dayton is not in ohio

Gene Schmidt is a New York based artist that I met last year at an International Arts Movement conference. I remember really enjoying his sculptures of irregular polygons fabricated from accumulations of rulers of various types. The rulers are cut to conform to the determined size of the object, rather than the object’s size being determined by a particular measurement. The ruler represents only its own shape, weight, width, and mass of material, no longer representing an abstract, external unit of measure.

[Auto Wheel and Rim, 9 x 6 in., 2007]

At that time Gene told me about a project he was working on called Manhattan Measure, that entailed laying red yardsticks (about 30,000 of them), end-to-end across the length and breadth of Manhattan. I’ve checked the website occasionally since then and saw recently that the project was finally completed (sans upcoming documentary).

[July 10, 2007, Central Park (photo Alicia Hansen)]

My affinity for snaking red lines aside, I just love the idea of hand measuring something of this scale. The obvious difference between this work and the works that I saw initially is that the rulers are actually being used for their capability to represent a unit of measurement. Initially there is something less appealing about this straight forward utilization of the ruler than the first works I saw, but Schmidt has taken the rulers and used them to create an object in his studio, essentially compressing the length and breadth of the city into a few cubic yards of space. I find this compelling when considering that we live in a world where actual spacial distance, as it relates to human action and interaction, has become a non-issue. Yet Schmidt’s project takes no shortcuts in spanning what is a great distance in relation to the human body, and the weight and mass of the final sculpture makes this difficult to ignore.