Floors & Floors' Inversions (On Zuzanna Czebatul’s “Opus Sectile”) by James D Bowman 3

If and when a Floor becomes more Floors than there are Doors before us, even before we reach each Slab, made into a pleasing and imperfect Surface Space on which a Sense of Place saturates an Arena of emotional as well as physical Motion, a Manifestation of the Risk and Chance involved in our Pursuits of Transcendence unfolds. The Tile Panels of Floors in Today’s World are seldom wide enough to become Environments unto themselves, but in Ancient Rome, for Instance, Marble, Mother-of-Pearl, and Cut Glass would be inlaid on/as Floors and (unlike Mosaics) each Panel would be sizeable. Halls, on the other Hand, are deep enough to become Environments unto themselves in most Cases. Here, the Spatial Experience is inverted: the Floor’s beautiful Panels aren’t a Means to an End but an End in themselves. If Floors, most of the Time, bear and transfer not Meaning and Pleasure but hurried Human Bodies from the Here and Now to the There and Soon, it would be a rare Moment in the Hold of which a Manifestations of the Risk and Chance involved in our Pursuits of Transcendence would ever unfurl. In the informative Press Release for the Installation of Zuzanna Czebatul’s “Opus Sectile” at Ludlow 38, we are invited to understand it [the Work] as an almost alchemical Reestablishment of a childlike Sense of Awe and Hyper-Awareness. For the open-minded Child, each Space seems so saturated in its own Isness it'd never occur to the open-minded Child that there was an Alternative to visceral Interaction with the Space. It is a Head polluted that can manage to dismiss Interaction with Space as a Waste of Time, preferring to interact only with Time (the Origin of such Curses as Nostalgia, Future-oriented-Hope-with-no-Room-for-the-Present, and more, even sillier Traps into which few Children walk) which is a Waste of both Time and Space. “Opus Sectile,” however, is a “conceptual Space where the Potential and the continuous transformation of urban Architecture can be renegotiated,” and echoes not only the Aesthetics of pre-modern Sculptures and that of the Club Culture of the Nineties, but modern Forms of Display and Presentation, the Press Release croons beautifully. “Here,” as Joseph Timko, in his essayistic Poem “The Geometry of the Beautiful Horizon” writes, the “Fabric of the World stretched smoothly across its Frame plays evenly against the Air [and] were we somehow to make our Way past the Edge of all this and to look back from the Outside, all the myriad Coherences would dissolve […] for this Path ushers us to the other Sense of Without.”