2010-05-03
Science of Imagination (in Ludwig Musem) (part 3 / 4)
SCI-FI promenade at the other end of time ...
Ludwig Museum's new exhibition "Science of Imagination" is not only based on a theme but it's actually this theme that is being shown, this thought and all that it means including the whole era of Science-Fiction and so it as much as becomes an expression, a non-verbal 3-D multi-media essay, a complex installation ...
a cikk fejezetei:
::::: Science of Imagination
What we see at the Science of Imagination exhibition is not really retro-futurism, but beyond that it's the new sci-fi already. Today's artists reflect on yesterday's sci-fi but not from the future that yesterday's sci-fi was pointing to but from one beyond that when sci-fi has already divorced the modern thought, when it's already non-modern.
Collapsist monument by Tamas Kaszas is an expression organized to the highest degree meanwhile it works like magic at the simplest level of expressions too (like when someone in the forest puts two twigs across expressing that a human was there). It's a complex expression being extremely elementary too.
As for its complexity the exhibition itself plays an active role too as what we see is not the actual work but a "pre-construction" of it. Even the phrase "pre-construction" has quite a meaning in the context of this exhibition where the La Jetée is being shown too.
There's more to it however. The "original" work is a shopping cart placed on green lawn having sledge feet instead of rollers. The contrast of the lawn and the sedge feet tells a story of a drastic climate-change already. Being acquainted to "history" however the past this sci-fi story refers to we can tell that shopping carts used to have rollers so even the change from rollers to sledge feet indicates a radical climate change. The exhibition itself adds to it too since it's not at it's original location, it's taken from there and now it's in the museum, somewhere else (the "cargo" style mounting tells the shipping's story).
Even the way of storytelling is quite remarkable - we see an archaeological artefact that we examine and make conclusions as archaeologists on the basis of a remnant from the past. This is really an original sci-fi situation, there was a catastrophe and now scientists at the location are trying to figure from traces what could have happened. This is an absolutely sci-fi story in which we are the scientists researching our own story. If blood or red colour is frightful because it's related to death, if passing is frightful then a shopping cart with sledge feet exhibited on lawn is the scariest icon of all. It's special about it that the end of consumer culture is connected to the green of the lawn and nature. Green and nature are supposed to be a happy ending but in this happy ending consumer culture is like a remnant of a fish washed ashore.
(note: in this work the basket part of the cart is a frail made of rushes which is a little bit distracting the above thought:))
This shopping cart however makes us remember a former piece of Ludwig Collection, still from the modern age. Duane Hanson, Supermarket shopper (1970) - a fat American woman with a shopping cart. It's not a painting, but physical reality, a super-realist-life-sized-sculpture as you see in a panopticum. Her clothes are original, as well as the products in her cart. This was a real sample from an age for the future, an imprint of consumer lifestyle. Had there just been a little more space aboard of Pioneer 10 then scientist sci-fi pioneer Carl Sagan could have sent this out together with the golden plaque. A message from planet Earth, this is what a human looks like.
Istvan Csakany's Bernsteinzimmer (Amber Room) alludes to the famous lost treasure of Friedrich Wilhelm 1st, where walls were all covered by figurative pieces of ambers. The special material for
Istvan Csakany is wood. The message of the work is really complex.
First of all we're stuck by the material, and by the strange fact that literally everything is made out of wood. The sight is like a sci-fi catastrophe scene as if everything was turned into wood (for some unknown reason, in some unknown way).
What really makes it an exciting sci-fi experience is that what we're looking at is like an imprint of a catastrophe. Since this wood is sort of white, everything is white, or rather duo-tone - without colours, only light and shadows - which intuitively reminds us of Pompeii as well as of a nuclear catastrophe.
This is confirmed by the fact that tools just lay there, like the work hasn't been finished, they must have been doing something when it all happened, when it all stoned - stoned into wood.
It's adding a philosophic depths to it that in a room which serves for woodworking all the tools that also serve for woodworking stoned into wood too. As if it was the vengeance of wood for the violent creatures who used to work it with violent tools. Now it was the wood that worked the workers.
This installation is a closed space which makes the one-time workshop appear as a prison cell, as well the one-time woodworking appear as pointless, since we see no product of the woodworking, we only see the consequences that everything stoned into wood.
Of, course, we can take it as someone made everything out of wood, a everything he made served woodworking. All in all this reminds us of Vonnegut's pieces of yeast, as they talk about the possible purposes of life and getting suffocated in what they are actually making - that is champagne, the original reason of their activity that can be only determined by deductive reasoning.
következő fejezet: Origami Space Race
a cikk fejezetei:
-Pilot Pirx-
2010-05-03