Both installations mediate representational modalities encoded by modern empirical methods to which art practice has surrendered. At the Pekao gallery, it is hard not to think of Turgueniev, and the threshold of industrialisation, the abeyance of the hand-made, the triumph of the mechanical over the manual.
I couldn't figure out if Thompson and Macdonald were deploying a requiem to the natural or to the 'natural emotion' - the swerving nervousness which the brain, in order to exert control over materials, needs to supercede. Is this trace of antropologycal emotion in the making of objects - which ofen shows up uninvited in the stripped galleries of art - what Thompson and Macdonald's work alludes to? That kinetic emotion trapped in the piano's inertia, betrayed technology's rapid obsolescence casting an unexpected sense of deja vu.
THE TECHNIQUE
translation / transcription , encoding /mediation, perception/meaning, ordering/inspiration
Macdonald's work is focused on deciphering semiotic systems, translating their meaning and iterating their code to yield a cross platform media. In one of his earlier pieces he perforated holes on metal plates to 'show' braille characters lit from behind'. The orifices twinkled out the names of different constellations which, perceptually, the blind are unable to apreciate. Whether braille symbols or any other graphic pattern, Macdonald' work extracts and exchanges signification. As in HUM, where the graphic pattern of birch bark is inscribed into a piano roll to produce sound vibration, musical harmonies. This type of feedback becomes a tautology where the tale tell of macdonald's critique is the arbitrary induction of a meaning system into yet another representational system...another perceptual leap where the natural trace is reconfigured, mediated from bark markings into sounds waves.
Macdonald's piece cancels out claims by empirical art as to the objectivity of the mind's constructs [both science and art forms] by water marking his own creation with what I've come to name perceptual trasvetism: a method of transposing symbolic forms and perceptual patterns and inducting them into yet another symbolic system. With this method Macdonald punctures the impermeability of empirical formulations with perceptual tricks that first transcend their form, only to fragment themselves and recede ad infinitum.
In these two installations the subject is induction from the organic to the mechanic. Both artists seek to express the absolute behind the appearances, a non-formal determinant akin to the DNA of perceptual cognition. Macdonald and Thompson arrive at Pekao Gallery from a common ground only to depart later from their con-junction through different strategies.
Macdonald sticks to poetics and lets his medium fugue away, literally escape from the trap of the visual perception into the released state of sound wave, like elusive sublimation. Thompson resorts to irony, dissecting and killing our positivist curiosity with the visual trap of a video projection in which kinetic perception is tested. Catching our suspended judgment at the moment when knowing and seeing become mutually exclusive, Thompson can smirk at us. And even laugh when she perverts the perceptual truth we have come to rely on.
THE SEMIOSIS
Knowing is not order although it hangs from it. The forms we know and can know are yoked to perception. The rules and systems we form, the scientific constructs, parcel out reality into order. this order and the forms we store in it, are exclusively perceptual. We peel one lotus petal at a time, while nature unravels the whole garden.
Representation schema as Fernand Hallyn defines them in his dissertation on Copernicus and Kepler, require an organisation of events in a normative system where phenomena can be contained. This systematising impetus patented by the positivists, has, in our search for the order of things, engendered a new order; one symbolically limited to a binary yet infinite script. Where perception and the world copulate incestuously: 010101010101010101. Art has also got on with the programme. But in rare occasions it finds its own hum.
Duncan Macdonald insists on making certain correspondences between, art making and science making. His work disrobes the empirical constructs and applies the same method of induction to his artistic pursuits. Scientific reasoning is no less inspired or poetic than art. It differs only in that it encodes reality into tight constructs and files relationships into theorems. Macdonald's artmaking far from sealing its prepositions from what is to come, before becoming a specimen, leaps outside the cognitive domain of perception.
Duncan and Thompson work doesn't submit to the facile repertoire of guises, which, like a halloween parade, often plague toronto galleries. Their work reflects a subtle intercourse between inspiration and order - it is in that con-junction where Hum has a sense of familiarity while reconfiguring the space to flee phenomenological reason and find the truth that perception could not chase .
HAROLD ALEGRIA-ORTIZ 5/00
YEAR01 FORUM INDEX
Artists:
Jessica Thompson & Duncan Macdonald
Words: Harold Alegria-Ortiz
Place: Pekao Gallery
Time: May 5-10, 2000
Documentation: Harold Alegria-Ortiz & Duncan Macdonald
Editor: Janet Hethrington
Video
Images: Jessica Thompson
Top - drive , 1999, slide projection, amplifier, dimensions vary
Bottom - untitled , 1999, video still
Braille code that looks like constellations - tools of navigation and
reference. Birch bark recalls the markings on player piano rolls: the
bellows and pumps the tree's breath. Air sacs in our lungs grow identically
to decidous trees. The seemingly random is blind to chance itself, or
is it blind-chance? My work investigates perceptual spaces as systems
of order.
Duncan MacDonald 4/00