297 x 210
published by Arthur R. Rose,
edition 500 pp.52, 297 x 210, 1999/ 2000
Launched Firestation Gallery, Dublin, October 1999; Arthur R. Rose, London November 1999

David Blamey
Tim Brennan
Matthew Crawley
Clare Gasson
Andrew Grassie
Graham Gussin
Matthew Higgs
Janice Kerbel
Doris Kroth
Jaspar Joseph Lester
Jeremy Millar
Alan Murray
David Musgrave
Elizabeth Price
Karin Ruggaber
Stuart Taylor
Matthew Thompson
Mark Titchner
Christopher Warmington
Ian Whittlesea

At one time or another almost everything passes through a sheet of paper. The page- 297 x 210, A4, white, nothing, possibly ruled with a margin, is the chance support upon which ideas come to be inscribed.

Arthur R. Rose invited twenty one artists to consider something that is already thought to death. 297 x 210 is structured around our familiarity with set quotidian dimensions which allow the publication to be read or browsed in the 'meantime'. The artists' contributions offer a conscious piece of work that would operate within the given structure or perhaps the more marginal thoughts that may surround the work. The book may appear as a distraction from the object in an attempt to promote discussion and produce something more solvent. This distraction is renewed through the foregrounding of proposal (Murray), meticulous transcription (Titchner), instruction (Price) and documentation of inadequate responses (Warmington) or unfeasible objectives (Brennan).

Page one begins with the alphabet. Janice Kerbel's 'Underwood' font is self-generated using the Underwood typewriter, from crime novels, as a model. The letter 's' is raised above the baseline. Rather than acting as a clue leading to one culprit it is now a postscript font that is untraceable in terms of origin. The font operates in terms of a red herring that leads us nowhere. Graham Gussin also structures his page with this sense of erasure. 'Prepared blank: Design for letterhead' is a graphic logo for a fictional company called Nothing & Nowhere. Stuart Taylor occupies the foot of the page. His intervention within the page set-up is found in his erroneous page numbering. The internal logic of this approach is echoed later in the book with David Blamey's 'Punch'. Part of the work inhabits the gutter as the familiar residue of two punched holes remain on the page. There is a real sense that notions of work have been abandoned as superfluous to the designated task ahead.

297 x 210 includes work that has the rigour associated with a conceptual model, but has been overlaid with melancholy (Price) or cross-referenced with popular culture (Warmington). Elizabeth Price's instructive page 'Ten Folds' is a set of instructions that lead to the production of a crashed paper aeroplane. The first seven folds form a generic representation of a plane. The next three folds give the plane the appearance of having crashed. The two separate sets of folds are made via the identical process. The language used to construct the plane is the same that causes its destruction. The presentation of instructions offers us the ability to recreate the work in our own time. In Ian Whittlesea's The light from Katrine Herian's studio, the work exists as a light meter reading taken in the artist's studio at a specific time- 12.00 hrs 29th July 1999. Authenticated by the signature of Ian Whittlesea and Katrine Herian the work for 297 x 210 offers the potential to recreate the conditions recorded.

If a list of instructions aid our journey from A>B then Alan Murray proposes an investigation of the grey areas along this journey. The nature of instruction and more broadly rules and regulations are examined for discrepancies. Murray, for a number of years, has concerned himself with the act of correction. his work is involved in perfecting the grammar, diagrams and general use of instruction manuals for household appliances. The language of instruction is scrutinised, amendments made, corrections republished and re-circulated through Murray's proposals to the manufacturers. His contribution for 297 x 210 shows the starting point for a project in which he examines the subjective decisions found within the laws of games.

“This 'set the limits' style of curating is repeated in another, less stuffy and more comic corner. Arthur R Rose gallery presents a show that is a book. Titled 297 x 210, this book is a paean to A4. Some of it is interesting, and some of it is not. But at least it doesn't present itself as either. Particularly interesting contributions are Doris Kruth's Residency Proposal 1, 2 and 3, which somehow manage to tell rather tall tales about buried treasure and missing people, all within the formal structure of artist-in-residence proposals. But this is the kind of project that 297 x 210 is all about: artists as Conceptual Administrators bent to flourish, and amassing numbers for the record. There are some nice objects too. For example, Graham Gussin's wonderfully crapp* letterhead design for 'Nothing & Nowhere' or Ian Whittlesea's The Light from Katrine Herian's Studio* authoring the owner of the work to recreate the level of light in Herian's studio at midday on July 28 1999, in any space they wish. (That's 3600 lux, if you're thinking of forging it.) Of course the minuscule fascinations of the Conceptual- Administrator don't just lead to pared-down Minimalism; contains curiosities.”

—David Barrett, Art Monthly 232, 99-00

“There's never very much to see at Arthur R Rose – a fictitious name invoking the spirit of Marcel Duchamp – but the artists who show here capitalise on an intellectually loaded aesthetics of nothing. '297 x 210' could be described as an exhibition within a book; 297 x 210 are the measurements of a piece of A4 paper. Nineteen artists were invited to contribute a piece of work around the idea of the blank page as "the chance support upon which ideas come to be inscribed", and to create something that was deep, ephemeral and easy to reproduce. The most appealing pieces display a trace of wit somehow attached to the physical laws of the space allowed: David Blamey has stapled the two-disc fall-out from a hole punch to his page. Karin Ruggaber has photocopied a sheet of speckletone watercolour paper, the texture showing up as minute flecks. Mark Titchner has covered a sheet of graph paper in manic op-art doodles; Elizabeth Price’s Ten Folds, provides instructions on how to fold the paper into an aeroplane so it will crash; Graham Gussin has desinged a grey tonal letterhead called Nothing Nowhere … Some of the artists seem to pride themselves on being earnest, taking boredom to an almost obscene level.”

—Polly Staples, Independent, November 1999

297 x 210,
Arthouse, Curved Street, Temple Bar, Dublin, 2000
Peter Lloyd, Letters, 1999
Christopher Warmington, Culture Notes, 1999
Martin Clark, D.R. Carr, 1999
Graham Gussin, Prepared Blank: Design for a Letterhead, 1999
Jeremy Millar, Introduction, 1999
Matthew Higgs, Thinking about art, 1999
Katrine Herian, Drawing, 1999
Ian Whittlesea, The Light from Katrine Herian’s Studio, 1999
Errol Perkins, Disappear; Ghost, 2000
Mark Titchner, Golem, 2000 (soundwork)
dumb projects, Minor Miracles, video, 2000
Martin Clark, An American in Paris, video, 2000
Nikolaj Bendix, Numb, video, 2000
Markus Vater, Video Sketch Book, video, 2000

“Language is present in all of Janice Kerbel’s work. Underwood, is a series of love letters to the seasons. The title alludes to the work’s mode of production —it consists of letters typed with a digital font based on a classic typewriter script. In Underwood Kerbel adjusts the script so that the letter “s” is aligned slightly higher than the main line of the text, suggesting a possible trace of the author, like that used by a police investigation to trace a ransom note. But this is a red herring, as it is a postscript digital font, and so untraceable to a single source. Making typographical interjections into the text, Kerbel calls our attention to the writer’s hand—and to the machine mediating the process of creation from artist to text.”

—Dhillon, Kim 2011, ‘See It Now or Miss It Forever: Materiality, Visuality, and the Written Word in Janice Kerbel's Recent Artwork’, vol.36, Revue d'art Canadienne