Based on a Grid, 2012, Photograph: Kristof Vrancken [estherstocker.net]
The installation Based on a Grid is one of my favourite works by Esther Stocker; it was commissioned by the Z33 House for Contemporary Art for its 2012 exhibition Mind the System, Find the Gap in the city of Hasselt in Belgium. The aim of this exhibition was to criticise the political, economic, cultural, and spatial systems that govern modern society, and at the same time to locate and examine their gaps, leaks and ambiguities.
Based on a Grid is paradigmatic of the abstract and minimalist aesthetics of Esther Stocker's work, as well as illustrates the way in which its artistic choices inform and sharpen its politics. A grid is indeed provided: a holistic and internally complex geometrical system expands over the whole of the exhibition space and encompasses the potential viewers. At the same time, however, Esther Stocker breaks it down; although the space remains structured, most of the grid's segments and joints are missing.
The fragmentation of the grid is a critical act of empowerment, both symbolically and practically; it manifests that the spatial structure is not an all too powerful system, and it also enables mobility in ways which in effect defy the grid, and would have otherwise been impossible. And in this respect, Esther Stocker's work constitutes a challenge to the viewer by putting forward the issue of perception; one may choose to see order by visually connecting the missing links, but they may also focus on ruptures and openings that deconstruct the preceding perception of form and structure. The installation thus suggests a set of choices which are inherently political; and most importantly, it does so by posing a question and calling for an answer, rather than offering one. This may actually be seen as its most empowering aspect; and it is also a feature that runs through Esther Stocker's wider body of work.
O.T., 2006 Photograph: Rainer Iglar [estherstocker.net]
La solitudine dell'opera (Blanchot) Pt. 2, 2010 Photograph: Loredana Ginocchio [estherstocker.net]
Esther Stocker's installations are evocative spaces of potential freedom; through their abstract aesthetics, they seem to suggest that there is nothing objective or neutral about any form of spatial order, be that of a house or a prison, a factory or a university, a military camp or a museum. The works are conceptually dialogical and therefore open to interpretation; the production of meaning is located in the actual viewing process, which is substantially interactive and participatory.
To the extent that the installations are experienced in physical terms, perception and movement appear to be inseparable components of the viewing process; as Rainer Fuchs argues in an article titled Systematically Broken Systems, the works invite and enable interpretation through mobility:
For while grid paintings open onto feigned spaces, Stocker’s installations create spatialized images into which viewers can physically enter. In the MUMOK installation, with its white bar forms set at equal intervals into the black surfaces of the floor, walls, and ceiling, viewers find themselves in the midst of a clearly structured picture space, one which seems to have found in the bars — which essentially frame an empty center — a spatialized picture frame. The visual appearance of this self-framing space is perpetually transformed by the viewer's own movements and changing angles of vision. That seeing is not merely a physiological process of navigation, but instead a mode of dynamic interpretive behavior is adopted here as the point of departure for an art which signals mobility and displacement as the most concise, conceivable form of determination.
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