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Peter
von Tiesenhausen Canadian Art, Summer 2001 |
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Canadian Art Summer 2001 Volume 18, Number 2 Peter von Tiessenhausen John Scott The pairing of artists John Scott and Peter von Tiesenhausen in the exhibition "Hydrogen Song" at the Kitchener-Waterloo Art Gallery this past winter was brilliant, and yet obvious. Employing similarly dark and foreboding imagery, the artists raise uncomfortable issues of utmost pertinence to our contemporary condition. Scott is certainly the more familiar artist; his work has been exhibited from coast to coast over the last two decades, and he was the winner of a Governor General's Award in Visual and Media Arts last year. For 'Hydrogen Song,' curator Clint Roenisch selected both older and more recent works. These included four large drawings, a hulking motorcycle titled The Avatar (The Deathless Boy) (1997) and a version of Scott's notorious Trans Am Apocalypse No. 3 (1998)-a 1983 Pontiac Trans Am with the entire Book of Revelation crudely scratched into its black surface. Tough, raw and direct, these works elicit fear and despair about the military/industrial-technology complex that propelled humankind headlong through the 2oth century and has been a catalyst to our increasing estrangement from nature. Younger than Scott, von Tiesenhausen has recently emerged onto the national scene with inventive and widely praised environmental and site-specific works, carved wood sculptures, drawings and videos. With his use of primarily organic materials and his frequent practice of abandoning his outdoor sculptures to the forces of nature, his work is frequently read as eco-art. However, this is to be only partly the case, since his themes probe the intrinsic relationships between humans and nature. His most impressive work in the show was Revelation (2000), an enormous wall constructed from full plywood sheets. After scorching the plywood, von Tiesenhausen used an axe and a chainsaw to carve primitive-looking figures engulfed in flames, then left the axe alongside the fallen wood chips for the duration of the show. At the upper left, an obscure image of a boat floats over the scene, seemingly a means of escape for the burning figures. The sheer scale, together with the charred surface of the wood, creates a visceral impact, with references to fire and water as dualistic forces of destruction and regeneration. Equally impressive in scale and presence was Bell (1997), a rough but exquisitely carved functional bell suspended from the gallery's ceiling by a cast-iron logging chain. The deep red patina and subtle aroma of its bee-propolis-covered surface support a symbolic reading of the work as a ritual object, adding a spiritual aspect to von Tiesenhausees investigations of natural and human life cycles. Clearly, wood carving is the medium where von Tiesenhausen is at his best. Other works in the exhibition fare less well. Trinity (2ooo) is a forest-like installation of pruned tree branches requiring viewers to stand in three designated places in the gallery, from which the branches roughly resemble standing figures. A clever gimmick, indeed, but without the visual or conceptual power of Bell or Revelation. In the end, despite their dire warnings against the destructive tendencies of our species, von Tiesenhausen and Scott invest deeply in the belief that art's inherent immaterial energies can provoke a transformative process, and that the process is quite capable of salvaging the human spirit from dark and tyrannicalforces. DAVID LISS |