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Gustav Metzger (1965, remade 2005) Liquid Crystal Environment [M5 control units, liquid crystals and 35mm slides, five projectors and polarizing film] Image (C) Kettles Yard |
Gustav
Metzger: Lift Off! Is both a homecoming and retrospective
exhibition for the artist which is currently being held at Kettle’s Yard,
Cambridge. Across the exhibition space Metzger’s creative activism and
symbiosis with science is captured in a space housing film, archive articles,
drawing and sculpture – all focusing on Metzger’s Auto-creative work.
Percolated
across the PR is an image (see above) of the splendid Liquid Crystal Environment. Yes, those are bean bags in the image,
and yes that’s a bit of cheeky carpet. Carpet! Carpet? I hear you cry, it’s
about time galleries understood that from time to time we are all susceptible to
gallery and museum fatigue. (Tate Modern take note) Reflected
from the white walls the heat sensitive crystals placed between glass slides
inserted into the five projectors, the crystals expand and contract as the
slides pulsate past the tick-tock clock changeover of slides allows areas to
fall into momentary darkness. All we see is the projection of the crystals,
just like our thoughts – we cannot touch the crystals, yet we witness them in a
continual state of flux.
Feeling at
ease the carpet configures our psychological associations with being at home, a
retreat, somewhere for conscious thought and time to slide over and allow the
crystals to be a breathing extension of our own neural transmission as our neurons
are activated not just from the light of other cells but by the light Metzger
mediates through the projectors.
Kettle’s Yard
seems to be another gallery to have welcomed vinyl text lettering with open
arms as the vinyl letters have leaked beyond the contextual blurb and into
quotes and manifestos from the artist himself, (context junkies rejoice). Situated
next to the piece Dancing Tubes back in
a white void, wooden floored now traditional contemporary art space is Metzger’s
fifth manifesto, On Random Activity in
Material/Transforming Works of Art. But of course, part way through your
pleasant reading of this beautiful wall text, you may be interrupted by the hum
of the air compressor resuscitating the previously silent still plastic Dancing Tubes back to life.
Attempting to
make “art untouched by artists”, Metzger explores the materiality of substances
usually found in a science laboratory. Artists and scientists are known for
undertaking experiments, however Metzger documents an objects presence in space
in Light Drawings (2014) where fibre
optic cables are suspended over sheets of photo-sensitive paper and are floated
across the paper by fans pushing currents of air causing the cables and
composition of the drawings to move.
After an
enjoyable morning in the gallery I was swiftly off to play musical chairs in
Kettle’s Yard house – such a contrast it was almost complimentary. The
exhibition runs until the 31st August, 2014 – is it time artists and
scientists collaborated more often? I think I need to start being nice to my
Bioscience studying sister.
See below for some images from the exhibition and a video of Gustav Metzger in conversation with the curator of the exhibition, Elizabeth Fisher.
Background, Gustav Metzger (1968, remade 2014) Mica Cube [Acrylic, Mica and air] |
Gustav Metzger (2014) Drawing Tubes [Compressed air and plastic tubing] |
Gustav Metzger (2014) Light Drawings [Photographic prints] |
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