NON-IDENTICAL ABSTRACTION ENGINE
Curated by Jan Tumlir
Including: Alexis Harding, Robert Linsley, Michael Murphy, Sasha Pierce
January 9 - February 6, 2010
The Non-Identical Abstraction Engine
Exhibition statement by Jan Tumlir, January 2010
In 2004, while working as an artist and educator in Canada, Robert Linsley began to rethink the relation between art and the institution from an openly pragmatic perspective. There, like here, art funding was on the decline, but three consecutive administrations had made a point of promoting research. Teaching at the time at the University of Waterloo, which is known mainly for its thriving science, math and engineering departments, Linsley conceived of a way to further his interest in abstraction and painting as a fellowship program, one that would adhere to the protocols of scientific research and thereby appeal to the funding sources that the sciences continue to enjoy.
Here is how Linsley put it in 2007: "Lately, I have found it helpful to take a more openly and deliberately instrumental approach in my dealings with the university. If I can initiate a new way for an artist to function within the institution then perhaps I can maintain the creative space both I and my students need." Tapping the university's science department, where the "instrumental approach" rules supreme, was a tactical move, but that is not all it was. "My strategy is to learn from the scientists. I have opened a lab. Just as a scientist hires post-doctoral students to work in their labs, producing collaborative results and jointly authored papers, so I set the direction of the research, hire post-graduate students, artists with an MFA, and set them free to develop their work. Naturally I don't direct my researchers as closely as a scientist would, because the goal of course is to produce independent artists. But (…) I also want to develop my own work and my own ideas, and I want to learn from my colleagues. I want to be part of a larger aesthetic enterprise…"
So the money was raised, the fellows assembled, work was produced and discussed, a series of lectures was delivered both by artists and scientists, studios were visited, exhibitions organized, and then once the money was spent, everyone went off again in their separate ways. The fellowship is now a done-deal, leaving it to shows like this one to shore up whatever potential remains. Hopefully, it will serve as a compelling reminder of what it is possible to think and do when one way of thinking and doing is exposed to another way.
I am proud to say that I played a small part in this "larger aesthetic enterprise," having visited the fellowship on two separate occasions, in 2005 and 2007. Alexis Harding, Michael Murphy and Sasha Pierce, the artists and former-fellows I have selected to feature here alongside Robert Linsley, are not necessarily the most representative; they are simply the ones that made the strongest impression on me. Certainly, I came to Toronto with preconceived ideas as to what has already been done, what may no longer be done, and what remains to be done, but I did not leave with the same ideas. Inasmuch as I have participated in this "aesthetic enterprise," that is, I have also been changed by it, however slightly.
This brings me, at last, to the "engine" in our title. Linsley and I have mulled over this wording at length because the function of language, not as a means of experiential description, but rather translation, has always been crucial to this project. Translating between the language of aesthetics and that of science, the fellowship set about to rethink the materials of painting as chemistry and its process as physics. The space of painting, formerly divided between pictorial and literalist descriptions, could be reconciled as a kind of black hole, the "event-horizon" of which presents us with a surface that directly corresponds to its depth. The works here gathered are the objective outcome of just such a transposition in terms. This constitutes an initial process of abstraction that is then allowed to run on, and run off where it will. The "abstraction engine" of our title is an auto-poetic perpetuum mobile. The artist can only keep it running, and then run alongside it, in pursuit of a something else that is known only as "non-identical."