Machan’s idea of a universal “looking to the shoreline” was given very specific inflections in work by Shilpa Gupta and Kimsooja, installed in Sydney with the work by Dibbets, Kreckler and Vasco Paiva. Gupta’s 100 Hand drawn maps of India (2007–08) shows the coastline of the Indian sub-continent drawn and redrawn by 100 adults, the boundaries of the country changing, its coastline in its particularities almost as elastic as its eastern and western-most boundaries. Shorelines are borders too, marking cartographic boundaries, and with them constructs of national identities. Gupta’s work suggests both the fantasmatic dimension of this ideological operation as well as its bloody working out in imperial and post-imperial history. Kimsooja’s Bottari—Alfa Beach (2001) is an inverted view of the eponymous Nigerian beach from where slaves were shipped. As sombre in its historical reference as 100 Hand Drawn Maps of India, the work’s reference remains invisible. The horizon line produced by the inversion of sea and sky yields nothing now except perhaps a kind of abyssal space of horror. (3) Dibbets’ “straight line in three dimensions” operates in historical time as well as space, as Gupta and Kimsooja make plain. Indeed the initial placelessness of that large Sydney room, it might be argued, was the result of specific aesthetic strategies rather than any universal meaning of the horizon line, particularly the maritime one. As Alain Corbin argues in The Lure of the Sea: The discovery of the seaside 1750–1840, the shoreline and with it the sea has a history of meanings, produced through a range of aesthetic and discursive practices. (4) Corbin shows how the Western seaside is a post-Enlightenment, and specifically Romantic project, underwritten as well by the new science of geology and the history of Dutch landscape painting. In his account the meanings accruing to the practice of looking to the sea–girt horizon are inseparable from this web of discursive and aesthetic representations. Thus, when we speak now of the spaces of LANDSEASKY, of the different forms of spatiality that are “revisited” in and by the works selected, as Paul Bai and Andrew McNamara’s deeply suggestive essays make clear, we do so through the languages of modernist aesthetic practice. (5) Outlining what he calls the Third Spatial Position, an “other than” to the familiar binary of inside/outside, Bai alludes to the phenomenologically–inflected thrust of Minimalism’s interest in the spatiality of the viewer. He writes of minimalism making the ‘spatial turn’ to ‘connect artwork to its surrounding space,’ a project undertaken in a different register by Kurt Schwitters’ Merzbau as McNamara recounts in his history of spatial art and early modernism. McNamara writes of Schwitters’ debt to artist Erich Buchholz who planned a spatial art of mobile screens and imagined the possibility of walk-in pictures. That these goals might be realized in “immersive” technologies, let alone the more prosaic bounds of a video installation, seems in this instance beside the point; as McNamara notes, a perennial theme of spatial art was movement. Bai asks: What would be the precondition of spatial construction, the “no space” that exists, unmarked by up/down, left/right, inside/outside, before space? Perhaps amniotic space offers a model for this kind of ur-space, a space also experienced from within the movements of the sea. Corbin hints as much when glossing Novalis’ Disciples at Saïs. He writes of diving into the sea and “experiencing the coenesthetic harmony that exists between the movements of the sea and those of the original waters carried within the human body.” (6) Untitled (Wind Charm) (2013), Bai’s installation in LANDSEASKY, suggests a different way of figuring this space. Instead of a sensory combination, the work proposes an analysis of sensory terms in Bai’s deceptively simple doubled projection of a spiraling wind chime. The chime’s movement is ambiguous; structured like a screw, it is difficult to establish whether it moves up/down or left/right, an effect that helps destabilize a viewer’s orientation in front of the work. In addition to this suspension of the viewer’s compass bearings, Bai de-realizes the illusion of the screen surface which leans against the wall behind it. (Leaning is itself a minimalist trope, a way of intruding into the viewing space so that space becomes experiential, while emphasizing the weighted materiality of the viewed surface.) In spite of these interventions, the apparent regularity of the chime’s turn makes this a meditative work that invites a lengthy, stilled contemplation. By way of contrast Barbara Campbell’s interactive close, close (2014) retains the shoreline orientation, showing footage of migratory shorebirds in their habitat, and demands activation by the viewer whose movement to and from the screen controls the aperture of a horizontal slice of the image which moves up and down the screen. Up close to the screen, this activation leaves the viewer ‘submerged’, a sensation cued as well by sound. Campbell plays on the blinds used by bird watchers and hunters to hide themselves while observing their quarry. Inverting this scenario by making the viewer activate the unfolding scene, the work withholds any complete perceptual field, subtly undoing the illusion of spectatorial agency. Like close, close, Wang Gongxin’s The Other Rule in Ping Pong (2014) creates an illusory space, created
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