Measuring Nothing

Jared Ginsburg, Two Horns, 2018, two-channel audio visual installation, duration infinite | Credit: Jared Ginsburg and blank projects

Jared Ginsburg at blank projects, 2018.

To begin with that sound: a single tone held for four seconds, followed by a pause, and then by a different tone at a lower pitch. Another pause. The first tone again; the second soon after. On and on, and always the same, a monotonous and melancholy fugue, echoing off the gallery’s parquet floors below and the exposed corrugated sheeting above.

Jared Ginsburg’s Measuring Nothing offers a repertoire of hesitations and inventions, a material study of perhaps and what if. With sculptures, video works, drawings and prints  –  or, as the artist says, with remains, traces, instruments, and devices  – Ginsburg notates the time spent in his studio pursuing answers to the undefined questions he sets himself.

The works exhibited, while idiosyncratic in subject and medium, share a distinct preoccupation with repetition as form. While this preoccupation is most clearly referenced in Ginsburg’s four video works (the footage being looped from the final second back to the first, always beginning again), it is also apparent in the sound that floods the gallery. It comes from Two Horns, a two-channel audio-visual installation of infinite duration; two identical box monitors set on two identical speakers, showing and sounding twin foghorns against a grey sea.

There too, is the unseen loop of the artist’s process  –  making, discarding, and making again. In Ginsburg’s studio everything presents itself as potential material; off-cuts and waste, even old and forgotten artworks, are repurposed and reimagined. This attitude against finality is most evident in the artist’s sculptures, which carry traces of their previous lives as other works. They are inexact and fragile constructions; a series of propositions for further propositions, object studies of objects only conjectured.

There is also a marked repetition of lines throughout the exhibition (for what is a loop if not a line joined at either end?). Three video works explore lines in movement; pushed across the studio floor, fashioned from a tangle of wires, and drawn by a marble rolled back and forth across a page. His kinetic sculpture, Double Seismograph, sets a line in motion too, if only just. It is a rudimentary bamboo object, held together with rubber and wire offcuts, that threatens to fall apart at any moment yet somehow persists in its slow, repetitive movement, its two disco-ball motors turning with something like reluctance. Nothing is achieved but a slight, unvaried motion and the object’s fragile endurance.

Lines come to rest in Ginsburg’s two assemblages, Hanging Drawing I and Hanging Drawing III (Variable), fashioned from strips of black rubber suspended in frames with lengths of string. The potential for movement, however, remains; the works easily rehung and redrawn, each composition uncertain and unstable. As such, these ‘drawings’ describe only two variations among countless others.

There is a single painting in the exhibition, Untitled no. 3547 (Force Over Time), a large-scale work on canvas that describes a series of false starts and revisions. Seen from across the gallery, the work appears almost entirely grey, save a single red line, two graphite points, and a bar of oil-stick blue, collected together at the painting’s lower edge. Up close, however, one finds within that indeterminate shade marks half obscured, painted over or sanded away; the unclear traces of an unclear process. Untitled no. 3547 is a painting under erasure, describing nothing in particular but only time spent; the artist forever doing and undoing, and starting again.

And yet, unlike the other works exhibited, Ginsburg’s drawings of proposed sculptures, figures, and a falling object have about them a sense of finality in that they cannot be reworked or changed (framed, as they now are, behind glass). They have entered into a stasis his other works resist. They can no longer be reabsorbed into the artist’s studio, are no longer propositions but products.

Measuring Nothing is visually spare, even austere. The works stand apart from one another; the space between them filled only by the repeating phrase of those two foghorns, which find little to absorb their echoes. Here, in the gallery, each object appears insubstantial, uncertain, easily broken. And something of this fragility suggests that the works exhibited have come to rest in this place for only a moment, that these objects exist only temporarily. Flotsam and jetsam  –  washed up into the gallery for a short while, until the tide returns them to the studio.