Peter Tyn­dall
pro­jec­tion-space [When Space­Can­vas is asked to repaint itself…]

This exhi­bi­tion has been brew­ing for some time. I first encoun­tered the term pro­jec­tion-space around late 1975 or ear­ly 1976, in the cat­a­logue to the Hay­ward Gallery’s 1971 exhi­bi­tion Tantra. Though much in that cat­a­logue appeared to me then as unfath­omably exot­ic, one par­tic­u­lar depic­tion and cap­tion greet­ed me like an old friend: 448, The Supreme God­dess as Void, with pro­jec­tion-space for image. Since late 1974, I had stripped away from my own image-mak­ing all but the depen­dent, sus­pend­ed frame and the equal­ly depen­dent view­er who projects upon that. Here, wel­com­ing me from a very dif­fer­ent cul­ture of aware­ness was sure­ly a reflec­tion of this same view. Here, too, were fea­tured those same hang­ing points I was now insist­ing were a fun­da­men­tal (causal­i­ty, depen­den­cy) com­po­nent of my visu­al chal­lenge to the dis­play of the West­ern con­ceit, the notion of the self-contained.

In ret­ro­spect, it seems curi­ous that it has tak­en thir­ty years to pub­licly incor­po­rate this fig­ure and this cap­tion into my art. Cer­tain­ly, she has been with me since first sight; and there have been var­i­ous draw­ings and stud­ies made of her made dur­ing this time. Sev­er­al ear­li­er projects that would have pre­sent­ed her pub­licly failed to even­tu­ate. Now the iden­ti­fi­ca­tion is greater and the time seems right.

The ear­li­est work in this exhi­bi­tion is from 1975. It includes a depic­tion of three sus­pend­ed, coloured paint­ings (such a curi­ous and lim­it­ed term, paint­ings), or pro­jec­tion-spaces, one of which has been whit­ed out. This intro­duces the ideogram, derived from the appear­ance of the sus­pend­ed, framed, projection-space.

Then, there are three large ideogram screens, two of which were shown in my pre­vi­ous exhi­bi­tion (with Lindy Lee and Tim John­son at MUMA in 2001). The grand third is shown here for the first time.

The group that fea­tures The Supreme God­dess as Void, with pro­jec­tion-space for image, though all paint­ed this year, are dat­ed to indi­cate they have exist­ed as full stud­ies well before this.

The most recent work in this exhi­bi­tion derives from the sub­ject head­ing of a spam email: When Space­Can­vas is asked to repaint itself, it first deter­mines the cur­rent time and updates each sprite with the cur­rent posit. Oh, thank you gen­er­ous matrix! Echo of the frames-per-sec­ond flick­er­ing on the movie screen of my teenage pro­jec­tion­ist days (see print­ed exhi­bi­tion invite with 1966 draw­ing of 35mm pro­jec­tor). Echo of the mag­ic moment I saw my first Lucio Fontana pierced coloured Spa­tial Con­cept can­vas. Echo of Yves Klein, of his Leap into the Void; his sell­ing of space as art as Void in exchange for gold thrown into the Seine; his Zones of Imma­te­r­i­al Pic­to­r­i­al Sensibility.

The next project is www​.pro​jec​tion​-space​.net

Peter Tyn­dall