![]() The connections Hall draws between minimal sculpture and gender politics are in conversation with David Getsy’s book Abstract Bodies, a book which applies the lens of transgender studies to art history to attend to the shifting morphology of Sixties sculptures by non-transgender artists. Looking to the Slant Step as a teacher, I want to learn what it seems to already know-I can’t always know what I am looking at.” In the polyvalence of the Slant Step, Hall finds resonance with transgender rights, including the legislative hullabaloo around inclusive bathroom access. “It makes me want to see it as more than one thing at once, or as many different things in quick succession. Gordon Hall’s essay for Verge’s book draws out a queer politics of slow reading, delayed assumptions in the name of avoided identification. Not to be mistaken for vagueness ambiguity makes room for specificity but wavers beyond decidability, so that one must hold its multiple possibilities at once. It’s (at least) double sense, refusing to resolve one way or another. Down with “either/or,” up with “both/and.” Ambiguity is ambidextrous: on the one hand, and on the other. I swarm towards irresolvability the blur and whirr of a nonbinary politics. So, what is “that thing” we’re describing? It is “so ambiguous as to be infinitely suggestive,” Artforum wrote after the group show.Īmbiguity is my jam. As a place-holder word, “that” is open enough to net in anything, but loose enough that it might slip back out again. Deictics can be a convenient class of words: relative, condensed, and flexible. I count four instances of the demonstrative “that.” “That” is deictic its frame of reference is context-dependent. ![]() Instead, it is addressed by its place of origin or at least, where it was found. The Slant Step doesn’t go by name until a page later. Interviewer: How long ago was that, that you guys found that thing? Nauman: The Mount Carmel Salvage Shop, on Lovell St. ![]() Interviewer: What’s the name of that store again? Turns out I’m not the only one who remembers it as “that thing”: Image: Book covers for Verge Art Center’s reproduced facsimile edition of the original Slant Step Book, as well as the companion book Slant Step Book: The Mysterious Object and the Artworks It Inspired. I chase down a review copy from the publisher. Is this blood memory, my sense of unearned familiarity with an object I have never seen in person? I find out about a new edition of the long out-of-print Slant Step Book, published by Verge Art Center, with a companion book teasing out its slanted line of influence on contemporary artists. I feel myself pulled back into its magnetic field. I can’t place when or where I first learned of the Slant Step, but conceptual minimalist artist Gordon Hall’s book OVER-BELIEFS led me back to it. When Richard Serra stole the Slant Step from that show and brought it to New York, this wayward object transcended its purely regional interest to art historians (file under: Dada, ready-made, defamiliarization, irreverent art). With time it became an object of fixation for a funk art movement of Bay Area artists and poets, culminating in a group show, The Slant Step Show, at Berkeley Gallery in 1966. Wiley found the Slant Step in a San Francisco thrift shop for fifty cents in the Sixties and bought it as a gift for his student-the artist Bruce Nauman, who went on to cast molds in homage. Fine Arts Collection, UC Davis.Īs legend goes, William T. Image: The original slant step is well-worn plywood covered by a coat of green linoleum. It is an invitation, a riddle, a call for response. It is an inside joke: a found object whose elusive purpose made for a compelling and enduring art mystery. What is it for? Nobody could figure that out, and that’s the point. It is an object that teases utility, like Meret Oppenheim’s fur-lined tea-cup, or Marcel Duchamp’s inverted urinal. The Slant Step’s so-called “step” inclines at a 45 degree angle, too steep for a foothold. The Slant Step’s so-called “step” inclines at a 45 degree angle, too steep for a foothold.… Image: Installation view of Gordon Hall’s Chicago exhibit USELESSNESS, courtesy Document Gallery. ![]() “All art is quite useless.”-Oscar Wilde You can’t really step on a slanted step. ![]()
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