Page 46 - New Scientist

CULTURE

A glimpse at time

Bio art comes of age at a small gem of a show, finds Simon Ings

South Korean artist Jiwon Woo and other chemicals. The is“simultaneously binding us,
Life Time: Biological clocks of the
collaborated with Han Wösten Anthropocene has never seemed through heredity, and separating
universe, MU Artspace, Eindhoven, of Utrecht University to study so immediate, or so insidious, us, by death”.
the Netherlands, until 18 February
whether there is a bacterial or as in this video installation. It is significant, I think, that of
MAKING art out of biological fungal basis to the Korean notion So much for the art. What of the works by established artists
material, living tissue or even of son-mat or “hand taste”– the the curation? MU Artspace’s show featured here, the strongest are
recordings of whole ecosystems subtleties of flavour imparted to juxtaposes the BAD shortlist with two video pieces.
is no longer a new idea. In fact it food by the person who prepares works by more established artists Noah Hutton’s film Deep Time
is one that is fast approaching it. Some local hooch-making kit to make a statement about the documents the destruction of the
its majority: SymbioticA, the was on display – in case you nature of time. oil-rich North Dakotan landscape
pioneering art and science didn’t get the point. Time is difficult to talk about – by 1970s-style big engineering.
research laboratory that did Then there’s an immersive the show’s cumbersome title is And Ex Nihilo by Finnish artist
so much to establish the field, eight-channel audio installation proof enough of that, and even Timo Wright juxtaposes footage
was opened in 2001. called Seasynthesis: a thudding from the Svalbard Global Seed
Life Time, a small show running and horrific distillation of the “Ex Nihilo affords us Vault, a frozen brain being
at MU Artspace in Eindhoven, sound pollution besetting the an ice-cold glimpse of prepared by a cryonics company,
the Netherlands, shows this North Sea. This is the work of a bureaucratic, post- and a workshop working on an
quintessentially 21st-century art Dutch artist Xandra van der Eijk, natural future” advanced humanoid robot to
at its best. Few pieces here would working with Han Lindeboom afford us an ice-cold glimpse of a
ever find their way into a regular at Wageningen University. the gallery’s lucid handout by bureaucratic, post-natural future.
gallery. A striking exception is Meanwhile, Chinese artist William Myers, a curator based Visiting Life Time is rather like
An Incomplete Life, a performance Guo Cheng has worked with in Amsterdam, labours under the watching one of those allusive,
installation by Dutch physical Heather Leslie at Free University title“A Non-Circadian Cadence”. polymathic documentaries by
theatre company Wild Vlees Amsterdam on a Canutic effort But the show itself does much British documentary film-maker
(styling itself as Proud Flesh in to remove all traces of human better, embracing a wide swathe Adam Curtis. While the show
English), in which a recumbent activity from a cubic metre of of temporal landscape,“from exhibits some of the method’s
actor is slowly engulfed by a pile soil taken from a dockyard in the the universal to the personal shortcomings, it manages the old
of salt spilling from the inverted city, sorting, washing and rinsing, and from the cellular to the Curtis trick of delivering much
cone of a giant hourglass. and removing rubble, plastics geological”. Time, we are told, more than the sum of its parts. ■
More often, the artists take the
scatter-gun conceit-making of
traditional conceptual art and
push it towards real experiment
and analysis. The pieces that
result are more interesting than
beautiful, but with good curation
this need not be a problem. It
would be a dull gallery-goer who
didn’t appreciate the exhibits,
including those by finalists of the
2017 Bio Art and Design Award. LIFE TIME: BIOLOGICAL CLOCKS OF THE UNIVERSE, MU, EINDHOVEN, 2017. PHOTO: HANNEKE WETZER
The BADs, developed with
leading Dutch researchers in the
life sciences, have been pushing
the boundaries of bio art since
2011. Three winners from last
year take centre stage.

Wild Vlees’s An Incomplete Life:
an actor is slowly shrouded in salt

44 | NewScientist | 20 January 2018