SPACE ODDITY
Conceptual work by Pratchaya Phinthong contemplates the richness of blankness
Parking curbs, in different colours, are arranged in a pattern in a gallery, which occupies a section of a parking space. In one corner of the room are seven cardboard boxes, which contain dozens of brown, slightly dog-eared log books, handwritten by security guards and caretakers of the National Gallery, dating back to the 1990s. Dry report on daily activities fill page after page. “5pm: closed room 1-4. 5.30pm, close the office. Midnight: new shift starts. Situation normal,” reads an entry from March 1998.
We’re not at the National Gallery; we’re at Bangkok CityCity, a three-year-old art space built on a commercial parking lot on Sathon 1. The current show by Pratchaya Phinthong is called “This Page Is Intentionally Left Blank”, an intriguing, highly conceptual show that teases and confounds.
The title suggests a rich interpretation: a blank page is a space within a space, a nothing in a thing, and yet the declaration that “this page is intentionally left blank” is a declaration that makes an abstract no longer an abstract, turning a nothing into thing. The parking curbs, the boxes, the log books, and the space itself: they form a metaphysical play of space and time, of function and banality, of something and nothing.
In the age of hypertext and hyperloop, Pratchaya and his curator Thanavi Chotpradit attempt an old-fashioned hyperspace. As part of this exhibition, Pratchaya paints the wall of Bangkok CityCity white — specifically with the 4Seasons A1000 white — and after months of painstaking negotiation and explanation, the artist got permission to paint one wall of the National Gallery with exactly the same white colour (some parts of the National Gallery are undergoing a renovation). The two spaces, the two realities — one an institutional gallery run by bureaucracy located at the foot of Pinklao Bridge, the other a private contemporary space in a sleek business district — are thus linked, virtually, metaphorically and yet plainly, visibly and tangibly. In a way, the National Gallery, miles away, is a component, an object, of this exhibition.
(This is the first time the National Gallery permitted an intervention of its interior. Years ago, Nordic artists Michael Elmgreen and Ingar Dragset proposed to paint the wall of the gallery white as part of their conceptual exhibition, but it didn’t happen.)
Space — the meaning, contemplation and fluidity of space — is one angle of “This Page Is Intentionally Left Blank”. The two white walls in two different locations in two surroundings, and also the parking curbs in the exhibition and the real parking curbs in the parking lot barely 20m away (the parking curbs Pratchaya uses are also real by the way, because they were taken from the parking lot; that’s the point, what makes an object an art object?). But to go back a little, what initially intrigued Pratchaya was the log books he saw a decade ago while visiting the National Gallery: in a room full of art pieces, these log books sat there, ignored, worthless, scrawled with handwritten records of what was going on around them during the day and at night, year after year. The most banal object in a place that shuns banality (art isn’t supposed to be banal!) — they were stuck in Pratchaya’s mind, and now he has found a way to use them.
As with the parking curbs, these “found objects” become art objects. “They also contain layers of time. They go through their own stages,” said Pratchaya. And in fact flipping through these log books, one felt the slow trickling of time: the report written in early 1990s and in 2018 follows the same pattern, the same use of phrases, the same sign-off sentence at once factual and literary: “Situation normal.”
What Pratchaya and curator Thanavi propose, perhaps, is to question normality with the deadpan curiosity of conceptual art. “This Page Is Intentionally Left Blank” bears the hallmark of Pratchaya’s other works (his works are rarely shown in Thailand), with its experimental rearrangement of space and objects. Prior to this latest one, Pratchaya’s last Bangkok show was “Who Will Guard The Guards Themselves?” in 2015, where a wooden structure was constructed outside the Bangkok Art and Culture Centre with a real-time image link-up to a gallery in Paris, and whose starting point was a photograph of a shuttered 7-Eleven (the store was supposed never to be shut!) following the coup of May 2014.
The paradoxical nature of what is here and what is not, what is art and what’s just “an object”, the real space and the exhibition space — all of this is the theme to “This Page Is Intentionally Left Blank”. A blank page, to Pratchaya, isn’t a mistake — the text announcing that it’s a blank page makes it aware of its status as blankness. To Pratchaya, art isn’t a conundrum; it’s a way to ask us to accept that everything is a conundrum, a thing in nothing, an art gallery in a parking lot, or vice versa.
“This Page Is Intentionally Left Blank” is on view at Bangkok CityCity Gallery, Sathon 1, until Jan 27.