PRESSEMITTEILUNG

John Isaacs - The Diary of a Loner

"If the eye, or an eye, can be truly objective, then the question must be - who owns this eye?"

20.21 is pleased to present the Diary of a Loner, a major new work by John Isaacs - an emotionally charged exhibition of isolation and contradiction, featuring Stanley Millers elemental pre-biotic experiment, and a re-interpretation of Einsteins classic studies of relativity. In 1952 Stanley Miller, while still a graduate student of biochemistry, produced a glass apparatus which contained what scientists believe to be the earths pre-biotic gaseous atmosphere, and by sparking electricity through it to mimick the effects of lightning, produced many of the simple organic chains of molecules which are the common building blocks of cellular life. The Diary of a Loner features film-sequences John Isaacs shot while visiting Millers laboratory in California, where, though an old man working in semi retirement - he still follows the same route of enquiry into the origins of life. The experiment is essentially a time machine - in vitro - of interest not only as a symbol of the methodologies of "scientific" belief structures, but as a truly fantastical allegory to the increasing complexity of the continious chain of events linking this chemical accident of life to the present. Portraits of tourists looking at the sun, a recorded discussion with Stanley Miller and the artist on the origins of life, the powerful music and images of the film, bathed in the cellular light of a slowly revolving disco mirror ball, orbit like a disparate and perplexing constellation arround the central figure of a partially dissected Wooly Mammoth. The Mammoth, itself a romantic icon of extinction, and isolation, is beeing dessected, a central metaphore to the themes Isaacs explores in the Diary of a Loner. "The concept of anatomy and therefore the methodology of dissection not only forms the basic of science, but effectively is paralleled in a human thought and activity. Languages, thoughts and objects, are constructed from their relative constituent elements, and we therefore build up a pragmatic world view which is in effect the sum of it's parts."

John Isaacs 1999

Kontakt | Archiv|Editionen | Antiquariat | Impressum