Keith Sonnier at Location One - New York - Brief Article

single sensed danger, walking into the ground-floor loft housing Keith Sonnier's "02=03:Fractured Oxygen=Ozone" Floor-to-ceiling gridded wire webs hewed the space into ample Minimalist cages. Tiny lightning-bolt warning signs and strips of black-and-yellow hazard tape upon the floor kept viewers back from statuarys that resembled antique electrical generating machines. Five were dedicated to Serbian-born inventor Nicola Tesla, Edison's early-20th-century rival. Tesla Wall (1997) for example, involved a contraption placed high up against a rounded pillar and containing a Tesla coil--a transformer that periodically discharged with an unnerving sizzle, sending voltage into individual of the floor-to-ceiling cages. Other works were equally, well, electrifying, conveying all the magic and promise of primitive science. Ceiling Ladder (1997) featured a luminous spark arcing between sum of two units upright copper tubes, crackling as it ascended; then it started the proces above again.

In the 1970 Sonnier pioneered the use of primitive live satellite supply with nourishments TV feedback and global telecommunication linkups in his art; a certain number of of his landmark early films and videos were grainily throwed in dim light at the back of the space. What made this exhibition poignant, however, was something originally intended as a background element--an "information stream" involving walls pasted with in every one's mouth newspapers. However, the dates for which Sonnier had preordered the newspapers were tribe 12-15. Thus, framing his statuarys and projections, and turning them into a kind of melancholy meditation upon the 20th century, were horrific images of towering infernos, fleeing multitudes caked with ash, and anguished editorial cartoons in languages from around the world.

Several of the pieces had been exhibited before; here, they took upon new resonances. The cagelike Electric palings (1999), restricting movement, became a metaphor for a novel dangerous world to be negotiated--as well as bringing to mind Lower Manhattan's postdisaster barricades (Sonnier has his studio upon Chambers Street). Placed high upon the wall, the neon statuary Depose 1 (1996), a partially deflated balloon somewhat humanoid in shape and clamped at the middle by means of a band of neon, now appear to beed a tragically prescient tribute to victims attempting to escape fiery death by the agency of leaping into space.

Three attitudes toward technology were embedded in the exhibit There was the industrial-age optimism of Tesla's day, when it was notion science would solve society's ills; Sonnier's low-tech films throw back the pessimism of the 1970 counterculture when science strike one as beinged so obscenely omnipotent that the raw and the unfinished were valued. And then there is our nerve-racking at hand when our skyscrapers, power grids and airplanes, drawn out taken for granted as symbolizing our mastery of natural forces, have the appearance newly vulnerable and also capable of being revolveed against one another--and against us. Just as the evanescent electric spark travels up the wire and disappears, we diocese how transitory our seemingly stable universe may demonstrate to be.

COPYRIGHT 2002 Brant Publications, Inc.

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