The Crud of the World, or, Holes Against Voids

Event details

This paper addresses the use of holes in recent sculpture, focusing on Katrina Palmer’s End Matter (2015) alongside works by Cady Noland and Caspar Heinemann. If the presence of holes in post-war North American and European sculpture has typically been read as suggesting a void or abyss, I consider the appearance of holes in Palmer, Heinemann and Noland’s work as connectors, portals or tunnels that illuminate the ideological and material construction of history and heritage. As the artist William Pope. L proposed in his pamphlet Hole Theory (2002), holes can be negotiated successfully by maintaining “respect for what cannot be seen” explaining that he is not after “purity” but rather interested in “how things fit together.” In this paper, I take up those ideas as sculptural propositions which assist in analysing artworks where the aesthetic form of the hole is emphatically not a void, but rather a conduit for registering how social relations imprint upon the material structure of our world.

Picture credit: Katrina Palmer, End Matter Bookworks 2015.

Dr Larne Abse Gogarty

Larne Abse Gogarty is a writer and art historian from London. She is an Associate Professor and Head of History and Theory of Art at the Slade School of Fine Art, University College London. Larne is the author of two books: What We Do Is Secret: Contemporary Art and the Antinomies of Conspiracy (Sternberg Press, 2023) and Usable Pasts: Social Practice and State Formation in American Art (Brill, 2022) Currently, she is working on a new project about recent sculpture and commodity culture through the lens of salvage, scavenging and sabotage. Larne has written catalogue essays for artists including Sam Gilliam, Alice Neel, and Gray Wielebinski and regularly writes criticism, mainly for Art Monthly. In 2026, she is curating an exhibition on the theme of conspiracy at the Warburg Institute, London. She is in the editorial group for Selva journal and Oxford Art Journal.