MAD INFINITUM
Artist Richard Penn is dotty about the cosmos — and will never give up his search for the unfindable. He spoke to Oliver Roberts about his new show in Joburg
IF thoughts of the universe and your place in it keep you up at night and send you trembling beneath the duvet in existential panic, then Richard Penn’s new exhibition at The Origins Centre is probably something you should avoid.
The collection — titled Surface Detail — is part of Penn’s exploration into the dark intricacies of infinite space-time, into notions of reality and the beautiful, horrifying question of whether anybody else is out there, trying to reach us through the cold static.
The very, very big and the shockingly small, our human understanding of these things and our limitations in trying to understand them — these have been the motifs pulsing at the core of the artist’s work since the beginning.
“When I was in third-year varsity, I started taking pictures of my father on very old, grainy black and white film,” Penn says.
“I took pictures of him doing very domestic things, brushing his teeth, putting on a shirt, that sort of thing, and the photos would suddenly remind me, throw me back to my childhood where I’d be watching my grandfather, and it got me to thinking about how gesture and mannerisms can be inherited.
“For about 10 years I would go back to these pictures and play with them, zoom in, zoom in, zoom in, until all I was looking at was this sea of dots which were actually the back of his neck — but obviously it was the universe, stars, photons, the very large and the very small, this protoplasm of nothingness.
“So it was a very intimate way of getting into the stars, getting into the idea of origins and all that stuff.”
Dots. Penn’s first exhibitions were of works made up almost entirely of dots. And still today, in some of the works at Origins, you’re going to see shapes and shards made coherent by collections of fine-liner dots.
That’s if you look real close. Stand back, retreat a couple of million light-years and what you’re looking at is a cell or a topographical map. But hang on — doesn’t that human cell also kind of look like that Hubble image you once saw of an exploded star? Isn’t that topographical map also a continent or a jutting image of Mars’s surface captured by the Curiosity rover?
“To the viewer there’s an enormous amount of information,” Penn says. “There’s tectonic plates, there’s all sorts of information going on there. But there’s also straight lines which look like something happened, the leg of an insect kind of thrown in there, fossil data. There’s a lot of information but when you look inside those things there’s never enough.
“We get images back from Pluto and Mars, we see water on Mars and get so excited about it but we need to know more all the time and in order to find more it’s going to take, like, another five years to get another probe out there, and then you find something else, and then it will take another 10 years, you know . . . Our lives are too short; that’s what also gets me really upset is that I’m not going to be there when something’s found out.
“So in the work there’s this sense of enormous amounts of data and information and that’s why the marks are so small, because they carry that idea.”
It’s a lonely outlook. Tormenting. That echo upon echo upon echo of knowledge and information and discovery; the maddening
idea that once you’ve solved one thing, there’s something else to be solved beyond that and beyond that and beyond that, ad infinitum.
It’s the nature of the universe or God or whatever you want to call it. Always discoverable but never solvable. You could call it the universe. You could call it God. You could also call it the human condition. One enormous question with a billion possible tiny little answers.
“I think what’s really come to the fore for me is our limitations on various levels of our ability,” Penn says.
“Because while we’re able to map a planet that is 10 000 light-years away, we’ll never get there, ever. But we know that planet has a rock, we know what its core is made of, what’s in its atmosphere, how long its day is — we know so many things because of curiosity and our brains’ ability to create these probes and these measuring devices that can do that. So there’s this incredible ability to know so much more than we’re capable of knowing, that we’re set up to know, but then there are so many levels that we’re just incapable of understanding.”
One of Penn’s pieces, Lost, is an oil painting of a space capsule seemingly drifting through black light without anyone at the helm. Or maybe there is someone inside, alive, able to steer the thing back to Earth, but they’ve let go, they’ve yielded to gravity and now they’re just spinning — spinning towards the possible hope of an answer as to why they even exist and how they became a sentient collection of carbon, nitrogen and oxygen atoms. Sentient enough to care.
It’s Penn’s belief, or hope, that artists and philosophers and scientists will one day collaborate to speed up the time it takes to get to the next level of humanity’s insatiable need to understand itself. Artistic whimsy and cool scientific pragmatism.
“An artist’s job is to imagine what’s possible, what can potentially be possible,” he says. “A scientist takes data and tries to make that data understandable and coherent for humanity. Then the artist asks, ‘What can we possibly know now?’ ”
Despite, or rather because of, the frustrations he feels about his essentially doomed quest, Penn intends on making art that seeks solutions to the conflicts of the very, very big and the very, very small.
“This is the world I want to be in,” he says. “I have to be making these kinds of marks with these kinds of thoughts in mind in order to alleviate the anxiety.”
Surface Detail is on at The Origins Centre Museum, University of the Witwatersrand, until November 29
‘I have to be making these kinds of marks with these kinds of thoughts in mind
to alleviate the anxiety’