Gail Hastings

Missing walls: Bureaucracy at work, 2007

The architectural space of the sculptural situation missing walls: bureaucracy at work, 2007, — outlined by the four zigzag walls differently colored blue, yellow, red and black – is at first seemingly empty. Instead one finds an apparently pointless passageway between the central chamber’s entry and exit that appears to be all that takes place within these four zigzag walls. That is until, of course, one leaves this central chamber and finds outside, on the black zigzag wall, a page from the ‘Encyclopaedia of works of art on walls never made’. For here we find, that the walls upon which this Encyclopaedia physically rests do not actually exist; due to being walls that were planned, but never made. Similarly, the central chamber just walked through belongs to the same library once planned, but never built. A dialogical space echoed within the missing walls of this sculptural situation’s library by a conversation that actually took place in 1911 between architects Walter Burley Griffin and Marion Mahony Griffin, from which stemmed the concrete planned space in the center of Australia’s capital city. At the crest of this capital the Griffins planned a library to tower over the nation’s parliament as the nation’s crown.