Art Review - February Issue - (Page 59)

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The VLA that’s what people who know what it is call it consists of 27 satellite dishes, each weighing 230 tonnes, pointed towards the heavens in order to map out the universe and explain such remote and mysterious phenomena as black holes and planetary nebulae. But while its primary role may be that of a passive mirror to the stars, the VLA is something of an attraction in itself. It appears in movies Contact, 1997 , pop videos Bon Jovi’s Everyday, 2002 and novels Arthur C. Clarke’s 2010: Odyssey Two, 1982 . And, in most of these, it serves as a cipher for man’s connection to the extraterrestrial; in other words, the VLA also functions as a launch pad for imaginative leaps, rather than a receptacle for cold, hard scientific radiowaves. So, for the VLA-curious or those people commonly known as geeks , the site’s administrators offer tours 8.30 am till dusk , explanatory video presentations of the equipment, not so sneak previews of the site’s latest technologies and several picnic tables. And, in the gift shop, alongside VLA T-shirts and fridge magnets, you’ll find a Solar System Magic Cube $7 . Like the data garnered by the VLA $78.5 million , it can be unfolded to reveal portraits of the solar system, but in a way that’s far more tangible than most of the other things that go on 50 miles west of Socorro. As its title suggests, British artist Keith Tyson’s Large Field Array 2006 , currently on display at the De Pont Museum of Contemporary Art in Holland, takes its jumping-off point from some of the scientific instruments to be found in New Mexico. Perhaps you might even describe it as occupying a kind of cultural halfway point between the VLA and the Solar System Magic Cube. For one thing, LFA is – as you might reasonably expect – big, and the VLA–Magic Cube analogy is a lot easier and quicker than any attempt at describing what the 300 individual sculptural cubes that make up the work actually look like. I say that not simply as an admission of laziness, but also because trying to describe or even come to terms with big, complicated stuff in a concise, albeit sometimes indirect, way is one of the things that LFA is about. The ostensible subject matter of the sculptures ranges from confectionary to cosmology, from particle physics to celebrity weddings, from natural science to Siamese sportsmen and from Fabergé eggs to the artwork of Yves Klein, Martin Kippenberger and Marc Quinn. And that doesn’t even give you a fraction of the total ON THE PLAINS OF NEW MEXICO, picture. But leaving aside its individual components, Tyson’s work coheres through a fusion of more or less mysterious ‘science’ and straightforward representational aesthetics. The majority of the beautifully crafted sculptures have an easily legible pop aesthetic; but how they are linked to their immediate neighbours and the work as a whole is the result of more subtle, and at times complex, operations. The result is a portrait of something that appears to involve life, the universe and everything. The VLA is what’s known, in the astrological trade, as an interferometer. Look that up in a dictionary and you’ll find assuming you’ve got one of the larger types of dictionary that it’s a radio telescope consisting of more than two antennae that relies on the phenomenon of interference to increase the effective resolution of the final picture. By combining all the static and rough edges of 27 individual images, and letting them overlap into something sharper layering individual radio waves until they flatten out , the VLA presents a much clearer global picture. Tyson’s sculpture works in much the same way. And if you know anything about Tyson, that’s probably no surprise. A Turner Prize winner back in 2002, his zany, more-or-less cod science aesthetic results in him being frequently described as the artworld’s mad scientist. Each of the cube sculptures is subject to the influence and distortion effected by the works around it. So, wandering through, you can pick up a trail of thought that begins, to take one example, with a glowing yellow sun, travels through portraits of various planets and astrological symbols, and ends up with a leering, goat-like head that seems to have something to do with pagan devil worship. Alternative routes involve commentaries on urban planning, natural phenomena such as volcanoes, tornadoes and deep-sea lobsters, and popular culture in the form of magazines, music, film and literature. LFA at times seems to function as a Borgesian labyrinth or a crossword puzzle that is as much cryptic as it is concise. But as much as it is sublime, LFA is not without a distinct element of the ridiculous. If anything and everything can be plugged into it or implicated in it, then the work as much as it is a portrait of everything is just as much a statement of nothingness in the sense that it is not specifically or exclusively about anything as it is a statement of somethingness – a bit like the captain’s map in Lewis p 58-61 Keith Tyson AR Feb07.in59 59 9/1/07 23:40:11  Warning : Unknown : The session id contains invalid characters, valid characters are only a-z, A-Z and 0-9 in Unknown on line 0 Warning : Unknown : Failed to write session data files . Please verify that the current setting of session.save_path is correct /var/lib/php/session in Unknown on line 0

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Art Review - February Issue

Art Review - February Issue

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