Glen Hayward

About the work

I am at the Whitney Museum moving from one floor to another. One floor has Helio Oiticica and the other floor an Alexander Calder Retrospectives. Between floors is this mostly red pipework. Calder and Oiticica work with colour, geometry and the body in relation to these structures. The unnamed artist who made the hall installation does the same. I am never quite sure where the brackets open or close on the world of art. If art is what makes life better than art, it is a looping, some sort of minimal separation, at least this is what your countryman Terry Smith proposes with his exhibit as a holding forth premise. Not all indigenous scholars would agree and I am sure some of the exotic ones as well. And you kinda have to be a partisan of one or the other pure difference oneness or the not one, 

Where to make the cut, the world not one, I take bad photos, that is because I am not taking photos, that is not the criteria, I am making sculpture. We see the world and its people through photos, that is our habit, to see the world through sculpture is anachronistic, To see it as full of monuments takes time and it is not sight that is our metaphor for seeing, the blind can see, our metaphor is intelligence and intelligence requires listening, To see oneself listening gets at a minimal paradox of sense making; tries to introduce a little gap of unknowing in our knowing and I like that.

Image credits are Cheska Brown

About the artist

Glen Hayward works with the idea that the infinite is parasitic on the finite, from his limited research into the phenomenon, he can attest that although carving is not infinite, the potentiality of the introduction of space into matter is some cause for hope, where there is none. Art and its hysterical relationship to the world remains one of the few spaces that can testify productively to the point that ‘anxiety is not without an object; indeed it is the primary object.’

Hayward lives and works on the West Coast of Aotearoa, the fools that predate him and must have loved each other enough at some point to have mixed genetic material were of Irish, English and Indian origin. I am also X gen so I assume solidarity way too quickly betraying my particularity. I am like Norman Bates demonstrating I wouldn’t hurt a fly by not swatting it while in Police custody.

Following on from Lacan’s earlier quote I also steal, ‘Sublimation is the elevation of the ordinary object to the dignity of Das Ding.

Represented by

PAUL NACHE