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Art emerges from small sources of inspiration. Proust had his madeleine cookies. Nietzsche had Wagner’s opera. Artist Iain Kerr has a bunch of seagulls in Cleveland.
OK, it goes a lot deeper than that. There’s paleontology, fossil excavations, Inuit history, global warming, cat harnessing experiments, Darwin and the philosophy of time. It is, you might say, dense.
Kerr is an associate professor of interdisciplinary studio and theory at the Maine College of Art, who came to speak at the University of Maine Wednesday evening. He began by describing a recent installation piece, “Deep Time, Rapid Time,” forged in collaboration with the artist collective Spurse.
The project space was designed as “a typical new media show – a dark space where you’ll watch a video, and won’t know when it begins or ends, and get kind of frustrated.,” said Kerr. But the space evolves as you travel through the gallery. Squeeze through a dark hole, and get covered with two-million-year old dust. Another passageway takes you into a humid room where felt-covered books absorb water from the air. Lights change color to reflect the mean color spectrum of the entire universe since the big bang – compressed into a time span of two months.
The exhibits were a bit like a trip to a children’s science museum, if children’s museums transformed themselves radically based on which secret passageway you discovered.
The driving force – in an exhibition, in all things – is time. Kerr has driven through western Kansas, seen highways that cut through mountains, revealing time in the layers of rock. As you move, as mountains shrink or expand, you are moving through time on an incomprehensible scale. In western Kansas, massive chalk mountains jut out of the landscape; remnants of the days when America was covered over by a massive inland sea.
In one piece Kerr presented, a number of sound generators are synched to interact with geological data, seismic shifting and methane expulsions. Each time the data changes, so does the sound generated, programmed to react in conjunction with one another. So if methane levels rise, it’s not that the volume goes up – instead, small things change about each tone, triggering other events which, in turn, trigger more events until some sort of new stabilization is reached.
The piece operates on a unique scale – a scale that models vast, incomprehensible stretches of time. It is a scale that renders human emotions, ethics and cultures into a model railroad village of dense existential despair. But Kerr was just getting started.
“The moment you dig out a piece of uranium, you are committing to a 230-million-year scale,” Kerr said. It is an event that transcends anything humans can rationally comprehend, beginning or ending. Kerr’s inspiration as an artist comes from looking at these time frames.
Humans evaluate time as a series of steps, “concrete cycles within time.” We measure time through sunsets, weather patterns. But none of this, Kerr said, is actually time. It’s just a series of steps – consequences, seen in succession.
Take Darwin. Or, rather, take a prehistoric fish and introduce it to Darwin. He’d tell you: Those fins, they serve a purpose. The finless fish lived underwater, flopping around in a sea where fins would be rather helpful. So fins began to emerge. But our hands, they serve a purpose as hands. We tend to think of this as progress, evolution or some kind of grand design. But our hands, at one time, had to function as those fins. They emerged from a practical purpose, existed to serve that purpose, and slowly got better at it. That process resulted in a hand. It could have happened completely differently – in fact, it must have, in a few lost evolutionary moments. The moment a fin meets land, a whole new set of options opens up.
Everything we do, every cycle we observe, is the byproduct of its relationship to something else. A chess piece serves its purpose, but also exists in relationship to other chess pieces. And so, the interaction of specific pieces defines an emergent quality – a system which, in turn, defines the individual pieces.
Which brings us to Cleveland. Cleveland’s Cuyahoga river has a man-made mouth. Ships bring coal through it, but only to a certain point upstream. These ships stop, and the river’s flow, further up, slows down. Fish like these spots – they’re silent and still. The ships load coal through mechanized processes – human beings don’t hang out in coal yards. But seagulls do.
And so, the birds come from miles around to hang out at the coal plant, feasting on the fish pool and enjoying their isolation from humans and predators. An intersection forms and a new space emerges: a spot on the river that has been transformed into the largest seagull rookery for hundreds of miles.
“The seagull doesn’t consider itself to be crossing a threshold,” Kerr said. “It simply sees it as a food source.”
Kerr believes this is a space artists are ignoring: the intersection of systems and the byproducts those systems produce. They emerge, develop, exchange and mutate. From this position comes the need to suspend judgment – “a kind of profound stupidity,” he calls it. You can’t ask experimental questions if you start out trying to preserve ideas.
Research – a scientific approach – is at the core of Kerr’s artistic practice. It is less about the creation of a product, or an object, or an experience, than about diving into the explorations of the ways systems intersect.
None of this theory is made explicit in the environments Kerr has helped to create. Instead, users are immersed in representations of his findings, left to come to their own conclusions.
