Katie Paterson - Mediascape

Katie Paterson is a British artist born in Glasgow in 1981, who creates conceptual and multi-media installations regarding the Universe, natural phenomena, human limitation and the transience of existence. Recently I have been drawn to the poetic beauty of her work and how she allows the concept to guide her choice of medium. For clarity, it is necessary to determine my understanding of ‘medium’ for the purpose of this writing as being “the means by which something is communicated” in the context of art making (Aarts, 2014). In terms of its stance between traditional and progressive, Paterson’s diverse use of media poses some interesting and potentially challenging questions about how it might be defined. As her practice is relatively new, with very little critical analysis to be found on her work, I am forced to consider my own ideas on Paterson’s position. Nicolas Bourriaud’s proposal of Altermodernism will serve as a starting point before I observe three prevalent themes occurring in Paterson’s work: collapsed distances, science and transience. Forming an understanding of historic lineage and current standing, I will contextualise how each theme is communicated.

 Nicolas Bourriaud’s idea of the Altermodern, put forward with the 2009 Tate Triennial Exhibition, presents a compelling account of contemporary art practice within the vast modern mediascape. It is suggested that artists are making work in response to a new “globalised perception”, created by international communication, travel and cultural exchange, which extends the potential of artwork in all directions of space and time (Bourriaud, 2009). One factor in Bourriaud’s manifesto is that a work of art no longer has a singular identity, limited to exist in one physicality or moment in time; rather, artists present an artwork as a trajectory of an idea, using different mediums and allowing the concept to traverse many states of being (Bourriaud 2009). Katie Paterson’s inclusion in the Altermodern exhibition is telling of a comparable approach. Indeed, Bourriaud’s description of the art scene as a “wave of displacements, voyages, translations, migrations of objects and beings” might well be a depiction of Paterson’s own practice.

Collapsing distance and time is central to all of Paterson’s work (Benjamin 2012). Connecting places through telecommunication, ideas through mental imagery and contracting time through the found object often intertwine, almost rendering the mind itself as the medium. In her 2007 gallery installation, Vatnajökull, a neon sign of a phone number was displayed which could connect the viewer (or caller) to a microphone recording an Icelandic glacier. Distance collapses through real-time technology, extending the limits of the body to witness a process occurring hundreds of miles away (LaBelle 2006: 232). A fascinating predicament arises from this example alone, of where the work begins and ends. In traditions of sculpture it is the neon sign, in canons of Conceptualism it is the viewer’s perception of the sign’s message (Popper 2009), in sound art it is the detached noise of the shifting water and in ecological art the work begins and ends with the awareness of the melting ice. It is clear, however, that Vatnajökull bridges all of these attitudes at once, existing across the world as physical object, audio, real-time experience, and conceptual artwork, playing out even after the exhibition finishes, both in the mind and in the glacier’s ongoing dissolution.

One particular characteristic that pre-dates Paterson’s practice is the invitation to involve the mind in the work, with emphasis removed from the aesthetic and placed instead on the concept. As Behrman observes, the work’s completion relies on urging viewers to use their own imaginations, just as many Conceptual artists have done since the 1960s (Behrman 2010: 24-25). Walter De Maria’s installations bare many resemblances to Paterson’s in their propositions of time, space and knowledge, not least in his 1976 Vertical Earth Kilometer ; the top two inches of a kilometer-long brass rod, planted into the ground in Kassel, Germany, are all that can be seen of De Maria’s intervention, anticipating its ability to “activate desire and the correspondent imaginative function” in the viewer (Pahapill 2006). De Maria’s work certainly issues the same sense of wonder and unassuming drama that is felt from Paterson’s appeal to connect times and places together in the mind. The premeditated omission of visual or written information to stimulate thought is a concept I am investigating in my own studio work, promoting the subjective connotations of materials and personal interpretation.

I have been considering the use of the found object by artists such as Cornelia Parker, Stefan Gek and Mark Dion, who call upon the identities of objects to create meaning and link ideas together as sculptural metaphors. In Paterson’s Fossil Necklace, 2013, she sourced 170 fossils before having them rounded, polished and strung together into a piece of jewellery that spans millions of years and thousands of miles within its beads. As in Vatnajökull, where the glacier recordings are treated as found object, the beads are used as symbol, representation and relic of a larger phenomenon and of another time and place (Behrman 2010). First use of the found object can be traced back to Duchamp’s readymades in 1917. Furthermore, the collection of relics and objects with representational value is an age-old inclination inherent to humankind but not to fine art practices until very recently. Cornelia Parker’s The Maybe of 1995, an exhibition displaying the personal belongings of famous people, illustrated how objects become relics, the juxtaposition linking disparate identities, and connecting times and places together; as is the necklace’s magic (Klein 2007).

Paterson’s fascination with geological remnants and the involvement of them in her work, discloses a growing relationship between the once-polarised fields of art and science. Artists are making work to learn about the world, as they always have done, but with unprecedented attention to scientific accuracy, procedure and technical collaboration (Werret 2008). Although this might sound limiting, it functions as a new creative outlet for artists who are configuring their work from “idiosyncratic sets of ideas that they seek to embody, test, represent or critique”, instead of merely responding to established philosophies of fine art through traditional mediums (Quaintance 2012). Far from restrictive, with this cross-discipline approach Paterson has sent a meteorite back into space, conceived the only existing map of every dead star known to man, and collected images of ‘ancient darkness’ from far-reaching places in the Universe. The latter, History of Darkness is an ongoing work started during the artist’s residency at UCL’s Physics and Astronomy Department, this itself significant of Altermodern attitudes. With cutting-edge technology, Paterson has archived hundreds of photographic slides depicting darkness from throughout space. This piece exemplifies a poetic duality that is present in all her ideas, a deep respect and enjoyment of scientific discovery together with an astute awareness of its inevitable limitations (Behrman 2010). As Pehapill writes, regarding De Maria’s Vertical Earth Kilometer, “our desire to know is all that can ever be materialized” (Pehapill 2006) and this is often the tone of Paterson’s creations. The darkness to me poignantly represents the ambiguity of the beyond, existing as both boundary and open space, impermeable limit and infinite potential.

The relationship she has with science is wonderfully multifaceted, as Paterson uses high-tech processes, collaborates with technical specialists and acknowledges forwarded-thinking theories, but pairs them with commonplace, antiquated, household technology in an attempt to explain the incomprehensible. Cornelia Parker can once again be called upon as a contemporary precedent for this way of working. In ‘Cold Dark Matter: An Exploded View’ (1991) for example, Parker used the everyday objects of a garden shed to make a four dimensional ‘diagram’ of the Big Bang, existing in both time and space (Searle 1991). Of course the exploded shed is not an exacting interpretation of creation, but the suspension by wires of the objects in space certainly gives a visual indication of the supernatural. In the article ‘Material Girl’, Jacky Klein describes how Parker enjoys “measuring the epic with the everyday, the monumental with the mundane", which is exactly what Paterson does in her 2008 installation Light Bulb to Simulate Moonlight (Klein 2007).

Depictions of nature and celestial mechanisms have been a constant throughout the history of humankind, so it is curious to observe the recent shifts in how these subjects are being addressed. Less representational approaches began in the 1960s, with conceptualism, Land Art and site specific practices; in Hans Haacke’s renowned Condensation Cube, first produced in 1963, he harnesses nature itself, presenting the process of water transforming as art. Similar uses of natural phenomena include De Maria’s Lightning Field (1977), Andy Goldsworthy’s Snowball Drawings (1992) and most recently Sonja Bäumel’s Cartography of the Human Body (2010), elevating the growth of bacteria to exhibited artwork. Paterson verges on this way of working, presenting natural processes, such as ice melting, with only minor physical interventions. In one article, it was questioned whether her works should be classed as “mere scientific experiments” instead of art (Egere-Cooper 2008), deliciously exemplifying the need for new terminology, such as Bourriaud’s Altermodern.

Transience and the consciousness of time’s passing is an integral notion in Paterson’s work that seems to permeate every aspect of its conception and its receipt (Venables 2013). Sense of physical scale in relation to the Universe’s incomprehensible expanse is also paired with an acute awareness of time, and the relative brevity of the human life. Langjökull, Snæfellsjökull, Solheimajökull (2007) is undoubtedly one of the artist’s most beautifully poetic formulations, where recordings of three Icelandic glaciers were pressed into records and cast in the glaciers’ own frozen meltwater; the sound of the real glaciers melting degenerates as the records slowly thaw. Immediately, links can be drawn with American composer William Basinski’s Disintegration Loops (2001), albums carrying the sounds of orchestral melodies progressively deteriorating as they play out on fragile magnetic tape. There are many things that can be discussed about these powerful conceptual works, not least their use of time as medium. Holland Cotter writes that “Art is all tied up in time. Time is its subject and its substance.”, encapsulating the self-referential nature of both events, where decay and mortality are played out in the work and as the work (Cotter 2006). What is also interesting is how an artist and a composer have come to make very similar works that test the boundaries of their respective fields, suggesting a corresponding shift in creative practices even beyond fine art.

The transformation that art has undergone and the state of flux in which remains might be explained by the rapid and ongoing development of electronic devices throughout the 20^th and 21^st Centuries. As Charlie Gere observes, from the very beginnings of civilisation the use of technology (tools) has been intrinsic to art-making, and the history of art is likewise the history of technology (Gere 2006: 13). Therefore technology tells the story of what it is like to be alive at any point in time. Paterson’s use of technology is not just functional, it is integral to the concepts of time and mortality that she explores; it is also curiously divided in two contrasting applications that marry closely in her works. (Benjamin 2012). Firstly, there is the use of cutting-edge equipment and advanced astronomical electronics that enables her to probe into the Universe, exposing with each discovery, how fleeting our lives and our Earth is in comparison. Then, there is the inclusion of slightly familiar but outdated communication technologies, such as record players, cathode ray TVs, even handwritten letters, which serve once again as self-referential embodiments of how technology, life and function subside. It is only with time and retrospect that these connotations of obsolescence can be accumulated; thus, ironically, Paterson’s use of antiquated technology, similarly with that of notable contemporaries Tacita Dean, Tris Vonna-Michell and Susan Phillips, is a characteristic that identifies her practice as unquestionably modern.

In this essay I have discovered that temperaments of Bourriaud’s Altermodernism feature in all of the themes I have discussed; globalisation is the greatest example of contracted distance and time, Paterson’s relationship to science and astronomy epitomises the modern hybrid practice, and nothing could describe the sentiment of altermodern processes better than programmed transience and an awareness of time’s passing. In unpicking the peculiarities of individual works I have come to understand how she appropriates processes and skills from other fields of research and uses them to communicate her ideas; this will inevitably contribute to the shifting artistic mediascape. Connections with science strike me as particularly prevalent, and have already started to demand new roles and methods of joint research. Technology as medium can be observed as a most interesting example of how art is continuing traditions of adapting to the inventions of the time, whilst simultaneously being approached with forward-thinking but backwards-looking attitudes.  I have also encountered aspects of Paterson’s practice that are shown to directly descend from historical ways of working, such as Conceptualism and new-media art, but they are largely used in partnerships or amalgamations, which add an often poetic complexity to the work’s ongoing trajectory.