Ebb and Undertow in the
Universal Grid by Stephen Klein,
Independent Critic from Brooklyn, New York
Email Stephen Klein, click here
| During the last two decades,
through painting, sculpture, installation and video, Lane Last has investigated
and explored the ways that human evolution has interacted, and has been
affected and altered by the discovery and harnessing of electricity. For
Last the Universe is ultimately abundant and teeming with life, and similar
to the Buddhist notion of Dependent Co-Arising, life is continuously and
simultaneously being born and dying in every moment; despite human systems
which may proliferate death and misery, Last believes that humans have a
will to life. Apparent throughout his renderings is the idea that human
systems will and can never eliminate life; the alternative is an impossibility
that the human animal due to superstition has been obsessed with. Despite
the magnificent intricacy and brilliance of evolutionary architecture, which
according to Last is most obvious on a molecular level, Last attempts to
convey in his work his belief that the life has unfolded because of the
power of love. Throughout his work Lane Last emphatically asserts his modernist
leanings as potentially the only escape-route from the flypaper that the
human animal has flown into in the post-Hiroshima era. Reconciling primitivist
imagery that denotes and echoes modern notions of DNA's mission to replicate,
Last has consistently expressed how all systems: academic, social, bureaucratic,
militaristic, economic, and classificatory imply Foucault's post-Nietzschean
message about the civilizations' ultimate will toward continual life. Last
implies in his work that the human sciences are socially constructed supporters
of power, and he includes “art as spectacle” as one of the purveyors
of domination. Acknowledging that his own education and methods are rooted
in systems of oppression and power has reverberating influence on Last's
effort to avoid a totalized approach to his imagery. Although he has faith in the tools humans fashion to better adapt to natural forces, Last's move away from totalization makes Last a pseudo-modernist because he understands that a totalized approach is at best a well-crafted fiction since it is impossible to view the complexity of the world from the limited perspective of the subject-artist. An artist's, or anyone's, perspective is limited because truth is inaccessible. The most an artist can hope to attain is a thorough analysis of socially constructed meanings. Rather than merely replicate or perpetuate these social constructions which support power, Last hopes to simultaneously celebrate and alert his viewers of the artificiality of socially constructed meanings and discourses; through his preference of examining the array of finite technologies that exist in modernity, while reminding his viewers of the beauty and fragility of the biological animal. Much of the artist's work is a celebration of chance. This apparent in his avoidance of classic interpretative strategies that reduces evolution to the concept of human progress; for Last evolution is about change and flux not progression. As an alternative to the standard monolithic myth that the origin occurred in a particular time and space, Last uses alternative methodologies for his ultimate pursuit of undermining the appearance of naturalness in scarcity of life and flux. Last's works convey a multiplicity, which is oozing with dynamic life, simultaneously involving chance and advanced engineering, because he believes that dispersion via electricity, the proliferation of sexuality and de-totalizating narratives are more hopeful view of human destiny. That electricity's ultimate purpose is to maximize life in the universe. Again reminiscent of Nietzsche's Genealogy of Morals, many of the themes that Last plays with convey the irony that human systems purpose(s) is to maximize life, despite what appears on the surface, on the surface, as the pursuit to destroy life. These vignettes remind viewers of the infinitely small worlds that exist within the finite spaces between 0 and 1. |