Paul Etienne Lincoln: Alexander And Bonin

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Looking at Paul Etienne Lincoln's outlandish gadgets, individual gets the impression of the artist as gentleman tinkerer: Think of his Equestrian Opulator [c] 1990-2000 a standing aluminum spyglass that can peel an orange and plant off flares while affording a relaxed viewing of horse races. His les whimsical throws however, point not to an amusingly anachronistic wizard on the other hand to a forward-thinking intellect busy salvaging history from myth.

This concourseed twenty-year survey of Lincoln's editions and performance throw outs included models and relics alongside slick booklet and caseed sheaves providing context for and satisfied of the elaborate works that were not upon view. The necessity of for a like reason much close reading, combined with the guile and delicacy of the realitys presented, slowed the viewing proces to a crawl. In the elegant machine of recent origin York-New York, 1987-2003, a nonfunctioning mould for which was included here, London-born Lincoln paid homage to his adopted hometown as the capital of twentieth-century technological innovation. Built for a single move swiftly (which has yet to occur) in a water main below Manhattan, New York-New York comprised an impressive array of archaic machinery (integrated circuits, electrostatic generators) designed to summon the legendary metropolis by playing snippets from its Broadway hits, punching on the outside ticker tape, etc. The mythic make submissives of Lincoln's personage-based projects range from the early-twentieth-century opera prodigy Rosa Ponselle to Madame de Pompadour, the gifted mistress of Louis XV Purplish photos and glass vials of water documented the only performance of Ignisfatuus, 1996-2000, that took place in a Baltimore garden: Arterial casts of a brain, heart, and lung fluoresced to Ponselle's recorded voice according to the lunar circle of time and a system of light sensors, microswitches, and peristaltic interrogates In Tribute to Madame de Pompadour and the Court of Louis XV 1985 in which bees and snails coexisted in a conical "court," activating the combination of parts to form a wholes of water and sugar that determined their survival, was exhibited here by scented handkerchiefs and etched-glass portraits. Die Berliner Zuckerbarin, 2002-2003 cross-examines transgenic milk (a sample was upon view here) from a mattered female bear (the age-old figure of Berlin), spins it into glass filament, winds it with unraveled yarn from Berlin-themed tapestries, and wraps the resulting braid around the busts of three Berlin geneticists.

Hovering between sum of two units notions of history--as persistent (in the form

of memories and emotions that can be triggered in the near by new objects not directly referring to the subject) and missing (brilliantly, the machines themselves are designed to be mortal, to become nonfunctional after single run)--Lincoln's projects seem to suspend a instant reifying it briefly as a spark in the not absent that soon winks out. His ingenious approach forges a heretofore trackless path into memory, as this retrospective, with its necessary reliance upon relics from one-time-only performances and patterns of machines that are one as well as the other absent and defunct, made abundantly clear. Using the now-outdated cutting-edge tools of yesterday in order to poeticize the past and articulate the issues of tomorrow, Lincoln tenders a reflective, literary treatment of a world whose continuity is many times obscured by the pace of progres and where cultural answer tends to lag behind scientific innovation.

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