Noumenon Conundrum

Charles Avery
The Islanders: An Introduction, 2004 – ….

For the past four years, Scottish artist Avery has created texts, drawings, installations and sculptures which describe the topology and cosmology of an imaginary island, whose every feature embodies a philosophical proposition, problem or solution.

Untitled (World View), 2008

Avery’s mapping of the Island, to be completed over a projected ten-year period, can be interpreted as a meditation on making art and the impossibility of finding “truth”. The artist is characterised as a bounty-hunter, retrieving artifacts and documenting scenes from the subjective realm. Some of the works on show will focus in absurd detail, on particulars such as the sale of pickled eggs in the marketplace. Others present mysterious landscapes, such as the “Eternal Forest”, a place no one can ever reach but where a prized beast called the Noumenon is rumoured to live. A specimen of the Island’s wildlife will also be on show, having been realised in the form of a large taxidermy sculpture. These vivid and intricate works invite the viewer to recreate the Island in their own minds, and to use it as an arena for exploring philosophical conundrums and paradoxes.

Untitled (Stone-Mouse Display), 2008

Untitled (Noumenon)

Untitled (Aleph-Nul)

Saturation Transition

Harm van den Dorpel
Saturation Transition, 2009

Harm van den Dorpel

\ Archaeology of Genetology \ AG \ 1

Maarten Vanden Eynde
First quire of a larger publication about Genetology, March 2009

Size: 100 x 70 cm (poster) 50 x 70 cm (folded)
Published by SIGN Gallery
Text: Hans Theys
Design: Raf Vancampenhoudt
Editor: Willem Vanden Eynde

Coral Crocheting II

Eleanor Kent
Electroluminiscent Coral, 2007

This work by Eleanor Kent was part of a larger display at Track16 Gallery in Los Angeles (02/2009) of the ever growing Hyperbolic Crochet Coral Reef made by The Institute For Figuring and crocheting fans all over the world. (See also previous post)

One of the acknowledged wonders of the natural world, the Great Barrier Reef stretches along the coast of Queensland Australia, in a riotous profusion of color and form unparalleled on our planet. But global warming and pollutants so threaten this fragile marvel that it may well be gone by the end of the century. In homage to the Great One, Christine and Margaret Wertheim of The Institute For Figuring have instigated a project to crochet a handmade reef, a woolly testimony that now engages thousands of women the world over.

As a response to the ecological crisis facing marine environments, the Crochet Reef project has been called by Ren Weschler “the Aids Quilt of Global Warming.” What began as a tiny seed in the Wertheim’s home in Highland Park has morphed organically into a worldwide movement – Sister Reefs have now been made in Chicago, New York and London, with other efforts currently under way in Sydney, Arizona and Latvia. For the first time, in this exhibition, Crochet Reefs are brought together from around the globe, massing into an archipelago of stunning craft finesse.

THIS IS THE FUTURE BEFORE IT HAPPENED…

Maarten Vanden Eynde
Platic Reef – sample, 2009

THIS IS THE FUTURE BEFORE IT HAPPENED…
(title of exhibition curated by Julie Deamer – Glendale, USA, 02/2009)

A “floating landfill”, twice the size of Texas and made up of plastic particles was swirling about 1,000 miles west of California and 1,000 miles north of the Hawaiian Islands. The trash collected in one area, known as the North Pacific Gyre, due to a clockwise trade wind that circulated along the Pacific Rim. While the plastic trash floated along, instead of biodegrading, it was “photodegrading,” — the sun’s UV rays turned the plastic brittle, much like they would crack the vinyl on a car roof. They broke down the plastic into small pieces and, in some cases, into particles as fine as dust.
Charles Moore, marine researcher at the Algalita Marina Research Foundation in Long Beach who discovered the plastic in 1997 and has been studying and publicizing the patch for the past 20 years, said the debris — which he estimates weighed 3 million tons and covered an area twice the size of Texas —was made up mostly of fine plastic chips and impossible to skim out of the ocean. Also, it was undetectable by overhead satellite photos because 80 percent was plastic and therefore translucent. The plastic moved just beneath the surface, from one inch to depths of 300 feet, according to samples Moore collected .
Ironically, the debris was re-entering the oceans whence it came; the ancient plankton that once floated on Earth’s primordial sea gave rise to the petroleum, being transformed into plastic polymers. That exhumed life, our “civilized plankton,” was, in effect, competing with its natural counterparts, as well as with those life-forms that directly or indirectly fed on them. Inside the North Pacific Gyre the natural plankton was outnumbered 6 to 1 in favor of the plastic plankton. The scale of the phenomenon was astounding. Plastic debris became the most common surface feature of the world’s oceans. What could be done with this new class of products made specifically to defeat natural recycling? How could the dictum “In ecosystems, everything is used” be made to work with plastic ? So far no organism was able to digest plastik plankton or transform it again into something organic, closing back the broken chain of life.

In February 2010 the Belgian artist Maarten Vanden Eynde (1977), based in Rotterdam, The Netherlands, went to the North Atlantic Gyre with a boat to collect 5 tons of plastic debris. He melted it into a huge plastic coral reef and shipped it to Oman. There, in the middle of a dried out sea, located in a dessert called ‘Mother of All Poisons’ (due to the hazardous environmental conditions), he placed the new coral reef as a landart sculpture, a remnant of a forgotten present discovered in a possible future.

Concrete Casting

Rachel Whiteread
House, 1993
concrete, (destroyed)

House, perhaps Whitereads best known work, was a concrete cast of the inside of an entire Victorian terraced house completed in autumn 1993, exhibited at the location of the original house — 193 Grove Road — in East London (all the houses in the street had earlier been knocked down by the council). It drew mixed responses, winning her both the Turner Prize for best young British artist in 1993 and the K Foundation art award for worst British artist.

Rachel Whiteread House

Nineteenth-century sculptors referred to the process of bronze casting as life, death, and resurrection as the original live object was destroyed in the casting process and resurrected in bronze. In a similar but distinctly different manner Rachel Whiteread casts the space inside, around, and adjacent to objects that have been part of people’s lives. This process and her choice of materials transform the residue of everyday life into ghostlike, uncanny spirit images of everyday objects.

Rather than using the traditional casting process of making molds of objects and then casting them in a different material, Whiteread uses the objects themselves as molds. For example her 2002 sculpture “Sequel IV”, is a casting of the enclosing space surrounding the backs of a library shelf done in plaster. This is a reversal of a bookshelf as the titles are hidden and the books inaccessible. Instead of inviting browsing, these books are inaccessible shadows, frozen in time, reflecting hidden knowledge. It is as if we came upon an ancient ruin of a library.

Sequel IV, 2002

Text by Damon Hyldreth

The Dogs From Pompei

Allan McCollum
The Dog From Pompei, 1991
Cast glass-fiber- reinforced Hydrocal

Mount Vesuvius was blazing in several places…A black and dreadful cloud bursting out in gusts of igneous serpentine vapor now and again yawned open to reveal long, fantastic flames, resembling flashes of lightning, but much larger…Cinders fell…then pumice-stones too, with stones blackened, scorched, and cracked by fire …

The scene described by Pliny the Younger occurred on an August afternoon in 79 A.D. Of the more than 20,000 inhabitants in the city of Pompei, several hundred died that day in their homes and in the streets. The rest fled toward the sea.

The cavity of The Dog From Pompei was discovered November 20, 1874, in the house of Marcus Vesonius Primus, in the “Fauce,” the corridor at the entrance of the house. The house was located in Region VI, Insula 14, Nr. 20.
During the eruption, the unfortunate dog, wearing his bronze-studded collar, was left chained up at his assigned place to watch the house, and he suffocated beneath the ash and cinders.
Allan McCollum’s casts were taken directly from a mold made especially for the artist from the original second-generation cast presently on display at the Museo Vesuviano, in present-day Pompei.

Lost Objects, 1991

The Natural Copies from the Coal Mines of Central Utah, 1993.

Allan McCollum’s series The Natural Copies from the Coal Mines of Central Utah is a companion to the two series’ he’d done before—the Lost Objects (casts of dinosaur bones) and The Dog From Pompei— all created from gypsum casts of fossils and done in cooperation with natural history museums around the world. The Natural Copies are recastings of “natural casts” of dinosaur tracks found in the roofs of coal mines in central Utah, which are produced through a process of natural fossilization as follows:
(a) by dinosaurs walking over spongy beds of decaying vegetation (peat); (b) by the footprints being filled with sand, (c) by the accumulation of thousands of feet of additional sediment, which compressed the peat to help form coal and solidified the sand to sandstone; (d) by removal of the coal in mining operations so as to leave the tracks protruding downward into the mine; and finally, (e) by the geologist brushing away the residue of coal to expose the sandstone filling the original track.

McCollum offers his Natural Copies as an allegorical presentation of the narrative attached to other kinds of collectibles and fine art objects: in their various modes of production, exhibition, distribution, and collection; their use and exchange value; their function as markers of natural history or embodiments of cultural memory; their ambiguous status as found objects, cultural artifacts, scientific specimens or fine art objects; and their relation to local lore and folk stories of the region.

By reproducing the natural casts as artworks, McCollum intersects another narrative into the story. Originally discovered in the roofs of underground mines, the footprints’ inverted position offers the eerie experience of a dinosaur walking on the ground above one’s head, already suggesting the realm of the fantastic: monsters and exotic creatures from a primeval and forgotten past, treasures produced over the millennia and unearthed from the subterranean depths through the competative and determined search for “the rock that burns.” McCollum’s evocation of this narrative in the fine art context immediately transforms it into a metaphor for romantic views of the archaic and unconscious sources of human creativity, and at the same time suggests a symbolic shadow narrative that might underlie all social relations in communal labor.

Integral to his exhibitions is the accompanying display of multicolored photocopies of didactic literature the artist calls the Reprints. This other display of “copies” reiterates the metaphorical references to community organization, production, and dissemination in the real time of the exhibition space itself; it not only suggests an alternative to the convention of the expensive fine art catalogue, it simultaneously presents an exuberant, allegorical drama of repetition and production which imagines an uncanny continuity between the geological (natural) copying of tracks and traces from a prehistoric past and the mechanical and electronic endless copying of today.

Apologetic Archaeology

Guillaume Bijl
Archaeological Site (A Sorry Installation), 2007

Right in the middle of a grassy area on the Sentruper Höhe by Lake Aa with nothing but trees and meadows around, is a milestone of cultural tourism. If the spectator steps a bit closer, he can view the archaeological excavation site from a balustrade guarding the edge of the pit. Standing there, he will see an unearthed, shingle-roofed spire topped by a weathercock. Guillaume Bijl discovered it – or rather, he invented it, as the spectator will quickly have guessed. It is an absurd, surrealist sculpture. With their steeples, the churches of Münster are still an integral part of the urban landscape. Bijl came up with the idea that “somebody could discover another church – one that had fallen victim to the passage of time, buried during the war.” And, thanks to the Belgian artist, Münster has now gained new perspective on the culture of façades.
With his characteristic charm, Guillaume Bijl has added an apologetic gesture to his work, assigning it to the category of “sorry objects” that reveal themselves to be reproductions. However, Bijl is not apologizing for drawing a caricature of our expectations, but rather for betraying his normal emphasis on realism. His modesty will probably not help him much, though, for his steeple will become a tourist attraction.

The car-age

Patrick Nagatani
Bentley, Stonehenge, Salisbury Plain, Wiltshire, England, 1987

Nagatani informs us that in 1985, a Japanese archeologist named Ryoichi received a mysterious set of maps that led him to excavate numerous historic and contemporary sites around the world noted for their cultural significance. For fifteen years Ryoichi and his team secretly excavated Stonehenge, Chaco Canyon, Ayers Rock, Kitt Peak National Observatory, the very Large Array radio-telescope, and other sites. At each location they unearthed a different make of car. Buried in the volcanic ash at Herculaneum they found a Ferrari. In the foundations of the Observatory at Chichen Itza was a Jaguar, while a Bentley emerged from Salisbury Plain near Stonehenge. Ryoichi had discovered a worldwide “automobile culture” that appeared to parallel our own, although it was anachronistic both historically and geographically. After unearthing the artifacts, Ryoichi’s team covered up all evidence of their digs, but not before Nagatani had photographed each site, providing the only existing record of Ryoichi’s discoveries.

Excavations: Recent Photographs by Patrick Nagatani
Andrew Smith Gallery, Santa Fe, US, 2001

Model A Woody, National Astronomy Observatory (VLA), NM, USA, 1997

Volkswagon ‘Beetles’, Xi’an, Necropolis of Mt. Li’, China, 1988

Who created the creator?

Shane Willis
MC MECHANIC – HAND FIXING HAND – Homage to MC Escher

‘This question is logically problematic. If everything needs a creator, than no matter what exists, it must have been created. Furthermore, to be created means that someone or something had to create it. But then, who created the creator and so on? Logically, this would mean there would be an infinite regression of creators and we would never be able to find the first, uncaused cause since, by definition (the questions says that “everything needs a creator”) there wouldn’t be any uncaused cause. This would mean that the sequence of creations is eternal. But, if it exists that there is an eternal regression of creators, then who created the infinite regression of creators? Remember, the question presupposes that all things need a creator — even the eternal sequence of creators — which becomes logically absurd. Furthermore, if there is an eternal regression of creators that are eternal, then the question is not answered. In fact, it cannot be answered since it weakness is that “all things need a creator.” Of course, this only begs the question in that how did the process begin? Therefore, the question only raises the same problem it asks and it is a question that, by its own design, cannot be answered.

The question is better phrased as a statement: “Everything that has come into existence, was brought into existence by something else.” This is a more logical statement and is not wrought with the difficulties of the initial question. In the revised statement “Everything that has come into existence,” implies that the thing that “has come into existence” did not already exist. If it did not already exist but then came into existence, then something had to bring it into existence because something that does not exist cannot bring itself into existence (a logical absolute). This pushes the regression of creators back to what we would call the theoretical “uncaused cause” since there cannot be an infinite regression of creators as discussed above and since in infinite number of creators would mean there was an infinite number of creations and created things including things that cannot be destroyed since they would constitute things that exist. If that is so, then the universe would have had an infinite number of created things in it and it would be full. But it is not full. Therefore, there has not been an infinite regression of creations’.

Creative thinking created by CHRISTIAN APOLOGETICS AND RESEARCH MINISTRY 
- Equipping the Saints. Defending the Faith. Reaching the Lost. -

M.C. Escher
Drawing Hands, 1948

Curved Space

Folded rock in Namib desert (Southern Africa)

When Einstein wrote his general theory of relativity in 1915, he found a new way to describe gravity. It was not a force, as Sir Isaac Newton had supposed, but a consequence of the distortion of space and time, conceived together in his theory as ‘space-time’. Any object distorts the fabric of space-time and the bigger it is, the greater the effect.

Just as a bowling ball placed on a trampoline stretches the fabric and causes it to sag, so planets and stars warp space-time – a phenomenon known as the ‘geodetic effect’. A marble moving along the trampoline will be drawn inexorably towards the ball.

Thus the planets orbiting the Sun are not being pulled by the Sun; they are following the curved space-time deformation caused by the Sun. The reason the planets never fall into the Sun is because of the speed at which they are travelling. According to the theory, matter and energy distort space-time, curving it around themselves.

- Anushka Asthana and David Smith, The Observer -

Two-dimensional analogy of space-time distortion.

Time as a Vertical Dimension

Walter De Maria
Vertical Earth Kilometer, 1977

A km-long rod of metal was buried vertically in the ground. The boring of the shaft, which goes through six geological layers, took seventy-nine days. The continuous metal rod is made of 167 m-long rods, screwed tightly together. The sandstone square which surrounds the top of the shaft is at the intersection of two paths which traverse the Friedrichsplatz in Kassel, Germany, site of theinternational contemporary art serveys, Documenta. The work is only visible in section: the kilometer of metalplunged into the earth can be seen as a representation of time in a vertical dimension.

- from 'Land and Environmental Art' by Jeffrey Kastner and Brian Wallis, PHAIDON -

Walter De Maria
The Broken Kilometer, 1979

Courtesy Dia Art Foundation © the artist. Photo: John Abbott
500 brass rods, permanently installed at 393 West Broadway, New York City
Each rod 200x5cm

With The Broken Kilometer, De Maria had put in place the fourth and last stage of his multi-part sculptural system. While the solid brass work in Kassel plunged a kilometre into the ground and The Lightning Field in New Mexico marked out an area of one kilometre by one mile with poles that all reached the same, absolute height, in 1977 he created The New York Earth Room – apparently permanently – by covering the entire floor of a room in Friedrich’s other SoHo gallery with an even layer of earth. The work can still be seen on the second floor at 141 Wooster Street. Two years later, when The Broken Kilometer – filling the whole floor space of a gallery – was installed as a permanent exhibition, it was clear that the viewer who encountered the piece in astonishment could only respond in one way: silent contemplation. – Thomas Kellein director Kunsthalle Bielefeld.

Landscaping

Edward Burtynsky
Kennecott Copper Mine No. 22, Bingham Valley, Utah, 1983

‘Nature transformed through industry is a predominant theme in my work. I set course to intersect with a contemporary view of the great ages of man; from stone, to minerals, oil, transportation, silicon, and so on. To make these ideas visible I search for subjects that are rich in detail and scale yet open in their meaning. Recycling yards, mine tailings, quarries and refineries are all places that are outside of our normal experience, yet we partake of their output on a daily basis’. – Edward Burtynsky –

Tanggu Port, Tianjin, 2005

‘These images are meant as metaphors to the dilemma of our modern existence; they search for a dialogue between attraction and repulsion, seduction and fear. We are drawn by desire – a chance at good living, yet we are consciously or unconsciously aware that the world is suffering for our success. Our dependence on nature to provide the materials for our consumption and our concern for the health of our planet sets us into an uneasy contradiction. For me, these images function as reflecting pools of our times’.
– Edward Burtynsky –

Oxford Tire Pile No. 5, Westley, CA, 1999

Oil Fields No. 13, Taft, California, 2002

Urban Renewal #5, City Overview From Top of Military Hospital, Shanghai, 2004

Sampling Mother Earth

Nobuo Sekine
Phase — Mother Earth, 1968
(270 x 220 cm)

In October 1968 Nobuo Sekine dug a hole in the ground, shaped the extracted dirt into a large cylinder and called the work “Phase — Mother Earth.” It was probably an experiment, influenced by discussions of the new Land Art and Minimalist works taking place in the United States.

When it was first constructed, the prevailing view in Japan was that it was kind of quirky visual play of positive and negative spaces. But artist Lee Ufan disagreed, claiming that this was actually the end of visual manipulation; it was in fact a real time, real life absence and presence presented in temporal juxtaposition — a before and an after.

This, Sekine’s piece and Lee’s comment, is typically pointed to as the founding moment of Japan’s influential, homegrown Mono-ha art movement.

Born into the post-war years and the supposed ruins of consumer culture, a small group of artists were attempting to create a new, utopian reality. They proceeded as if art might be re-enchanted by shifting attention away from the objectification of images and to the creation of a world of encounters, with everyday objects, that might end up looking like mythic gestures.
Mono-ha, literally “the school of things,” was initially an informal term — sometimes used derisively — that brought together loosely affiliated artists around Tokyo including Sekine, Lee, Susumu Koshimizu, Katsuro Yoshida, and 12 or so others.

By MATT LARKING
Special to The Japan Times

“Faced with this solid block of raw earth, the power of this object of reality rendered everybody speechless, and we stood there, rooted to the spot… I just wondered at the power of the convex and concave earth, the sheer physicality of it. I could feel the passing of time’s quiet emptiness… That was the birth of ‘Mono-ha’. – Nobuo Sekine

Mo(NU)mentum

Maarten Vanden Eynde
Mon(NU)mentum, 2008 AD
(450 x 60 cm)

Time is a philosophical dimension, a basic substance which we breath in and out constantly. Just like space it is always there. Time experience however seems to be working on many different levels in an ever changing and more personalized speed (sometimes a minute can last forever and your life can fly by in a fraction). Time is not static, it is always on the move. The impossibility to stop time is mirrored by the impossibility to live in the present. ‘Now’ is an elusive point between the past and the future. Like the gardener on his way to Ispahaan, the present is on his way to an unavoidable destiny: the past. There is no escape. When you read THIS word, it became history already. The future is catching up instantly. What is the force that powers the engine of time? Is the present being pulled towards the future?

The Universal Law of Gravitation has several important features. First, it is an inverse square law, meaning that the strength of the force between two massive objects decreases in proportion to the square of the distance between them as they move farther apart. Second, the direction in which the force acts is always along the line (or vector) connecting the two gravitating objects.
In 1687 Sir Isaac Newton first published his Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica (Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy) which was a radical treatment of mechanics, establishing the concepts which were to dominate physics for the next two hundred years. Among the book’s most important new concepts was Newton’s Universal Law of Gravitation. Newton managed to take Kepler’s Laws governing the motion of the planets and Galileo’s ideas about kinematics and projectile motion and synthesize them into a law which governed both motion on earth and motion in the heavens. This was an achievement of enormous importance for physics; Newton’s discoveries meant that the universe was a rational place in which the same principles of nature applied to all objects.
Could it also work for Time?

Between two objects, let’s say A and B, there is a point where the gravitation of both objects is working with equal force (L1 point, named after Lagrange ). This point is balancing between the two attracting masses. If it is slightly bending towards A or B is will be attracted more by either one of them. It can only move from it’s frozen position, without loosing it’s equal balance, if A and B change mass simultaneously. The mass A is loosing, B has to gain. If time would be a linear experience, and A would be the past and B the future, than the point (C) hanging in the middle would be the present.
Presuming the past is getting longer and longer (or bigger and bigger), in order for C to be equally drawn to both A and B, it needs to be moving towards the future. The past is getting bigger and the future is getting smaller. And on top of that the speed of this process seems to be accelerating. With the population growth as exemplary model and driving fuel, evolution takes place at an unprecedented speed. New inventions and discoveries changing the world beyond recognition are constantly coming closer after each other. Just like the birth of matter during the big bang, time was created at the same moment and moves equally with the expanding universe; faster and faster to it’s final destiny.

The installation ‘Mo(NU)mentum’ is made up of several layers of history, creating a massive pillar. The drill core is like a sample of time, taken from the earth in the future to understand how the world evolved. Starting with a massive block of stone (in which the different geological layers are visible) the drill core contains samples of wood, copper, metal, bricks, concrete, asphalt, tar and plastic. The layers are getting thinner and thinner the closer they get to the present = the plastic layer. So far the materials created a foundation for the next, but the plastic layer is so thin and vulnerable that it is impossible to continue from there. It is a final moment in present evolution.

Mo(NU)mentum is a monument for the future, visualizing the impossibility to continue the current evolution. It is a permanent memory and trace of Generali Groups Executive Forum on Time: Business Opportunity and Strategic Timing. The best Champagne was served in plastic Champagne glasses. The empty glasses were collected and melted on top of the installation, thereby physically contributing the last layer.

Genetologic Research

The Science of First Things – by Maarten Vanden Eynde