tim(e)'s head

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Tim(e) s HeadBy Mihaela Brebenel

Thursdays in London are eventful. And not only because of lost prophets that you can

come across in your normal transport routine on a night bus, giving you a secretinsight on the house William Blake used to live in. This can happen on a Saturday, as

well. First Thursdays are the celebration of lively patterns, worn out shoes and pocket

dogs carried around by jewel accessorized fingers in a derive through the labyrinthical

streets of the East.

It is nothing like Fitzgeralds accounts of modernist parties, where an assortment of

dandyness meets social games and intriguing conversations. No, it is the narrow

streets that suddenly create ant-like formations in front of small entrances. It is the tin

cans, plastic glasses and bite-size wrappers that take the stage. It is the dim lights of a

small gallery space that accommodates whispers and laughter, soundly augmentedopinions and rushes of distrust over the value of what is there on display. And it is art

that is hanging! Not only on the wall, but from the ceiling, reaching out of a crevasse,

impending your movement, projecting itself on your toes. And the whole setting is the

artistic cocktail party of creative of art makers, movers, shakers, buyers,

commentators, activists, naives, believers, promiscuous compromisers.

Of these, I have met some. Of the works, I have seen some. Of them, I let myself open

to one.

On the street named Vyner, the Wilkinson gallery presents Room Divider. On theexhibitions interrogations, pursues and inquisitive drives, curator Michael Bracewell

speaks through an A4 paper and 5 paragraphs. Glamour and intellectualism, mythic

interiors that abolish time and drive both enchantment and illusion are elicited from

two texts by F. Scott Fitzgerald, respectively Simon Puxley and brought forward by

Bracewell into the works of this exhibition.

Paradoxically enough, the same mysticism of the street, the same glamour

intellectualism, chatty cocktail attendees contracting spaces and expanding time form

the scene of Thursdays experience.

What Room Divider essays in the works displayed is mirrored back by the art cocktailthat is the public entering the gallery. In return, they are mirrored by the works they

look at and they reflect the tensions held within the gallery space, between machine

and sensuality, nervousness and languor, seriousness and jest, nostalgia and

futurology, chaos and order.[1]

Trapped between bodies of others, holding iPhones, sending emails, making their way

amongst carved wood, digital projections, turning to a friend to share a witty joke and

then collapsing under the weight of a genuinely serious thought. Physicality and

virtuality intertwine in this space that can no longer stand as a Room, divided and

rejoined by the works, the setting, the bodies.


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Fitzgeralds account refers to a room that was evolving into something else,

becoming everything a room was not.[2] Becoming. Becoming physical, becoming

virtual, becoming human, becoming animal, the in-betweens revealing their

potentialities, intensities reaching their plateaus, not consecutively or consequentially,

but permanently in movement.[3]

A massive projection covers one of the walls that divides one exhibition room from

another. In between the bodies becoming and the rooms becoming, it interrogates

notions of space and time, it distances itself from film but brings together a narrative

of virtuality exposed. Its reflections on the spectator faced with the rawness of the

digital medium both contracts and expands the room. The watching eye extends its

retina over the colors, shape shifting the experience as the path amongst visitors takes

a narrower form, then extends, releasing the full potentialities of the pixelated screen

on what Dziga Vertov called the too immobile eye of the human.

What looks back at you from the massive wall is the openness of the projection to

affect you and be affected. Its digital body stands naked in the eye of the beholder; it

reaches in shame to cover its pixels by a continuous movement; it reminds of the TV

screens no reception grey and white dots. However, that was opaque, while the

restless nature of the real- time computer generated projection is translucent, spread

and almost gaseous. In its nakedness it stands in front of the human eye; when facing

it, the body of the spectator becomes pixelated, its like the projection covers itself

with the human skin, it engulfs all human form that interacts with it.

And so used to pushing buttons, dragging and dropping, touching and creating

inferences with the digital media they use, the cocktail of artistic people engage withit: they marvel out loud, take photos, stretch their hands and bodies and in

exclamations:

It is pixelated!

You are pixelated!

It makes me pixelated!

Being, making and becoming pixelated are just some of the stances that Tim Heads

installation springboards into. Positing, posing, becoming a photo are some of the

others. For the simple and clear reason that it drives the impulse to use other digitalmedia to capture it, for the person who is pixelated and for your immobile eye in

which you do not trust to render something so specifically digital to sight.

The choices of how to relate to these works are not predetermined and place us in a

more direct physical and reflexive relationship with the material substance of our

dominant technologies.[4]

The possible disenchantment coming from the acquaintance with the naked body of

the digital is equaled by the seductive response of putting your own body in-between,

only if just to see what happens. Tim Head wishes to produce work stripped of a

narrative, but this piece can actually be read as an allegorical creation story: human

marveling at the most hidden sides of the digital that he created, watching this


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exposed physicality that he- the man- never expected it- the digital- to reveal and all

this climaxing with the human trying on the digitals skin.

Tim Head was born in 1946 in London and has exhibited widely internationally. His

solo shows include MoMA, Oxford, Whitechapel Art Gallery in London, the British

Pavilion, Venice Biennale and ICA, London.[5]

[1] Wilkinson Gallery, Room Divider, 2 July- 15 August 2010, Exhibition Statement.

[2] F. Scott Fitzgerald, Tender is The Night 1934.

[3] The notions of becoming understood in the terms exposed by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari

in A Thousand Plateaus. Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Wiltshire: CPI Antony Rowe, 2004)

[4] Tim Head, The Digital Dimension. Artists Statement. 2009, information

fromwww.ucl.ac.uk/slade/timhead/texts/th_digitaldimension.htm

[5] Selected bibliography accessed on Tim Heads

websitehttp://www.ucl.ac.uk/slade/timhead/selbiog.htm

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