Читать книгу Performance / Media / Art / Culture - Jacki Apple - Страница 26

Now imagine yourself a traveler from another world, and as you approach Earth, tableaux of twentieth-century high-modernist art float across the black horizon of deep space in ever-changing, exquisitely beautiful permeations of light and color. Or exactly the opposite. You’re on a long distance journey on a starship, and through the wonders of technology the world you left behind can be conjured up for contemplation and sustenance. Or maybe you have just entered into that realm of consciousness, that dimension of perception that transcends linear time and material space altogether, a state of being in which light and sound are essential elements of transport.

Brian Eno’s most recent light and sound installation Latest Flames suggests all of the above. Eno, known as the primo maestro of ambient sonic landscapes, is a conceptualist whose interest is in creating environments or “settings” in which the audience has the opportunity to enter into a state of heightened sensual awareness and encounter the unfamiliar. Paradoxically his cool, pristine, formal aesthetic produces meditational spaces that induce both an intensity of feeling and a harmonic sense of well-being.

Eno’s work, which is at once esoteric and accessible, seeks to unify experience and perception, body and mind, the analytic and the intuitive, the sensual and the spiritual. Thus, minimalism and romanticism easily cohabit in the same piece. The audience is not a separate entity but an integral part of his conception, an active element. There is no “us” and “them” in Eno’s cosmology. There are no “aliens,” only different forms of expression and being with limitless possibilities of interaction and communication.

In Latest Flames Eno pushes the philosophical ideals of twentieth-century abstraction beyond the boundaries of the art object and invokes the experience it has sought to represent. Eno refers not to art history but to art’s aspirations when his images quote Malevich and Mondrian who sought to express principles of universal harmony in their paintings, and Kandinsky who wanted to capture through color and form the feeling conveyed by music. Or abstract Surrealists who explored the landscape of the psyche and dreams, the Bauhaus’s utopian vision of art and technology that culminated in the glass skyscrapers of international urban architecture, and Rothko and his color fields searching for the realm of the sublime.

The abstract images that seem to float in space are actually sculptural cardboard structures illuminated from underneath by video monitors that project changing hues of color. Each island of light is suspended in an all-pervasive cushion of ambient music, overlapping waves of sound that ebb and flow through the space. The hardware that produces all of this is nowhere in evidence. An overt display of technological virtuosity is antithetical to Eno’s intentions. Technology is simply another tool in the service of the imagination.

We look down on the tops of skyscrapers, a panorama that passes from sunrise to sunset to sunrise. We sit in a living room and contemplate the “Mondrian” on the wall, a non-narrative video painting that is an alternative to television, the great transporter of our time. But Latest Flames does not pacify, offer vicarious living, or a means of escape. Instead it stimulates, energizes, and rejuvenates by directly sensitizing and intensifying the viewer/participant’s perceptual awareness. It is about being in it, not watching it. That in itself contradicts the conditions of media saturated reality.

Ultimately Eno’s is an optimistic vision that believes in the power of the imagination, the possibilities of invention, and the creative potentiality of human consciousness. “Where is the seat of the soul?” inquired Swedenborg. According to Eno, everywhere. The irony is that it is Eno, not Hwang or Chong, who is the “outsider” in the art world.