Introduction

Esther Schipper is pleased to announce the opening of Angela Bulloch's eleventh exhibition with the gallery.

Entitled In Virtual Vitro, the exhibition includes new contributions to key series in the artist's oeuvre, among them a Music Listening Station playing records issued by her record label ABCDLP, a Drawing Machine, and two Happy Sacks. Displayed on an iPad, a video with an avatar gives a short introduction to the exhibition. Encountering Bulloch's work has always been an activity, an ongoing experience. This diachronic element is literally built into most of the pieces in the show's first room: watching the machine draw or the Pixel Box change, listening to the music she selected. To encourage the visitors to remain she offers the double-edged comfort of giant denim Happy Sacks: while they are indeed comfortable, they are also almost impossible to exit gracefully. Both visitor and object are asked to exert themselves.

Two new hybrid Pixel Boxes, Thing One on Pixel Box Blue and Thing Two on Pixel Box Red in effect act as transition into Bulloch's most recent body of work. These pieces combine lit boxes that display a sequence of monochrome color modulations with a charcoal-grey object in the shape of an irregular rhombus. While the light sequences requires the viewer to watch for actual variances of the box's illumination, Bulloch's engagement with convex polyhedra, so-called Platonic forms, provokes a different kind of sustained attention from the spectator, namely, attempting to find an underlying logic to the shape. This may be because, confronted with these unfamiliar forms, our spatial imagination goes haywire: the planes and angles appear to change, even as we are trying to understand their relationships and the volume they create.

Human preoccupation with these geometric shapes has a long history: for Plato polyhedra represented ideal, preexisting building blocks of the world and for the 17th century mathematician Johannes Kepler scientific evidence of the divine in a harmonic plan. But their combination of simplicity and complexity also has long fascinated architects and artists. Using contemporary computer software to change the polyhedra, Bulloch's alterations imbue the elongated and distorted versions with a subjective quality. This effect becomes even more apparent in the second room of the gallery. Here the roughly life-sized, totem-like pieces, assembled from a varying number of distorted rhombic shapes, may seem to stubbornly take on personalities. Some are monochromatic, others multi-colored but all refuse to be easily grasped. The viewer enters a room apparently peopled with their presence.

The introduction of these new shapes makes manifest a trajectory of Bulloch's preoccupation with the history of shapes and human interaction with them, of which Minimalism was just one articulation. The felt wall hangings literally conflate the artist's past and present themes. Hercules, for example, refers back to her investigation of Minimalism but also includes a night sky, three modular sculptures, and fragments of the classical mosaic pattern that is another iconographic motif recurring in the recent work. Other wall hangings, like Gang of Four Wall Hanging 016, appear to double as background for prints of these patterns, both found and digitally distorted.

To some extent, Bulloch's work has always acknowledged what contemporary philosophy recently has begun to call the object's "essence": in this context, the term is not meant to refer to classical notions of ideal or absolute form. Instead it poses the object's radical autonomy from human observation and thought, arguing that objects have a hidden core unavailable to us. As "human objects," (a term with which this discourse wishes to emphasize the equivalence of all objects) we must content with the frustration of other objects' unknowability. Bulloch plays on this tension between explanation and the kernel of alterity that always remains: the light sequence of the Pixel Boxes or the movements of the Drawing Machines are programmed but their parameters often obscured by also including arbitrary elements. Her work promises a certain amount of understanding yet at the same time deliberately and openly forestalls the viewer's effort to seek it—inviting us to look again.