Years ago I became familiar with the work of Robert Irwin, an American artist who in that period was absorbed by space and light.
His work was spatial and at the same time unapproachable. You had to experience it in order to see it and you could only experience it when his three-dimensional work was actually set up. No photographs of his work existed or were allowed to be taken during his installations. I have been able// to see only very little of his work in real life and unfortunately have only seen texts and several, probably unauthorised photographs.
At the time I was fascinated by space as an architectonic concept and as an idea. Irwin taught me that light is of great importance, more important than any other material or structure.
I have been strongly influenced by the work of Irwin and also that of James Turrell. I realised that architecture is very restrictive and that without the limitations inherent to architecture, architecture does not exist.
For these reasons I have become interested in those restrictions and subsequently in, i. a. , the diversity of spatial structures. I started to develop spatial concepts which could serve as an idea for the design of, for example, a house or apartment.
As a result the path on which I had set out as an architect increasingly became a voyage of discovery in the field of three-dimensional installations. I was of the opinion that my work was related to that of Irwin and Turrell although the similarities were perhaps not directly apparent (because in my work light was not so dominant an element as in the work of these two artists).
My work began to spread to the peripheral areas of architecture and other disciplines. And consequently I became more interested in the work of other types of artists. John Cage inspired me to investigate how the builders of my projects could respond to each other and thus contribute to the end result.
However, “my coincidence” was not determined in advance, but simply depended on the availability and presence of all kinds of ingredients. A relevant example is the project in Finland, where a wooden house was dismantled and then reconstructed but not according to a premeditated plan ( the House Project, Pori Art Museum, Finland, 1993).
Up until now I have made a number of installations based on various themes. In several projects a couple of hundreds of people were working simultaneously resulting in vast structures. I did not work according to plans describing what the end result should look like. However I did hand a simple spatial concept to anybody wishing to take part, initiating an unpredictable but not uncontrolled building process.
Not only was the construction of the installation an experience but also actually being in it. Often performances inspired by the installations and their creation took place leading to theatrical events. In Iceland I made a simple installation consisting of 300 grams of knitting wool connecting lots of small metal hooks screwed in all places into the walls, the floor and the ceiling. Black light emphasised the threads but not the space. The space was made inaccessible but that could hardly be seen. The threads looked like laser beams, or thin metal rods or bundles of light that bounced off the walls.
The result was a three-dimensional structure that appeared to be unattached to the walls but which could not exist without those walls. The space was in fact filled up without using materials. This was a three-dimensional drawing which from each angle could be seen as a different three-dimensional object.
The illustrations in the gallery give an impression but can never conjure up the threedimensional image.
The project was realised by Ger C. Bout in collaboration with Illugi Eysteinsson & Ragnheidur Ragnarsdottir & the staff of the Liiving Art Museum Reykjavik Iceland.