1996 THE Drawing on Floor.

ALEN OZBOLT

WALKING is either going away /distancing, or coming near /approaching. (Path is the goal; it also ends there.)

The drawing is situated on/along the pavement or on/along the road, or (in the medium of carpet) on staircase as the place of passage. Generally we do not live outside on the pavement, on the road or on the staircases, they primarily serve for, for walking, going, comming, traveling or changing from one level to another. They are places of passage. Walking on drawing on/along the floor constitutes the path. Walking is not waiting; the path can be searching, walking can be runaway, also.

It is not the idea of a direct, physical occupation, or colonisation, of the urban space or, properly speaking, of the staircase that connects two levels of the building. The drawing do not block, somehow 'stop' the space, the drawing extends betwen two points and carpet connects (in)between two or more levels. The work is not intangible, but rather tangible, functional, and in the case of stairs, emplaced (and exhibited) lying on the stairs (again on the floor, in fact), although the installation has its height, the height reached by the stairs.

The drawing on the floor or on the carpet situated on staircase is intended for walking, and through walking the viewer also incorporates his/her body into the work. And the walking is soft, silenced; with its material and texture, the carpet silences the step, the walking turns soft and easy.

The spatial emplacement cannot be grasped with one sole look, but rather - literally - with several steps, in time. Thus the installation offers two possible perceptions (viewings): the immediate experience through walking, but also the view from a distance: mental perception. In fact, the spatial emplacement does not have its own space (when using the floor, the pavement or the stairs it has only borrowed the space), its territory, its "grounds". Somehow it is without the inner, unreachable space, for it is "all" within the reach of the viewer's step, stretched out in front of her/his feet.

Human or non-human? The drawing is shaped according to the step (measure) of man, and thus it is anthropomorphic, but not anthropocentric, since man is no longer neither the measure nor the limit of all matters. The imaginary space is other, different, larger and wider than human experience.