Loss of the middle ground
Barbara Penrose's recent installation quietly demanded the viewer's attention. This thirteen metre 'drawing', constructed from black contact adhesive, oscillated between the appearance of a three dimensional brick design and a flattened grid-like pattern. Minimal and cool in design, the work was laden with art historical references—the apocalyptic paintings of Frank Stella, Geometric Abstraction, the wall drawings of Sol LeWitt and the wall/floor pieces of Eva Hesse. With these references and Penrose's use of repetition, the grid and geometric form, it is easy to place this work in the file marked Minimal art. However, closer inspection revealed contradictions which belie the desire for such easy categorisation.
Zelevansky has written that while the Minimalists did not 'share a large body of beliefs... they did share a desire to escape the emotional and autobiographical emphases of Abstract Expressionism'.[1] One of the nagging and rewarding contradictions within Barbara Penrose's work Loss of the Middle Ground, is the rationality of the design combined with a re-instatement of the emotional and autobiographical. Rosalind Krauss has argued for an obsessional—as opposed to a rational—reading of the repetitions in the work of Sol LeWitt.[2] Similarly, when one reads Penrose's work as the whole, her working process has an obvious focus on the obsessional. The installation of this drawing deliberately forces us to think of work—and possibly women's work—the labour of cutting the endless strips of fabric, the labour of attaching these to the wall and floor with (almost) geometric precision, the labour of stripping away these pieces and the labour of scrubbing the walls and floor free of adhesive to return the gallery to its pristine, white cube, state. These processes of cutting, placing, peeling