Gordon Hall, Resident Artist Lecture 2022

Gordon Hall is an interdisciplinary artist, theorist, and writer whose practice spans sculpture, performance, critical writing, and event organizing. Hall opens the lecture with a small book made during the first year of the Covid pandemic called Other People’s Houses, a collection of screen-grabbed images of the domestic backgrounds visible behind colleagues and students during video calls, and a meditation on how those mediated forms of proximity generated their own modes of intimacy and distance.
As Hall describes, at the center of their practice is an inquiry into bodies’ relationships with objects, particularly objects of use. Hall came to sculpture from a background in dance, and this lineage shapes a persistent concern with embodied knowledge and the physical and spatial relations between bodies and things. Their sculptures exist at the scale of furniture and largely below waist height. Hall designs original works as well as exact replicas of found pieces, understanding replication as a form of intimacy, describing the experience of getting to know an object well enough to remake it as analogous to the desire to becoming familiar with the body of a loved one. Furniture interests Hall because of the way it always requests or conjures bodies even in their absence. Hall’s objects make these requests while simultaneously refusing to be read definitively, existing in productive tension between the recognizable and the strange, the abstract and the representational. Making them is a method for imagining bodies differently. Hall explains that this interest in creative modes of public address also underlies The Center for Experimental Lectures, a curatorial project in which they commission artists and writers to take the situation of the public lecture itself as raw material for making new work. Hall then describes other performances which take place in exhibition spaces, unscheduled and thus serving small intimate audiences. This method creates a possibility of performance which remains active even in exhibitions without it, because the knowledge that living bodies have been or could be among the objects changes how viewers read them.
The lecture turns to The Number of Inches Between Them, a solo exhibition at the MIT List Visual Arts Center built around a found bench Hall discovered was not anonymous furniture but a work made by Dennis Croteau, an unknown artist who died from complications related to AIDS in 1989. Researching Croteau’s life became a way of grieving a history of loss and examining how the AIDS crisis distorted the historical record of abstraction by erasing queer artists and critics who might have told a more complex story. Central to the exhibition was a letter Hall wrote to Croteau that could never be delivered, which Hall then reads aloud during the lecture. The exhibition also included a single performance with four queer elders. The title comes from sculptor Scott Burton, whose 1970s Behavior Tableaux performances organized audiences in closely packed chairs with the stated intention of making viewers aware of “the emotional nature of the number of inches between them.” Hall then discussed a second exhibition, END OF DAY, which was made during Covid lockdown and organized across three interconnected rooms. Hall talks through the works included: a concrete Helvetica U cast at stool height, a nail-studded clothes valet replica, leaning chair backs, and a projected image of a Thorne Miniature Room shown at actual size, producing disorientation around perceived scale and a sense that still objects might at any moment become the site of action. Hall closes with a reflection on writing as integral rather than supplementary to their practice, and on a shared commitment across all media to retraining perception toward slower, more open and nuanced practices of reading, applicable to objects and bodies alike.