Tyson's four rooms display a universe of objects, paintings, photographic works and installations that reveal elements of our reality constructions and explanation models in material form, using a wide variety of artistic styles. The painter Dawson deliberately chooses a "naïve" style for his painting, so that he can make the presence of ancient explanation models for time and reality visible as effective elements within our present.
Keith Tyson's four rooms display a
universe of objects, paintings,
photographic works and installations
that reveal elements of our reality
constructions and explanation models in
material form, using a wide variety of
artistic styles. Philosophy, science,
technology, language and description
patterns for forms of nature and culture
are all ordering structures for reality.
Tyson shifts them through a number of
transitory formations and an infinite list
of possibilities in his laboratory. He
realizes works that relate chaos and
order, space and time, possibility and
actuality to the individual viewer as he or
she stands confronted with a landscape
showing the simultaneity of micro- and
macrocosm.
In Keith Tyson's work we are confronted
simultaneously, as an idea and in
material form, with the library of Babel:
an infinite number of rooms and books
that themselves open up rooms and
ideas, multi-dimensionally and to infinity,
as described by the writer Jorge Luis
Borges. This universe contains no two
books (or things) that are identical, it is
infinite both in its spatial extent and its
spatial reduction; it is perhaps only time.
But we also find ourselves facing an
image of the internet, the nervous
system and Marcel Duchamp's
conceptual and parascientific strategies,
or taking a wild ride along the
boundaries of scientific models that are
Science Fiction and reality at the same
time.
The exhibits in the exhibition are hybrid
forms - they generate locations in the
form of games, images, machines or
mechanisms, from which literature,
inventories and phenomena unfold their
linguistic, mathematical and physical
elements into spatially and temporally
infinite spheres. The artist started on the
basis of a new group of his works
created for his one-man show in the
South London Gallery this year, then
extended the exhibition to include some
very recent and some older works: a
"Supercollider", 2001, is based on the
idea of the Cern particle accelerator. It
brings descriptions and illustrations of
existing elements of reality together
multi-dimensionally in one place and
condenses existing "material" as a
network of logical and illogical
simultaneities; this appears with the
"Think Tank", 2002, a neuronal network
of forms and descriptions that
interweaves fictions and is
expotentiated in its turn by the work
"Escape Mechanism", 2002, which uses
linguistic lists of events to make time
and space collaborate. A wall painting
that reveals a view of a cellular structure
as a gigantic landscape finds its
counterpart in a photograph of banal
aluminium foil, simulating the image of
the universe existing on the basis of just
one element. A closed system ("Tiny
Bubble of Complexity", 2001) generates
an infinity of colours in reaction to itself;
a sculptor equipped with planetary rocks
circles lazily around itself. "Night in a
Billion", 2001, offers unimaginable
masses of possible groupings. The view
of stellar constellations consists of
twelve individual water-colour sheets
that can create sky in more that four
hundred million combinations.
"Random Tangler (Recursive Transition
Knot)", 2001, also produced endless
variations: this work is a game that can
be played by any number of players. Like
Keith Tyson's "Art Machine" based
works, which are already familiar, it
delivers a linguistic definition of a work
that the players create themselves. In
this game, systematics and freedom,
chance and intention, authorless
definitions and individual interpretation
generate all conceivable styles and
appearance-forms for works of art
simultaneously. His computer-assisted
"Art Machine" works related to a
potentially infinite information network
of internet resources, but the "Random
Tanglers" play-box deals with the
potentially infinite network of individual
subjects and the variations,
transformations and varieties that the
interplay of "systems" that we would call
subjective or objective can create. Two
other works in the exhibitions also
makes the system called "human being"
central when confronted with the
landscape of the system called "reality":
"Now Capacitor (Mirror)", 2002, and
"AMCHII - Angelmaker Part 1 (15
Seconds before the Apocalypse)", 1999,
show time and lay it open to experience:
the shortest time-span in which the brain
can register an image is a hundredth of a
second. A digital clock in the mirror of
the "Now Capacitor", in which the
viewers are reflected as images
themselves, counts the average length
of a human life of 76.5 years in these
units, while the video "Angelmaker"
carries the images the individual has
imagined to the outside. Thinking
thinking and seeing.
Dates:
Public guided tours:
Wednesday 24 April (Medea Hoch) and
Wednesday 15 May (Medea Hoch) at 6.30
p.m. Group tours can also be arranging
outside opening hours on request.
Events:
Sunday 12 May at 6 p.m.: Verne Dawson
book launch with a talk by the artist
Sunday 2 June at 6 p.m.: Keith Tyson
book launch with a talk by the artist
Catalogue:
KEITH TYSON, approx. 96 pages, with essays by Michael Archer, Kate Bush, Jeremy Millar, Keith Tyson and Beatrix Ruf, and a picture inventory; published on 2 June.
The painter VERNE DAWSON
deliberately chooses a "naïve" style for
his painting, so that he can make the
presence of ancient explanation models
for time and reality visible as effective
elements within our present. Portraits of
historical figures, landscapes that
amalgamate creation myths with
phenomena of the modern world, still
lifes and abstract pictorial compositions
risk taking a clear-eyed look at
concepts of tradition and modernity and
are metaphorical images of a cultural
and historical way of looking at things
that sees history not as research but as
the origin of our reality. Was George
Washington a good person because he
decided to become not the king but the
president of America, and what social
phenomena generated this? What
influence on culture is exerted by real
figures like the "Unabomber", who sent
a letter-bomb once a year as a protest
against the dominance of high-tech, or
the fictitious character of Barone
Ramparte in Italo Calvino's "The Baron
in the Trees", who moved into the
treetops as a protest against reality?
Has our relationship with numerology,
astrology or rituals changed, even
though we still call the days of the week
after heavenly bodies? Is "the wild"
natural and good and civilization always
a problem? The "Big Bear" in Verne
Dawson's painting is looking
circumspectly from the starry sky at an
auspiciously distant point at which an
observatory can be seen in the wild
landscape: the "wild" bear, the bear in
the constellation and the scientific
facility for researching the images that
were read in the skies to provide
direction and assurance even in ancient
times, are bought together in a single
image. Thus the artist's pictures are
anything but naïve in terms of content,
and constantly deal with the
relationship of civilization or culture to
what we customarily call nature; they
are asking that morally interpretative
analyses and approaches should be
revised.
Dates:
Public guided tours:
Wednesday 24 April (Medea Hoch) and
Wednesday 15 May (Medea Hoch) at
6.30 p.m. Group tours can also be
arranging outside opening hours on
request.
Events:
Sunday 12 May at 6 p.m.: Verne Dawson
book launch with a talk by the artist
Sunday 2 June at 6 p.m.: Keith Tyson
book launch with a talk by the artist
Catalogue:
VERNE DAWSON: Heaven and Hell, approx. 48 pages; published on 12 May
Image: Keith Tyson, a tiny bubble
Kunsthalle Zurich
Limmatstrasse 270 8005
Opening times:
Mon closed, Tue - Fri 12 to 6 p.m., Sat/Sun 11 a.m. - 5 p.m.