John Chilver

Number intersecting with art: three studies

By means of close readings of artworks by Robert Mangold, Florian Slotawa, and Walid Raad, the paper considers some main ways in which number is figured in contemporary art. Mangolds Frame Painting series of the 1980s, Slotawas Hotelarbeiten of the 1990s and Raad/The Atlas Groups series Lets be honest, the weather helped of the late 1990s/2000s are examined. Mangolds frame-based works are described first as articulations of number as geometrical relation; and second, following from their preoccupation with frame and centre, in terms of their equivocal containment of a central void. Slotawas Hotelarbeiten are understood as inventories that become performatively and sculpturally recomposed. Raads work is found to rhetoricize the tropes of the documentary inventory. Number here is figured as geometrical relation or as manifestations of the inventory. Art can thus offer ways of thinking and experiencing number other than as counting or measuring. It is argued that if, in postconceptual art (as in the work of Slotawa and Raad), the artwork is typically a distributed rather than a spatially singular, gathered entity, then inventories (and their transformations) are likely to be how number appears in contemporary art.