RIGOROUS INVENTED SYSTEMS
Artists who depict imaginary worlds or systems in bright & confusing ways. A partial compendium of references for DmMobileUnit. Similar to Paddy Johnson/Art Fag City's denigrating term 
complex cosmology artists, in which Mathew Day Jackson and Mathew Barney fall.
Shea Zellweger
"From a basement in Ohio, guided literally by his dreams and his innate love of
pattern, Shea Zellweger developed an extraordinary visual system - called the
'Logic Alphabet' - in which a group of specially designed letter-shapes can
be manipulated like puzzles to reveal the geometrical patterns
underpinning logic... Zellweger's Logic Alphabet is based on a crystal-
like arrangement of its elements. Thus where the traditional approach to
logic is purely abstract, Zellweger's is geometric, making it amenable to
visual play... Like his notation, Zellweger's working methods are delightfully
unconventional. While constituting a genuine research project in logic, his
notebooks (made between 1953 and 1975) have remarkable visual appeal,
passing through phases reminiscent of Russian Constructivism, outsider art,
concrete poetry and pop. These days we accept outsider artists, and are
perhaps aware of outsider scientists, but Zellweger may be the first we
could define as an outsider logician."-cabinet magazine.
Paul Laffoley
"Paul Laffoley was born into an Irish Catholic family in Cambridge, Massachusetts in 1940. He spoke his first word, "Constantinople," at six months, then remained silent until the age of four (having been diagnosed as slightly autistic), when he began to draw and paint. In his senior year at Brown University, he was given eight electric-shock treatments. He was dismissed from the Harvard Graduate School of Design... in 1968 he moved into an eighteen- by thirty-foot utility room to found a one-man "think tank" and creative unit called the Boston Visionary Cell. Laffoley supports himself with a job at the Boston Museum of Science, returning to the BVC not only to eat and sleep but to work on multimedia renderings of his visions of alternative futures and complex realities. During a routine CAT-scan of his head in 1992, a miniature metallic implant, 3/8 of an inch long, was discovered in the occipital lobe of his brain, near the pineal gland. Local M.U.F.O.N. investigators declared it to be an alien nanotechnological laboratory. He has come to believe that the "implant" is extraterrestrial in origin and is the main motivation behind his ideas and theories." -Dilletante Press
Nedko Solakov
"Since the late 1980s Nedko Solakov has been using storytelling as a specific tool of his artistic expression. Sprung from the artist's fertile imagination, the stories take shape in a unique artistic universe made of drawings, paintings, installations, videos and performances, in which he tackles personal as well as universal themes, using a strongly poetic yet critical approach often tinged with a fine sense of humour." -Art Facts Net
"look up to see below: a community of miniature figures nestled in the roots - trolls, glands, worms, and gnomes... Its the trees we like, and the impression of swimming underground as one walks around." -Deitch
http://www.artseensoho.com/Art/DEITCH/nedko97/nedkoGIFS/nedko.jpeg
"Solakov tells us the story of St. Pipo, a strange guy, who lives somewhere in the ocean in a comfortable underwater cave. His big time is coming up on Christmas Eve, when Santa Claus delivers the Christmas presents under the decorated Christmas tree. At that very moment he sneaks rapidly into the people's homes through the toilets, approaches the Christmas tree and takes the Christmas presents."
Dunne & Raby
"A meat-eating robot has been developed by the University of South Florida. Microbial fuel cells contain living bacteria which break down food and convert the nutrients into electrical energy. Imagine if this technology took off. How would things change?"
"For thousand's of years, the Chinese fertilised rice paddies with biological waste, including human sewage. Rural households once expected dinner guests to leave a gift before they left. The faeces was used to return the nutrients from the meal back to the soil."
Mark Manders
" I still believe that art is the language to work in. It's ultimately closer than science. After all, what am I? A human being who unfolds into a horrifying amount of language and material by means of very precise conceptual constructions." -Singing Sailors, p. 53
"The entire installation Reduced Rooms with Changing Arrest (Reduced to 88%) should be seen in relation to a normal chair which has not been reduced and which is shown behind a glass display case (p. 47). In this way, this normal chair sets itself apart from reality and the reduced installation. An identical copy of this chair at a reduction of 88% is also part of the installation. By placing the normal 100% chair in the display case, reality is in fact displayed." -Singing Sailors, p. 53
Duchamp Green Box
"Only the 'Large Glass' interested me, ... I wanted to be free of any material obligation, so I began a career as a librarian, which was a sort of excuse for not being obliged to show up socially. ... At the same time, I was doing my calculations for the 'Large Glass'...
The ideas in the Large Glass are more important than the actual realization.
The "Large Glass" constitutes a rehabilitation of perspective. For me, it's a mathematical, scientific perspective, based on calculations and on dimensions.
What we were interested in at the time was the fourth dimension. Simply, I thought of the idea of a projection, of an invisible fourth dimension, something you couldn't see with your eyes.
"The Bride" in the "Large Glass" was based on this, as if it were the projection of a four-dimensional object. I called "The Bride" a "delay in glass."
A tactile sensation which envelopes every side of an object approaches a tactile sensation of four dimensions. Consequently the act of love as tactile sublimation could be felt as a physical interpretation of the 4th dimension."-Valdosta
Yuri Leiderman
"Yuri Leiderman's artistic production is highly heterogeneous, for it is not focused on a specific visual form. Rather, it subjects the form to precisely defined concepts which systematically connect different sciences, literature, philosophy and art phenomena with personal stories, obsessions and artistic investigation." -Skuc
"The deeper I got into the text, the more I researched, consulted experts - librarians, philosophers - and involved friends from all the world as I inquired about chemistry, catalysis, mythology, polytheism, psychology, Tonio Kroger, Russian cosmology, analytic geometry, the Cold War, design theory, meta-communication and numerous perplexing small things like what does "sucked out of a finger mean"? And those people began to take interest and started having their own conversations about this dialog. I was amazed how after months had passed, they remembered and could quote lines back to me about goats peeing, 'radiant-floated moments,' 'nonsense models,' so forth." -Geneva Anderson
Guy Ben-ner
BonnieCollura
"She has been applying her "System" in her work for over ten years now, recombining twisted characters (including, in her latest piece, Abraham Lincoln, St. Sebastian, C3P0, and Jesus) according to a color system (abductor red, creator green, martyr yellow, guardian green) and personal set of symbology and references that are interwoven and developed over more than a decade."
"With their generative nature, these personalized systems resonate with the interlocking networks of cyberspace, the unraveling mysteries of genetic coding, and other new structures that are rapidly altering our world."-Village Voice
Robert A. Small
"Robert A. Small uses an obscure perspective on Plato's forms to reduce human behaviour to geometry. His parallels between shape and event are vividly, exhaustively and erroneously illustrated, creating a false mythology out of the everyday and the 'alreadymade'" -Time Out NY
T.R. Quigley
"My work from 1980-2005 is based on mapping from the literal (words) to the visual (shapes). I take as my starting point an arbitrary operation performed on the twenty-six letters of the English alphabet -- placing them in a circle with identical spacing between the letters. This produces a "letterwheel" -- an arbitrary device for taking letters of the alphabet as its input and transforming them into geometrical shapes as its output. The choice of words provides an additional layer of complexity and introduces an element of "free play". (
Jonathan Meese
Meese's whole performances project is like a big recycling plant for social exorcisms, figuring out what can still be helpful at stirring up false certainties of what power and desire really mean, and what merely repeats false certainties. Meese's installations look like a bohemian squatter's lumber room, with labyrinths of narrow passages, staircases leading down to the original ground level, and arcades built into the space beneath these passages. The artist re-creates his little big worlds of troubling great details, photos, seventies poster, objects, writings. Not only gestures and clothes, but also the biological factor of facial features seems significantly culturally formed, by beer and order, class and stupidity, anxiety and depression.
Matthew Ronay
also see AssembledSpaces
Regardless of what he?s cobbling together, Ronay enjambs seemingly unconnected objects into a complex narrative sprawl. In a self-interview he conducted for Uncertain States of America, a group show at Astrup Fearnley Museum in Oslo, Ronay writes, "The work definitely does not illustrate ideas. At least not explicitly concrete ones. It elicits a response. If someone is lazy they would misunderstand the setup as nonsensical or a non sequitur. Instead, what is offered is a chance to create something revealing out of something that is trying to lose its self-consciousness."
Gordon Matta-clark
