Harm van den Dorpel
Wednesday, 14 March 2012
Work from About at Wilkinson Gallery
“…He is not aware that a gallery system exists. All his work exists in the virtual sphere, which to him is more real than the reality we all supposedly inhabit in the day-to-day. That was then. Even now, it doesn’t matter to him so much which of his works are realized, in the physical, and which remain virtual. Both, to him, are objects, completed works. They are just said in different ways, enunciated using two separate. Even language has its defaults. “Destabilized in Photoshop.” The eventual necessity to enter the gallery system, infiltrate the physical with his virtual systems, is read as a sort of betrayal by those adherents of his early efforts. In doing so, their misunderstanding of his intentions is revealed. For him, the virtual never a critique or evasion of the actual. Virtual and actual were always one and the same. Just as mind is but an extension of body. The work is always about process, no matter the form it takes. (By necessity, the forms must shift constantly. This is one of the rules of the system. As such, it is also broken; hence, the emergence of interrelations, series.) Conjure a body-mind machine, mattering itself into objects. The art object is a thing that is permitted to simultaneously be something else. Many things at once, that thing. Can we keep track of it, its vehicular motions, through our established. Should we allow those categories some slippage. Perhaps apply some slippage: lube them up, recognize their mutability, their indifference to our yearnings for stabilized meaning…” – excerpt from “Revenge of the Spheres” by Travis Jeppesen for Wilkinson Gallery