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Drawing on science for art's sake
Juan Geuer's new exhibition at Toronto's Peak Gallery is called The Truth About
Cartesian Clarity and if there's anybody who knows a thing or two about
clarity, Cartesian or otherwise, it's Geuer.
Juan Geuer (pronounced goy-er") is now 85 years old. He has led a wholly
remarkable life. So remarkable, in fact, that it's tempting to try to recount
some of it here - at the risk of rather shortchanging a discussion of the work
in his new show. This will have to suffice: Geuer was born in the Netherlands
in 1917. He spent a good deal of his youth in Germany until, as the clouds of
war began to gather, his father succeeded in getting his family expelled by
means of what Geuer calls a " particularly vigorous protest against
book-burning."
With war inevitable, the Geuer decided to travel as far from Germany as
possible, finally settling on Bolivia as their haven. With his parents away, scouting out a place to live in South |
America, the 21-year-old Geuer, now back
in Holland, shouldered the task of raising his six younger siblings by himself.
He and his brothers and sisters finally joined their parents a year later, in
1939, living in the Bolivian jungle for the next 14 years under cheerful but
demanding conditions not unlike those of the Swiss Family Robinson.
Here's where we have to skip a bit. How Geuer eventually ended up in Ottawa in
1954 is an absorbing story. Even more absorbing is the way the essentially
self-educated adventurer, now married with children, ended up copping a job at
the Dominion Observatory where, for the next 27 years, he became a highly
productive scientist and, eventually (though the two disciplines are, for
Geuer, intimately interrelated), an artist.
The central work in Geuer's Peak Gallery exhibition is a massive construction
called The Loom Drum. Beautiful in its resolute stylelessness, it was
first shown in 1986 at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in a two-man
exhibition with Michael Snow. Then, in 1992, Geuer pulled it apart and
redesigned it. The work appears, at first, to be a jumble of screens, viewing
devices and hundreds of feet of computer cable. Eventually, if you take your
time, its visual cacophonies resolve themselves into meaning: The thing turns
out to be a device you can enter, within which, if you sit on what Geuer calls
"the art side," you find yourself gazing upon a large flat drum, alive with
what seem like random bursts and flashes of light. Sit in the seat on the
opposite side, however, and you find yourself staring through a viewer at a
screen that is, in fact, a map showing the overall view of the plate-tectonic
structure of North America - millions of years of geological history in a
glance. The flashes of light you saw on the other side are now offered as an
electronic re-creation on that map - in a period of 14 1/2 minutes - of the
5,300 earthquakes, with a magnitude of four or more on the Richter scale, which
occurred between 1960 and 1989. Just to keep you oriented, there is a small,
gauge-like time-wheel directly in front of you, as you sit in the piece,
showing you the day, the month and the year of earthquakes exploding before
your eyes. The machine is, after all, as Geuer points out, a model of precision
- not a vague, impressionistic, live-in lightshow. The rest of the Geuer pieces
are equally wondrous. His breathtaking Mylar drawings (they are, in fact, like
graphic intakes of breath), which have never before been exhibited, are also
about mapping. Here, the silvery lines of such drawings as The Nameless Grid and Beyond Parallels are created, you finally notice, by the art ist's having painstakingly scraped
away the requisite lengths from their plasticized backgrounds. The drawings are
miracles of deftness. Scrape too hard, and you puncture the delicate Mylar
membrane. Scrape too lightly, and you lose the line entirely. "My aim," says
Geuer about his work in general, "is to engage the viewer." Fair enough. "And,"
Geuer adds, saving the best part for last, "to re-enchant the world, not as
mystification but as clarity. I want to say how fine the world is, how
wonderful it is!" And Juan Geuer should know.
$1,200-$80,000. Until Oct. 30, 23 Morrow Ave., Toronto; 416-537-8108.
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