"Writing is trying to find out what we would write if we wrote” Marguerite Duras

Guy Bennett's installation "This Space Available" is part of his “Nearly Actualized Works,” a textual project that describes potential works in other media. In this case, four cards with written text are placed on the four corners outside of the gallery. Here Bennett leaves the gallery “empty” but “fills” it with possible texts that demarcate the space and point to the utopia of pure form without content, or form as content.

The effect is a mise en abyme or an endlessly self-referential recursive loop (think the endlessly unbegun biography of Tristram Shandy) whereby the piece is never made, or has not been actualized, but paradoxically it is made real by revealing the process of planning, which, since it becomes content, implies another process of planning behind it, and so on ad infinitum, proposing that there is no zero degree of creativity.

In addition to exposing thought process, the texts around the gallery invite the possibility of politicizing real estate; thus the empty space is “available” for thoughts about many things, police brutality, homelessness, nuclear weapons, et al.