see all that is invisible or hidden. Watching this work unfold, we harbours a new problem needing to be solved.
problem needing to be solved. The womans
experience the same thrill as when we think we might have been
told a secret. The paradox of the secret is that it is not hidden, but
passed along. Watching Vlatka in this performance, we cannot
know what she is thinking, but one thing we know for sure is that
from her hidden place on the other side of the door, she knows
what we cannot see.
Writing this text, Im looking through the images of Unhinged,
some taken by me, some by others during performances of the
piece in different locations. One image in particular, which I
took in Brussels, leads me concretely to this question of Vlatkas
thoughts ‒ of what we know, and what she herself knows, hidden
from our view behind the door. Its the image I shot looking down
at the door. In it we see eight fingers (four on each side of the
door) and a Converse shoe in which we assume there is a foot,
the wooden floor extending away to the edge of the frame.
Hugo Glendinning
Without Rhyme or Reason
A woman clocks in for work at 9.00am, smartly dressed in
black, hair in a ponytail. She begins the task of arranging fifty
chairs, slowly, methodically. Gradually she positions the chairs
into neat formation ‒ a regimented grid ‒ before appearing
to change her mind. The seating arrangement is disassembled
and regrouped into a single long line, evenly spaced. Yet,
before long, this too is abandoned, seemingly deemed unfit for
purpose, somehow not quite up to the job. The deliberation
continues. New options are tested and rejected ‒ over and over,
again and again. At first glance perhaps, it could be possible
to conceive of this lone individual as a diligent host, akin to the
wedding planner intent on finding the perfect model of seating
to accommodate the capricious whims of her nuptial guests. Or
else, at times, she may seem like an overzealous conference
organiser maximizing the possibility of delegate interaction,
wilfully breaking up the larger social group into more intimate
network hubs for optimal coffee-break dialogue. On occasion,
her actions evoke those of the novice teacher, somewhat
undecided how best to organise her class, uncertain where to
place the chairs to keep the space dynamic, since every solution
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vlatka04.indd 18-19
gestures of assembly and disassembly might appear to have
some utility, performed as part of the process of making ready,
as preparation for some unspecified future event. An hour in and
the promise of utility appears questionable, a little suspect.
At times the arrangements seem determined, as though they
were diagramming a specific scenario or following a clear plan.
pp. 43-46 But in other moments the organisation of the chairs becomes
frustrated or distracted, sent off course ‒ a touch wild. The
identifiable configurations of chairs begin to offer moments of
fleeting stability, which merely punctuate or interrupt the longer
episodes of formlessness or of unruly, vertiginous disorder. In the
absence of any named occasion to plan for, the configurations
of chairs remain wholly speculative, hypothetical, abstracted.
After two hours there is still no prospect of resolution in sight;
each reconfiguration seems to thwart the logic of the previous
one, refusing to allow the possibility of any narrative to emerge.
The different arrangements operate as propositions for potential,
yet unfulfilled, relational interactions ‒ imagined meetings or
fictional gatherings ‒ that are barely asserted before they are
reconceived according to a different plan. The ebb and flow of
action is maintained over the next eight hours ‒ the duration
of a typical working day ‒ until 5.00pm, the time for quickly
downing tools and clocking off. Nothing has been achieved,
no conclusions have been gleaned, no resolution granted.
Throughout the day, the unfolding event remains suspended at
the level of the preliminary ‒ the anticipated guests never arrive;
their presence can only be imagined. Over time, the intent or
purpose with which this task is performed appears increasingly
foolhardy or misplaced. Each configuration is disbanded before
any chance of inhabitation, collapsed almost as soon as it is
proposed.
Sooner or later it becomes apparent that the task of assembling
chairs is not preparatory; this is it. These are disposable
structures, sketches; never intended for actual use. Whilst the
various configurations evoke real possibilities for communication,
the location of the action itself collapses all hope of functionality
or utility, since the chairs are assembled in the shallow waters
of the Los Angeles River, under Fletcher Drive Bridge in Elysian
Valley. This is not a place wherein a briefing meeting might take
shape, nor an exam or time-share seminar. It is not the place for a
congregation, a reception, the patient formation of a seated queue,
the first confessional of a self-help group, the gathered reunion
of the class of 74, a game of bingo, a job interview or speed
pp. 77-80 date. Instead, this is This Here and That There, an uninterrupted
eight-hour performance by Vlatka Horvat. Previous iterations of
this project have been performed in similarly incongruous sites:
a large pool of water fronting the Haus der Kulturen der Welt in
Berlin (2007); a plaza at the site of the former Zollverein coal
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 mine in Essen (2009), where even on dry land there remained a
certain absurdity to the interminable rearrangement of chairs.
This Here and That There extends Horvats concerns around the
relationship between body and site, further questioning how
an individual negotiates the specific terms of occupation and
inhabitation within situations that appear limited or framed by
absurd rules. Horvats work often takes the form of a series
of attempts to find imaginative solutions within the terms of an
illogical, curiously self-imposed, system or structure; where the
artist-as-protagonist engages in various forms of endless action,
irresolvable quest or repeated task that seem inevitably doomed
to fail. Many of Horvats projects operate according to a model
of purposeless or even Sisyphean reiteration, in which a form
of non-teleological performativity becomes activated in relentless
obligation to a private rule or order that is either absurd,
arbitrary or undeclared. In This Here and That There, Horvats
perpetual assembly and disassembly of the chairs evokes the
plight of Sisyphus, locked forever into the action of rolling a rock
to the top of a hill, only for it to then roll back down again. Yet
within Horvats work, the Sisyphean myth is conjured through the
economic or diagrammatic vernacular of the instruction manual
or informational guide; its cycle of failure and repetition explored
as a playfully propositional, as much as existential, condition of
lived experience. The failure of each repeated attempt to find the
right configuration of seating operates as the momentum for
the work, the impetus for the development of new permutations
and solutions to the task at hand. In this sense, Sisyphean labour
becomes generative, with repetition always producing something
new or different, and capturing the possibility of endlessly playful
and mobile reinvention. Politically speaking, this opening out of
possibilities within a limited frame becomes a way of creating the
potential for alternative modes of existence within situations that
have been perceived as inflexible or irrevocably constant. The
authority of the rule collapses in the wake of a performer who
‒ like Sisyphus ‒ refuses to buckle under its pressure, or who
persistently endeavours to find new ways of creatively inhabiting
the instruction through the performance of unlimited repetitions
within the limited terms of the task. The critical inconsistencies
produced by the artist appearing to move between different
positions ‒ between seriousness and levity, investment and
disinvestment, humour and despair ‒ complicate any single
reading of the Sisyphean tendency. Interpretation remains
multifaceted and shifting, never fixed. The irresolution produced
by the punctuated cycle of Sisyphean failure and repetition in
the work prevents the inevitable disappointment experienced in
the moment of completion. In This Here and That There closure
is traded in favour of endlessly unfolding permutations. Horvats
actions thus remain forever suspended at the point of anticipation,
at the threshold of what is still yet-to-come.
Emma Cocker
vlatka04.indd 20-21
Floor Chair
Vlatka Horvats wide formal spectrum of artistic practice ranges
from photography, performance and video to works on paper,
sculpture and installation. Regardless of her choice of media for
any given project, Horvats efforts always involve an investigation
of the medium itself, the logics of which she often works to
thwart, make evident or turn over. Through ongoing research
and a persistent engagement with specific questions revisited
in different aspects of her practice, Horvats work stays open
and the possibilities it generates are seemingly never finalised.
Since my collaboration with Horvat on the exhibition Displaced
Divisions at Galerija Škuc in Ljubljana was mostly situated in
sculpture, I will stay in this territory and, by looking at her work
Floor Chair (2009), try to address a segment of Horvats work
within sculpture which in my view raises questions about the field
of sculpture itself.
pp. 51-52, 54 Floor Chair ‒ as well as Horvats other variations of half-chairs ,
Wall Chair with Moss and Mirror Chair (both 2009) ‒ clearly
and simply raises the issue of how we experience space in the
context of sculpture. The moment we are confronted with these
works, we must rethink or re-encounter the relationship between
the material and the non-material, between what is seen or what
can be seen on the one side, and what can be imagined and
conjured up, on the other. Horvats work is an invitation ‒ and
failure to accept it leaves the viewer stuck in the world of banal
utilitarian objects.
In Floor Chair and her other three-dimensional works, Horvat
questions the limits of our perception of sculptural objects ‒ an
act of encounter contingent on the tension between an object
and the space that the object occupies. The work plays with the
viewers experience of material reality and attempts to reinterpret
a familiar object ‒ the chair in this case ‒ by modifying it and
placing it in unexpected relationships with space. These acts of
repositioning and reordering of space and things in it prompt
the viewer to experience material reality and memory in a new
way. The viewer has to complete the artwork, make it whole
through both rational and imaginative processes triggered by
the encounter with the spatially reconstituted object. But perhaps
the most important issue Floor Chair raises is the question of
the boundaries of space. What determines the boundaries of
a space? Are they determined by walls, as tangible physical
obstacles, or by the viewers inability to shift his or her perception
from the material to the non-material? The extent of the viewers
participation in the encounter with object and space hinges on
his or her cultural grounding, on the assumptions, frameworks
and sets of understandings he or she brings into the room ‒ its
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