David Cotterrell’s Unlikely Endeavo
NYARTS
style=’font-size:8.0pt;font-family:Verdana’>The first book to chronicle the
work of British artist David Cotterrell, The Impossible Project
style=’font-size:8.0pt;font-family:Verdana’> explores Cotterrell’s fascination
with technology, politics and romance.
Cotterrell’s work often pushes the parameters of art and scientific discovery:
playing with an acknowledged tradition of eccentric invention, he customizes
existing technologies to assert new use-values. A practice divided between the
gallery and the public realm, the differing demands of each intervention are
reflected in Cotterrell’s sensitivity to site as both location and subject.
He’s a postmodern, interstitial figure whose methods are as mercurial as his
image: always changing, always expanding, always redefining what it means to
take up space. As an architect and as an artist, Cotterrell has added a stock of
gestures to the now inscrutable and defiant contemporary air-molding scene.
Where did he come from?
lang=EN-GB>His first solo exhibition, “Reference Frame,” explored themes of
approximation and translation in the process of representing behaviour through
data. The links between this work and the origins of criminology in French 19th
Century pseudoscience will creep some people out and delighting others with its
craniometric overtones. “Reference Frame” took on important questions
about representation that no conceptualist can ignore. This concern with the
framework of our perceptions has remained with the artist throughout his
development. “God’s Eye View” consists of three projections
exploring facets of the symbolic order imposed on human experience of the world.
The work both celebrates and questions the wisdom of attempting prediction.
Struck by the inadvertent beauty of systems created to ease understanding of a
complex world, Cotterrell here replicates the language of predictive modelling
to highlight what is lost (and gained) through the process of translation.
Working with a set of
climatic statistics to predict possible future weather systems, isobars
continuously create new patterns, which metamorphose the reality of a tornado
into an agreeable aesthetic experience. Traffic flow around an urban centre and
its inevitable gridlock as more and more vehicles are introduced into the
equation mimics video games like SimCity style=’font-size:8.0pt;font-family:Verdana’> and Populous
lang=EN-GB style=’font-size:8.0pt;font-family:Verdana’>. Red dots, each
representing a human life, dash to and fro: bunching together in ‘desirable’
spaces and leaving others abandoned. These works have an eerie quality
reminiscent of science programmes that exhibit the acceleration of the spread
of HIV or ebola through a healthy host. We see human choice and naturally
occurring patterns reduced to game-like conditions.
The quest for God-like
status is brought down to earth by the limitations imposed by humanity’s
collective imagination: prediction machines are only capable of replicating
identified trends. Our inability to witness all of the convolutions of
existence is reduced to an abstraction: a translation or ‘Beginner’s Guide’ to
this shared existence. Cotterrell employs the visual language of meteorologists
and spatial analysts to create works that openly question the wisdom of urging
the blind sibyl to tell her tale.
