Emissions

This week we take a walk through the electric field and contemplate the relation between electrostatics and microwave emitters.

Wassmann Institute

Thanks to Sophie Vogt for her contribution to the previous posting. For more about the work of Johann Dieter Wassmann I strongly recommend you follow her suggestion and visit http://museumzeitraum.blogspot.com/

Thanks again to Mark for his further commentary on the museum with his latest posting on his blog http://markcritic.artsblogs.com/blog/blog.asp?blogId=8551

Mark raises some interesting ideas about museums, about the whole business of putting stuff on display, about post-Dada fringe, and much more. He has a more academic approach than I but then he wrote a Master's thesis on Duchamp so he would, wouldn't he.

I am also reminded of an exhibition, part of the Melbourne Festival in (I think) 2003. Titled ' Bleeding Napoleon – the works of Johann Dieter Wassmann' it purported to be a tribute to the work of a 19th-century German sanitation engineer, but was in fact the creation of a local artist whose name eludes at this moment but I will look it up so stay tuned.

New display

There is a new work in the window now and this week it's a nod to Euclid, the man who gave us classical geometry. No, I haven't forsaken electricity for mathematics. There is a link between the two but I'm not going into that now - you'll have to see it for yourself.

I should however mention that behind the Museum (in concept not geography) there is an overlap of science and mathematics which reflects the Director's personal background and inevitably informs his artistic practice, such as it is.

Critical acclaim

This week the Museum celebrates its first review with a link to Mark Holsworth's blog at http://markcritic.artsblogs.com/blog/blog.asp?entryId=69892. As you will see, Mark posted this over a month ago on 30 September during the Fringe Festival but I only just found it a few days back.

Earlier statement

This was written as an artist's statement for an exhibition July 2005 Same idea as the longer statement posted earlier except specifically relating to the exhibition at King's...

The underlying theme of these works is our perception and uncertainty regarding electricity, especially in a domestic environment. Despite our familiarity with electricity at an everyday level it remains an invisible inexplicable force, tinged with fear, mystery and connotations of both pain and sexuality. At home our domestic appliances are taken for granted, and a simple light globe seems harmless enough with its warmly glowing filament. But even the familiar microwave carries a subtext of menace from the mysterious rays behind that shielded door.

We trust electricity – up to a point. Keep it in its place, don’t let it out. A light beside your bed is fine but lights in your bedsprings? These works try to show that a slight shift in the spatial or functional relationship between everyday objects can ruin your day, or at least significantly affect our emotional responses.

Don’t touch. No user-serviceable parts inside. The warning signs ostensibly protect us but at the same time they also reinforce our fear. Science museums, teachers and other white-coated experts ostensibly tried to educate us about electricity while exploiting our apprehension with their don’t-try-this-at-home demonstrations. This collection of works tries to bring these contrasting aspects of electricity together.

About the Museum of Electrical Philosophy

This is the start of an ongoing excursion into thoughts and images relating in some way or another to electricity and museums.

It is an online parallel to the physical exhibits at the public display area of the Museum of Electrical Philosophy which can be found on the 6th floor of the Nicholas Building.

The rationale of the Museum of Electrical Philosophy is to explore the visual representation of interactions between electricity and human thoughts and emotions. In particular the museum’s exhibits, together with their associated documentation and signage, are concerned with feelings of fear, bewilderment, uncertainty, sexuality, pain, self-awareness... and any combination of these and more.

Electricity remains a mysterious, almost magical phenomenon for many people - and perhaps most. This is despite two centuries or more of observation and theory that preceded our current era of technological vanity. In that time what was once called ‘natural philosophy’ has been refined, reborn and renamed as ‘science’. More than just a lexicographical refinement, this came with a paradigm shift from the realm of thought to knowledge, from observation and wonder to theories and definitions, from humility before God to the arrogance of technology.

And yet the magic remains, despite the physics, the equations and unattainably uncertain world of electrons. If anything the physical existence of wires and silicon chips and all the other paraphernalia only adds to the mystery of it all while the diagrams and symbols of textbooks are as arcane to the general population today as the alchemist’s were yesterday.

Not surprisingly the mystery and inexplicability of electricity can be found in art, both implicitly and explicitly. When Michelangelo showed God reaching out to give life to Adam, their outstretched fingers could easily be read as electrodes, positive and negative, carrying energy from one cosmic level to another. On a different scale, Walter De Maria’s ‘Lightning Field’ embraced the incalculable energy of the atmosphere.

In the centuries between these two artists came the experimenters. Volta made dead frogs jump and thought he had found the spark of life; Edison proposed the spark of death in the form of the electric chair. Today we switch on a light or read an online blog, but for most of us our conceptualisation is little different from the realm of ‘influence machines’ of the 19th century.

It is in this context of mystery and magic that the Museum of Electrical Philosophy offers its collection of drawings. Not drawings in the sense of marks on paper but images and objects that are drawn (or derived) from electrically related concepts. The electric shock remains a potent source of fear, the electric lamp carries messages of more than illumination. The lightning bolt remains as a universally recognised symbol of danger and the risk of death. Nothing is sure; all is uncertain; this is the philosophy.