Gosford as Gallery

Kibble Park was selected for the recent Click Here event by KoPAS to amplify awareness of the topography that defines Gosford Town, and the hidden flows that naturally and emotionally effect our sense of place.

[I am using Gosford ‘Town’ rather than ‘City’ as I think it better reflects the reality – not aspirations. A city is such because it has an identity derived from its constituent activities rather than because of a governmental designation and being a jurisdiction of governance.
A place also can be defined by what it is not, in comparison to other places. Here is a list of City attributes. How does Gosford score?
Central research library, museum, town hall, contemporary art centre, botanic gardens, moving image theatre, central park, university, artists studio quarter, quality newspaper.]

The proponents of various town planning strategies for Gosford, and who talk of ‘precincts’, seem unaware that the town is an integrated whole, with movement corridors and appropriate sites for functions geographically indicated.

Gosford Town itself is ONE precinct encompassed by Rumbalara Reserve, Presidents Hill and the Waterfront – and in any case, is too small to be dissected further.

The Click Here project assumes the Gosford ‘hollow’ as its locus operandi, in old art-speak, its Gallery. So it is interesting to hear of the work by Urs Fischer who dug a ‘Gosford’ shaped hollow within a gallery.



Extract from the New York Times:
“At Gavin Brown, Urs Fischer takes a jackhammer to Chelsea its self.
By Jerry Saltz
Urs Fischer has reduced Gavin Brown's Enterprise to a hole in the ground, and it is one of the most splendid things to have happened in a New York gallery in a while. Experientially rich, buzzing with energy and entropy, crammed with chaos and contradiction, and topped off with the saga of subversion that is central both to the history of the empty-gallery-as-a-work-of-art but also to the Gavin Brown experience itself, this work is brimming with meaning and mojo. It was also a Herculean project.
A 38-foot-by-30-foot crater, eight feet deep, extends almost to the walls of the gallery, surrounded by a fourteen-inch ledge of concrete floor. A sign at the door cautions, THE INSTALLATION IS PHYSICALLY DANGEROUS AND INHERENTLY INVOLVES THE RISK OF SERIOUS INJURY OR DEATH; intrepid viewers can, all the same, inch their way around the hole. Fischer's pit is titled You, and it took ten days to build, costing around $250,000 of Brown's money. (Heaven only knows what his landlord thought of it.) The gallery's ground-level garage doors facilitated the jackhammering and removal of the concrete floor and the use of a backhoe to excavate tons of dirt and debris, after which a crew closed off the space with immaculate white walls. There's also a cramped antechamber, superfluous but well executed: A smaller reproduction of the main gallery, down to the air ducts and electrical outlets, it’s sort of a mini-Me You. Ducking through its pint-size entrance is like going though a door in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. You have to crouch as you enter and watch where you step in preparation for the more precarious and thrilling main event beyond.