Last Space (Documenta 11) • ROBERT ESTERMANN

Last Space (Documenta 11), 2002
C-print on polyester, purpose-built temporary plywood walls, bleach
320 x 515 cm, overall dimensions variable
courtesy Galerie du Jour Agnès b., Paris

Last Space (Documenta 11) turns a residual zone of one exhibition into the existential center of another. A smoking recess becomes a chamber in which freedom and suffocation, spectatorship and waste, image and architecture are held in the same physical equation.

Robert Estermann took the photograph during documenta 11, glancing from inside a temporary exhibition hall into an exterior niche constructed as a smoking area. He recognized the scene instantly: a small family enclosed by a peculiarly gray-painted plywood architecture—part waiting room, part holding area, part Star Trek console—and pressed the shutter of his analog camera.

A couple leaf through an exhibition catalog, perhaps hoping it might make the exhibition more legible. Their daughter faces the camera, but her attention seems to be elsewhere. They occupy the same enclosure without quite sharing a situation. Behind them are two legally required emergency exits; in the foreground, an ashtray bin. For the monumental C-print, Estermann altered only the sky, giving it a faint nicotine-yellow cast.

At Galerie du Jour agnès b. in Paris, the photograph occupied the largest room of the exhibition, which was otherwise left entirely empty. Both entrances were narrowed by purpose-built temporary plywood walls recalling the provisional utility architecture visible in the image. The small passages intensified the emptiness: the visitor’s body was briefly compressed before being released into a volume that felt at once radically open and short of air. The walls were painted white on the inside, while their raw construction remained visible from the outside, like the reverse of a theatrical set.

The photograph functioned less as a window than as a displaced mirror. Visitors entering the room encountered members of their own species contained within another architecture, while the daughter’s gaze traveled back across the image toward them. They found themselves in the last space of the exhibition, looking into another last space: Why am I here? Where do I put myself?

The sharp swimming-pool smell of chlorine bleach used to clean the gallery floor hung in the air. Bleach in the white room, nicotine in the yellow sky: purification and contamination, habit and slow destruction. These meanings were not illustrated but enacted: the temporary walls redrew the room, the photograph extended into architecture, and the visitor’s passage set the work in motion.

Last Space offers no definition capable of giving life meaning. It gives the visitor more space than they know how to inhabit, and almost too little air in which to do so.

shown in:
“Robert Estermann”, Galerie du Jour agnès b., Paris, France (2002, solo show)

Bibliography:
“tout est important – Hans-Ulrich Obrist parle avec Robert Estermann very yellow plane – mercredi 4 septembre 2002”, édition galerie du jour agnès b., 2002, Paris, CD audio, 40′