Denis Masi was invited to look at the space and make a proposal for it on the basis of his previous experience of site specific work, both within and without the gallery context. His most recent work has been wall-based but as soon as he saw this glass corridor-like space, wall work became window work. His intention was to doubleglaze the windows with glass panels etched with jargon words' taken from books and articles about the reunification of Germany. In the catalogue to his exhibition at the Edward Totah Gallery in London in 1991, he quoted some words of V. S. Naipaul:

"Where jargon turns living issues into abstraction, and where jargon ends by competing with jargon, people don't have causes. They only have enemies; only the enemies are real."

Some jargon phrases are familiar cliches such as Old Regime or Multicultural Society which we understand even out of context, but most are examples of the incomprehensible jargon of socio-political theorists, such as Lag Problem, Preference Template and Salvation Programs. In addition, the words acquire a threatening severity by being printed in the crisp mechanical font of Helvetica - the universal font of directional signs.

The jargon words - in pairs noun plus adjective - were grouped on each panel according to their source in East or West German discourse, but the artist had not made any decision to allot certain panels to the east or the west side of the gallery. Taking the colours from the German flag, Masi covered the original window panes with red gel on the west side (four windows) and those on the east side in yellow (six windows) so that the space was flooded with red and amber light. As the sun rose in the east and sank in the west, first one colour and then the other would dominate the atmosphere. But the incompetence of the English transport company introduced an unexpected element of chance: of the ten panels, six arrived in shatters. There are six windows of the same size on the east side of the gallery but three of one size and one of another on the west side, so if any more or less had been broken the whole concept of the work would have fallen apart.

Although Masi's work is always immaculately conceived and presented, it is produced in collaboration with others, a process which demands a flexible attitude, and for all his careful planning, he regards each work as 'in progress' until finally determined on site. Masi took advantage of the accident by laying the shattered panels on the floor in front of the yellow-gelled windows, so that it acquired an additional dimension: a window and floor work enclosing a colour-saturated aerial space. His response to what seemed at first a disaster turned the whole piece into something more imaginative than he had originally envisaged.

At the private view the laws of optics introduced a second element of the unforeseen: the daylight in the open doorway at each end of the gallery appeared to be a heavenly blue, like a gift of blue sky through a prison window.

October 1995