AUTOCENTER presents:
ASTALI / PEIRCE
SEAMS
F I N N I S S A G E
14.04.2012 From 20.00
opening hours: Thu-Sat 4 - 6 p.m
Text by: Ana Teixeira Pinto
Plate Tectonics is a Cold-War theory. During the 1950s and 60s, while the eastern bloc and the western world were under massive geopolitical tension, the large-scale movements of the earth’s lithosphere began to be described as the...
[read more] AUTOCENTER presents:
ASTALI / PEIRCE
SEAMS
F I N N I S S A G E
14.04.2012 From 20.00
opening hours: Thu-Sat 4 - 6 p.m
Text by: Ana Teixeira Pinto
Plate Tectonics is a Cold-War theory. During the 1950s and 60s, while the eastern bloc and the western world were under massive geopolitical tension, the large-scale movements of the earth’s lithosphere began to be described as the sliding and clashing of colossal continental plates.
In Tolia Astali and Dylan Peirce’s exhibition “Seams” all materials behave like tectonic plates. A sequence of panels (Footnotes, XII, III, XXX) circumvents the walls, overlapping each other, stacking up, knocking each other over. Large boards hang in perilous equilibrium, like frozen dominoes, their fall halted by a fossilized tree trunk (Pores, II). The title “Pores” is a reference to the annotation entered by Robert Hooke in his diary in 1665 when he observed petrified wood through a microscope for the first time: May 27th, Pores in Petrified. Roughly at the same point where the panel sequence ends, one finds some other concrete boards heaped against the wall (XIII, III, VII). The “Domino-Effect” is yet another Cold-War image, but in Tolia Astali and Dylan Peirce’s work the political is subsumed in the geological.
Most objects in the show can be said to belong to the tradition of primary structures and geometric abstraction that has constituted the formal lexicon of modern art, from constructivism to minimalism. Squares, plinths, frames, columns, racks. Together they create an architectonic ensemble that surrounds the viewer, like Robert Smithson’s experimentation with spirals. Yet these pristine geometries are here held in a strange state of stasis, frozen in time, the moment right before becoming obsolete.
Uncannily reminiscent of post-tsunami Fukushima, some solitary rack (Rack Stack, XII, III, XXIV) stand idly by, like a reminder of a human life long gone, while an ensemble of hefty sectioned window frames towers above the visitor (Footnotes, XII, III, XXX). One cannot avoid recalling the images of intact houses being swept away amidst a wave of wreckage. A pool of what looks like dark crude oil (Capture, XI, X, XXI) stands next to the split stack. The whole show can be described as the scattered remains of a civilization long lost, or, that washed up in the wake of some terrible calamity.
Astali and Peirce have an uncanny ability to see Human History as Natural History, to look at cultural artifacts as if they were fossils, the preserved traces of some remote past. In a series of photomontages –shown inside each panel– photography appears as pure surface, in which the photographic plate comes to the fore. Converging plates collide, creating subduction zones, slabs, and deep trenches. Some images disappear underneath others, replacing what they fail to reveal, creating inflexion lines, loops, and discontinuities. Matter becomes subject matter. In a methodical and repetitive manner elements arrange and re-arrange themselves in visual anagrams. Like a schizophrenic Ars Combinatoria, fractured images create an excess of fractured meaning, leaving it to the viewer to decide whether everything signifies or nothing signifies.
In psychoanalysis, a subject must distinguish between what belongs to the self from what belongs to the “other” in order to construct a coherent identity. The concept of “Moi-Peau” (Me-Skin), put forth by Didier Anzieu, refers to the skin as the ultimate boundary in the scaffolding of the “I.” A fractured psyche is the one that has lost the ability to discern events in an inner life from events in the outer world. Faced with an overabundance of polysemy, the image of thought that emerges from these shattered storyboards is one of either paranoia or aphasia.
The result is thus unsettling, disruptive, and disconcerting. Hands, a hat struggle to emerge out of the spoilage. Sections of floors, ceilings and walls—reminiscent of Gordon Matta-Clark’s architectural cut-outs—fuse into one another. Peas hatch inside a cat’s skull causing it to shatter. Organic and inorganic, haptic and visual, intentional and elemental are confounded with one another. The collages become vectors that distort the space surrounding them. In a mise en abîme of recursion and permutation, everything becomes immersed in ontological ambiguity and dissonance.
Around 1915, the Dada movement distinguished their politically oriented practice from the fantasy postcards and dioramas so popular during the Victorian era, coining the term photomontage. Whereas the photographic montage used in traditional postcards and dioramas created an illusion of continuity by fusing all elements together in such an artful way that all evidence of artifice erased, the Dadaist collage made all the seams visible; upon viewing, the illusion was shattered and the gap between sign and referent became apparent. Photo -collages, Walter Benjamin noted, typically interrupt the context into which they are inserted. Their critical dimension stems from this disruptive power. The choice between photographic illusion and photomontage is not merely an aesthetic choice between kitsch and avant-garde. Once the simultaneous states of the present are perceived as irreconcilable, historical narrative typically emerges in order to resolve this fundamental antagonism, by rearranging its terms as a temporal succession.
In History, time signifies social change and the uniqueness and irreversibility of political events. Nature is, in this sense, the opposite of history, for within nature, time signifies only cyclical repetition. Does nature have a history? From an evolutionary perspective, nature becomes history: A panorama of progress in which the passage of time is represented as an improvement. Yet nature and history are hard to fuse into a harmonizing whole. Within nature, the potential for extinction and oblivion remains in dialectical tension with the possibility of renewal and creation. What is thus at stake in the breakdown of historical narrative is the commitment to a synchronic, rather than diachronic, understanding of nature and life. From such a perspective, “progress” and “dialectics” are polar opposites.
Astali and Pierce’s are more interested in the structural rather than temporal relations between the objects that populate the imagery of modernism. What they seek to understand is not the historical process whereby these formal elements and conceptual frameworks come to be what they are, but the logic that requires them to have the structure that they have. That is, how an idea of gestalt can be reconciled with the unruliness of matter and the forgetfulness of nature.
In the physical sciences, entropy is the only movement that seems to imply a particular direction, something like an arrow of time. All isolated systems will eventually deteriorate and start to break apart, as energy is more easily lost than gained. Norbert Weiner, the father of cybernetics—yet another Cold-War theory—is said to have referred to modern art, which like thermodynamics is an isolated system, as “one Niagara of entropy.” This tension between abstraction and dissolution is also present in Tolia Astali and Dylan Peirce’s work. Instead of a Golden Art Age, their sculptures and photo-collages can be said to represent the Ice Age of what Dan Flavin called an “inactive history.”
As Vladimir Nabokov aptly put it, at present, it seems that “the future is but the obsolete in reverse” (Lance, 1952).
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