It’s best to probably keep them separate, at least in the beginning, for these are parallel practices that seemingly do not get knotted at one point or at the end of some loose rumination over their works. Yet they both ply on routes of uncertainty—that median of visibility and mere presence—of the quotidian and the sublime.

am.pm.

If Gaston’s work pummels on the guttural primacy of language, Götz’s work, on the other hand, is an elegant calligraphy on the poesy of silence. His preference for and extensive use of concrete in his other works is a testament to the brutal muteness of this industrial material, its mass a deafening density in the urbanscape: the rubble from its discarded and bulldozed parts and the mumbling whispers of fallen monoliths.

am / pm, however, utilizes the skeletal armature underneath this gray mass—iron rods were drilled 5 centimetres deep through the gallery’s floor and were bent, forming arcs appended with glowing fluorescent tubes at one end, making it look like antiseptic rainbows emanating only stillness, or a grounding to a degree zero.

am / pm, the abbreviations for ante meridiem (before midday) and post meridiem (after midday), signals the divisions between night and day in a 12-hour time system. In such a system, the 12th hour is designated as the zero, with the points being noon and midnight. In occult traditions, these points are the apogees of light and darkness, the axes that link the mundane world with other-worlds; hence, it was also believed that the sun stops its voyage at noon—or scientifically, it is at this time that the sun is directly over the meridian; thus, neither being ante nor post, the sun is in this momentary static stillness at this median. Yet the bent iron rods imply none of such, or only remotely of such, as they wind their way through space in unimposing glide: like the cloud tracks of a jet plane leaving traces on the immense blue of the sky, or the crack of lightning in slow motion as time traverses space in defiance of the pull of gravity, or momentum in erratic intervals—yet permissible of infinite permutations for the number of arcs that can be configured in such a space with the constant as the base—in this case, the gallery’s concrete floor.

The ‘irony’ by which Götz uses industrial materials to evoke ephemerality, or rather, elusive states of lightness, is revealed in how he has used concrete to extricate contrasts; instead of pouring them into solidly singular blocks, they are molded to cascade to deceptively look like felt (Bela) or to warp them like waffles (Dix), or to take on organic textures as that of wood (Holders) and to bestow upon them a reed-like delicacy of hushed brittleness—qualities that are seemingly anathema to the drive towards constructing monoliths for which concrete was essentially for. Even his habit of destroying his works—crushing them into rubble after exhibiting them—appears to be a marker of this drive. The site of exhibition is the only ‘noon’ of his structures’ manifestation, where its ante-state is its powdery grains waiting to be poured into the mixer, and its post-state is its ruins, ‘pounded’ out of their ‘mortar.’

Form, it seems, has been the product of a language that needs to concretize ideas or the information being conveyed; as language is essentially symbolic and syncretic in its constant permutation, but is very much arbitrary in its very use and contrivance. The universality of metaphors, despite the disparate distance and differing cultures from which these were invoked, might have also been the result of an increasing homogenization of sites and places engendered by the manufactured quality of cityscapes and the expansion of urban ideals which almost always becomes interchangeable with ideas of contemporaneity. As art’s language is essentially form, the tropes and processes learned from a prescribed dogma have usually been anticipatory of such condition or even predate it with numerous propositions, whether in the void of plasticity or in the actual, material realm that enables these propositions.

Curiously, both Gaston and Götz, in the very materiality of their chosen media, have deployed language and encased it in a body despite their many tangential allusions. However, in the implications of the word ‘pound,’ or ‘pounding,’ as in the action of striking something repeatedly to the ground, to grind something to powdery nothingness, to a metric measure of mass such as cement, or the pulsating intervals of rhythm that determine their works’ formal compositions and look—whence therein the former as air, the other in light—they intersect at the meridian in evoking language at its most primeval: as pestle cupped by mortar, as yin and yang, as night and day.

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