Peter Halley , 1953 New York, USA
He lives and works in New York Peter Halley is one of the most influential artists on the international scene. He became known in the mid-eighties as the promoter of the so-called neo-geo movement. Although he uses geometry as a fundamental support for his works, he always insists on his figurative reference: the space and time of our society, its political and social terrain, the closed order in which we live. Its cold and rectilinear forms are the plastic expression of our complex urban landscape: rectangular cells connected by networks of conduits, prisons, diagrams, isolated organisms. Its characteristic Roll-a-tex texture and expressive use of colors also refer us to our social environment, establishing affiliations with Pop Art, digital information and mass culture.
Work at the collection: Exploding Cell, 1983
Exploding Cell, 1983
Exploding Cell (1983), is a pioneering work in "computer animation" that generates spaces from lines. These cells allude to both the "grid" of Foucault's society of control and the circuits of computers.
This two-minute computer animation from 1983 is Halley’s only work with the moving image. Aline drawn from left to right; it becomes a horizon with a cell. A black conduit appears underneath and is ‘lit up by an illuminating gas’,with escapes via a smokestack before the cell turns red and explodes, leaving a pile of ashes that flicker with stroboscopic effect.
Halley explains: ‘The idea had something to do with Cold War politics and the threat of nuclear destruction, as the exploding cell was originally about civilisation ending. But the narrative of the exploding cell very quickly became an ongoing part of my work. Then as time went on, the narrative became less important to me, and eventually I began to focus solely on the icon of the explosion. The more I think about it, the more I’m convicted that the explosion is also a central image in our culture. It goes back a hundred years to the beginning of modern warfare and terrorism. I’ve used the image of the explosion over and over in my wall-size digital prints, in contrast to the cells and prisons which are depicted in my paintings. The two motifs have really allowed me to set up an opposition between classicism and romanticism. The cells represent confinement, but they also allude to order, a classical order that doesn’t change. On the other hand, the explosion is always an icon of change, it references a transformation between one state and another. I find it interesting to juxtapose those two opposing attitudes. Nietzsche used the terms Apollonian and Dionysian to describe the dichotomy between classicism and romanticism.’
ARCO/BEEP Electronic Art Award - 19th Edition
