US ECU UL MONS ONT SOUTEAUS UA Monsieur Abraham BENG + Madime Ha BIARD LUSATION BEC PHOT: ala Diecion Rigtonae des Affnes Calewrdles Mase d'Arbois Adjin as Affires Caller de a Vile dArh + Monsieur Dominique LECLERE Dinecteur des Srices Techniques de le Vile Arbo HERIEY atest trans, a ‘ i arn/ Baan, New: To., sh NECHYATAL/ Cuts ANDERSON / Thomas GAVEL Mie CHEVALIER / at FUDEE Carter HOUGKIN / Chratol KORLHGFER/ Peter KOGLER/ Steve MILLER / bert MORGAN / Matt MULLIEAM / Peter EY / Philp POEOCK / Tina POTTER / ik SHIM ‘ous cea UU ONT meiGe LES TLS: Joseph NECHVATAL A Chratise DE LIONIERES POUR LES TRAQUETIONS commana cenena: Jauegh NECHVATAL © Les anteurs, Conseretion Dépantementale des Masées du Jora NerdUniversal Crimes of Love. The artists in this exhibition are united in their search for the key of life. Like medieval scientists trying to weigh the soul, these artists arrange experiments to capture the human ‘consciousness and determine its form and function. All the tricks of scientific inquiry are enlisted, so that every element of potential instruction is examined, charted, reduced to pure number and assigned a place in a vast array of information. As the information deduced by our artists becomes more refined, so it becomes more dense and emblematic, emerging finally as an image - - an art object in which human understanding is reified. In these scientific and spirited works, the artist attempts to siaunch the flow of chaos and locate the universe in the every-day paradigm, an attempt which results in transcendence. Our emerging techno-mediacratic society is ruled by a system of advanced information dispersal which sweeps us along in a deadening flood of facts characterezed by a virtual anarchy of excess. Excess contains the dialectic of the purely mathematical opposed to the weakness of the flesh; it is addressed in the mind/body split. Excess is like the Beast known by the number (666) ; it is mutant, cancerous, threatening, yet it can provide a means of transcendence by drowning Self in a flood of Other and escaping the boundaries of convention. Left unordered, excess is chaos, but controlled, we may designate it as culture and celebrate our ability to keep away the Void. ‘To control excess we construct a conceptual matrix in which it can be contained, Caught like the Gorgon on Perseus” shield, the artist-hero captures excess in image and sign, crossreferenced by the prescriptions of culture. This may appear as celebration when itis in fact a form of fixation, and act of magic and cannibalistic voodoo. Describing chaos in stasis, the artist transfers power to himself, as the controller of barely visible forces of creation. Hewing a stable doorway of access to a zone of hot mental processes, the artist creates an object that triggers our internal memory with instructions to decode our position in the universe and to grasp the human condition, De Sade is our jumping off point in an intellectual lineage that pursues a fugue of the senses into capturing a yet to be discovered framemork of order, the aesthetic equivalent of a unified field theory. In such a framework, we might define the correlations between genetic recombination and thought pattern, memory and decay, manipulation and disease. It is clear that these interstices exist, bbut their precise significance eludes us. The brain, acting as a highly evolved pattern finding device, deduces trends of variation and progression and thereby arrives at meaning. It is the mutant and anarchistic that prove the most interesting, often serving as the genesis of anew pattern, a dendritic branching into the unknown,