LEAPING CONDITIONS

I have travelled 6,959 miles and this is the 4,622 day of my life.
Fox-Talbot’s journal, April 18, 1813 (Age 13)

The beat of the heart, the pressure of blood in the vein, the length and weight of flesh and bone, all are continually assessed and re-assessed according to standard scales, which in turn determine other measures. The distance to be maintained between fencers is calculated according to the length of their lunges and thrusts.

This installation playfully illuminates the unlimited possibilities for measuring the body’s passage through time and space. Its title, HIGH JUMP ON THE MOON, in referring to the varying pull of gravity on different planets, reminds us of the conditionality of all cognizance. As such, the exhibit is an integral part of an ongoing investigation of perception carried out in both the collaborative and solo work by the artist Linda Lindroth and the architect Craig Newick. Any passage through the history of images and artifacts is marked by measures, many now forgotten, abandoned, or questionable, What shall we make of the massive plan of Stonehenge, of Nazca lines traced in the Peruvian desert, or of Walter de Maria’s” Broken Kilometer,” its 500 brass rods configured in a Soho gallery since 19797

The passage through HIGH JUMP is initially marked by sound, Six-minute variations interspersed with a variety of sound events over several hours are part of the musician’s contribution to this hypothetical conference on measure, It is sound that marks the space and duration of movement, its volume diminishing or increasing according to the listener’s distance from an audio speaker set into a membrane of translucent plastic. This rectangle is also the support for base strings, the musician’s proposed standard of measure. As with all supports, it implicates a possible falling and a consequent metamorphosis of the measure, perhaps as one of Duchamp’s “standard stoppages,” a scale determined by the chance patterns of a dropped string,

Across from the musician’s piece the Diviner’s transparent column of water proposes the deepest hole drilled in the Pacific-504B-as a common gauge, Can this give some precision to our affections? Perhaps adding an extra stanza to the old lyrics, “my love is deep as the ocean, wide as the sea,” … “it’s 504B.” Passing to the next room, the Wine Merchant/Astronomer’s proposition that a system of measure be based on human potential imposes itself in the form of an six-foot-high image of the moon-a place where an earthbound, six-foot jump can soar to thirty feet.

Behind it the filmmaker’s storyboard proposes a quotidian standard of measure: the length of her day as a working mother. Strips of film banded in rows within a steel frame cast a variety of projections on floor and wall. Objects float in space and time: a rubber globe in a kiddy pool, inflatable lips in a bathtub la replay of Man Ray’s Observatory lime the Lovers) along with pictures of friends and family outings, The Vitruvian ideal is reconfigured, set in flux, Along a side wall, four digital photographs-headshots, their life-size tripled, feature the four imaginary conferees. Leaps of technology accurately measure faces that are, in fact, merely stand-ins for immeasurable speculation,

High Jump on the Moon. Exhibition Catalogue Lukacs Gallery Fairfield University. Fairfield, CT

c 1995, 2011 by Julia Ballerini