Roni Horn. Gold Field.

A sheet of gold on the floor

Roni Horn made Gold Field between 1980 and 1982. According to the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, which holds it, the material is pure gold and the dimensions are 124.5 by 152.4 by 0.002 cm. The last number is the thickness: just over a hundredth of a millimetre.

The gold was annealed and rolled into a rectangle. It lies directly on the floor, with no plinth, frame or glass. The Guggenheim calls it a nearly volumeless sculpture. More precisely, the museum says, it is less a sculpture than the material of gold itself, what the artist called its simple physical reality.

At that thinness, gold no longer resembles a heavy bar. It looks like a patch of light set on the floor. People entering the room tend to see the colour first, then realise it is an object, and have to lean down to grasp how thin it is.

The pawnbroker's daughter

Horn is the daughter of a pawnbroker. The Guggenheim says she was fascinated by gold from childhood, especially by how people have loaded it with layers of mythological and economic meaning.

Gold may be the material that carries the most stories. It is money, dowry, crown, the thing kept in safes and weighed to the gram. Few look at gold and see only gold.

With Gold Field, Horn wanted to strip those layers away. She wanted viewers to meet the material unmediated, as something to see and almost to touch. Not cast into jewellery, not struck into coins, not stacked in bars. Just a plane, very thin, very wide, lying at the viewer's feet.

Placing gold on the floor is a choice too. Precious things are usually raised up, put in cases, lit. Horn set it as low as it could go, level with dust and footsteps.

A horizon for Felix

Stripping away meaning does not leave the work empty. The Guggenheim writes that Gold Field does not rule out metaphorical readings. It waits for the right viewer.

That viewer was Felix Gonzalez-Torres. He first saw Gold Field in 1990 at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, at a time when his partner Ross was dying of AIDS and the social and political climate felt almost hopeless to him.

Gonzalez-Torres later wrote about the gold. He saw in it a new landscape, a possible horizon, a place of rest and beauty, a place to dream, to regain energy, to dare. His text, 1990: L.A., The Gold Field, appeared in Earths Grow Thick, a catalogue on Roni Horn published by the Wexner Center for the Arts in 1996.

Gonzalez-Torres himself made works from fragile materials to hold on to Ross, such as the pile of candy in "Untitled" (Portrait of Ross in L.A.). Reading the two works together, it is clear why a sheet of gold on a floor reached him so deeply.

So thin it is almost not there

Gold Field sits on a strange boundary. It is made of a precious material, beaten so thin that it has almost no thickness. It is more than a metre and a half wide, yet has no bulk. It is sculpture, yet nearly all surface.

That thinness makes it fragile. A speck of dust, a crease, a footprint could mark it. Perhaps that is why viewers stand further back, look longer, breathe more lightly.

More than forty years on, Gold Field keeps its first question: can we look at an object without telling a story about it? And if we cannot, is the story about the object, or about ourselves as we look?