Jan
Dibbets chooses the space previously occupied by
Giulio Paolini in 2002, with sixty fragments of a text written
by memory, and Edward Wincklhofer two years later, with an
unsettling dais at environmental scale and a constantly whirling
circular saw.
“At Ostia’s old Synagogue fantasy awakens the
traces from the past and brings them alive. The ruin turns
into a building, the walls enwrap space again. Are we still
here or were we already there? The fata morgana is constructed
on the foundations of its own remains. We wander along reality
and go right through the walls. Open very carefully the (non
existing) doors and walking tiptoe silently enter the endless
space far as the eye can reach. And see although nothing was
left it’s all still there.” This is what Dibbets
has to say about Sinagoga Ostia Antica. The building,
the walls and the space he mentions are evidently neither
the originals nor their reconstruction but the scarcely perceptible
idea of building, wall and space that make it possible to
bridge sidereal distances and establish dialogue between the
millennial past and the present. Taking the four surviving
columns as a unit of measurement, Dibbets draws a rectangular
perimeter in the air at the same height with lengths of white
elastic attached to four iron pillars precisely positioned
at the four corners of the field. Another two lengths intersecting
to form an X act as a virtual wall. In the juxtaposition of
the reality of the building in ruins and its presumed mental
reality, Sinagoga Ostia Antica constitutes a new
version of the “Perspective Corrections” developed
by the Dutch artist from 1967– when he produced the
first forty specimens at the age of twenty-six after a brief
involvement in Abstract Expressionism – to 1969 . As
he explains, “What interests me are the levels of reality.
We have a certain image of what a real thing is, and then
there is another thing which is just as real, I mean in your
mind, not visually. All things that are clear are real.” |
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