A house a skin can be — Ariana Reines, “The Cow” ____ 4478 (Grundrisse): Gallery Structure (1). Preliminary Materials for a Theory of the Gallery. Following the installation of Blue Print: Gallery Structure (0) at Reisig and Taylor Contemporary location 0000 (2680 South La Cienega Boulevard, 90034) in Spring 2023, this work occurs as the second iteration in the gallery’s ongoing Gallery Structure series. This series processes the material, historical, social, economic, and conceptual constructions of the Gallery as a cultural industry or marketplace and a physical room built between bodies and passages. A processing of the rates, languages, limits, substances (and narcotics) of the gallery. A questioning of how to ask foundational questions. What is a gallery? While Blue Print focused this question on some of the intrinsic, internalized symbols and tropes of the gallery, the current installation at 4478 West Adams Boulevard, 90016 (location 0001) moves towards extrinsic, external but embedded, material economies and logical structures of the gallery. 4478 rigorously turns to the ‘building-blocks’ of the gallery: matter, energy, transformation, information, observation, calculation, transmission, and condensation (or gelling). (Sun, soil,) concrete, plaster, wood. The work is a demonstration of the work of the gallery. What does it mean to be a place that shows (and sells) works of art? (What is the value of the gallery?) Beginning at its foundations, 4478 (Grundrisse) (or ‘4478 (Foundations)’) works-through the landforms and architectures of the gallery as a developmental and relational structure—and as a record, database, or archive—organized and produced through coded (coated) forms of physical and cultural labor. (It is like one of those shows where all the museum or gallery workers ‘get’ to install their own work for a show—except we also own the means of production!) This is a way of working with the materiality of labor and time through the contexts of the gallery. By literalizing, displaying, documenting, and performing a reading and writing—a de/ciphering—of the gallery’s hidden or subliminal forces, logics, and structures, Gallery Structure (1) is a process of a gallery (beginning to) give an account of itself and its surpluses. A work with the gallery as a transformative technique of the body (like sitting or standing). And an orientation of a gallery as a localized but unsettled structure and self-conscious process, instead of a gallery as an anesthetized reproduction or result of established systems of wealth, accumulation, and capital. Lately, there seems to be some sort of ‘identity crisis’ going-around the contemporary art scene in the U.S. and internationally. (Don’t worry, though: it’s a good crisis.) This is evident in the growing demand for, and increasing establishment of, different approaches to “the gallery,” ranging from renegade artist initiatives (like O’Flaherty’s in NYC) to micro-galleries and homegrown art spaces—and galleries in disused historic buildings (like SHED projects in Cleveland, Ohio). While many of efforts are just re-stylings of the norm, just dressing-up as if Daddy’s hat has fallen off, there are also plenty of efforts that are forcing galleries to ask important questions about the ways in which they function and how this relates to the artists they work with and the exhibitions they present. With this installation, we are taking this instability of the gallery as a starting-point for asking how to work with this unstable structure. How might a gallery remain with its instability without becoming catatonic? Initially, this installation hypothesizes the structural necessity of a gallery as an unavoidable medium or exchange between readymade planetary systems and the (extra)terrestrial evolution of techniques of a body. A necessary exchange between structure and delirium. Between organized bodies in orbit and a body set adrift…. The work begins literally. We begin to work with the building of A Wall (2024-). Since a wall seems to be one of the most necessary, or at least most enduring, structural features of a gallery, this is a practical place to begin the practice of theory of the gallery. (Maybe even more so than the actual foundation, the building of the wall seems to constitute the founding act of the gallery.) A Wall is built over the course of the exhibition. This practice slowing-down the cyclical movements of the gallery demonstrates a connection between delirium and clarity at the level structure: like the phases and physics of particles, the structure of the gallery only seems to make sense at a certain distance, and at a specific speed. (And once I am near enough I cannot tell the difference between some fuzz on the floor and the span of the cosmos.) This initial moment of (mis)recognition produces an identity crisis that most often leads to attempts at disappearing the position of the gallery beyond the vested heredity of a name (of the father): “Reisig and Taylor (Contemporary).” But this disappearing act is already doomed to fail, since a gallery must always appear at the place of a “don’t look.” So what would it mean to slow-down (or sometimes speed-up) enough to keep track of the invisible forces, forms, and formulas of the gallery? How does a gallery demonstrate and display its necessary structures, and not only what it wants to show (the structure of its desire)? Or, what is the socially necessary labortime of the gallery?How does a gallery work? And at what value? At what cost? How does a gallery learn to speak its own language (to itself)? In order to begin to address these questions—if only to produce more questions—the works composing this installation deal in part with measurement, calculation, logic, architecture, distance, observation sampling, time, condensation (and gelatin). These syntactic tractions among the works provide a minimal grammar of the gallery’s language, the limits required to communicate a void. (As if I were try to explain a gallery to extraterrestrials, it is a matter of how to say nothing while still saying something). Ultimately, this halting pace of deconstructing the gallery from within unlocks connections between the local processes and programs of the gallery and the deep time that populates its structures. What are the gallery’s structures? What is the galley made of? And what makes-up the gallery? (Is this all absurd?) (Sun, soil,) concrete, plaster, wood. Building itself from scratch and addressing itself in its own (alien) language, the structure of the gallery is worked-with as a medium—as a kind of (“no-Man’s”) land: place, space, light, and time. And a as a mode of address. 4478. 90016. A (failed) transition between image and information. 34.03257659309928, -118.33773906153222. A rhetoric or figure of speech. (Sun, soil,) concrete, plaster, wood. A timeframe. 0009/0028/2024 - 0008/0012/2024. A transmission. 1000101111110. A fit, a start…. … And also a negativity. An address to the void. Or at least a certain amount of negative space (1200 square feet, in the case of the gallery). But a negativity that resists the usual connotations of an emptiness or a negation. It is not nothingness. It is a real negativity. And a logical opposition (blank walls | signed objects). A logic of negative magnitude. (Maybe even a gallery’s disappearance might be made to count for something, after all.) (Sun, soil,) concrete, plaster, wood. Gelatin. A skin a house can be. . . . . /Questions, Alternations/ a. How and why is time measured with space? How is information is converted into space and time? Or, what is the relationship between distance and history? b. How are samples (aliquots) collected? Or, how is an activity or event recorded as data and how is the resulting information stored? Or, how is an energy emission—(thermodynamic) work—such as a radio wave, rendered into an image and a measurement, such as a wave, and a frequency or a wavelength? How is this recorded observation (and translation) verified? c. How do these generalized circuits between work, exchange, record, and (re)production recur—or are only made possible through—human processes of rendering their environment into a legible, calculable, inhabitable, structure? d. What is the relationship between work, (artistic) creation, duration, and value? (And, what is the difference between work, labor, creation, and production?) e. What is the relationship between calculation (of structure) and delirium (of symbolics and imaginaries)? f. What is a gallery’s bodily function as a medium between physicals (environments) and cultural or poetic relations? /Parameters/ Location/ > Address: 4478 ~ 1000101111110 > Zip Code: 90016 ~ 10101111110100000 > Coordinates: 34.03257659309928, -118.33773906153222 ~ 100010.00001000010101101111, -1110110.01010110011101100001 Expenditure/ > Month: $110110101100000.00 > Year: $1000001101000000.00 Equivalence/ > Weight: 4478g = 9.872lbs > — : 0 , | : 1 [ 4478 = 1000101111110 = |— — —|—||||||— ] Labortime (Aliquot (Metronome))/ > 1 minute of labortime ≈ 1.11 inches of work = 1.11 inches/minute of labortime ~ 1.00011100001010001111 inches/minute of labortime > 1.11 inches/minute x 1.11 inches/minute = 1.2321 square inches/minute ~ 1.0011101101101010111 square inches/minute of labortime Area/ > 1200 square feet = 14400 square inches / 1.2321 square inches/minute ≈ 11688.58 minutes of total gallery labortime ~ 10110110101000.1001010001111010111 minutes of total gallery labortime Frequency/ > 1.11 inches/minute = 0.0185 inches/second = 0.0185 Hz = 0.0000000185 MHz labortime (where a single cycle corresponds to 1 inch of travel), 0.0185 Hz ~ 0.00000100101111000111 Hz Dog Years/ > 1 bone ≈ 2 weeks of (intermittent) gnawing ≈ 0.1 bone/hour = 0.000005 bone/minute ~ 0.00000000000000000101 bone/minute > 1 bone ≈ 2 weeks of (intermittent) gnawing ≈ 26 bone/year (26 dog years per 1.0 Julian year or per 1.00068 calendar years) ~ 11010 bone/year > 1 Julian year ≈ 7 dog years ~ 111 dog years per 1 Julian year > 26 bone/year / 7 dog years = 3.714 bone/dog year ~ 11.10110110110010001011 bone/dog year Laikas/ > 1 year = 525600 minutes ≈ 3679200 dog minutes ~ 1110000010001111100000 dog minutes > 53.82 minutes of runtime (on Voyager 1 Golden Record) ≈ 0.000714 dog years ~ 0.00000000001011101101 dog years > 0.000714 dog years = 1 Laika ~ 1 Laika > 0.000714 dog years of Golden Record / 3.714 bones/dog year = 0.00019224555 bone/dog year of Golden Record ~ 0.0000000000001100101 bone/dog year of Golden Record > 1 Laika / 3.714 bones/dog year = 0.00265 bone/Laika ~ 0.00000000101011011011 bone/Laika > 0.00019224555 bone/dog year of Golden Record / 1.11 inches/minute of (human) labortime = 0.00017319418 ~ 0.0000000000001011011 (delirious speed of Golden Record in bone/dog years running at 1.11 inches per minute of (human) labortime) > 0.00265 bone/Laika / 1.11 inches/minute of (human) labortime = 0.00238738738 ~ 0.00000000100111000111 (delirious speed of Golden Record in bone/Laika running at 1.11 inches per minute of (human) labortime) ____________________ Image: Installation view of “Gaze—or, Misrecognition” (2024).