Sally Smart: The Space of Inventory

The cut is only visible as a break in repetition. A collage is always pointing to some sort of cognitive process with the material; this makes sense here or that doesn’t work there. Then comes the need to cut this idea, to make the process free… The process is reordered, the source material is curbed, the scissors are blunted or the fixtures are reinvented. It’s these mappable actions that demand this need to take, in some way, the material away from ourselves. The process is confused so that the artist cannot inflict order upon the materials in a totally deliberate way. To diminish, and in diminishing, retain authority over our materials. A prefiguration, in which the props brought to the performance of collage are already collaged themselves.

I remember early on when I would travel with my mother and she would bring an installation map to the gallery or museum. It would have numbers and lines on top of a photograph of the planned install, sometimes collaged or digitally altered. It was a loose grid, something rehearsed in the studio to then be reinterpreted in situ. I think of Smart’s collage elements now, large

photographic scenes from a video work, embroideries of digital collage and printed grids as using the prefigured as a material of collage, arriving already at a distance from the process. One costume might be a collage constructed from a myriad of operas but also contain the top of a pin which once affixed it to the wall of the studio or a dually tinted surface formed from two different iterations of the same image. Arriving with a grid-like presuppose-ness these flat amalgams invite re-recognition, reinterpretation and re-assemblage, making the artist an audience to her own work. The grid in this sense is the representation of the strategy that the artist has used to separate herself from her material. As Krauss writes about the centripetal grid: “The grid is an introjection of the boundaries of the world into the interior of the work; it is a mapping of the space inside the frame onto itself. It is a mode of repetition, the content of which is the conventional nature of art itself. ” 1.

Smart creates collage out of her own history, using the grid as a theatre upon which to stage the performance of her practice, alluding to trajectories of pinning hands, legs moving across the studio, and schemes of thought that coalesce in the work itself. As if spreading out the material elements of the collage before their arrangement, Smart’s net of connection bears down upon the construction it contains. In this most recent iteration, each grid is a printed and repeated pattern, beholden to a second grid created by the cut - formed by the mismatch of lines and duplication of marks, creating a surface of reproduction in which the grid itself has become the material of collage.