Author: BOCStudio

Science, Feb. 19 1970 was prodcued as part of: Forms in the Realm of Time, Laure Genillard, London, 2008

A set of 5 wooden structures constructed with repeating wooden segments based on drawings used by cognitive psychologists in 1970 to study mental modeling based on our ability to recognize representations of objects at different degrees of rotation.

Forms in the Realm of Time
Laure Genillard, London
Exhibition : 10th May – 5th July 2008
Private view : Friday 9th May 6 – 8 PM
Opening hours: Wed – Sat 2 – 6 pm.

Brian O Connell, based in New York, creates sculptures and photographic works based on resemblances and affinities with 20th century modernist thinking. New objects allow him to re-interpretate the conflict between the visionary and the utilitarian, whilst showing that the process of making and arriving at a statement can stay chaotic and poetical in nature. This exhibition brings together three groups of work that share an approach to the relationship between material, form and time more so than any specific content. Each group is comprised of second or third order appropriations – i.e. formal products based on the structure of previously available sources.

The first – Case 1.1-8 – is a wooden case of shelves holding multiple interpenetrating glass and copper boxes. Each box represents the volume described by the catalogue of the Scientific Instruments collection of the Museum of the University of Utrecht (NL).

The second group is a set of large-scale wooden structures constructed with repeating wooden segments based on drawings used by cognitive psychologists in 1970 to study mental modelling based on our ability to recognize representations of objects at different degrees of rotation. The drawings on which these sculptures are based appeared on the cover of the February 1971 ‘Proceedings Issue’ of the journal Science. A large-scale colour ink drawing of this cover accompanies these pieces. There is a remarkable similarity of these drawings to those of artists of the time whose concerns were equally cerebral.

The third group of work is a collaboration between artist Lisa Oppenheim, mathematician Philip Ording and the artist entitled: Sergeant C.M. Battleship of Sydney, Australia, leader of a RAF (Royal Air Force) attack which destroyed six Junker 52s and damaged others at the El Aden airdrome, examining some of the telephone wire which was draped from the oil coolers, wireless masts, tail, and rudder if his plane when he returned to the base. Flying low over the road, he cracked through enemy telephone wires. This work is comprised of a silver plated knot of copper wire and a photogram produced by placing the object on colour photopaper and exposing it under different filtering conditions. This knot is based on a photograph described by the title in the U.S. Library of Congress “American Memory” photographic collection. The jumble of wire is based on the topological structure of the 2-D knot of the photograph not the geometric shape of the knot pictured.

These projects all deal with the relationship of forms to various kinds of sources – catalogue data, magazine covers of cognitive tests and archival photographs. They are as much about the disconnections with their sources as they are about an attempt to replicate them. They are tragicomic in their vain attempt at ‘accuracy.’

The show’s title is taken from a chapter heading of Henri Focillion’s 1934, The Life of Forms in Art.

For House Beautiful, I am taking advantage of the new Berlin gallery’s division into two spaces that almost mirror one another. I will present two sets of work that rely on similar but inverted processes of production.

On one side, I will install a group of work entitled House Beautiful made up of a model-scale multiple sculpture consisting of eight 30cm square pieces of glass framed in brass which can be positioned in multiple ways on another 30cm square piece that stands on four small corner posts. Using these glass panels it is possible to reconstruct the majority of Piet Mondrian’s square compositions within the frame of the base. This changeable sculptural form is in fact a tool for producing large-scale unique color Photograms. Eight photograms will be hung in the space. These are the result of positioning and exposing two configurations of the sculpture four times (once each under magenta, yellow and cyan filtration and one multiple exposure of each with each filtration exposed at different heights).

In the opposing gallery I am presenting Nomadic Morris a series of multiple cardboard pieces and a sculpture made of ash-laminated plywood panels hinged and grooved together. Each cardboard sculpture is a hybrid reconstruction of an untitled 1967 Robert Morris sculpture and the ‘simplest support’ described in James Hennessey and Victor Papanek’s ‘Nomadic Funiture’ of 1973. Like the apparently formal sculpture of House Beautiful this ply-wood sculpture (first made in collaboration with Daniel Riesman) is a tool for the production of other work. It is the template used to produce the infinitely repeatable cardboard sculptures.

The title of this show is taken from a popular American architectural magazine published by Hearst. The April 1953 edition was dedicated to laying out the design, cultural and life-style principles of ‘The New America’. It’s mission was to describe a distinctively American modern design style. This was to become the ‘modernism’ of 1950’s America stripped of any pre-war progressive pretensions Modernism may have had. This project literally gave form to a new capitalist (neo-liberal) utopianism emerging in America’s suburbs. The building in which Adamski’s new gallery (an import from Aachen, Mies’ birthplace) is housed was also built in 1953 by Hermann Henselmann working within another particularly ideological formal framework, Stalin’s neo-classical redirection of industrial modularity and efficiency.

A particular target of House Beautiful’s editor Elizabeth Gordon was Mies’ recently completed Farnsworth House which to her smacked of both communism and elitism. In her editorial “The Threat to the New America” Gordon published a list of points by which the reader might recognize the perilous influence of such design, a tell-tale sign of which (accompanied by a photo for reference) is that these:

Stylists design houses, furniture to look like typical Mondrian compositions (left): flat, banded, carefully asymmetrical rectangles of very few colors.

In this show a pen and ink tracing of Gordon’s International Style identification checklist serves as a key to this source and the formal language explored and exploded by the super saturated color photograms.

The inclusion on the other side of this show of Nomadic Morris serves as an opposing historical bracket. It finds it source in urban nomadism’s later critique of many of the conceits, difficulties and consequences of modernist design and the economic and political systems it embodied. This work was originally made for “Future Nomad” a show currated by Sara Riesmann at Vox Populi in Philadelphia which was envisioned:

…as a post-script to the urban nomad movement of the 1960s and 1970s when self-conscious design culture was made accessible to the uninitiated through publications like Ken Isaacs’ How to Build Your Own Living Structure. (Reisman)
An important component of this piece was my collaboration with Reisman’s father, Daniel Reisman, as a means of insisting on the inter-generational, do-it-yourself vision of urban nomadism’s own, perhaps lost, utopian vision.

I’m fascinated by structures and juxtapositions that develop from the purely formal combination of objects that in and of themselves belong to divergent discursive spheres. By combining things ‘mistakenly’ and pushing such combinations to their most absurd degree, the point at which they almost coalesce into seemingly meaningful or seamless objects, I think it’s possible to both enjoy the strangeness of such combinations and become aware of how exactly such formulations are used in other (political and historical) spheres, as a means of producing apparent connections. This is primarily an art of and about rhetoric, which in visual terms is expressed through contesting forms and formalisms.

–Brian O’Connell
New York, May, 2007.

Catalog Contribution for A is for Alibi , Uqbar Foundation, De Appel July 2007:

The mounds of oyster shells left by the Dutch who once lived where I now live in Manhattan have become the focus of archeological and musicological study. What was once a garbage heap is now the site of historical preservation. At the same time not far from the disused manufacturing sites now used by artists as studios in Brooklyn’s Bushwick neighborhood (once Breukelen and Boswijck), you can buy auto parts taken from smashed up cars, by referring to them by shelf and object number, like getting a book from the library. Distinguishing between an archive, a collection, a storeroom for obsolete equipment, a recycling bin and a trash heap is increasingly difficult especially as we become more globally aware of the materials we use and disuse.

When we first visited the depot of the University Museum collection of scientific instruments I was struck by the differences among the objects held by the collection. Perhaps most puzzling was the way that recent objects looked no different than those mechanical and electronic things we see around us everyday. Aside from the odd oscilloscope, the most ‘scientific’ looking of these recent acquisitions could easily be mistaken for outmoded fax machines and espresso makers or combinations of the two.

It was explained that this is because science has changed its use of instruments; testing for results rather than building machines to produce (or not) a result. In some ways, this is true of art as well; less concerned by the particular effect than by the process by which an effect is achieved and revealed; often less preoccupied by objects than with documentation. In cases, the importance, necessity and usefulness of maintaining collections of objects is a matter of serious concern. If an experiment can be repeated and its results confirmed that is much more scientifically significant than reenacting the experiment using the same equipment. Nonetheless, the instruments are preserved in places like the Utrecht University Museum’s Collection.

By becoming part of such collections these tools move from being the instruments of, to the objects of study, and as such they become subject to whole new ways of being looked at, cataloged and used. They move from scientific observation, to historical and in many ways aesthetic observation, admired for their ingenuity and the craft of their construction as much as their sometimes unknown contribution to science. They become mysterious and fetishized objects that hold hidden meanings, rather than tools built to reveal hidden truths.

The clues to these meanings are held primarily by those who collect them and through the records they maintain. In the case of the Utrecht Collection, one such person is Tiemen Cocquyt who described the development of the inventory in an email exchange as follows:

About 1928, an older professor in Physics discovered a group of about 2000 instruments in one of the attics of the university. This led to the foundation of the University Museum one year later . [This] professor (P.H. van Cittert), together with his wife, started working on an inventory . Some inventories of these instruments were found (one from 1816 and one from 1830) What we now have is a large box containing thousands of cards, one for each instrument. We call these the ‘Van Cittert cards’, would they not still be in use, they would be a museum object on their own .
However, another catalogue (also card system) was found, this was an inventory of (modern) instruments in use in the Physical laboratory . These we call the ‘Ornstein cards’ (after professor Orstein who made them).
So… these inventories were available when the computer came into use in
the 1980’s. Up till now, the curator (Jan Deiman) has been working on
converting the cards etc. to database records.

Clearly, this inventory is anything but a simple list of objects divorced from the specific histories of those who compiled it. It is the repository for all the surplus meanings and investments (social, cultural and institutional) that the objects within the collection represent. For A is for Alibi I have reconstructed one case of the depository of the museum (Case 111.1-111.8) using the only information available from the catalog in list form: a list of dimensions for each object along with case, shelf and object numbers. I used this list as a kind of instruction manual for producing the piece. A glass box, the dimensions of which are exactly that of a corresponding catalog entry, represents each object. The catalog reduces each object to three dimensions that describe the maximum volume of each object. This results in a ‘cataloged volume’ that exists only within the descriptive gap between inventory and collection. This volume necessarily exceeds the material volume of the collection itself and so the boxes that contain it unavoidably interpenetrate one another. So, in the end this is a project that is about surplus, about that which is not reducible to or containable in, a box.

CASE 111.1-111.8
A for Alibi, De Apppel, Amsterdam, July 2007