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Press Release
Meno {2:1} Peter Lewis
Peter Lewis is an artist, curator and writer who has exhibited both within the UK and
internationally since the 1970s. His works, which may
be called 'configurations' (to borrow a term from the
philosopher Alain Badiou) employ a wide variety of methods,
forms and resources.
Their point of correspondence is to be found in Lewis'
approach to his source materials, a process of drawing out or
'subtraction' that results in compositions that are never
calculated or directly nameable. In the process of searching,
working and engaging with the source material, the residue or remainder of this dialogical
activity results in a complex voiding of established values, fixed classifications and neatly
readymade meanings.
For his exhibition at T1+2 Gallery Lewis has taken Plato's
short but rich and vivid dialogue 'Meno' as the starting
point for a process of subtraction, in effect reading it as the script for a markedly new
configuration. Lewis employs the Socratic
'enchelus' (a Greek expression
signifying the idea of challenge or of testing) that motivates Plato's
protagonists, who are conventionally regarded as seriously (but
imprecisely) searching for knowledge through dialogic exchange,
with, however, their intention being to end at an
impasse.
This impasse might be dramatic: an individual subject's
pre-conceptions may collapse, smashing to pieces the
cause-and-effect chain of articulated
meaning, laying bare, with equal measure,
the void at the heart of things. Words just might, in this powerful
and penetrating interruption of the unexamined 'reality', pierce
right through the skin.
In 'Meno', the conversation
opens up the question of the recollection of something that can or cannot be known, setting
in motion a discussion of the nature of knowledge itself. In Meno
{2:1} the dialogue is
'voiced' by subjective and disembodied
entities, with Lewis drawing upon a paradox that is already located in the fact that
Plato's own voice speaks through Socrates, and vice
versa. The search itself, as played out by the protagonists
in 'Meno', is always embarked
upon as a risk, that of betraying what is invisible to it with its own
visibility.
[Text edited by Peter Suchin]
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For Meno {2:1} the main wall
of the gallery is the focus, yet simultaneously the
'blind' of the work. Hundreds
of images from newspapers collected over a one-year period have been painted
over, covering a monumental 30-foot
wall, the newspapers having been re-assembled in the form of a
storyboard, derived, in the first
instance, from the words that are here both buried and retained.
A curtain of felt cuts across the gallery space, preventing and delaying the immediate viewing
of the wall.
The concealment of the 'painting' by
felt, a deliberate holding off of the viewer's direct
encounter, suggests a kind of theatrical mediation, as well
as a means of protecting the work from the outside world. However,
this division of the gallery into two areas also restricts movement, stalls
expectation, breaking the complacency inherent in art gallery conventions of
display. It is neither an 'installation'
of a work nor a 'multi-media'
spectacle, but a counterpart, a dead zone casting shadow on what
is to be seen as acceptable. In front of the makeshift
'stage', speakers and recording equipment
provide a muted soundtrack made from several sources, notably a recording of a performance by the
singer James Scott. Scott had 'appeared'
in the final episode of David Lynch's televisual epic Twin Peaks,
in the Black Lodge (a 'dead zone'),
singing the haunting song 'Under the Sycamore Tree'.
Scott's voice is affective here, forming a foil or oscillation
between the live recordings also employed (those of actors representing the voices of Meno and
Socrates, giving readings from 'Meno'
and from Jacob Klein's published commentary on the text). The
interference to, or interruption of Scott's singing rebounds with
an equal force upon the viewer/listener caught up in the task of listening to the words of the
dialogue. In the film The Dead Zone, [David
Cronenberg, 1983] such a space is located within the
subject's own capacity to release recollection whilst in seizure of a
premonition.
Meno {2:1} is a work that disconnects
the logic of dialogue in asking what might happen outside the predicate, by projecting its
subject's excellence into the contingencies of the present time.
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