Paul Etienne Lincoln at Christine Burgin and Alexander and Bonin - Brief Article

Resolutely turning their backs upon the contemporary world, two extraordinary installations by the agency of Paul Etienne Lincoln reveled in an extravagant nostalgia for the scientific, artistic and technological achievements of earlier times. At the one and the other galleries, Lincoln cast himself as a behind-the-scenes ringmaster, a character which began to suggest his relationship to the half-imagined, half-remembered worlds which he coaxes into existence.

The Burgin installation, titled The World and Its Inhabitants, consisted of an assortment of tiny mechanical personages, greatest in quantity under a foot tall, made of wire and base objects. Displayed on wall shelves, they exhibit either actual people or scientific, technological or medical principles central to Lincoln's conception of post-Enlightenment Europe A wall panel noted that these figures, which draw upon 18th-century automatons created for private entertainments, were originally introduced to the world at a small dinner party presided above by the artist. Each was then electrically brought to life to perform a one-time-only, three-minute action; having lived its brief life, the figure then continues to exist as a kind of relic of itself.

level in their inanimate state, the little figures are quite fascinating. Lincoln provided a put of cards which explained the identity and meaning of each single They are centered on certain themes: doomed exploration, visionary science, the magical side of technology and the strange and oftentimes tragic lives of divas, dancers, performers, magicians and inventors. Mungo Park, for instance, was a Scottish explorer who disappeared in Africa near Timbuktu. He is exhibited as a small insectlike figure astride a plaster globe who appears to be desperately attempting to locate his position upon a map.

The next to the first installation, at Alexander and Bonin, focused upon the early-20th-century opera singer Rosa Ponselle Again

were not absented with a defunct mechanical apparatus that Lincoln created in 1996 for a Victorian-era conservatory in Baltimore. Titled Ignisfatuus, the work used celestial motion to make its activities, which involved the playing of recordings by means of Ponselle. Bringing together visually arresting ultimate parts that speak to the pre-electronic age when the mechanisms of technology were still visible, the work mirrors a Cartesian mechanics in which life is explained using the type of the machine. Here a station of tubes and vials are conjoined to an old turntable and three bell jars containing beautiful glass casts of the arterial combination of parts to form a wholes of the brain, lungs and heart. plane with a detailed accompanying catalogue, it is difficult to comprehend the complicated workings of the apparatus, on the other hand that hardly seems to matter.

the couple installations are remarkable for the precision and technological expertise which have gone into their making, and also for their evocation of the sweet rhyme of lost worlds. Lincoln momentarily put under waters us back into a universe where technology and alchemy could coexist and magic was hardly incompatible with the reign of reason.

COPYRIGHT 2000 Brant Publications, Inc.

COPYRIGHT 2000 Gale Group