This is a little late...I'm sorry.
I had to turn my laptop in for repair and didn't get it back til a day or so ago.
But here's what I've been thinking about all week...or all month...I'm not actually sure how long.

This past summer, at Pace Wildenstein in the Chelsea area, they had an installation by an artist named Keith Tyson.

To give you an example of scale, it was in a gallery with renovated warehouse space. From the time you enter the space by pushing aside thick black curtains, to the time you leave, in order to take in the whole installation, it would take around an hour or so. It's about half the length of a football field from the black curtains to the very back wall.

In terms of the pieces themselves, I'm about 5'3" and each of them averaged about half my body size. A lot of the pieces were worked around the idea of a cube (I could've fit into were I in a fetal position) and there were over 200.

Each piece (top 5 are examples of specific pieces all put together for the final installation) came together to form what he called the "Large Field Array" (bottom 2 are examples of the whole installation from different angles). From the pictures of the whole installation, you can see that he has effectively made the whole room a piece. In order to take in his whole body of work, you have to walk around the entire room and walk around each piece individually. They are all done with such great detail, the books the penguin stands atop of had their spines beautifully painted and lettered with the names of famous authors. The top piece was a large scale, sculptural representation in homage of Bosch's "Garden of Earthly Delights". Throughout the installation, Keith is paying credit to the people, places, ideas, etc. that made him who he is, and in turn, affects every individual in our society.

The idea of the "Large Field Array" is one I haven't been able to get out of my head. Walking through the installation, I was inspired by each piece, and at the end, looking back on the whole thing, I had a moment of epiphany where I felt instantly in tune with all the forces of our universe and for a second, was able to pin all the intangible hopes and dreams of humanity on the basis that clarity of purpose and integrity of thought might be able to propel our civilization to the understandings it has, until now, only kept stumbling over.

It's really tough to describe what it really felt like, and I don't want to overblow the situation for the simple fact that others may not be affected the same way as I. But it felt a little like what I suppose tripping on acid might feel like, or what our discussion in class on thursday theorized. I was able to conceive Keith's image through both abstract and concrete negation, and that doesn't happen to me often unprompted. Like Magritte's painting, "Ceci n'est pas une pipe", it is both what it is and what it isn't.

But mostly, I don't want to admit that it probably affected me so deeply because I have a background in scientific thought. Besides, my favorite muppet is Beaker.

I've already eaten up enough bandwith with this thing just trying to keep up with me and save my draft...good ol' technology. So I'll leave this off with an excerpt from the press release of Keith Tyson's installation, "Large Field Array", from Pace Wildenstein. You'll see that his mark as a succesful artist was made on me because he achieved what he set out to.

The work is named after the Very Large Array (VLA), a field of Radio Telescopes in New Mexico. The VLA focuses on one spot from multiple viewpoints to give us a clearer picture of the universe. Similarly, Tyson’s monumental modular work combines over 230 separate sculptural forms into a single Field Array, which is designed to operate as a gigantic experiential lens for viewing some of the fundamental forces that make up reality.

In an interview with Dominic van den Boogerd published in the exhibition catalogue, Tyson remarked, “Each one of the pieces is the sum of all possible forces acting upon it. Each sculpture is basically the result from the things around it.” The catalogue also includes an essay by Dr. Jacob Wamberg, professor of Art History at Aarhus University, Denmark.

The individual elements of Large Field Array are two-feet squared and arranged at four-foot intervals in a roughly cubic array on the floor and walls of the gallery. They range from hyper-real illusionistic sculpture through to residues of physical processes. Each sculpture is connected with all the other works within the field, and these connections are diverse whether visual, psychological, causal, philosophical, physical or conceptual. The viewer is subsumed within this gigantic field and is forced to re-make it themselves, by tracing these myriad connections. They combine to form a lens that allows the viewer to interact with their essential boundlessness. The work attacks the myth of individuality, and the accepted concept of the unique discrete artwork. It continues Tyson’s joyful exploration of how everything in the world is connected.


If you're interested in Keith Tyson and his work, here's the link to the Pace Wildenstein site about this installation, and google will handle the rest.