Concentrate: Pistoletto’s Infinity Cube

In 2017, I was invited to exhibit in a group show titled Punctuated³. The gallery had been divided into thirteen different sized sections, which had been randomly allocated to each participating artist, who were invited to create new work especially for the dimensions of that space. Each area was a third of the size of the one before it; resulting in artworks that vary in size from over two meters to just under three centimetres. The size of the allocated section was the only parameter given for the content and provided the title for each work.

When allocated the smallest space in this show, I thought I'd drawn the short straw. Finding freedom to work within the mere 2.6cm³ constraints, I recalled seeing Michelangelo Pistoletto’s ‘Metre cube of Infinity’, in ‘John Latham’s: A Lesson in Sculpture’, held at The Henry Moore Institute, in 2016.

Pistoletto’s cube is one of a series that began in 1966, which are loosely assembled from two common materials; mirrors and rope, wherein, six mirrors are turned toward the interior to form a 100cm³ chamber of infinity, which is unseen and can only be imagined. 

My concentrated version harnesses an equally infinite chamber as Pistoletto’s original, but, while attempting to construct this miniature version, I replaced Pistoletto’s use of rope with tiny, elasticated orthodontic bands that degrade over time. 

Over time, it’s taken approximately 4 years for all the orthodontic bands to disintegrate; a material reference to the response that Pistoletto had to his series, when he began to symbolically destroy several versions by shattering them with a mallet, followed by recreating them after this act of destruction.

I consider each iteration of re-working ‘Concentrate’ as a slow cycle of re-formation and a symbol of the active process required to reform the complex systems bound up in any institutional environment.