Teksten > Radioactivity
One morning in April of 2000, Andy chased
a small, radioactive isotope around the summit of Mt. Hvannadalshnukur.
The two aerial entities swished about through the air, 6,952
feet above the southern coast of Iceland, skirting the frosted
azure expanse of the North Atlantic Ocean. The radioactive
isotope was able to move about very swiftly, emitting a stream
of bluish-coloured Beta rays, so fine only Andy could see
them. The tiny element blinked and shifted over a vast radius,
doing its best to allude Andy's grasp.
This whole mischief had begun earlier the previous evening,
when Andy foolishly released the corrosive isotope from its
embedded state within a crystalline of Beryl, incorrectly
assuming it to be outdated and harmless. Since realising his
poor judgement, Andy had done his best to capture the speedy
radioactive enfant terrible before it contaminated any innocent
cell systems.
Assuming an ultra-fast, 99.99 per cent the speed of light
velocity, the isotope spiralled away from Andy's pursuits
and began to enter a Trans-dimensional vortex. Andy quickly
followed the element through this vortex, feeling terribly
responsible for its potentially hazardous liberation. But
after entering the wormhole of the vortex they came to rest
within a pocket of stillness, appearing to have penetrated
a spatial-interphase between two instances of reality.
By slowly following the vortex to its
singularity, Andy and the isotope entered a completely different
location in space-time. It was now November 2002 and they
were inside the brightly-lit interior of the Galerie Duchamp,
an art centre located in a small town in Normandy called Yvetot.
The isotope, only concerned with dodging Andy, instantly disappeared
among the gallery's wooden floorboards, while Andy took a
moment to adjust to his sudden change of setting.
On the wall directly behind him, he saw a large photograph
by Geert Goiris, depicting the southern coast of Iceland.
This dramatic photograph, which sensually captured the high
cataract of a melting glacier, must have been the source of
the vortex. Its singularity must have rested within the micro-millimetres
between the surface of the photograph and the gallery space.
Moving closer to the enlarged, glossy photograph, Andy studied
the suspended cascade, measuring the misty air along the canyon
wall and sandy ground below. While briefly contemplating the
piece, Andy was once again overcome by Geert Goiris' ability
to effectively arrange an obscure, desolate location into
a poetically disquieting scene, containing an odd mixture
of balance and inauspicious solitude.
Turning his attention back to the task
at hand, Andy began to search about the Galerie Duchamp for
any signs for the hidden isotope. On the wall opposite from
the photograph/vortex, hung two large prints, which displayed
4,096 possible ways to assimilate a computer figure. This
work, by the artist Hans Verhaegen, showed each and every
way one could pose a human outline, by only using the fundamental
features of arms, legs, torso, head and shoulders.
"Have any of you seen which way the isotope went?"
asked Andy, levitating in the air before the prints. A myriad
of voices replied all at once, in a harmonious, digital chorus.
"In fact, we were only watching each other…calculating
or stances and choreography. You see the slightest error would
rend our data incorrect…our dance must be absolute,
like an intricate hieroglyphic tale! We are an encyclopædia
of feasibility…We are each vowels and consonants in
a much larger story…"
Andy studied the population of little, black and white figures.
It was true, although each being was individually unique;
they collectively formed one body, and even in an overall
way, one identity. They were apart and yet at the same time,
they were one; a species of random contingencies, whose total
sum perhaps, reflected the 4,096 possible ways that a singular
delineation could reflect itself?
Not far away from the computer figures,
Andy found an installation by Koen De Decker. A selection
of large, uninhibited drawings was displayed upon the wall
as well as within a separate viewing portfolio in the space.
On the floor, close by the portfolio, an antique female mannequin
head was situated so that it gazed up at a plate glass covered
sphere. Andy asked the mannequin head if it had seen where
the isotope went, but she did not respond to his question.
The mannequin held its wondrous smile, vainly oblivious to
Andy's question, concentrating on the polygons of reflections
next to her face.
Andy went through the portfolio and looked closely at the
mannequin's face. The images he encountered contained a paranoid,
even schizophrenic quality of splintered personalities. He
found no traces of the isotope there, peeking through the
assortment of twisted characters, engaged with reflections
and reflexive confrontations. By coming close to the mirrored
sphere, Andy could not help but to see himself involuntarily
sequestered into the multifaceted mise-en-scène of
Koen De Decker's installation.
Deciding that he should go over the space a little more thoroughly,
Andy floated up towards the ceiling and began carefully crawling
along the neglected crevices of the gallery's architecture.
Soon he came to notice a work by Lieve D'hondt. Using lines
of yellow masking tape, she had marked out and laid down certain
boundaries within the building's interior, creating a series
of transparent borders one must constantly intersect or cross.
These site-specific markings highlighted the intangible conditions
of the location with a subtle, conceptual blueprint, as if
the empty areas between the gallery's architectonics were
granted a system of invisible, subjective beams and buttresses.
The yellow lines emphasised the perpetual trespasses of the
gallery's public, giving Andy the feeling that he was somehow
inside a three-dimensional, heterogeneously aligned clock.
Before he ventured downstairs, Andy moved
over to an installation by Heidi Voet, which covered a section
of white flooring around the open stairwell to the ground
floor. A stack of several-hundred paper sheets, placed upon
the floor just at the top of the steps, illustrated the folding
directions for an Origami swan. A large double oval of blue
gravel spread out across the white floor mimicked a peaceful
body of water, while two separate stacks of particleboard
rested off to the side, cut out into the exact folds indicated
on the Origami instructions sheet.
Andy swept over the installation, seeing how the heavy, awkward
particleboard panels had translated the buoyant example intended
for paper forms. The work conveyed a sense of distress and
failure through the wooden figures miscarried attempt at elegance.
The body of water remained conspicuously empty of its graceful
swans, while the reality of the particleboard grounded the
illustrated example's hope for an ideal state.
Going downstairs, Andy saw a fine trail
of Beta rays, drifting out from a floor installation by Lucie
Renneboog. Wasting no time, Andy entered the installation,
suddenly swerving through a complex maze of doll-sized chambers.
Each room within the maze had a different sort of wall decoration
and floor covering. Andy felt as if he had entered an immense,
psychedelic Barbie funhouse, following the course of perpendicular
suites as they turned and banked in every possible direction.
The miniature chambers, although empty of objects, came across
as being saturated with differing patterns, shades and motifs.
Ultimately Andy drifted through each of the small dens, effected
by a synthesis of varying moods and sensations. One could
project themselves within the colourful spaces and dream a
variety of florid, claustrophobic dreams. Despite their small
scale, Andy could not help but to feel the immensity and breadth
suggested throughout the topographic kaleidoscope, though
there was no trace of the escaped isotope?
At this point Andy was becoming discouraged.
It seemed he was never going to capture the little isotope
and that it would probably succeed in making some poor inhabitant
of Yvetot very ill. Yet at the very instant Andy was thinking
these things, he caught sight of the elusive element, working
its way up a gallery wall, disappearing inside a colour photograph
by Freya Maes. Andy shot himself directly into the photograph,
suddenly skating over top of a tray of sweetened appetisers,
being held by a not-so-amused server.
Andy saw the isotope had injected itself into a mini-tiramisu.
Following the trail of Beta rays he also went into the dessert
and began sifting through its spongy layers for the radioactive
speck. Unfortunately, though by the time Andy had swam through
the thick, creamy bowels of the tiramisu, the isotope was
nowhere to be found.
He pulled back out of the photograph and hovered in the air,
regarding an entire set of pictures. Andy vigilantly ran his
eyes over the selection of prints, noticing an unlikely series
of immobilised seconds. Fragments of the periphery became
magnified. Split instances, which would have otherwise faded
from the annals of recorded perception, hung on the wall like
a uniquely, cloistered documentary of disconnected, visual
sentences. If one let go, they could loose themselves inside
the curiously banal affairs of the subject matter.
Not knowing where he should go next,
Andy floated over to a chill out installation by Francis Denys
and sat down on top of a large, neon orange ball. This beanbag-like
lounge set had been constructed by wrapping orange-coloured
tape over rounded bundles of straw, creating a removed, florescent
atmospheric area underneath the steps to the second floor.
Andy sat there for some time, taking a pause from his isotopic
quest. Though before he knew it, Andy had dosed off into a
shallow nap. He slept quickly and dreamed a very queer dream.
He dreamed that a perverse little man sat on top of two orange
balls, directly across from him. The man had fine lips and
a very thin moustache, but absolutely grotesque body mass,
consisting of large, tangerine-coloured postulates.
The strange person, who despite his atrocious appearance carried
an air of opulence and importance, disgusted Andy. The grotesque
figure rose up and began making weird declarations, pleading
with the collection of flame-coloured spheres, telling them
tales of labyrinths, think tanks and modulated imprints. The
figure's perplexing speech, although filled with systematic
logic, left Andy with an itchy, greasy feeling, which is most
likely the reason why he awoke so suddenly with a start. Looking
over to the bright orange balls across from him, the gross,
naked figure was gone.
Andy moved up into the air, slightly over lounge, digesting
the installation's placid mixture of Claes Oldenburg softness
and dermatological distress.
On the other side of the gallery's ground
floor a tiny, blue blip was just perceivable. It was the radioactive
isotope, emitting a flash of Beta rays from atop a sculpture
by Freek Wambacq.
Andy was there in a second, grasping the tiny element in his
vaporous, green hands. At last he had apprehended the pesky
isotope! Andy was very relieved. He lowered himself away from
the ceiling and took a deep breath. While calming down he
could not help but to regard the work in front of him. It
consisted of a table, a thin wooden plank and a long wooden
stick, which extended between the plank and the ceiling. The
stick apparently sustained a very high force of pressure,
due to the fact that a small scrap of cardboard was squashed
in between its tip and wooden plank.
Only when one looked up towards the ceiling, was the riddle
revealed: the stick did not come in contact with the wooden
rafters at all, but rather stood completely erect and detached
from any means of support. Andy admired the clever play of
contrasts between the crushed piece of cardboard and the loose
end of the stick; a puzzling paradox of pressure and dispensable
compaction.
Just as he was about to head back in the direction of the
vortex's singularity, a man walked into the gallery, startling
Andy and causing him to loose his grip of the isotope. By
using his ESP, Andy instantly learned that the man was Monsieur
Thierry Heynen, the director of the Galerie Duchamp. The isotope,
hoping to avoid Andy once and for all, quickly tucked itself
into the underfold of Monsieur Heynen's turtleneck sweater.
Being extra careful not to rupture the isotope in such close
proximity of a human respiratory apparatus, Andy gently reached
up underneath Monsieur Heynen's turtleneck and flushed the
isotope out into the adjacent hall. The director swished his
hand at Andy's escapades, thinking only that a late season
mosquito had just buzzed past his ear.
But now, much to Andy's dismay, the isotope was once again
on the loose. He followed its mist of Beta rays into a small
antechamber, which came off the gallery's entrance area, pinning
it in a closed off chamber. Now he had it cornered. There
were no windows and no other ways out. The isotope fluttered
about the air of the little room and then came to land in
the middle of a video installation by Ronny Heiremans.
By looking at a television monitor, one could see what appeared
to be a grainy, black and white video still, taken most likely
in an Arctic Sea region. Broken icebergs and patches of murky
water depicted a scene of frigid, lifeless serenity. The isotope,
finally conceding its capture, gave up pestering Andy and
disappeared into another vortex within the monitor screen.
Andy let out a long sigh of relief. The little radioactive
element had returned to the inhospitable, polar hemispheres,
where it could burn out the last years of its half-life without
posing a threat to any fragile cell systems.
Andy was content. He smiled to himself and circled to go,
but something strange caught his eye. A video camera lay on
the floor with its lens pointing towards the unusually cluttered
floor. Its wires ran directly into the monitor, as if it were
sending a feed to the television screen. Then Andy looked
carefully at the wads of aluminium foil and newspaper, scattered
about the little room's floor and it dawned on him that the
monitor was not showing an arctic setting, but a photographic
negative of that very room! The icebergs were nothing more
than balled-up paper, situated about the floor to resemble
hunks of frozen ocean…
But if the isotope had not journeyed to the Arctic Sea, then
where had it gone?
Alice Evermore 2002
Staal / Made in Belgium
Group exhibition Galerie Duchamp, Yvetot, (France). Selection:
Netwerk Galerij
18/10/02 > 04/12/02