Popova’s Wall is a horizontal wall-arrangement in UPSpace of Lyubov Popova’s 1923 Russian Constructivist-Productivist Textile Design, its solid watercolour shapes enlarged and outlined with yarn held in place with nails. It is my second wall-arrangement of that work, the first being the vertical Popova's Column, made in Articulate where its verticality and colour linked it to Articulate’s architecture. Both Articulate and UPSpace have the familiar mixed exhibition architecture of a building repurposed to house a ‘white cube’. At UPSpace this architecture is the dramatic high white walls enclosing the shed floor and roof at its centre, almost an artwork in itself, and for the two weeks of the show it was a major component of Popova’s Wall.
That was one way to ignore the function of the white cube walls as the ‘absent’, non-space, art-frame that Brian O’Doherty identified when he coined the ‘white cube’ as a term in the 1970s. That’s what prompted the Popova arrangements, as apart from wanting to remake her work in some way, I was also curious to see if that reading could be over-ridden by using artwork to make the white walls be read as present instead of absent. Admitting the walls’ presence is one way artwork can use its own medium to show regard for place. It enables artwork to act as an example—a role model—for people to emulate in our own relationship to place.
Not that Popova said she wanted to show regard for place, but she did want her work to engage with the social issues of her time. This is shown in her turn away from easel painting and towards textile printing in response to the new regard she saw being paid to working people in the few years following the 1917 Russian revolution.
