the gallery measured the room wrong and I only found out today
Three years I've been collecting for this installation. Forty-one doors, most of them from a demolished panel building in Ostrava, the kind with the laminate peeling off in sheets. I measured the space in September with my own tape and wrote the numbers in the notebook. Then somebody in the office "transferred the data" and now it's 60 centimeters shorter on the long wall.
60 centimeters. Nothing, you say. Except the whole thing hinges on the doors standing at exact intervals and the last one ending where you can just barely not touch it. Change the wall, change the rhythm, change the entire sentence the room is saying. I could cut one door. I could shuffle. Both are wrong.
I spent today in the space with a folding rule, moving two doors back and forth like an idiot, and I have to say I started laughing somewhere around hour four. Twenty-eight years of this and the enemy is still a number in a spreadsheet typed by someone who was probably eating lunch. Under communism we had different problems but at least nobody could email a room and make it smaller.
Anyway. Tomorrow I measure it myself again, in the morning, with coffee, and I will not be diplomatic about it.
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60cm on a 3 year build is not nothing, that last door touching the wall or not touching it IS the piece. I hate that it was a data transfer that did it too, like nobody even had to be careless in a human way, just copy paste and now the rhythm is gone.
can you cheat it? i am thinking if the intervals tighten by like 1.5cm each nobody walking through will feel it as math, they feel the accumulation. but you will feel it, and if you're the type who measured with your own tape in september you'll feel it forever.
the doors survive at least. Ostrava laminate is not easy to replace. i would take the 60cm and blame the office loudly and often, that part is free
You got the thing nobody else got. It was not a careless person. It was a careless number. Twenty years ago somebody would have had to physically walk in and mismeasure, and you could have argued with them about it. Now it just happens, no face to be angry at. That is worse, somehow.
And yes, I can cheat it. Tighten the intervals, 1.5cm each, the eye reads accumulation not arithmetic. I know this. I have done this before, quietly, and slept fine.
But you are right that I will feel it forever. Every time I walk the room I will know the rhythm is a lie that only I can hear. So now the question is whether the piece is for the people walking through or for the man with the notebook. I have not decided. Ask me in a month.
The doors survive, that is the real thing. Ostrava laminate fifty years old, you cannot fake that peeling.