Telephone Booth

Mauritsstraat 36
3012 CJ Rotterdam
The Netherlands
Telephone +31 (0)10 794 7405
Fax +31 (0)10 794 4766

Opening Hours: Wed–Fri from 1–5 PM

 

 

Piet Zwart Institute is pleased to introduce Telephone Booth, a compact project space. Telephone Booth utilizes two recently disused spaces in the Piet Zwart Institute one a storage space and the other a telephone booth. Its progamme will consist of past and present participants along with local and international artists.

 

Telephone Booth is supported by the Piet Zwart Institute - Willem de Kooning Academy.

 

 

 

THE FIRST CALL

 

Lee Welch

The Marriage of Reason and Squalor, II

26 May - 6 June 2011

 

  

 

Lee Welch

GLASER: Isn’t it that there’s no gestation, that there’s just an idea?

[..]

STELLA: But we’re all still left with structural or compositional elements. The problems aren’t any different. I still have to compose a picture, and if you make  an object you have to organize the structure. I don’t think our work is that radical in any sense because you don’t find any really new compositional or structural elements. I don’t know if that exists. It’s like the idea of a color you haven’t seen before. Does something exist that’s as radical as a diagonal that’s not a diagonal? Or a straight line or a compositional element that you can’t describe?

[..]

STELLA: It’s just that you can’t go back. It’s not a question of destroying anything. If something’s used up, something’s done, something’s over with, what’s the point of getting involved with it?

JUDD: Root, hog, or die.

[..]

GLASER: Reductio ad absurdum.

STELLA: Not absurd enough, though.

JUDD: Even if you can plan the thing completely ahead of time, you still don’t know what it looks like until it’s right there. You may turn out to be totally wrong once you have gone to all the trouble of building this thing.*

 

Image: Lee Welch, The Marriage of Reason and Squalor, II, parquet floor, 2011.

 

The Marriage of Reason and Squalor, II takes the form of a parquet floor within Telephone Booth, like Frank Stella’s painting, the floor consists of two identical vertical sets of concentric, inverted U shapes. Each half, one in a disused storage space and the other in a defunct telephone booth, contains stripes of dark stained wood that seem to radiate from the single vertical line at their center.

 

 

 

*Glaser, Bruce. 'Questions to Stella and Judd, Interview by Bruce Glaser.' Edited by Lucy. Lippard. ARTnews 65, no. 5, September 1966, pp. 55-61