4 and 1/4 (2024), steel, found object, glass, silicone tube and cow’s milk, 100x100x100 cm.
4 and 1/4 (2024), steel, found object, glass, silicone tube and cow’s milk, 100x100x100 cm.
4 and 1/4
2024
Deptford Vault, 118 Deptford High St, London, UK.
December 1st - 3rd 2024
An invigilator removes a bottle of milk from the wall and loads it into a holster affixed to the sculpture, from which it drains incrementally into the box. The exchange is often left unobserved. Inside the structure the artist attempt to set a personal record for drinking as much milk as possible within an hour, and the volume consumed gives the work its title. Viewers who linger may register bodily sounds, shifts in movement or changes in pace, though the exhibition handout gives no indication that a performance is taking place.
4 and ¼ inaugurated the box work serise and marks a shift towards object-based performance. Withdrawing the performer removes the artist's ego from the encounter: with the body absent, the endurance cannot be read as a demonstration of what the artist will undergo. It also removes the body as a site of interpretation. A visible performer carries gender, sexuality and race into the work whether or not those terms are part of it, and the labour is read through them. Behind steel, the labour is left unattributed, and what remains is the procedure and the rate of consumption.
The piece draws on the interior logics and industrial surfaces of Peter Halley's early paintings, and on the concealed mechanics of Lyle Conway's human-operated creature effects for Return to Oz (1985), withholding information in order to sustain speculation. It flattens gesture into object, rendering the performer as a locus of indifference. That state is contingent on the viewer walking past without knowing, an inattention the sculpture's minimal design invites. Precedents include Dan Graham's pavilions and Gregor Schneider's insulated rooms. Here, however, the work is in part undone at the moment a viewer becomes aware of the performer, and that undoing opens a non-explicit dialogue between viewers that the practice has yet to develop.