Natural History in its Aesthetic Fashion

“..stepping lightly down to bathe in the rainbow-coloured spray, would have seen the identical sights that we now saw,– the great prawns gliding like transparent launches, anthea waving in the twilight its thick white waxen tentacles, and the fronds of the duke faintly streaming on the water like huge red banners in some reverted atmosphere...” wrote Philip Gosse to his son Edmund in 1907.

Gosse is the author of Omphalos: An Attempt to Untie the Geological Knot (published two years before Darwin’s Origin of the Species), a marine biologist and illustrator of sea creatures, anemones and corals. I was reminded of him when I stepped out of my trap with Blued Food, on a visit to VeGeTal PLaNeT, created by French artist Vroum Short. Beneath a churning sea, we moved through galleries containing natural and cybernetic forms that flared, spiked, oscillated and swirled. Short’s output is almost overwhelming. She layers animations to create unique compositions that impart a kaleidoscope of moods. Blued’s distinctive eye led us through the wild maze of panels and free standing kinetic work and settled in front of a piece called Chaos.

Abductor, 2006. Fred Tomaselli. Courtesy of the James Cohan Gallery

It reminded me of the artist Fred Tomaselli, who explores the relationship between art making and drug taking. His chosen materials include pharmaceuticals - prozac, aspirin, antacid, saccharin, ephedrine - plants and magazine clippings that he meticulously arranges onto glazed panels. The combined effect makes references to everything from a primitive 18th century folk quilt to a tripped out 3-dimensional universe that morphs in front of your eyes, requesting an audience with your spiritual side. Tomaselli writes, “I want people to get lost in the work. I want to seduce people into it and I want people to escape inside the world of the work.” Short accomplishes this too, especially with Chaos, inviting viewers to literally sit on pose balls, alongside its pulsing panels. I was seduced by its celestial and rhythmic patterns, and disappeared into my own galaxy. Short’s Neptunian botanical installations offer an aesthetic appreciation of nature in its most fantastical forms.

More photos here.

The Romance of Natural History by Philip Gosse

Burning Life is coming...

City (Los Angeles)

I lived in London a few years back – got used to the soot and the tea breaks and the football (ah footie)! After a year, work demanded I take a short trip to the heart of America – Los Angeles - which I’d never been to. What a contrast! In LA, the sun always shone, the smiles were gleaming white, the streets were so smooth and wide. The moment I landed in LA, strangers, in line at Starbucks, at the gas station, in the middle of a crowded gig, just about everywhere, would embrace, shout “Hiya!” Call me!” and hand over a business card (often with no business described). But beneath their sunny smiles was a slight desperation. Making a living in LA was tough. Most visitors don’t see the back side of the Hollywood sign, the side left unairbrushed.

In City (Los Angeles), presented by the Brooklyn is Watching project, Miso Susanowa wants us to appreciate the real LA, its gritty, overwhelming side, the LA beyond the starry sidewalks. Susanowa recorded the sounds of the night outside her apartment window in LA at Hollywood and La Brea Avenues. Photographs of Hollywood Blvd. make up a three sided box in which Susanowa invites the viewer to sit among a moving grid of disorienting “snapshots” showing nameless, featureless faces. The chaotic sounds of the LA night is amplified all around. Viewing the installation in mouselook allows the viewer to become tangled in the grid.

As much as Susanowa wants to illustrate the dark side of her city, there is something rather beautiful about the installation whilst you’re immersed in it. The screen shots I took look like some kind of technofied marblized paper.

While the people I met in LA may have been struggling in their tiny run-down houses, they had fresh fruit to eat every day, dropping off the trees in their back gardens. Susanowa has captured LA as a city of contradictions.

Visit City here.

Pacific Theme by Broken Social Scene.

The Cult of Personality

Artist Kasabian Beck asks us to consider celebrity within Second Life in his latest exhibition at Hotel Dare, “Slebrity™”. Presented against the spare white walls of the gallery are several panels depicting the names (in an also spare, sans serif font) of well-known personalities – creators of all types - within SL, seen in the image above. Struck by the cult of personality in the metaverse, Beck muses on “the very idea of virtual notoriety, how it is sought, attained and why it is or is not important...” I wasn’t familiar with all the names presented in the gallery which is an important point. It’s possible I might not have known any of the names – what meaning would the exhibition have had for me then? The names chosen have been curated – by the artist – revealing his own particular world experience. This exhibition will mean something different to each viewer and ought to inspire discussions about what I call the “flux” of personality. What most of the names have in common is that they are brilliant self-promoters. In art, reputation can be considered more valuable than in many other fields where celebrity is cultivated. Look at the Young British Art movement of the mid ‘90s; young artists, with small bodies of work behind them, created retrospectives and museums dedicated to themselves, to protest the English art institutions that had belittled them. Is the tone of this exhibition condescending? Do these names have any value at all as ideas or things to disagree with?

Virtual fame is the same as any other kind of fame, earned and unearned. As psychologist James Houran writes, “we need celebrities as much as we need food, water and shelter. We need them to feel connected.” These names on the wall are humans, not martians, not simply avatars. We condescend to these human fundamentals, our desire for celebrity, at our peril because we are human – not always wonderful but very predictable and found in all environments. A thought-provoking exhibition...go to Slebrity and have a think.