{"id":923,"date":"2010-10-09T15:19:03","date_gmt":"2010-10-09T13:19:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.genetologisch-onderzoek.nl\/index.php\/923\/beeldende-kunst\/"},"modified":"2023-12-31T14:41:48","modified_gmt":"2023-12-31T12:41:48","slug":"negative-space","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.genetology.net\/index.php\/923\/beeldende-kunst\/","title":{"rendered":"Negative Space"},"content":{"rendered":"

Mungo Thomson<\/strong>
\nNegative Space<\/em>, 2006<\/p>\n

\"Mungo<\/a><\/p>\n

Full color, 160 pages, 10-1\/8″ x 7″ x \u00bd”
\nDesigned by Mungo Thomson with Conny Purtill
\nPublished by Christoph Keller Editions<\/a> and JRP|Ringier<\/a>, Zurich<\/p>\n

\"Mungo<\/a><\/p>\n

\"Mungo<\/a><\/p>\n

Thomson\u2019s ongoing Negative Space project tempers profound ambivalence with assurances of earnest conciliation. The works in this series\u2014including Negative Space (2006), an artist book, and Negative Space (STScI-PRC2003-24) (2006) and Negative Space (STScI-PRC2007-41a) (2007), large-scale photographic murals comprise psychedelic images culled from an online archive of copyright-free starscape shots taken by the Hubble Space Telescope that the artist downloaded and reversed. (Thanks to a simple Photoshop operation, the inky chasm of outer space becomes the antiseptic pallor of the empty gallery in another act of reversal.)<\/p>\n

The Negative Space murals are, as Thomson quips, \u201clike visual whale songs\u2014atmospherics for the spiritually inclined. Wallpaper for Esalen. California all the way.\u201d This means that they are tainted with hippie-stoner associations, but their admission of delight in and curiosity about the world extends well beyond them. In his Gifford Lectures on Natural Theology, delivered at the University of Glasgow in 1985, Carl Sagan described nothing short of the search for the sacred in the universe, beginning with a very simple formulation: \u201cBy far the best way I know to engage the religious sensibility, the sense of awe, is to look up on a clear night. . . . I think everyone in every culture has felt a sense of awe and wonder looking at the sky.\u201d
\nIn this way, Sagan opens onto a series of startling observations about the relative unimportance of man in the center of an ever-vaster cosmos\u2014a smallness that is neither a palliative nor a burden, but an invitation born of never really being very sure where it is that we stand. So Thomson offers a site of promise, which aches with entimentality even as its refusal of consolation admits to the impossibility of any easy belief.<\/p>\n

– Based on a text by Suzanne Hudson is a New York\u2013based critic and an assistant professor of modern and contemporary art at the University of Illinois.<\/h5>\n

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