There’s a whole heap of madness going on in most people’s minds, most of the time, isn’t there? Unlike everyone else, however, artist Simon Tyszko has the good sense to set it free, run with it, and allow his wildest thoughts to become touchable. Like the full-sized Dakota airplane wing installed in his flat on the fifth floor of a Fulham council estate. Or his work in cocaine, Absolute Hypocrisy, that made a criminal of the buyer – the ‘deal’ taking place in a Parisian hotel room. His practice is an ode to what-if, a punk-prayer to the possible. His latest show, in the arch space at the Beaconsfield Gallery, is a cornucopia of his most recent explorations in tangibility – some of the best bits that have made it from mind to matter. So go play at The UnFunFair today. Vyvian Raoul LeCool
A Text by Peter Suchin
The UnFunFair:
adapted from an text written for Moderneonlights 2011
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“Yellow and then black in the wink of an eye and then yellow again”: this line from Claude Simon’s The Battle of Pharsalus, reads like a description of a moment in the pattern or cycle of a neon work by Simon Tyszko, for whom that medium has taken on a paradigmatic role. [1]
For neon is the signifier of the Modern par excellence, the ever-present yet ethereal element of illumination, of a saturation and penetration of light to all spaces and places where Capital – that is the motive force and social system we call “Late Capitalism” or “Post-Industrial Society” – has penetrated. Neon – the name itself, from the Greek, means “new” – exemplifies ultra “cool” technology, it is the “mechanical” gift of the gods that makes the contemporary city shimmer and glimmer like no other technology of light before it. Paradoxically glamorous and mundane at one and the same time, neon both illuminates the western world and renders it opaque, hides in its folds and waves of brightness the falsehoods perpetuated ad nauseum by the advertising industry.
The technological wonder that is neon itself makes this evident and visible through its functional action of illumination, but its use within advertising and within the very fabric of the city itself is its means of disguise, pretending to the apparent neutrality of a utilitarian device whilst its snazzy ubiquity makes marketing, glamour and glitz appear as natural (as opposed to entirely partisan) modes of presentation, influence and address. |
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Notes 1. Claude Simon, The Battle of Pharsalus, Jonathan Cape, 1971. These words constitute both the first and last lines of the book. 2. Roland Barthes, Roland Barthes, Hill and Wang, 1977, p. 143. |
Peter Suchin is an artist and critic, contributing to Art Monthly, Frieze, Mute and many other journals. |
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