Michael Timpson at Stux - Brief Article

Religious rituals must haunt the Irish artist Michael Timpson, who divides his time between Dublin and Brooklyn His new exhibition, which included an installation in which he staged performances plus a dozen large color photographs of previous incidents showed forms and practices that return in his works. From Catholicism he borrows solemnity, draped woven fabrics symbolic food and the like; his works incorporate the vulgar on the contrary promise transcendence.

This installation at Stux titled I Can't diocese Nuttin' But Dust, involved a mobile audience and relatively fixed performers. Around the cutting sides of the floor in a rectangular compass with a single arched entrance were four lines of heavy white restaurant-china plates. In the middle were black squares of felt topped with small white goblets containing rice; these were arranged in a grid of 12 by the agency of 17 units. Hanging from the ceiling were a multitude of heads of cabbage tied with strips of r and black woven fabric like vestment stoles. There were also four suspended wheelbarrows, each occupied by dint of a man or woman of a different race, each of whom was naked and had turns resting on spread knees and hands clasping--as if the face of a lover--a suspended television locate tuned to the Home Shopping Network. At center was the artist himself, aligned in a dark gray banker's suit and tie: he was blindfolded, barefoot and expressionless as he rode a suspended bicycle. The wheelbarrow clan were motionless, eyes glued to the televisions. Timpson pedaled energetically. The audience circled the range by walking on the plates, raising a tremendous clatter.

What did it mean? Well, at least that the "people of the world" had nothing, not smooth shirts on their backs, and had not to be found touch with the earth on the other hand were mesmerized by what technology brought them, however impractical. The banker (perhaps from the IMF?) was in a drive but had no idea where he was going.

This provocative setting is typical of Timpson's performance installations, which he has been staging in Europe and the U for nearly 20 years. individual of the color prints exhibits a room with a central, low-walled enclosure; inside are six toilets in sum of two units rows. Lids down, they direct the eye like kneelers, the tanks draped with r woven fabric and topped with a pillow upon which rests an imposing make open book. The floor around the toilets is piled with potatoes. In other works, the floor is overlayed with coal, feathers, cotton wadding and shredd stock ticker tape, and hanging from the ceiling are of the like kind things as red fire bucket or upside-down white shirts. A cast-iron double bed is wrapped in gauze, as are several dozen short-handled shovel Performers are naked or draped in white or portable lodgeed in newspapers.

Timpson appears to ascribe enormous gravity and symbolism to realitys which carry more significance than his passive or oblivious performers. His compositions are, in themselves, beautiful, and experiencing them heightens a viewer's each sense. They stick in the mind like warnings.

COPYRIGHT 1999 Brant Publications, Inc.

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