I SEE one of our letter writers, E. Quill of Bray, Co Wicklow, noting how it has become dairy gore - beg pardon, de rigueur - when talking about a gallery or restaurant, to use "the cold word `space' instead of the homely word `place'". The writer wants to know who started this and what it (all) means.

Right. Not long back, Arny Gallacio exhibited a 34 tonne block of ice inside the Victorian Pumping Station in London. In its earlier incarnation the station was merely a place. By virtue of the artistic installation it became a space. Why? Because as the ice gradually melted, the space (in the place) initially given to the installation remained the same, but that occupied by it decreased, The later you came to see it, the less you saw - indeed the less you saw of it every time you looked at it. By transference and association then, the gallery became more space than place.

In another exhibition at London's Lisson Gallery a couple of months back, Tony Oursler, a rather intelligent commentator on the communications media, showed the contents of two specimen jars "talking" to each other, by means of a recording. A large female heart and a small male brain argued about how best to understand the world. Clearly there could be no agreement, no meeting of minds. A common set of standards could not be established between the emotional and rational views put forward by the two protagonists.

In fact, if you looked closely, and I always do, the two organs were not conversing. They were in dialogue with another character who was off mike, and there was thus a gap in the apparent conversation into which the spectator could slip. In other words, there was a space, but not a place. Physically climbing in there was not an option.

Meanwhile, a piece in the London Review of Books a while back told how a particular poet "owns the territorial rights" to New South Wales farming poems. In this instance, despite the artistic connotations, we are talking only of place, the staking out and fencing in of territory. In the same way Patrick Kavanagh acquired the exclusive rights to Monaghan scrubland elegies and south Dublin canal bank sonnets all the way from Sallins to the Ringsend Basin. There were a few controversial CPOs along the way but the whole thing is now tied up by the legal crowd, with long leases involved in most cases.

But look at the Greeks and their "agrafa". All this means literally is "unwritten", but their reference was to entities undrawn on their maps, areas in the Pindos mountains excluded from cartography so as to avoid imposition of taxes. In other words, here we have areas which are neither spaces nor places (at all) in the "real" world of the revenue authorities.

Direction plays a part too. A few weeks ago, Ms Rebecca Rees of the AA in England said that "There really are women who hold the map upside down so it follows the direction in which they are driving."

This disparaging comment reveals ignorance of the fact that there is no such thing as the definitive map. Wordsworth talks about "haunting spots of time", spaces waiting for the chance connection that will give them a sudden life in the imagination. They remain undefined spaces until seen and defined and given clear boundaries, at which point they metamorphose into places. The lady drivers referred to by the AA lady may well be travelling in a Wordsworthian sense or space frame and there is nothing wrong in that. When they get there they will recognise where they are.

Now consider Connaught Place the one in Delhi, not London. This important commercial hub of Indian life was officially renamed (by the Congress party, surprisingly, not by right wing Hindus) a couple of years ago and is now officially "Rajiv and Indira Chowk" (as if the Gandhis were not already sufficiently honoured with street names). In this case the place is the same, the space is the same, yet the Place is different.

But as jeering Delhi-wallahs at the time reminded the Congress party sycophants, Connaught Place is a circus, and "chowk" in Hindi means a square.

An even more unhappy change has occurred with a particular plot of land outside Delhi, where in 1903 Lord Curzon held a magnificent ceremony to commemorate the crowning of Edward VII. Once beautiful, it is now a barren plot of thorns, flooded and pestilential during the monsoon, a haunt of robbers and other low life.

It is the same space but a different place (altogether).

I am glad to sort this out and I hope E. Quill is now happier.