Robert Wise
"Robert Wise" by Brian Grison, Spring 2007, pp. 113-14
At age 12 Robert Wise was practicing the do-it-yourself philosophy of Popular Mechanics magazine when he exploded a homemade bomb in the local woods. He discovered that the explosion was less intriguing to him than the colours of its powdery residue, and this appreciation of natural beauty at the molecular level led him to studies toward an engineering degree. As a research assistant at the University of British Columbia he helped design the cryogenic vacuum system for the TRIUMF particle accelerator. This project required six months of research in Switzerland and further studies in Berkeley, California. However, while travelling, an epiphanic insight into the essential nature of technology caused him to “fall out of love with ‘big science.’” He abandoned his engineering career for visual-art studies at the University of Victoria, where he was deeply influenced by the sculptors Mowry Baden and Roland Brener.
His exhibition at Deluge Contemporary Art, “Floor Sanding Fantasies,” consists of four sculptures: Gödel-Gödel, Lacuna, Blink and ratgnaw. In each work the social and political hegemony of technology is undermined with magic and reassuring humour.
Gödel-Gödel, which hangs from the ceiling, elucidates Wise’s ideas and methods. Named for the mathematician Kurt Gödel, the sculpture is an ad-hoc synthesis of high-tech systems and components: an air compressor, a low-pressure switch, a programmable power distributor, a flip-flop timer, light-gathering acrylic, a battery, a solenoid valve, a rubber dental manikin and weather-balloon fabric. Resting at ankle level, the rubber head, anchored to a yellow disk by a studded leather strap, slowly inhales and exhales a large bubble that fills with air pumped from overhead.
While humorous, Gödel-Gödel radiates an uncomfortable itch. Western art is filled with decapitated heads, and Wise’s addition to this iconography embodies Max Weber’s theory of the condition of disenchantment that develops when intellectual and phenomenological perception are severed from one another. Gödel-Gödel represents the threat of technological ambition, the endless components and programs that technology elaborates for its survival and dominance—to the detriment of humanity, the community and nature.
The artist’s theme comes full circle in ratgnaw, which resulted from Wise’s discovery of a partially chewed potato on the kitchen floor of his cottage. The sculpture consists of a life-size cast-bronze potato lying on a square section of linoleum flooring cantilevered from the gallery wall. Encouraged to pick up the bronze, the viewer discovers its weight, and wonders— enchanted—about the diligence of a rat struggling to move a potato across a kitchen.
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