The grid is the classic means of structuring art, beloved of minimalists who want to remove the contingency of the artist’s hand from the finished work. At the same time, it’s a Platonic ideal towards which actual instantiations can only strive. Behind the jocular cover of a title taken from a children’s game, Rickard demonstrates how the real penetrates the ideal by systematically changing the method of producing the grid, by dropping ink onto grid-marked paper from varying heights. The sequence as a whole then yields a push and pull we can read into and between the individual drawings: yes, there is an ordering grid behind the apparently arbitrary scatter of ink dropped from head height; likewise, there are imperfections to be detected in the supposedly accurate results achieved from toe height. What’s more, this collision of chance and regularity generates its own aesthetic, one in which the artist sets matters in motion and then steps back to see how they develop. And it also builds the action, the process of production, very visibly into the result: you can look at the drawings as explicit documentations of their own process. Paul Carey-Kent, |
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