Landscape Object (Variable Globes)

Gerhard Marx
Landscape Object (Variable Globes), 2021
Plywood and reconstituted map fragments
Work: 38 x 64 x 66 cm

Landscape Object (Variable Globes) forms part of a series of works ( the Variable Globe series) that engages physical depictions of space - ‘spatial imaginaries’ – with an interest in how these descriptions affect and shape that which it describes. The conventional ‘globe’, as one would find in classrooms and studies offers a simplified world view in which the world is presented as a singular, cohesive, and contained entity, one in which all parts are contained by the whole. Through the logic of collage, these sculptural works fragment and dissemble existing cartographies and rearrange them to construct ‘propositional cartographies’; spatial representations that aim to comprehend more complicated spaces of overlap, intersection, simultaneity and palimpsest. In constructing the sculptural form of ‘Landscape Object’, the logic of the XYZ axis was followed – three planes intersecting at 90 degrees is the axial logic on which the simulation of space is built. At the heart of the laminated birch-ply construction from which the sculpture was ‘grown’, lies three intersecting planes; similar to the XYZ axis, except that these planes do not intersect at 90 degrees. This provides a deliberately skewed, or maligned axial point from which the sculpture is grown. The result is a construction that seems to unfold in a gestural, contorted manner from this subjective, ‘mistaken’ point, following an informal logic of agglomeration and adaptation, rather than the globe’s inherent implication of containment and comprehension. Another logic that informs the sculptural form of Landscape Object (Variable Globes) is the intersection of space as suggested by perspectival logic, with the viewer’s experience of physical space - the space in which the work is experienced. Each plane or facet of the sculpture is shaped to describe the illusion of a flat surface in space, (a map in space) so each ascribes to a perspectival logic, a vanishing point of its own – implying a space and perspective that is separate to, distinct from and in contradiction with the physical space of the viewer. The ambition of this logic is that of constructing objects that sits uncomfortably in the physical world of the viewer and suggests other viewpoints; alternate perspectives that decentralizes the viewer of the work. The act of laminating paper cartographies onto three dimensional form mimics the construction method of conventional globes. Curiously this act reverses one of the central concerns of cartography - the logic of projection - which transposes the continuously curved surface of the obloid earth-body onto a flat plane in order to make complex, dimensional information manageable, portable, and inscribable. The act of transposing flat cartographies into dimensional space then marks a moment of bringing the theoretical into the real; it marks the opposite of ‘projection’ – arguably an act of ‘reflection’. The cartographies used to coat the sculptural form of Landscape Object (Variable Globes) are taken from a broad collection of decommissioned and discarded cartographies. The fragmentation and reconstruction of these cartographic shards pays no heed to their histories, heritage, boundaries, geographies and nationalities and points of origin. The logic of collage allows these dissonant fragments to be combined into a new subjective, migrant logic, suggesting a spatial imaginary which aspires to hold multiple positionalities, doubled presences, failed containments, lapsed distances, histories folded into one another, interwoven geographies, worlds that exist across, in between and amongst: a propositional cartography. Gerhard Marx 2021