| Artist: | Peter Halley |
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|---|---|---|
| Title: | Prison with Underground Conduit | |
| Date: | 1985 | |
| Nationality: | American | |
| Context: | Postmodern Plurism | |
| Movement: | Neo-Geo | |
| Materials: | ||
| Subject: looks like Minimalism's hard-edge geometric abstraction, except Halley tells us: "My works are not abstract." So he wants us to read these abstract forms as representational; what do they represent? The geometry of our FAX world of computers and TV screens. This is Neo-Geo, a revisionist view of Minimalism that adds a conceptual content for a Hyperreal late 20th c. context. Halley only simulates Minimalism; his shapes are meant to be read metaphorically, not just formally. The box forms and circuit networks are metaphors for our post-industrial Information Age. He thus adds extra-pictorial baggage to the "purity" of Modernism. Here he puts prison bars on the Modernist square suggesting that geometry is not something perfect, but imprisoning. The image reads like a plug socket that offers only two possibilities: on and off. Computer chips with electronic circuits become our only support system. Speaks of the cell-like isolation of individuals who only meet on line. Electricity as the only connection to the world and others. Style: hard-edge geometry, but asking for a read other than the purely abstract and formal. Going against the stripped down, lean, "less is more" aesthetic of reductionist forms of Minimalism. Uses Pop colors. Considers his work not coldly formal, but emotional: simulations of a computer aesthetic. Context: Neo-Geo as a revisionist revival of hard-edge geometric painting, but now embracing the extra-pictorial "baggage" of associations and metaphors that Greenberg's Formalism tried to rid itself of (but which they never did get rid of completely). Existentialism seems back, but updated for a high tech world of corporate headquarters that redefines the void as an information glut. The problem of meaningful human communication in the Information Age. | ||
