RAM Gallery
20th anniversary-exhibition

November 19th 2009 - February 14th 2010

Prolog

(previous to November 19th - active or passive until February 14th 2010):

:
Judging RAM Gallery

- the declaration of the white cube.

Av Eli Malene Haugen (N).

Curator statement

To create the inside from the outside is the being of architecture.

Today, here and now, we are close to this inside, and in the weeks until the 14th February we will look closely at what this inside is made of.

RAM Gallery celebrates its 20th anniversary in this inside, and asked me in advance, to discuss the room, which is a part of this inside we are in now, even though the room in this inside never has been the same, -perhaps…

In order to have a closer look at the room that never was the same, I decided to give it a name: The White Cube was it to be called, and as the White Cube, it should show us its inside.

Now I hear us all crying out that the White Cube is a pretty stupid name because it describes only ideas or institution and / or worse, an architectural nothing - but never the room.

... And I don’t disagree with all of us who believe that the White Cube is nothing more than all of us who seek to achieve the optimal meeting between us - whatever it may be, the ultimate encounter between man and art ... and whatever the optimal may be.

After all I am an architect, and although the white cube for some is an architectural nothing, an architectural vacuum and / or an architectural cover for all that inept architecture is concerned with, I will not agree with it - although I acknowledge that the architect and architecture, as almost everything else, are full of ideas and rarely speak the truth. ... And thus often overshadow what is essential.

How then, to watch the inside of the room that never was the same?

We may do it by calling the inside The White Cube and shoot it down from the sky to look at it closely while it is lieing in front of us.

We shall let it explode and implode in layers. The explosions and implosions shall last for a while so we may watch the bits of the inside that we now call the white cube – and to avoid ideas that blind us when we watch the fragments of the white cube I propose that we therefore are not architects and artist but choose the roles as constructors.

We shall remove ideas from our reading and be open in order to watch the inside of the room and what it is made of. When we are not artist and architects but constructors we might find the meaning in that which is without ideas and therefore completely meaningless.

The being of construction is the meaning in the meaningless. To connect one thing with another is a construction and always has meaning. First and foremost because something lies beneath, over or next to another, and together the touched thins become a construct. Nothing is so radically meaningless as a construct. Nothing is so efficient as exploding / imploding the white cube in order to look at the inside of the room as a construct.

The construction becomes the deconstruction of the white cube that is the inside of the room that never was the same. But as all constructions the construction must have a beginning, a place and the thing it shall work together with besides the constructor who deconstruct, explodes or implode.

The beginning is here and now a time ago and was now officially declared as a place, inside, material and time.

Rolf Gerstlauer

Oslo, november 2009

Biography

Rolf Gerstlauer is professor at The Oslo School of Architecture and Design and runs together with his partner a small atelier in Oslo. Studio Gerstlauer Molne’s works are on architecture, film, photography, dance/choreography and include now also noise-production. As an architect Gerstlauer has a love/hate relationship with the white cube, yet as a constructor and maker the extended exploded/imploded white cube represents the base for all of his creative works. Earlier confrontations with the white cube include works like: Momentum 2000 – nordic biennale of contemporary art Moss (with Moment Architecture), OslKunsthall – Oslo Art hall 2000-2003, Contiguity 1999 – AHO, Architecture as Infrastructure – National Museum for Architecture Oslo (with StudioB3), ‘Timeroomchamber’ - Uri/Switzerland and ‘Headhunting’ - DogA/Dansens hus Oslo.