SingartThrough The Wormhole of Time
The British Broadcasting Corporation has a highly popular science-fiction television programme, “Doctor Who”, that depicts a humanoid alien (a Time Lord) called the Doctor who explores the universe, from the past to the future, in his TARDIS, a sentient time travelling space ship with an exterior that appears as a blue British police box – a common sight in 1963 Britain, when the TV series first aired.
It gripped my imagination as a little girl and to this day I still faithfully follow the Doctor as he faces a variety of enemies in his bid to save humanity and alien civilisations by righting the world’s and galaxies’ wrongs.
Hence, it does not take much to make me fully comprehend Thai artist, Rirkrit Tiravanija’s persistent fascination with time travel and its equally persistent centrality in the themes that he has chosen to run through his artwork: for example, his masterpieces in his “Tomorrow Is Another Fine Day” London exhibition in 2005 were permeated with the motif highly popularized by the 1985 American comic science fiction film, “Back To The Future”.
In his current exhibition at the Singapore Tyler Print Institute (STPI), inspiringly titled “Time Travellers Chronicle (Doubt): 2014 – 802,701 AD”, Tiravanija’s explorations into this genre draws inspiration from a variety of vital sources.
Unsurprisingly, H. G. Wells’ “The Time Machine” is 1 central pillar: published in 1895, it coined and popularized the concept that a time machine is needed to travel purposefully and selectively into the past or the future. Only in Tiravanija’s case, the medium for travelling forwards or backwards in time is irrevocably tied to food and drink – both of which he 3D printed.
For one, he harks back to his early days as an artist – 1992 to be exact – where he offered visitors to his 1st solo exhibition in New York Thai food cooked on site. For another, he has been working on a science fiction novel of his own, where his protagonist goes through the wormhole by consuming a bowl of steaming hot Thai curry noodles.
For the 3rd, Tiravanija recalls an after-exhibition drinks session by fellow artists. Having lost count of the number of Nigrone cocktails they have sloshed down their jubilant throats, he found them slumped on the floor as bare as the day they were born. And with absolutely no recollection of how they had ended up in their birthday suits. It was as if the specific alcohol consumed had taken them through a wormhole at Star Trek-like warp speed too.
The 3rd medium through which Tiravanija wants STPI’s visitors to transverse through space and time is that of trusty chrome. That he derives after hearing his friend’s little son say to him, ‘Of course in the future, everything will be in chrome’ – a direct quote from an episode of the popular American TV cartoon “SpongeBob SquarePants” that had 1st aired in 1999.
In that particular series, the main character Squidwart gets locked in a freezer, from which he escapes 2000 years later and learns from his descendants that everything has indeed become chrome – and so, as have Tiravanija been inspired to flush over his futuristic mono prints and mixed media at STPI.
Yet the influence of Well’s “The Time Machine” does not end there: its Time Traveller goes roughly 30 million years into the future from his own time and witnesses 1st hand some of the last living things on a dying Earth – menacing reddish crab-like creatures slowly wandering the blood-red beaches chasing butterflies in a world covered in only lichen-like plant life.
Reading that synergizes in Tiravanija’s creative mind the unfolding of life through famed naturalist Charles Darwin’s theory of natural selection and the evolution of his Tree of Life. And so this New York and Chiang Mai based artist chronicles in 8 “Chapters” of silvered mono prints, with accompanying chromed pedestals and 3D printed artifacts, the revolutionary changes in speciation from now to 802,701 AD – where the Tree of Life 1st drastically diversifies and grows in branching complexity (as we see mapped from results of the scientific Genome project); only to regress to Darwin’s simple drawing of the Tree of Life again at time’s ultimate end.
And through it all Tiravanija emphasizes that the laws of nature has to be completely obeyed in all of the essence of time. Life has always to be paternally arranged after the Fibonacci sequence of integral numbers: 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55, 89, 144, etc. etc. etc… regardless of the simplicity or complexity of the species of life living at any point in finite time.
This belief draws sustenance from this fact: the sequence has always existed in nature since time memorial: it dictates the branching in trees, the arrangement of leaves on a stem, the fruitlets of a pineapple, the flowering of artichoke, an unfurling fern, the arrangement of a pine cone, the family tree of honeybees, and the list goes on. Some scientists have even claimed that Fibonacci’s numbers govern the breeding of rabbits, the seeds on a sunflower, the spiral of shells in all sorts of snails, and the curve of waves.
And Tiranvanija knows that this is accomplished always in obedience to time as attested by the constant rising and setting of the sun and the eclipse of the moon. The last he captures succinctly with “Moon Rise – Time Is Setting – Tomorrow Never Arrives” for “We Can Travel The Sun When It Is Setting”: imprinting Darwin’s and the Genome project’s Trees of Life onto some of the full blown circular faces of his many lunar creations.
Still how will our future really pan out? That he thinks will be written as the long mane of crowning glory continues to grow from his head: so we have to hope that it is as his artwork says, “(His) Hair… Can Predict The Past, The Present And The Future” – the way growth rings in the trunks of trees tell the type of summer or winter each towering plant has under gone for a particular year. Thus showing us the environmental conditions its exact location has experienced as well.
Yet can we patiently wait for this ever so gradual growth? Does this not make the future a fact of the present if viewed now? Or of the past if examined the next day?
Are we not more inclined to take the leap through curry noodles, Nigrone cocktails and chrome wormholes into the vast galactic oceans in which our imaginations swim a la H.G. Wells? And work towards bringing our positively pictured futures into pristine reality.
What if our projections into the tomorrow of tomorrows are bleak? Well, surely we share Tiravanija’s ingenuity and with it, we will bring about a future far better than that pictured by Wells.
So gleefully hyper drive through time via Rirkrit Tiravanija’s works of art at the Singapore Tyler Print Institute at 41 Robertson Quay, Singapore 238236 before his more than sci-fi exhibition ends on 28 June this year.
