750 Points towards Infinity

Red Brick Art Museum Collection

© Tatiana Trouvé

Intro

750 Points towards infinity consists of 750 weighted plumb lines, all pointing in different directions, as if gripped by the density of multiple magnetic fields. At first sight, these hundreds of plumb lines seem to point in just one direction – at the ground beneath us. Their oblique trajectories then seem to imply a substantial disruption of the laws of attraction, a disturbance with no specific explanation, which some could always read as a sign, indeed a metaphor on the scale of the earth or the world, now disrupted. It would make more sense to detect, in the density of its attractions and their multiple distortions, the possibilities of a plurality of worlds condensed into a small area. But would this account for the infinity assigned to the 750 points in the title? Surely not.

To grasp the ‘infinite’ range of these ‘750 points’, we need, as it were, to invert our gaze, as if the sky were inscribed on the ground. In that case the infinity of these plumb lines points upwards rather than downwards, and the ground becomes a kind of map of the sky. This upside-down world in which the sky and the ground are equivalent can only be perceived by means of an optical trick: inverting our viewpoint. In this connection we may mention a work that proposes the same kind of optical exercise: Piero Manzoni’s Base of the world (1961), a rectangular bronze parallelepiped on which we can read the upside-down words ‘Base of the world, homage to Galileo’.

This need to shift our gaze is induced by many of Tatiana Trouvé’s works and put to the test in some of her drawings and her Polders, with objects floating in the void or, conversely, frozen in mid-fall. We find it again in her interplay of mirrors, duplication and false perspectives. But it is here that it is at its most radical, with 180-degree reversal, a total disorientation that comes close to vertigo. One this rotation has taken place, we can find our footing once more and realise that these plumb lines do not require us to seek infinity in the depths of the cosmos, but here, and allow us to grasp the implications of this shift in viewpoint. In other words, infinity is here below – perhaps even captured in the few millimetres that separate the plumb-line weights from the ground, the infinitesimal that Marcel Duchamp called ‘infra-thin’.