Fundamental Forces was the title of my solo show at Gravity Gallery in 2019. Three bodies of work were included in the exhibition: Fundamental Forces, Horror Vacui, and Controlled Feeding Status.
Art does not represent the visible; rather it makes visible.”
Paul Klee
While Taylor Hokanson’s Fundamental Forces sounds like some sort of military industrial task force with claims to a super-hero storyline, the exhibition is a gathering of almost sci-fi, proto-science tinkerings with molecules, radio waves, electro-magnetic currents, and behind-the-scenes punishments of the carceral state. There is a narrative stitching the parts of this exhibition together, a story about physical structures of the most basic kind, about how things are made at a level that is unseen but demonstrably present, demonstrably material. On a technical level, all of these projects are produced using the 3D modeling software, Rhino. The over-arching theme of Fundamental Forces aligns with Klee’s observation that art makes the invisible visible. Certainly making the unseen seen is the stuff of super-heroes but also qualifies as a revelatory scheme worthy of any artist or scientist working to unmask hidden things. If only we could truly see what surrounds us!
Weird cutlery: This project, “Controlled Feeding Status II,” may seem oddly disruptive given its clear objectness, its hefty visibility as a three dimensional, beautifully made thing. Encased in a lux handmade wooden box lined with green velvet, disfigured eating utensils cast in silver are presented as if expensive jewelry or surreal versions of the family silver. Five forks are lined up, each increasingly displaying more and more tumor-like growths that bubble up all over the tines and handles. These forks call to mind other fantastical tableware such as Salvador Dali’s silver-gilt dessert service with its mollusk patterns, floral-clad snails, spoons with enameled flower bowls, dessert forks with ruby eyes, or Meret Oppenheim’s defamiliarization of an ordinary spoon in her delicious “Fur Breakfast,” a tea cup, saucer, and spoon delicately enrobed in rare gazelle fur. Like the surrealists, Hokanson heightens viewers’ awareness of the eating utensils, the detailed oddity of their forms, the preciousness of the metal. These are tools that serve as emblems of civilization, but here they are disturbingly twisted and deformed. Freed from having to eat with one’s hands, humans are presented instead (as babies often are) with weird instruments designed to mediate our experience of eating. And that’s just the tip of the things that make up the 21st century’s civilized largely unseen forces shaping how and what we are condemned to eat, food laden with the invisible toxic chemicals of agri-business and with microplastics polluting the oceans and fish along with all of the bodies of earth’s inhabitants. Hokanson writes that Nutraloaf, “a behavior modification tool used in some prisons, inspired the project. Nutraloaf is engineered to be technically nutritious and profoundly bland – so bland that a group of Illinois prisoners sued unsuccessfully, to have it classified as cruel and unusual punishment.” A hand-written yellow 3×5 card with the Nutraloaf recipe is attached with tiny brass tacks to the inside of the box. The work makes horrifyingly visible an aspect of the diseased U.S. food system, but also refers to its abject intersection with the force required to maintain the monumental U.S. carceral institution through its practice of feeding prisoners “punishment food.”
The Monumental Prints: Three large-scale computer controlled drypoint etchings, measuring three feet wide, track other fundamental unseen forces that surround everyone and yet make a lot of everyday activities possible. The giant prints constitute a pattern of lines, concentric circles, images of a cell tower and a disembodied hand with thumb and two fingers extended. That hand turns out not to be flashing a gang symbol; rather, it is an illustration of the right hand rule, a nifty trick for remembering the orientation of electromagnetic fields. Radio waves, sine waves, electromagnetic currents—not really what we think about often, if at all—are visualized in a hybrid mode of production. It’s all process—much of it invisible—that brings together Illustrator software, CNC modeling, and a print making method that dates back to the Renaissance seen in the work of Albrecht Dürer and Rembrandt, among many other artists. The technique of incising patterns into a hard surface with a sharp tool probably dates back to pre-history, but what artists love about drypoint is the effect of the burr, that raised edge produced along the furrows created as the tool engraves the plate, whether metal or plexiglass. The lines produced are soft and dense, rather than the more hard-edge lines typical of other techniques of etching and engraving. The delicacy of the burr also means smaller print runs since the pressure of the printing process will eventually flatten the raised edge. These are printed in editions of three. The physicality of the burr makes the illustration of the cell tower and the disembodied hand, actually a photograph of the artist’s hand manipulated in a processing sketch, seem very old school, like the kind of drawings usually found in outdated technical books. The impressive size of the prints, however, elevates such drawings and puts on display what is normally invisible, overlooked, and not very well understood.
Aromatics: The storyline continues to unfold with more revelations of unseen things. In a series of gorgeous prints of tiny molecules, Fundamental Forces hacks into the optical preferences of traditional western aesthetics, but raises the question: why make invisible aromatic molecules visible? Isn’t the sense of smell sufficient? This translation of olfactory material—volatile and ephemeral—into a series of candy colored digital prints, again is all process. Hokanson built a machine he calls Horror Vacui,[1] a large scale imaging device. The artist describes it as consisting of “a mobile platform, capable of moving a large television up and down train-like tracks with computer-controlled precision. As the TV moves along the track, it will display sequential slices of digital models, effectively 3D printing forms in light via long-exposure photography.” The process is geared toward creating a display of aromatic molecules, including benzene, hyacinthin, apricot, cinnamon, naphthalene, and uric acid. The benzene molecule is a very basic hydrocarbon, and many other adjacent molecules found in cigarette smoke, jasmine, cinnamon, peanuts, roses, apricots, peach pits, and naphthalene build off of the elegant simplicity of the benzene ring. The molecules, built of carbon and hydrogen and other atoms, are obviously too tiny to see with the naked eye, but are structures that nonetheless surround us in our everyday life, and indeed enter our bodies when we come into contact with them. They are ordinary, but like many ordinary things, they often are also overlooked—here precisely because they can’t be seen. Despite this invisibility, these molecules are forces to be reckoned with.
This desire to see—scientific to be sure—informs aesthetic practice as well from the Enlightenment to the present. The power of the modern visual regime emerges almost simultaneously with the scientific method, with the German philosopher Immanuel Kant’s theories that the sense of sight rightfully belongs at the top of the sensory hierarchy because vision offers the intellectual distance necessary for critical thought. The sense of smell on the other hand, aligned as it is in Kant’s theory with the animalic and with its proximate nature, enjoys no such position. Kant—along with many influential thinkers after him—relegates smell to the bottom of the sensory hierarchy, and thus deems it unworthy of providing any access to knowledge. The very structure of the brain seems to underscore this hierarchy, with smells traveling to a different part of the brain than visual stimuli. Smell is processed by the limbic system where memories also are stored.
The question is will we understand benzene—or any other aromatic—if we can see it? We know from high school science classes that the benzene molecule is a hydrocarbon composed of six carbon atoms joined in a ring with a single hydrogen atom attached to each. We may also know that benzene is a widely used industrial chemical found in crude oil and gasoline. It’s used to make plastics, resins, synthetic fibers, rubber lubricants, dyes, detergents, drugs and pesticides. The Encyclopedia Britannica notes that it has a faint, sharp odor. If there is one molecule that constitutes our toxic modernity, benzene might be it.
Critical Making: The three distinct projects of Fundamental Forces swim in a context in which there is an infinity of information, along with a persistent anxiety of existential dread, a dread that we cannot see or know the forces that fundamentally shape and control the world we inhabit. From election interference to identity theft and to the very food we eat, the energies we harness, the air we breathe, we are at a loss, often reduced to depression or hopelessness. How to think about or engage with all these forces—the toxicity of agri-business and the prison industrial complex, or electromagnetic currents, radio waves, and aromatic pleasures and toxins swirling around us—prompts Hokanson to make things that are critical of the very state of things. “It’s all just stuff,” he once told me. This exhibition presents evidence of a hands-on practice that desires to make the invisible workings of that stuff visible. The artist takes things apart and raises the question of difference even if, or maybe especially if operative on a very tiny scale. The resultant evidence of this work gathered together in Fundamental Forces asks viewers to contemplate a narrative of transformation, the transformation of things as they go from one scale to another, from the invisible to the visible.
Debra Riley Parr
[1] Horror vacui is Latin for “fear of empty space.” In the visual arts, the term often refers to the preference for filling a composition with detail, leaving no negative space. In science, Aristotle’s use of the phrase comes into play, referring to the notion that nature abhors a vacuum. Of course, aromatics are gases, which tend to fill space entirely.