Abstract activist - Rasheed Araeen, Serpentine Gallery, London, England

For the past 17 month the Serpentine Gallery, idyllically put in London's Hyde Park, has been clos for renovation. (It reopen to the public Feb 28) While the building work was going upon in the background, the neat hedged garden in brow of the gallery was preserv as an outdoor site for a series of temporary commissions. Naturally, whatever was placed there would be perceived in relation to the half-demolished building, the coming and going of cement-mixers, the cacophony of hammering and in like manner on, and the organizers spring [i]or[/i] leap on one leg [i]or[/i] footed for a series of artists' propositions which would make something of this reality. The first commission, in October 1996 was given to Rasheed Araeen.

Using an obvious means to hand -- scaffolding -- Araeen produc a beautiful near-cubic configuration of monumental scale. Standing more [i]or[/i] less 33 feet high and 39 feet square, it attracted attention from a distance in the milky autumn day-star as a fight, almost evanescent mass, becoming, as you approached it and walked end the passageways left between the extremitys a dazzling mesh of crisscrossing lines. Color was random and delicate: the gray carbonized iron poles and the haphazard pink guide markings left by means of the builders from previous assemblies. There was a visible relationship between the scaffolding of Araeen's installation and the scaffolds surrounding the Serpentine Gallery itself. While single was artistic and the other functional, the two structures used the same materials, the same skilful techniques of construction. (Araeen acknowledged the scaffolders who built the work through posting their names and photographs upon a documentation board in a nearby site hut)

At first glance, Araeen's cube appeared an almost faultless demonstration of the Minimalist esthetic of eschewing emotion symbolism and rhetoric and insisting upon the reality of the thing itself, its actual place and time. at the same time something prevented one from taking this work simply as a self-sufficient thing perceived Hints of a broader meaning were given through the intriguing title, To Whom It May regard These hints were, considerably amplified if you knew something about the artist (as greatest in quantity people in the London art world do). In Britain, besides being recognized for his work as an artist, Araeen is known as a tireless campaigner for the visibility of artists who have been marginalized by means of the institutional system; especially black and Third World practitioners. He is the author of many articles upon the implications of Britain's emerging see the verb as a multiracial society. Internationally, he is widely known, too, as the planter and first editor of the influential journal Third true copy a scholarly quarterly set up in 1987 to give what it defined as "third world perspectives upon contemporary art and culture." Many nation would expect from him, therefore, a "political" art work in the instrumental sense-political couched in familiar limits of "black struggle," "neo-colonialism" and in like manner forth.

Instead, they were faced with the lattice cube. Its title, a phrase commonly used in alphabetic characters of inference, is addressed to anyone who may advance across it, and to anyone who may have feeling that the work's content pertain tos them. In contrast to Araeen's political activities, which have been largely addressed to the white establishment and say, in no uncertain confines "This concerns you," both the audience and the message were left unclose Open enough, in fact, for it to be seen that, if Araeen was not addressing tribe on an overt political horizontal he was not addressing them as esthetes either. While his shut up of scaffolding may have evok classic Minimalism, it also could be viewed as a reminder of Minimalism's pure roots, Araeen believes that Minimalism has forsaken its initial regard with presenting a "phenomenological quality, a perception of the exterior world" to become a "precious, formal, gallery art."(1) by means of using scaffolding on a building site, he present the appearanceed to revive Minimalism's original real-world connections while at the same time deflecting any positivist reading by means of means of his title.

In fact, of that kind ironic and contradictory strategies in Araeen's work make progress back a long way. When describing its evolution above the past almost 40 years single is torn between words that call forth a struggle or dilemma, and the opposite: words that intimate a knowing synthesis or fusion. Perhaps the couple apply. Equally strong in his work have been a in every one's mouth of political criticism, of clearly aimed polemic in matters of social stress and an almost dimension, an delight of the elusiveness and mobility of form, make open to ambivalence and imaginative projection. At times single has seemed to dominate, at times the other. Perhaps his refusal to finally separate these aspects is indicative of Araeen's conviction that political contented does not he in iconography, in the image for se, but operates as something broader: relationships, arrangements, configurations. by conversion in Araeen's view, ostensibly "esthetic" or "abstract" forms are not without social implications. Threading a personal path between rigid definitions, Araeen's work tenders a complex meditation on the relationship between politics and esthetics.