Sixteen Birds & Inflatable Architectural Body @ Wood Street (to April 4)

immediate impressions :
- kinetic sculpture
- robotics
- zen mechanics
- alienation
- pseudo-industrial & regulatory translation of natural processes
- computer - aided (mac minis in the cieling)
- white on white on white with silver accents, pseudo-surgical tubing, touches of lubricating gel
- oh! where's my patience. so i can really experience this.

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Gallery 3

Inflatable Architectural Body

Gallery white-out, white covers the windows. White box with mechanical apparatus hanging from the ceiling at center. The puffs and grinds of this sculpture having an internal dialogue in front of the viewer. Hangs like -- fruit? squid? vines? many organic analogies for a clearly inorganic object.

Movement triggered by inflation and deflation of the white tubes tugging on the closed system. Hisses, noises, clicks whirs and breathing.

The gallery attendant lets me in on a secret: the argument its having with itself is tearing the thing apart.

I have a self-other clinical relationship with it. Then I ask if it is permissible to lie down under the thing and, in fact, do so. Only now am I vulnerable to it. Intellect knows its not going to hit me. Instinct tells me this is dangerous. I have a heightened awareness response. I think of some of the self-destructive delusions I have watched people bog themselves down with (including myself).

I have been reading a tibetan buddhist tract about the discursive mind, our ability to get into closed loops of thought, immediately before viewing this piece. Of course I project that notion onto this work. I find that idea fits in a satisfying way. I decide I understand this work.

Gallery 4

Sixteen Birds

The windows are uncovered.

Sixteen flying Vs. A flock. Oh the birds of appetite. White sculpture, white walls. They are flaccid, wings dangling down. My presences figures into, triggers inflation. Up. Cascade from front to back. They fly out the window.

Did the artists make the mechanical birds because they could. Don't we all make art because we can. Well its less destructive than any other way of existing, even in its uselessness. And it is beautiful.

Fourth floor of Wood Street. Birds fly past the windows. This is such a clean image, there are so many resonances in art history - Van Gogh's fields with black crows scudding across the sky, Saint-Exupery's Little Prince flying, his flock of wild birds carrying him. Intuitive, clean, immediately get it, sit, rest, watch the birds breathe, their wings inflate and deflate in some musical sequence scored to a rhythm I don't know.

Wood St. Galleries