The topic of this conversation between Sadia Shirazi and Rasheed Araeen was the large-scale participatory construction Zero to Infinity. Installed in the Tate Modern Turbine Hall between 22 July and 28 August 2023, the work comprised 400 wooden cubes with open faces bisected end-to-end by diagonal struts, each painted in a bright hue of red, yellow, blue or green. Among the various prior iterations of Zero to Infinity worldwide, this was one of the largest manifestations yet. At the exhibition’s opening, the cubes were positioned in a perfectly symmetrical square array – a configuration determined by the artist. Visitors were then invited to break this static gridded construction and reconfigure the cubes into novel arrangements. The rigid structure was rapidly disassembled; cubes were scattered across the floor, stacked in precarious columns and massed together in irregular clusters. Thousands of individuals took part in this collective action of assemblage over the work’s month-long presentation, transforming the inert grid into a continuous process of chromatic movement. This activity turned traditional hierarchies on their heads: the museum, traditionally a site of passive spectatorship and authority, became an arena for the public’s self-directed collective creativity. The artist, traditionally the authorial creator, became a spectator of the work’s co-creation.
Left to right: Sumayya Si-Tayeb, Rasheed Araeen and Sadia Shirazi as part of Uniqlo Tate Play: Zero to Infinity, Rasheed Araeen in Conversation at Tate Modern, 27 July 2023.
Photo: © Ian Tuttle
Initially conceived in 1968, but not realised until 2004, Zero to Infinity has now been exhibited more than thirteen times worldwide. Araeen and Shirazi came together to discuss the work’s transnational genesis and itinerary, proposing to unpack its intellectual journey between Karachi and London as well as the racial-geographic exclusions that contributed to its delayed public reception. To this end, Shirazi began with a presentation that charted the work’s trajectory across Araeen’s multi-faceted career as an artist, professional engineer, founding editor of Third Text and curator of The Other Story: Afro-Asian Artists in Post-war Britain at London’s Hayward Gallery in 1989–90, to name just a few of Araeen’s major contributions. Beginning with his early works in 1950s to 1960s Karachi, she located incipient concerns with geometry and movement – subsequently key to Zero to Infinity – in a series of early works. We viewed, among others, Araeen’s semi-abstract watercolour Waves at Sandspit 1956, depicting rhythmic swells of water in the Indian Ocean; as well as the angular geometries of Sindh’s regional architectural vernaculars in works such as Windcatchers in Pink 1963, the name of which refers to an architectural technology for natural cooling prevalent on the skyline of Pakistan’s city of Hyderabad. We also paused to dwell on Araeen’s earliest experiment with sculpture: a twisted metal wire that Araeen recovered from a burnt tyre in 1959 and subsequently reconstructed and exhibited under the title My First Sculpture. Shirazi’s genealogy made a welcome intervention in prevailing narratives of Araeen’s career, which tend to overlook his decade of practice in Karachi. Countering the assumption that London was the originating site of Araeen’s artistic innovations, Shirazi recentred Karachi as a pivotal locus in his trajectory.
As the event progressed, Shirazi endeavoured to lead the conversation through Zero to Infinity’s long genesis, situating the work in relation to Araeen’s engagement with industrial forms in the 1960s as well as his expansion into publishing and curation in the 1970s and 1980s. Yet, nearly as soon as the conversation began, it repeatedly veered ‘off script’, as she wryly noted. Araeen intervened in her efforts to chronicle his artistic journey by foregrounding the politics underlying the need for an introductory overview of his practice at such a late stage in his career. Despite being in London for ‘fifty-nine years – working, writing, publishing’, Araeen stated, his work remains relatively little-known for an artist of his accomplishments. These include, he noted, his 1960s structures, comprising works such as the open-frame cube of First Structure 1966–67, which comprised the basic element redeployed in Zero to Infinity, as well as the free-standing, lattice-like construction Rang Baranga 1969. These works broke with the formalist paradigm of modern sculpture and, in doing so, independently accomplished an artistic innovation typically deemed the exclusive achievement of Minimalism. Tate, the artist stated, was aware of Araeen’s innovations since 1970, yet his work was ignored at the same time that minimalist art from the US was canonised as a paradigm shift in post-war artistic practice. Addressing the audience, Araeen said: ‘You don’t know my work. You have to ask yourself why.’
Continuing, in a pedagogical mode, to place the interpretive burden on attendees, Araeen further speculated about subsequent connections between Tate’s acquisition of multiple works – including Zero to Infinity – and a letter-writing campaign that he conducted to critique the Islamophobic public discourse that surged in the aftermath of the 2005 bombings on London’s transport network. Was the timing a coincidence or an effort at appeasement? Araeen posed such open-ended questions with few direct answers, compelling the audience to independently interrogate the presence and functioning of racial-geographic borders within the art institution and its wider social context. The artist’s impetus towards (self-)interrogation demands uncomfortable reflection on complicity with racialised hierarchies as well as possibilities of transformation at individual and collective levels.
Although Araeen’s interventions diverted Shirazi’s efforts to trace Zero to Infinity’s intellectual journey, their performative and pedagogical ethos effectively foregrounded a core concern of the work and the discussion as a whole: the role and agencies of an artwork’s publics. This concern animated Zero to Infinity from its earliest conception, as Shirazi demonstrated by surfacing from Tate’s Archive a 1968 text that Araeen wrote under the work’s first title, ‘Bio-Structural Environmental Play’. ‘Touch these structures with your hands’, the text entreated. ‘The aesthetic experience is your own relationship with space and environment. You can continuously create new relationships… by playing with these structures… Don’t let anybody tell you the bullshit that art is only in museums and galleries.’ This poem-like text – which, to my mind, also evokes the performative form of the manifesto – distinctly participates in a series of problematics and techniques shaped by the upheavals of the worldwide insurrections of 1968. In this moment marked by proximity – however concrete or illusory – to qualitative social transformation, many artists and theorists seized upon participation and play as forms of aesthetic education or sensory training. These were understood as intermediary techniques for abolishing the artist’s specialised role and generalising artistic construction throughout everyday life. In this context, we might see Zero to Infinity as a mode of modelling the individual and collective potential to deconstruct established structures – the physical form of the grid, as much as the social hierarchies that continue to structure our present – and construct new modes of collective organisation in turn. Although not directly addressed in the conversation, this spectral historical connection between Araeen’s text and the politics of 1968 indexed a key element of the work’s critical potential.
While Araeen’s 1968 text signalled an anti-institutional posture, the role of art institutions nonetheless also emerged as a core concern of the conversation. A work of Zero to Infinity’s scale and ambition, Araeen stated, could not be realised without the support of an art institution. Araeen sought this support in 1968 by submitting a proposal for the work – then titled Bio-Structural Environmental Play – to the ICA, yet received no response. As a result, the work ‘went into hibernation’, in Araeen’s words, for more than thirty years. Removed from public circulation, the work was consequently not available for the public to make a decision about its significance – ‘not only historically’, in the artist’s words, ‘but in society as a whole’. What kinds of individual experiences and relational forms might have been produced had Zero to Infinity been exhibited and engaged by public audiences at the time of its conception? How might these have entered and interfered with wider social formations, such as the intensified global connectivity enabled by new communications technologies or Britain’s ongoing imperial mentalities? It was the art institution’s task, Araeen stated, to make artworks available to the public so that they could decide on their historical and political significance.
As Araeen returned repeatedly to Zero to Infinity’s capacity to activate public agency, he also proposed that the work’s operations had a doubly political and scientific basis. The work’s titular reference to ‘zero’ did not refer to nothingness, he stated, but rather to a form of ‘static energy’. When the public broke the work’s initial format of a symmetrical grid by reconfiguring it into new arrangements, they unleashed this ‘static energy’ within a process of infinite transformation. Araeen identified a scientific analogue to the artistic process conceptualised in Zero to Infinity in the concept of spontaneous symmetry breaking discovered in a 2008 quantum physics breakthrough by Nobel Prize-winning scientists Yoichiro Nambu, Makoto Kobayashi and Toshihide Maskawa. As Araeen described in a 2008 text which he read out to the audience, this concept of spontaneous symmetry breaking provided a novel account of cosmic existence by explaining why opposite forces, deemed to be in a symmetrical state within the laws of physics, did not cancel each other out but, rather, expanded to create our universe.1 Identifying this convergence between artistic and scientific discovery, Araeen drew a line between the potentials for infinite transformation in cosmic energy and human capacities.
The conversation concluded, appropriately, with an image of Tate visitors busy in the process of reassembling Zero to Infinity. After thirty years in hibernation and another decade in storage at Tate, Zero to Infinity had re-emerged, having ‘given birth to 400 children’, Araeen quipped, to unleash the public’s collective creativity. Such moments of playful humour ran throughout the conversation, animated by Araeen and Shirazi’s charismatic rapport. This ludic ethos was not coincidental. Asked why he stepped away from the performance work that he primarily pursued in the 1970s, Araeen responded that he had not – he was ‘performing now!’ Yet Araeen’s playful strategies nonetheless had a serious pedagogical intent. Reflecting on the question of performativity in Zero to Infinity, an audience member asked Araeen to consider the work in the mode of a choreographic score: Would he identify anything that the public should not do with the work? Pausing for a moment in thought, Araeen responded that he hoped, whatever the public decided to do with the work, they would think before they acted. He later added that this stimulus towards critical reflection extended towards the work’s significance as a whole. Now that Zero to Infinity is definitively in the public domain, it is up to us, the public, to determine what we do with its catalytic potential.