Six Degrees of Separation

author Ivanka Franke
written by Leo Modrčin

 

The premise of the play Six Degrees of Separation by American playwright John Guare is based on a thesis that there is a chain of connections between every two persons on Earth through a maximum of six other persons, as in I know you, you know her, she knows so and so, and so forth. While the main protagonist of the play, a young drifter from the Bronx, used this principle to penetrate the arty high society of New York, another such chain of connections occurred in conjunction with the installation of artwork by Ivana Franke this spring in PS1 in New York, and has brought about a particular reading of her work and connections between the two cultures.

 

Ivana Franke has filled almost an entire room at the PS1 with barely visible structures of stretched fishing line and Scotch tape, suspended to form structures with three x,y,z axes, the multiple origins of Cartesian lines that start forming space but never define it completely. A visitor is invited to enter the room, but the fragility and invisibility of the structure questions the mere ability to control space that we easily take for granted.