Sebastian Black: 3 New Shapes
3 New Shapes
1
The first shape is an aquatint on paper. The image is composed of black boxes. A black
box in certain fonts (Helvetica here) represents a full stop, a period. A black box painted on a canvas 100 years ago would have proclaimed a full stop of sorts too; that the same box now merely designates a period isn’t besides the point.
The print is accordion bound and displayed here upright on two big pedestals. The hope
is that it becomes extroverted, less book more folding screen. Folding screens are shapes which ostensibly order space by obscuring disorderly shapes. Luckily they make flimsy disciplinarians; think of fig leaves and their attendant etceteras. What I mean is the screen becomes a surface on which we project all sorts of new and naughtily assembled shapes and in this respect it performs the opposite of its stated intent. If we want to be serious we could say that a folding screen is an opacity which creates transparency, a device for seeing through the given into the possible. Nowadays most (usually flat) screens do the exact opposite. Through their seemingly endless capacity to represent they transform the possible as such into a mundane succession of givens. Todays ‘transparent’ screen often conceals a very opaque black box.
A sticky vinyl letter is flat until you peel it up and fold it. I guess what I mean is that they are first and foremost shapes, agnostic towards the complimentary propositions: meaningless stuff and stuffless meaning.
2 and 3
These aren’t entirely “new” shapes per se. There is a desk whose form is borrowed from a
building and a building whose form is borrowed from a desk. The building is the Ministry of Finance here in Paris. I like that it has an embarcadero, an architectural appendage which proposes a speedboat as a viable alternative to email. The desk is a standard piece of furniture found near the A.T.M.s at any Chase Bank branch. These objects used to hold deposit slips and collect wastepaper.Now that most transactions occur digitally they mainly just hang around.
Both shapes are atavisms in some regard, kind of like tailbones. Writing is their shared invisible tail. Also both shapes borrow from banks. However the terms of their contracts remain ambiguous.
– Sebastian Black