Posts Tagged ‘entropy’

Wednesday, June 2nd, 2010

Apples and Enamel by Lance Wakeling is a series of fifty-five process sculptures – each of which consist of a rotting apple covered in gesso and, then, glossy white (and in two instances, glossy yellow) lead-based enamel paint.

They are process sculptures in the sense that one views each of the apples as an individual art object – yes – but one also views the processes of gravity, entropy, and decay.

These processes are pictured through the artist’s use of the gesso and enamel over the apple’s surface which allows it to flexibly compress without cracking as the apple itself rots away from the inside (one might think of the look of certain Claes Oldenburg “soft” sculptures from the mid-1960s – Soft Toilet, for example).

Thus, the form of the sculpture is in a continual state of transformation.

Eventually, the surface of the apple will compress to the point that it has nowhere else to go, but, at that point, the form of the apple reads as a sign of decay as much as it does a solid form and, as such, one is nudged towards continuing to think of the sculpture in terms of the time of its decay which continues unabated from the inside.

What significance, though, does the apple as the locus of this decay afford the work?

What does an apple do here that, say, a peach or roast beef wouldn’t do?

Well, one could think of the apple as bound up with the Apple corporation – a sort of The Picture of Dorian Gray meets the iPad.

That’s one possibility. Another would be that on art historical / iconographic level, the apple is perhaps best known to be “forbidden fruit” – desire incarnate as described in the story of Adam and Eve.

And if one is to view the works in the context of the white cube art space on either a pedestal or in a vitrine (which would each mark the work as capital-A-Art), then this reading makes a certain amount of sense.

One could say, then, that the work pictures the glossy white sheen of desire incarnate as much as it pictures this desire’s ongoing decay.

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Thursday, April 29th, 2010

The world of Christopher Priest’s novel Inverted World is literally moving forward.

Indeed, the world is, one learns, a large mechanical sphere moving on continuously built-out tracks which are plotted by people such as the novel’s protagonist, Helward Mann.

Mann’s only job, as a “Future,” is to survey ahead of the track-work, making sure that the world’s journey towards what is referred to as “optimum” is as smooth as is reasonably possible.

The reason the world engages in this peculiar activity is the oft-mentioned fear of a centrifugal force in the natural world which, as Mann can attest to, would suck the mechanical world into a Hellish entropic spiral – a void.

(Mann saw this).

Now, this would be fine were it not for the fact that this world – in its endless march towards “optimum” – is overrun with mountains of its own feces.

One can hardly look around the world without viewing its own crumbling mechanical apparatus, its own genetic aberrations, and its own unapologetic human exploitation and warmongering – all conditions contingent upon the world’s progress in one way or another.

But, surely – as Mann would argue – there is simply no other option – one must keep going.

Indeed, Mann, as a professional surveyor into the future, would know – he has, after all, seen it:

If Man(n) stops working, Man(n) goes to(ward)s Hel(l).

(This is what Helward Mann saw.)

For Mann, one must choose the lesser of two evils and march on into the future.

The problem with all this, though – as the novel’s foil to Mann, Elizabeth Khan, demonstrates – is not that Mann is wrong per se, but rather that his question is badly stated.

It’s not that there is a binary between going forward towards the Truth and backwards towards Hell (as if time were a piece of string); but rather that there are a plethora of radically incomplete goings – never forward (as if towards “optimum”), but simply “on.”

All one can do here, then, is be reasonable and present to what is in front of one; that is to say, see things.

In the case of the world of Inverted World, the paradigm of seeing must shift or the world will drown in the endlessness of the ocean (in a sort of reversal of Mann’s own understanding of the void).

Again – it’s not that Mann is “right” or “wrong” here but that his vision is for better or for worse in ruins.

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Tuesday, April 20th, 2010

“Hydrate and Perform,” one part of a two-part solo exhibition of the work of Tobias Madison at the Swiss Institute, features sculptures and prints which function as synthetic visions of the natural world.

The sculptures in the exhibition are divided into a pair of categories:

1. Translucent horizontal cubes which are filled with a variety of colors of Vitamin Water.

In approximately half of these tanks the artist has placed artificial bamboo shoots which poke out of the tops of the tanks.

The effect of these bamboo shoots is to both frustrate the strict cubic linearity of the sculpture and compound the sense of artificiality introduced into the work through the use of the Vitamin Water.

2. Translucent vertical cubes which are filled top-to-bottom with claustrophobically-confined, paint-splattered artificial plant arrangements.

These cubes are supported upon minimal vertical bases – the surfaces of which are combinations of various faux wood patterns.

The prints in the exhibition, likewise, are divided into a pair of categories:

1. A series of large, framed scans of compact discs which have been digitally-manipulated to appear as though they have melted and spilled down the page like paint spilling down a canvas.

2. Several un-framed prints of similarly digitally-manipulated imagery which is no longer legible as the representation of any particular object – it reads not as a melting CD, but rather as the melting effect itself.

In combination, these sculptures and prints frame not just the artificiality of natural elements and phenomena, but – through their aestheticized / fetishized presentation – frame the desire for artificiality itself wherein artificial water is more desirable than actual water and the effect of “liquification” overruns the effect’s functional representational application.

However, there is another (perhaps unanticipated) formal element occurring here which is worth mentioning.

In the tanks of Vitamin Water, one views blocks of colorful, über-artificial water – yes; however, one also views the accumulation of dust and debris which has gathered in the corners and walls of the tank, disrupting the vision of total, almost evil, artificial cleanliness.

This trace of naturally-occurring entropic process is, like the dust “breeding” on Duchamp’s Large Glass as photographed by Man Ray or Smithson’s vision of crumbling cinematic apparatus, a death mask – a reminder that even the hyper-virtualized quality of contemporary experience is always already a ruin.

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