Ring – Spalten

“Ring – Spalten” is the basic form of the Minimal Ring series and its reference. This is where the set-up is described that all the other works share.

The city of rods lies on a ring. Its cross-section is a rectangle: a straight shell outside and inside, plus two flat side discs. A single grid runs all the way round and over the whole cross-section – outside, over the edge onto the side, back along the inside and across the other side out again. It has no seam; whatever happens on it runs over the edges without a break. At the four edges of the ring the rods tilt around the edge and become shorter. Outer shell, inner shell and sides each carry one colour from the palette; the light adds only gradations and stands fixed in space.

The objects are cubes made of cubes. They roll endlessly all the way round, on the outer shell and on the inner shell, there upside down with the shell as their floor. The ground gives way to them, springs back and keeps their colour for a while. The side discs carry rods in restless steps; when a cube passes by above, close to the edge, a wave runs across the side. The ring moves itself: it turns like a wheel, flips over with a half turn, swings back as if on a rubber band – and the rods spring along with it. The camera has its own choreography: it circles, steps back into a wide shot, travels close along the shell past tall rods and flies through the centre – down along the axis, standing still there and looking outwards at the inner shell, then out again at the bottom. Whoever touches an object punches a square hole around it into the ground.

Minimal Ring is the fourth series after Minimal Quaderspuren, Minimal Sphere and Raw Cube: the same twelve works – each with its own ring shape, its own grid, its own figure and its own rhythm.

The landscape of this work is built from one figure: cross ribs over the whole cross-section, like a tyre tread or a gear wheel. It repeats all the way round, without a seam.

Ring: 300 rods all round, 16 wide, 10 deep. Objects: cubes of three by three by three on two lanes outside and one inside. Gestures: calm wheel steps. Camera: the basic beat.

Placement in the post-digital model of positing

The basic form of the series: cubes roll all the way round, outside and inside, nothing else.

The series works with grid, rhythm and repetition. Deviation comes from the height at which each rod stands in the ground, and from the sequence: cubes rolling one behind the other are at different phases of their rotation. On the ring every path returns into itself, outside as inside; in addition, each work has its own ring shape, its own grid and its own rhythm.

Square and rectangle are concrete forms, in the ground as in the bodies upon it – even the cross-section of the ring is a rectangle. Only where the movement meets the ground does it receive an informal impulse, reaching across onto the side discs, over which a wave runs when a cube passes by above. Two concrete structures whose interaction has an informal consequence – here again lies the field of tension between the concrete and the informal. Between the two poles, stages can be traced here: the fixed grid, the cube rolling edge over edge, the ground that gives way and springs back, the restless steps of the sides, the trail that holds its colour only for a while.

Between the non-representational and the representational: the spatial view alone already presents the concrete forms representationally, as bodies in space – here as a ring through which the camera flies, so that one looks from the inside outwards. The series is thus in fact a virtual sculpture in motion – a sculptural digital animation.