Andrew Gangoiti text page

In a simple and elegant construction in the rear gallery at Gertrude Street, Andrew Gangoiti provided a concise coda to the gallery's exhibition history and the development of contemporary art over the last ten years.

Gangoiti constructed a floor to ceiling column out of stainless steel cable. It was a hollow form; an outline sketch traced in the air and stretched taut between the two horizontal planes. It sat next to the central true load-bearing column like an ethereal holographic projection. Yet the tensile strength of its material suggested it was in fact keeping the roof on. Indeed, Gangoiti's column had - in between floor and ceiling - also been rotated ninety degrees, as if the two planes had been separated by some plate tectonic force and the cabling worked against this torsion.

In an earlier installation Replication at ether ohnetitel gallery, Gangoiti used similar cabling to suspend a one-fifth replica gallery space within the large rear gallery. Instead of rotation, the emphasis was on diminution; shrinking the gallery into an object to be negotiated rather than inhabited. In both cases the gallery or a part thereof was redrawn inside a new outer spatial limit and maintained in suspension by unseen forces.

Andrew Gangoiti,
Post Theory, 1996

At 200 Gertrude Street, the gallery's column has of course featured conspicuously at the centre of every show for the last ten years. Indeed the various attentions paid to it or not might comprise a kind of history of recent sculpture. Such a history would culminate in Gangoiti's close attention, indeed, his myopic focus on this single architectural member.

Through the rise of installation practice in Australia even the most insignificant architectural or spatial quality takes on monumental and significant proportions. There's an imaginary sliding scale of values for the column at 200 Gertrude Street, say between irrelevant background detail to an integral and meaningful element. Most recently artists have worked with rather than against this element for specific reasons which charaterise current art practice.

The visual arts are now undoubtedly all interrelated in the field of vision. Painting and sculpture are no longer self-contained and self-referential practices. A different, global sense of space reconvenes the arts - including gallery design - as linked parts of the same extensive ambience. This is what architecture (especially since the Bauhaus) have imparted to the visual arts - this interrelation of artforms in global space - such that 'seeing' or 'looking' is transcended by a superior sense or conceptual understanding of the spatial continuity between all things.

In general, the ensemble has replaced the object (which goes to the core of current installation practice) and we now look for a certain quality of space in arrangement rather than within bounded, singular forms. Gangoiti's column assumes its profound form on this basis. It is a figure or cipher of a recent spatial history of contemporary art. It operates both within the new delimited spatial arena of the visual arts (which we may designate simply as the 'architectural' or 'architectonic') and also within what has been one of Melbourne's more reslient venues for contemporary art .

Its right angle rotation is furthermore a lyrical flourish in relation to both these sets of reference, as if not only marking a physical displacement or distance but also a qualitative difference between old and new positions; as if to say, art is not where it once was, and it has changed direction.

Sure, by now these maybe banal observations in writing but their representation in prosaic sculptural form more or less proves the point. To distil poetry from theory is not easy and Gangoiti's succeeds.

Stuart Koop
1996