MACHINES AND THE MOUNTAIN BY MARK GISBOURNE 2010
The mechanisation of the modern world has led to a deferred understanding of everyday life. We all use machines but few know their actual hidden workings, and we accept them simply as a given. Philip Topolovac is very interested in how our relationship with machines and technology obfuscates our daily experiences of the world. Since machines and the technologies related to them are everywhere today, they have gradually taken on the status of a 'hidden visible' in our daily lives.A paradox occurs where specialists are needed if things go wrong, though the things that go wrong are invariably connected to the most commonplace of human activities; transport and travel, cooking and heating, lighting and communication. At the same time the machine-systems are frequently hidden away behind walls, in ceilings or under the floor. Or, conversely, they are industrially framed or encased to give their presence a sort of faux status of an aesthetic experience of what is in fact a utilitarian object. In areas of science fiction (often proto-science fact), machines are frequently presented with their mechanisms exposed. In these cases a further obfuscation resides in how we subsequently read their mechanical or technological effects, which can sometimes be seen as a frightening dystopian nightmare as in Ridley Scott's 'Blade Runner' (1982) or as a dystopian satire as in Terry Gilliam's 'Brazil' (1985).
Philip Topolovac's sculptures expose the status of the engine and the machine as a sort of abstract fetish. In works like Ohne Titel (Aggregat II) (2009) and Ohne Titel (Loch) (2008) pseudo-machine engines hang from ceilings or expose themselves through walls. Conversely, a work like Schütz (2008), where the sculpture is free-standing, presents itself as if it were a heating system or radiator unit. Indeed, they are not unlike Edouardo Paolozzi's British Pop Art pseudo-sculpture-cum-machines of the 1960s. Though Schütz has been stripped of colour and denies the utopian optimism of the earlier time period. The point to be made about all these works is their subversive non-utilitarian nature as a purely sculptural intervention. They give off the appearance of machine-units but serve no actual mechanical purpose; they expose the pseudo-aesthetics of machinery simply for what it is. The installations tucked up on the ceiling corners of a room, take on an appearance of parody and presence. It is parody in that the installed locations remind one of an earlier age of Constructivist imagined utopias. Vladimir Tatlin's famous installation of his Corner Counter Reliefs (1915-16), or alternatively Alexander Rodchenko's installations in the 1920s spring immediately to mind.
Topolovac also examines issues of how modern technology uses machine design, to manipulate and shape the understanding of a viewer's perception. The orderings of today's taxonomically-driven machine-technologies are exposed and question – as a type of mechano-morphic simulacra – what informs the increasingly obedient and conformist conditions of consumption in our world. Machines increasingly make human life more machine-like, perhaps, unintentionally fulfilling De la Mettrie's materialist attitudes to Man A Machine (1748), and extending the inferred mechanical habits and behavioural repetitions of animals to mankind. The artist questions whether our seeming addiction to machine technology is not merely a state of the ubiquity, but increasingly how it has come to dictate and shape how life must be lived.
If machines, taxonomy and repetition inform one body of Topolovac's work, then issues of perception and misperception form the other. It is often a question of the misperceived use of scale and of materials dislocated from nature, that informs the landscape-based sculpture projects of the artist. In a series of works like Bergform I (2008), Bergform II (2009), and dia-projections such as Berge (2008), he works with ideas of material dislocation and perceptual misreadings. In the case of Berge as a black and white slide projection, piles of sand and rubble are photographed in such a way as to suggest they are mountainous landscapes. Ironically, the 'hidden visible' of this series of slide-projection images is, that they were taken on site locations in and around Berlin, a city all but totally flat and far removed from any sense of a mountainous environment. At a philosophical level it arouses a much more complex issue, namely are things as perceived to be understood as they naturally present themselves? It provokes the old Kantian question of the ding-an-sich (a thing-in-itself, the noumenon, posited as an object or event independent of the senses) which can never be known, but only through the appearance of how it presents itself. The Illusion as a result becomes inverted, for if we can only understand things through the sensations of their appearance, there can in fact be no misperception. It is only in the light of secondary knowledge that the viewer comes to understand that they have experienced a misperception of the object, and that the clarification of a visual Illusion is not part of the thing-in-itself as it is perceived.
The polyester sculptures Bergform I, and Bergform II, approach matters differently, having less to do with the immediacy of Illusion, but alternatively embracing forms of translation and inversion. The Bergform is simply the cast of a pile of sand. Visually that, which formed the contours of a mass has been translated in such a way as the actual mass has been dispensed with, another inferred 'hidden visible', and in consequence a sculptural polyester cast of its skin-derived appearance has been created to replace it. Topolovac makes no attempt to play with the illusion of it being a sandheap, since its frayed polyester skirt edges explicitly refer to what is actually is, namely a cast of a pile of sand. He also makes this very clear by showing the nuts and bolts of how the different sections of the cast are bolted together. Therefore, far from being a natural object, the work, like its stylistic companion Bergform II, asserts itself as purely a sculptural object that denies the original content of its referent source.
The sculptural interventions of Philip Topolovac follow on from the continuously deferred sense of understanding and lived experience where I began, and confront head on the commonplace paradoxical misperceptions that we all confront in our everyday life.