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AS TO PLACE

Peter Downsbrough

AS TO PLACE
1978

7 x 4 1/2 inches (17.7 x 11.4 cm)

112 pages / Unpaginated / Perfect bound / Softcover

71 plates, 5 chapters (photographs, Two Lines)

Offset (black and white)

Publisher: Peter Downsbrough, New York

Printer: Edwards Brothers, Inc., Ann Arbor, Michigan

Print run: not noted (992)

ISBN: 0-9602192-1-8

LCCC: 78-65771

CATALOGUE RAISONNÉ NUMBER: 20

Through the vertical approach, the cover of this book looks, at first sight, to be very similar to the previous one, AROUND. Yet in relation to its content and the Two Lines image in combination with urban photographs, it is connected to books such as BESIDE, A PLACE, and AND. New is the inclusion of a table of contents listing five chapters, the titles of which–“AS,” “TO PLACE,” “AND,” “TO PLACE,” “AS/AGAIN”–are not repeated in the book. Again, the Two Lines drawings are usually placed at the bottom of the page. The eight images are full-page vertical photographs of New York City street views. Because of the double vertical lines–comparable to the two lines on the spine of TWO PIPES, FOURTEEN LOCATIONS or the body of AROUND–the cover is divided in two halves, with a monochrome metallic blue plane on the left and a New York street view–one half of a vertical photograph–on the right. On the back cover, Peter Downsbrough placed a negative version of Two Lines.

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Peter Downsbrough has developed a strongly reduced visual vocabulary, which he uses to investigate the given space in a very personal and precise way. His material consists of letters and lines. He uses adhesive letters, forming conjunctions, prepositions, verbs and/or nouns and applies them to the walls, floors and/or ceilings. Lines, for which he uses cloth tape, emphasize certain architectural elements. Metal pipes, in the space and sometimes on the wall, accentuate the space. Areas defined by lines or painted black sometimes play a role, and, with the lines and the words reveal the architecture of interior or exterior spaces.

This rigorous treatment of the space continues in Peter Downsbrough’s books, maquettes, photographs, videos or prints. They all reveal an extreme coherence, which some situate in the minimal and conceptual art movements. In the course of time, the spatial interventions with the parallel vertical pipes or dowels have been complemented with words, lines and planes. Conjunctions such as AS, IF, BUT, FROM, MAAR, OP, EN, ET, OU, MAIS… have a double function: they work as iconographic signs which underline and reveal the space, and they offer the viewer the possibility to go, in his/her mind, from one thought to the other. For a conjunction is a word that can’t be declined or conjugated; it establishes a connection between sentences or parts of sentences.

Peter Downsbrough: With the word, one takes part in a dialogue, a discourse on its precise meaning. The word for me is an object. It has both a precise and a vague meaning. It is a universe one is confronted with. But there is no obligatory way of reading.

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