The origin of Twisted Logic, shown at MOP Gallery in Chippendale in July 2011, goes back nine months earlier to a series of geometric paintings I created, which explored the modernist art of Theo van Doesburg (1883-1931). As the concept evolved, the central motif, a triangle, soon escaped the canvas and was reproduced in spray paint on clear acetate, the acetate allowed to curl upon itself, twisting the triangles in tightening cones towards the ceiling.

The same project led to 1.5 m x 0.5 m wall works comprising triangles cut from mirrored-steel, bent and folded into further triangular shapes.

What started as an exercise to explore the flawed utopianism of the modernist project had veered into minimalism with mirrored-steel shapes that drew the viewer into a relationship with themselves and the space around them. But the true potential of the concept wasn’t fully realised until it was revisited and reworked for Twisted Logic at MOP.

For MOP, the scale was expanded approximately three times. Each work began with a sheet of mirrored steel 3 metres long by 1.5 metres wide. These were cut along the diagonal to create two 3 metre tall right-angle triangles. The metal was then precision folded to create further triangular facets, pushing out into three dimensions and bringing volume to the works. Some were conceived as floor works, others intended to be hung. Conceived as a site-specific installation, the entire exhibition was prototyped to scale, within a scale model of the MOP space.

Fabricating in mirrored steel involved a deliberate choice to include the gallery space and the viewer within the final work. There is a tendency for viewers to regard reflected fragments of the gallery space or themselves as extraneous noise. The mind’s eye works to exclude these intrusions the better to ‘see’ the idealised form. However these reflections, far from being incidental, are conscious inclusions, allowing the work and the observation of the work to evolve at the same time. As the observer moves around the gallery, the mirrored facets snatch different fragments of the space and oneself and assemble them in a new whole. The act of observing becomes an act of creation.

The black works, constructed in a similar manner and spray painted with matt black automotive enamel, are a counterpoint to the mirrored pieces. They anchor the space, dark and prostrate, reflecting nothing, not even a glint of light.

The perceptual challenge inherent in the installation is to see it as a whole, one complex every-changing entity that encompasses the gallery space and the viewers within it. Since René Descartes in the seventeenth century, we have been taught that the way to understand an entity or system is to break it down into its smallest and most easily understood parts, and then gradually ascend, piece by piece, to an understanding of the whole. The success of reductionism in explaining physical phenomena on the very large and very small scale encouraged reductionist approaches across all human endeavours. Susan Sontag pointed out the reductionist tendency in art criticism in her essay Against Interpretation when she complained of the critic’s propensity to reduce a work of art to its ‘content’. ‘Interpretation, based on the highly dubious theory that a work of art is composed of items of content, violates art. It makes art into an article for use, for arrangement into a mental scheme of categories.’[1]

There is intelligence in the whole that cannot be apprehended by even the most exact understanding of the constituent parts. As the Chilean biologist and philosopher Humberto Maturana puts it, the ‘greatest hindrance in the understanding of the living organization lies in the impossibility of accounting for it by the enumeration of its properties; it must be understood as a unity.’[2]

Twisted Logic invites an open, inclusive, holistic understanding. The many-angled mirrored facets make it impossible to ignore the reflection of one’s own face or the shoes of one’s companion incongruously sitting beside it, or that with the slightest reorientation, the picture transforms into an entirely new entity. Due to our fascination with mirrors (and the possibility of catching a glimpse of our own form), the viewer will often not see the black floor works until he is almost upon them, causing an awkward retracting of steps to better take in the object he almost stumbled over. By employing strategies to include the viewer within the unfolding work, Twisted Logic resists the tendency to reduce art to its constituent ‘parts’ –form, content, materiality or historical antecedents – and at the same time it resists the ‘otherness’ and privilege of the art object. The work encompasses all of these things, including the unknowable complexity of the viewer himself, and becomes a total environment which cannot be understood by the sum of its parts.

When modern painting moved into the expanded field, the intent was not to mimic sculptural forms but rather to extend ‘flat’, non-figurative modernist concerns beyond the frame. The frame is problematical, not only because it inevitably links any new work on canvas to the vast body of painting that came before it, but also because the convention of the frame allows the viewer to stand outside and apart from the work and regard it as an object entirely ‘other’ than himself. In fact, frame or no frame, one always participates in a work of art because observation is not passive. The act of observation has an impact on the thing observed; and by definition, vice versa.

 

[1] Susan Sontag, Against Interpretation, and other essays, (New York, Picador USA, 1961) 7

[2] Maturana, Humberto R., ‘Biology of Cognition’. In Autopoiesis and Cognition: The Realization of the Living Humberto R. Maturana and Francisco J. Varela. (Dordrecht Holland: D Reidel Publishing Co, 1980) 5