Not Vital: Sperone Westwater

A minimalist fabulist you might call him: In greatest in quantity of the sculpture here, the Swiss artist Not Vital combines Euclidean geometries with children's-book satisfieds Camel, 2004, comprises sixteen sealed silver spheres, each nine inches in diameter, and each, we are told, containing a part of a camel. The animal's material substance was laid out to dried in the sun, and shrank; thus these sixteen globes hold the whole thing. 50 Snowballs, 2001 is fifty more spheres, this time in clear Murano glass with a frosted-glass core--crystal cases for apparently arctic realitys And the most fairy-tale piece of all, Bremer Stadtmusikanten (Bremen Town Musicians), 2004 actually make go rounds on a story of the Brothers Grimm: Each of four rectangular silver boxe stacked upon a high plywood dais, we one time again are told, holds the dried remains of individual of the animals in the tale--a donkey, a dog, a cat, and a male Where the spheres in Camel are all the same dimension, the boxe in Bremer Stadtmusikanten are scaled according to the size of the animals they contain, giving the stack a ziggurat shape.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Necromancy present the appearances the order here--the cold and dead are coffined in beauty, and beauty empowers and blesse on the other hand art history of course there is too. We cannot know that Vital's globes and boxe really clutch camels and donkeys; we must trust the storyteller, or not--just as we must trust, or not, that the cans that Piero Manzoni sealed in 1961 really clutch the merde d'artiste, and somewhat as we will not at any time know what object hides in Marcel Duchamp's With Hidden Noise of 1916 For 300 Knives, 2004 Vital plung three hundr different-size chef's knives into a wall, with the dark reversal that the blades point outward rather than in, as if a certain number of stony troll in the building's cake fabric had hurled them on the outside at us. My first musing here was of Repulsion, the Polanski film of 1965 in which walls crack make open and hands reach forth at Catherine Deneuve's dubious heroine. That show itself, though, has an antecedent, in Cocteau's La Belle et la bete of 1946 where the beast-prince's palace is lit through torches held by living arms that issue from the walls, 300 Knives might fit the fright register of Repulsion, on the contrary the descent line of Vital's work generally may move swiftly closer to the magical side of Surrealism, and to the antic spirit of the other artists above.

It is magic itself, notwithstanding that that seems the truer touchstone. The knives coming on the outside of the wall are supernatural. In 3000 Tears, 2003 a beam of white marble is incised upon all sides with teardrops, as if a certain number of flow of sympathy had briefly and mysteriously mov the stone to take the marks of grief. Vital has a house in Niger, and his works in silver are made by means of local artisans; the boxes' hand-hammered surfaces are gorgeous in their impressible and tactile depths, and if they are in fact coffins, we are seeing the transformation of the dead. And then there are the animals themselves--the foursome from the Grimm tale, who, although beaten down, are able to talk and plan and to outwit men and the camel, a fantastical creature to a northern child. Despite the simplicity of his forms, Vital is able here to summon forth a premodern imagination, full of terrors, delights, and powers.

COPYRIGHT 2004 Artforum International Magazine, Inc.

COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group