A+B
In 1985, Italo Calvino composed a series of lectures identifying a set of values to be upheld in the next millennium. In Exactitude, he outlines in numerical sequence a precise definition of a methodological paradigm: 1) a well-calculated plan 2) the evocation of a memorable visual image and 3) choice language to express the subtleties of thought and imagination.
The second chapter of the Six Memos project is Methods A+B, a solo presentation of new works by Karl Burke. Bipartite in structure, it is divided by time and space: Method A at Rua Red Gallery (29 March – 10 April 2010) and Method B at the Joinery Gallery (15-20 April 2010), with new site-specific interventions responding to a custom-built gallery and a space adapted for exhibition purposes.
The fact is, my writing has always found itself facing two divergent paths that correspond to two different types of knowledge. One path goes into the mental space of bodiless rationality, where one may trace lines that converge, projections, abstract forms, vectors of force. The other path goes through the space crammed with objects and attempts to create a verbal equivalent of that space by filling the page with words, involving a most careful, painstaking effort to adapt what is written to what is not written, to the sum of what is sayable and not sayable. (Italo Calvino, Exactitude, undelivered lecture from Six Memos for the Next Millennium, 1985)
In Method A, Karl presents a geometric puzzle, an extract from a three dimensional grid, drawing from mathematical data. Like the ‘mathesis singularis’ proposed by Barthes, the structure is completed through an imaginative and experiential process or study – up into the centre void of the gallery and down through the negative space of the floor. The modular components are fragments of a greater whole, dissipating the misty saturation of visual imagery.
In Method B, Karl continues to dissect the scientific logic that informs his work, this time at the infinitesimal level of the quantum field. Studies on the elemental forms of nature and the attempt to replicate its patterns are here used as the blueprint for artistic production. Coupled with observations of the infra-ordinary, the exhibition is explicitly playful, a subtraction of weight, a renegotiation of the adapted joinery space. Photography, video and sculptural interventions play with the versatility of possible interpretations and with our willingness to believe in the authority of theoretical propositions.
Karl Burke lives and works in
