RAM Gallery
20th anniversary-exhibition

November 19th 2009 - February 14th 2010

An Automatic Smile

Vernissage Thusday November 26th at 7pm

Curator statement

This is a construction that gives all it has in order to be ready.

This is a construction that uses all of it self, the room and the room it is based on, to become a construction. Not less, not more.

An Automatic Smile by Thomas McQuillan - second attempt

This is a construction that through its weight creates the friction that is necessary to construct itself together with the white cube.

It is a dry construction. Without binders, but with a particular technology of anchor.

The construction is in its being statically decided.

For every construction that rests, it is decisive to the system of all outer forces and outer factors that the resulting force and the resulting momentum at a given point equals zero.

The construction is in its temperament statistically decided.

Not all supportsystem and inner forces or cross-section sizes may be calculated by using the laws of statistics alone. It cannot be said that this construction is resting.

An Automatic Smile by Thomas McQuillan - an introduction to the astronomer Knut Jørgen Røed Ødegaard's later introduction of 'An Automatic Smile'.

This is a construction that through its being and temper continues to explode/implode the white cube.

Up till now the room was hanging in thin air. With the Carpenter/Norris reopening it was given mood and context. The construction in An automatic smile shows us the way down and up. The room is anchored in the room. The inside was now anchored in the outside and is no longer an abstract but is concrete.

Is there anything in the automatic smile that makes it possible to precisely localize the room? We hope to get the answer when the astronomer Ødegaard popularizes the construction, the white cube, the inside and the room that never was the same… and we anxiously await the answer.

An Automatic Smile by Thomas McQuillan - fourth and final attempt.

Without warning and curated ideas, the automatic smile hit me immediately and with all its meaningless power.

Eight years have passed since I saw the smile first and then the construction.

…and still it makes me cry.

The construction is alike the smile radically meaningless.

Smile is radically meaningless. We still don’t know for certain why the smile exists, where from it comes and what causes it.

But it smiles.

And it explodes and implodes - the room, all its surroundings and us

- over and over again -we cannot get enough of it…the smile.

Thank you for the smile, Thomas.

Rolf Gerstlauer – 26th November 2009

Oversatt av Kristine Fresvig

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.