0182
11-09-2011
IN DEN BEGINNE…
Paul Bogaers
Artist
Dimensions when closed:
32 x 44 x 7 cm
Dimensions when set up:
70 x 44 x infinite
The manuscript consists of 85 separate components: two ground plates and 83 photographs on wooden sticks. When set up it shows a crowd comprising 137 people and a dog (because it has never been shown that animals do not, like people, in any way strive after higher things). It can be viewed from one side only, and so shares the quality of flatness with a photograph or a page from a book, the States Bible, for example. And yet it has an enormous spatiality, which extends in the depth direction but especially vertically. Remarkably enough, the work shows to equal advantage in an interior space and outdoors, because a ceiling or a roof do not in the least undermine the infinite space that extends above the work.
When closed, the photographs are hidden away inside the two ground plates. To set the manuscript up, the ground plates are placed next to (and up against) each other. The photographs on sticks, which are numbered on the back, are placed upright, in numerical order, in the correspondingly numbered holes in the ground plates. It is important thus that one works from back to front, so that all of the sticks can be positioned without pushing aside the other photographs.
-PB
