendicular to the plane (the effect of aerial photography). This is in contrast to one point perspective in which these projections converge at a single vanishing point and point of view (their diagonal trajectories converge at a certain ideal point of view in relation to the form). Thus orthographic projection produces a point of view within a two dimensional rendering which is omnipresent in relation to the form. It is also a point of view which represents the culmination of Merleau-Ponty’s ideas and perhaps, the covert civic aims of minimalist sculpture disclosed by Krauss:

The [object] itself is the flat projection of all possible perspectives, that is, the perspectiveless position from which all can be derived, the [object] seen from everywhere. (3)

The floorplan or aerial view, as one of any number of such projections of a form in space, retains this quality in a point of view which dissipates evenly across the entire surface of the plan. One is, as it were, above every point on the map; that most privileged vantage point, of God, of the pantheon; a point from which to perceive your own participation in the work. This is the inherent democracy of maps; a point of view (or rather encompassing plane) germane to the notion of a public audience. However, it is a point of view which had to be liberated from its ‘top secrecy’ within the military and scientific institutions of the Enlightenment (via Girard Desargues, in the descriptive geometry of Gaspard Monge) and likewise, more recently, from its latent status within the minimalist oeuvre.

1. Rosalind Krauss, Passages in Modern Sculpture, Thames and Hudson, London, 1977, p. 270.
2. Douglas Crimp, “Richard Serra’s Urban Sculpture: An Interview”, Richard Serra: Interviews Etc. 1970-1980. New York Hudson River Museum, 1980, p. 168.
3. Maurice Merleau=Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, translation by Collin Smith, London, Routledge Kegan Paul, 1962, pp. 67-9.