Interactive and kinetic pieces concerning the Tower of Babel.

December 5, 2008 - February 15, 2009,
at Gatineau's Maison de la Culture.

OVERVIEW:

Study For The Tower of Babel #1 and Study For The Tower of Babel #2 are two interactive paintings depicting abstractions of the Tower of Babel. When the viewer approaches a painting for closer inspection, adding himself to the collective consciousness of the work, the Tower (or Towers) rises higher, and its construction is furthered.

CONCEPT:

It is needlessly pessimistic to view the story of Babel as a cautionary tale of man’s hubris. In my view, the Tower of Babel stands as a symbol of man’s potential to achieve the transcendental when a pure collective consciousness can be formed.

The dominant theme in art since Duchamp has been the participation of the viewer as integral to the “completion” of the work of art. Ideally, this approach to art-making creates a more participatory experience, working towards re-establishing the collective consciousness. It has failed. The Duchampian revolution has instead acquiesced in the persistent intellectual laziness of contemporary art – an unassailable justification for producing conceptually bankrupt artifacts of the cult of mindless individualism.

Study For The Tower Of Babel #1 and #2 takes the principle of the viewer completing an artwork literally, and finds congruency between that principle and the lessons of Babel. A viewer may influence the work in an observable way, but this transformation is merely a symbol of the greater collective experience being built.