|
aeroplastics
|
contemporary | ||||||
| Peter Hutchinson | |||||||
“I only wish I could live long enough to cultivate Martian sand cactus and Venusian orchids...”  Tchaïkovsky’s Dream 1996 Spanning the primitivism of the “return to the land” and science fiction of the leap into future, the career Peter Hutchinson, in Land Art and the Narrative Art, is one of those rare ecological visions that provided us with a version of Flower Power at the height of the hippies era, one that escape the confines of the laws of the genre. With his very first earthworks, the question of language quickly came to the fore because of the need to supplement the observations made in situ with photographic documents as well as written commentary. However, il the transition from Land Art to Narrative Art, wich was defined as such in 1973 during the "story" exhibition held at the Gibson Gallery in New york, culminates in the production of graphic works, in the form of photo collage with handwritten captions, these will most often still be landscape. If the fusion of man and his environment continues to be the crucial theme of peter Hutchinson’s work, the humour is the necessary counterpoint. Just as science fiction was for ecology, humour is, for romanticism, a remedy against corniness. “Foraging” (1971), which is presented as an account (in the form of articles, films and photos) of a mountain survival trip embarked upon by the artist, represents rather well this ironic distance, wich prevents the work from having the heaviness of New Age romanticism.  Rhododendron Forest 1995
for further information contact Jerome Jacobs aeroplastics main page |
