Building Untitled Force Perspective

(Thomas showed this sculpture in my living room in Bridgeport, two summers ago(?), and we had a reading to celebrate. This is brief reflection on the on the sculpture that evening.)

Instillation view of Building Untitled Forced Perspective. Photo: Thomas Moore.

It is a nervous feeling, a balancing act--Thomas Moore's Building Untitled Forced Perspective (2019). Centered in the room is an object of architecture: a miniature assembled of household items. Styrofoam. Window blinds. Wisk. Colored pins. Everything bagel seasoning around the base, resembling people themselves. At first the work looks like an allegorical pastiche, as if Moore reassembled domestic material into a hybridized work/domestic architecture--just take a walk and look at the new condos being constructed throughout this pandemic. What Moore is concerned with is perspective; the sculpture is not about the object itself--it is a nervous feeling. It is like Hart Crane's poem The Bridge (1930); it is not about the Brooklyn Bridge, Crane isolates the tension of looking at the Brooklyn Bridge. 

Building Untitled could fall over. There is no support for the structure--displayed in the center of a lively room, the precarity of the sculpture forces the viewer to engage their perspective. This is a tool of the Minimalist trade, tension between aesthetic and non-aesthetic. The border between reality and fiction. If you step too hard, if too many people are in the room, if you lose balance--it will all come tumbling down. The party over.

Juliane Rebentisch describes a unique reflexive potential in the tension between form and practical concern: a reflective structure that distinguishes the relationship to a work of art from all other reflective relationships in the world. Moving around Building Untitled, around the room as it is filled with lively guests, the viewer is able to become aware of their own body--though only able to articulate the object their body is not, Moore's sculpture. Herein lies Rebentisch: the aesthetic quality of the object is not the properties of the object, but are understood as the product of a process of experience initiated in the experience with the object. As I said, a nervous feeling.