Postcard from Vienna (and Deep Space)
In 1968, Robert Irwin entered the Art and Technology Program, established by Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s curator Maurice Tuchman. The project, which ran from 1967 to 1971, put him in contact with Caltech’s Nobel-winning physicist Richard Feynman, with whom he toured IBM’s San Jose facilities and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena. The same year, Irwin also met Dr. Ed Wortz, head of the laboratory at Garrett Aerospace Corporation, who was working on the physiology for NASA’s moonwalks. They started a fruitfully open interdisciplinary research project on perception (which also involved a young James Turrell before he left the project in 1969), that resulted in a lifelong friendship and changed Irwin’s perception of reality at large and of art in particular. Their repeated tests on sensory deprivation in anechoic chambers convinced Irwin that it is crucial to remove everything from the visual frame of an art work and to instead position the viewer at its core, so that he / she could experience ‘all the marvel inherent in our perceiving ourselves perceiving.’
In 1968, Robert Irwin entered the Art and Technology Program, established by Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s curator Maurice Tuchman. The project, which ran from 1967 to 1971, put him in contact with Caltech’s Nobel-winning physicist Richard Feynman, with whom he toured IBM’s San Jose facilities and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena. The same year, Irwin also met Dr. Ed Wortz, head of the laboratory at Garrett Aerospace Corporation, who was working on the physiology for NASA’s moonwalks. They started a fruitfully open interdisciplinary research project on perception (which also involved a young James Turrell before he left the project in 1969), that resulted in a lifelong friendship and changed Irwin’s perception of reality at large and of art in particular. Their repeated tests on sensory deprivation in anechoic chambers convinced Irwin that it is crucial to remove everything from the visual frame of an art work and to instead position the viewer at its core, so that he / she could experience ‘all the marvel inherent in our perceiving ourselves perceiving.’
Half a century later, Irwin’s classic ‘site-conditioned’ experimentations – as he defined them – still work their magic. His intervention in the Secession’s main gallery, Double Blind (2013), is an invitation to experience ‘light and space’ as simply as it looks. The installation replicates the grid structure of the main room’s floor and ceiling with a disorienting succession of transparent cells made of different shades of scrim, merging into three identical large volumes. When I visited it was late afternoon. The summer light filtered through the glass ceiling as well as from the door opened onto the greenery of the garden, opening up the white cube and cutting across it with a central perspective. Double Blind asks for quiet navigation. As opposed to it’s behaviour in a vacuum, when light moves through thicker media such as air, it slows down, infinitesimally. By enhancing the visibility of this liminal reduction of speed, Irwin seems to expand the experience of time into the present tense.
By contrast, or maybe along surprisingly intersecting lines, Rossella Biscotti’s project The Side Room, exhibited in the Secession’s Grafiches Kabinett, explores how the radical compression of physical space magnifies inner dimensions. Developed in parallel to her project for this year’s Venice Biennale, The Side Room is the result of a six-month ‘Oneiric Workshop’ created by the artist with fourteen inmates from Venice’s Giudecca gaol. We hear recordings of them narrating vivid dreams and see their portraits, drawn by one of the female inmates, making their absence palpable. Biscotti also presented a series of sketches on paper, in which she notes the seating arrangements during their meetings inside the prison as fluctuating group portraits.
In the downstairs gallery Thomas Locher tackles the issue of materiality and temporality from a different perspective. Through the juxtaposition of images taken from the media and the history of art, his show Homo Oeconomicus analyzes the relationship between economy and language, by focusing on themes of gift and credit, following Derrida’s Given Time I: Counterfeit Money (1994) – ‘where there is gift, there is time’, as Derrida said.
On the same day, I visited The What If?… Scenario (after LG), a show of works by Cerith Wyn Evans at the Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary (TBA21) in Augarten. Here again art, technology, credibility, language and the revolving doors of perception were at play. The exhibition opened on 4 July to commemorate the one year anniversary of the detection of the Higgs boson particle at CERN. Though theorized in 1964, until last year it had been a wholly imagined keystone of particle physics’ Standard Model. The existence of the Higgs boson proves the invisible cohesive force field that pervades space and determines its dynamics; without it, all matter would float around at the speed of light. The show, whose title pays homage to Liam Gillick’s eponymous 1996 exhibition in London, is intended, as Gillick himself put it, ‘to address some of the problems inherent in developing a notional sense of the future’. This update presents nine works by Wyn Evans that are included in TBA21’s collection. For the occasion, Wyn Evans created a new, large neon sculpture A Community Predicated on the Basic Fact Nothing Really Matters (2013) reproducing the simulation of a particle collision predating CERN’s Large Hadron Collider. The artist superimposed a diagram of the chemical structure of LSD synthesized by Albert Hofmann onto this, thus including layers of information excluded from the rational / scientific line of thought, as if to evoke the countless overlapping subliminal and emotional worlds that shape our understandings of our surroundings.
Light is the obvious common denominator in this show, from the neon text installed at the entrance (One evening late in the war, 2008), both visible and invisible in daylight, to the radiating neon columns (Untitled, 2008) in the main space, positioned next to “Astrophotography – Stages of photographic development” by Siegfried Marx (1987) (2007), a crystal chandelier (modelled after the original in Ca’ Rezzonico, Venice) which works as a light transmitter, by communicating in Morse code three short texts on astrophotography. No night, No day (2009) is a new, immersive multi-channel version of a piece that was premiered at Teatro Goldoni during the opening of the 53rd Venice Biennale, a ‘blind’ collaboration between Wyn Evans and Florian Hecker who had independently developed an abstract film and ‘psycho-acoustic’ soundtrack. Next to the monitor, controlling the light projector for Cleave 01 (2001), stands a pile of different editions of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Petrolio, his dense and incomplete novel published posthumously in 1992 that the work is based on, while the series of works on paper, Shadow I-X (2012), is Wyn Evan’s amplification / annihilation of Marcel Broodthaer’s famous 1969 artist book where he replaced all the words in Stéphane Mallarmé’s Un Coup de Dés Jamais N’Abolira Le Hasard (A Throw of the Dice will Never Abolish Chance, 1914) with black bars. Here, those bars are excised. Like the light of a supernova, Mallarmé’s constellation of words keeps on shining, across time and individual meanings.
