The childhood experience that determines spatial practices later develops its effects, proliferates, floods private and public spaces, undoes their readable surfaces, and creates with the planed city a 'metaphorical' or mobile city, like the one Kandinsky dreamed of: "a great city built according to all the rules of architecture and then suddenly shaken by a force that defies all calculation."
Michael de Certeau 1
Rhetoric, we may remember, was originally an art of space-of gesture and of staging-as well as an art of speech.
Victor Burgin 2
Stefan Chinov's new works attend to surface and volume, scale and the articulation of the space of its installation. Indeed, the works, while discrete objects, virtually fill the gallery space. But for the height of the gallery extending upward through two floors, claustrophobia might well result; that it does not is a tribute to Chinov's care in the planning and placement of the works in the installation, so that the space is used fully, but not used up.
Catler's Bench and His Wife's Bench are low, sprawling, more like benches for banqueting in the Etruscan manner than a conventional bench designed for sitting. One can actually sit on them, even in the gallery, contravening the convention of the space of gallery and museum in which the distal visual perception of objects is authorized and valorized, but the proximal tactile direct bodily experience of those obects is not authorized and is indeed forbidden. This opportunity to touch as well as see is crucial to the apprehension of Catler's Bench and His Wife's Bench, as the massive plywood forms appear rough, but are filled and sanded to a smooth surface. The cushions covering the upper surfaces of Catler's Bench and His Wife's Bench are three inch thick slabs of foam rubber covered with pale pink silk, evoking the decorum of a Victorian parlor or the bawdiness of a bordello, forming an oppositional pair with the industrial feel of the plywood, which seems to have been procured from a construction site where it might have been intended for making forms for site-placed concrete. Jejune observation though it is, it is difficult to read the soft pink silk as other that female in resonance, and the hard, rough plywood as other than male in resonance. His Wife's Bench is the longer of the two benches, with an angular dogleg bend; its fabric more textured. Catler's Bench is shorter, rectangular; its fabric smoother. The referent of the 'his' of His Wife's Bench is indeterminate: does the 'his' refer to the artist (whose wife is the referent of Head (Vessela), the portrait head on the plaster shelf above His Wife's Bench), or to Catler (the artist's wife's dissertation supervisor, Anthony Catler). Any number of narratives, from a comedy of errors to a mystery of Byzantine complexity, might derive from this situation.
The figure-the body-is referenced by synecdoche: the part substitutes for the whole. Head (Vessela) has a disembodied head laying on its right side on its cast plaster shelf, Hub (Grant) has a wax cast of the back a head with the absent face seemingly buried in the cast plaster shelf supporting it. With their placement on three contiguous walls Hub, Hub (Grant), and Head (Vessela) triangulate the space of the gallery, and with the horizontal surfaces of their supporting shelves define an implied plane parallel to the gallery floor and the upper surfaces of Catler's Bench and His Wife's Bench. Unlike Hub (Grant), and Head (Vessela), Hub is not figurative, but is as abstract as a schematic industrial or architectural model. In plan, Hub is a parallelogram, open on two opposite long sides, closed on two opposite short sides, closed on the top and open on the bottom. From the intrinsic evidence of the works themselves, it is indeterminate whether Hub or Hub (Grant) is the antecedent instance. As a formal abstraction, one might suppose Hub to be the ur-case, the type which enabled the thematization of Hub (Grant) as a token or particular instance; conversely, one might suppose Hub to have been abstracted as the type or universal case from the token Hub (Grant). 3
Chinov cites two passages from Quintillian's Institutio oratoria. 'Figure' is defined as that which obtains when language is given a conformation other than what is ordinary or obvious, analogous to the positions one's body assumes when sitting, or laying down, or looking back, so that one's bodily gesture takes on a particular inflection.4 Quintillian's rhetorical figure of the analogy of figures of thought and of speech in rhetoric to the dispositions of the body qua figure is apt, and usefully recovered. Recovered, for too long it was obscured by the ascendency-indeed, the hegemony-of emphasis on the grammer and syntax of visual signification in the form of formalism writ large. To move beyond the grammer of the elements and principles of design is to recall-extending and shifting Quintillian's analogy-that the trivium also included rhetoric.
Stefan Chinov received the Bachelor of Fine Arts from the National Academy of the Arts, Sofia, Bulgaria, and the Master of Fine Arts from Southern Methodist University. He is Assistant Professor of Art at East Central University, Ada, Oklahoma. Recent exhibitions include: Faculty Projects 7: Stefan Chinov, Studio Gallery, Brookhaven College; MIX Series!: works by Stefan Chinov, Dallas Contemporary Visual Arts Center, 2002.