A theory of everything

By ANDREW CLIFFORD


As awareness of the universe grows more intricate, astronomers, mathematicians and physicists need to negotiate sophisticated theories to reach a common understanding of what makes the cosmos tick.

Paul Cullen may not understand the finer points of quantum physics or its latest string theory of matter and the universe, but he says he is intrigued by the oblique ways that complex ideas can be illustrated and explained.

"They are presented in ways that can be really engaging and they are dealing with things that are deeply mysterious and inexplicable," he says. "One of the things that interests me about them is just the way that, for someone who isn't a mathematician or a physicist, they almost work in an evocative way, in the same way that art or music might work.

"The responses we have to it are more subjective than an objective understanding of what's being articulated by those theories. It's that relationship through language and words [that is] perhaps the way the public comes to those things."

One of the most important interpreters of popular science is the diagram, and Cullen considers his art to be like a diagram of a diagram. His explorations are presented like a sports debate in a restaurant where salt and pepper shakers become players and pieces of cutlery are goal posts.

Everyday items are recruited into new roles, but in Cullen's curious constructions they don't represent actual objects but illustrate more abstract ideas like gravity and speed and, more specifically, the way we describe gravity and speed.

Having grown up in the rural environs of Te Awamutu, Cullen began his career with a degree in science, majoring in botany. He says he decided there were more exciting vocational paths to follow so he took to art via a course in landscape architecture and now heads the sculpture department at Manukau School of Visual Arts, while completing a Doctorate in Fine Arts.

However, Cullen's early training was not in vain; it still plays a vital role in his practice. Much of his previous work references gardens and the way they are a modified landscape, reconstructing and ordering our relationship to the physical world through ideas and imagination.

Like gardens, his eccentric sculptures and wall-pieces are three-dimensional drawings; sketches that play with the way we use diagrams, maps, charts and models to depict ideas.

He uses strangely modified tables and dissected textbooks to mimic the way numbers, letters and symbols become codes that define our understanding of the universe as well as underlining the uncertainty of that knowledge.

Cullen recounts Italo Calvino's story of Mr Palomar's comical attempts at stargazing. After peering at a torch-lit star map, Palomar is unable to see anything in the dark until his eyes have adjusted. By the time he can see stars again, he has forgotten their arrangement on the chart. By repeating this routine, he negotiates the territory between diagram and reality.

There is a similar humour in Cullen's assemblages, which could be seen as a science display from a Monty Python show, with the slightly surreal way they invert the usual physicality of common objects.

Hundreds of bright yellow pencils are obsessively arranged in rows to penetrate and support old pieces of cut-up furniture, while pencil sharpener globes rise out of old books, which are glued shut, carved into and decorated with enigmatic jottings.

An upturned stool, also balanced on pencils, is missing a leg, rendering it useless as a stool and reinforcing its new role as a depiction of surface, volume, gravity and more esoteric forces.

It recalls the early conceptualism of Marcel Duchamp, who in 1917 famously named a urinal Fountain and placed it in a gallery, shifting its usual role to that of both art object and the representation of an idea.

Duchamp also used a stool in the place of a plinth to display an upturned bicycle wheel, blurring the distinction between art object and its framing support.

Cullen also acknowledges that his upturned furniture recalls a 1961 work of Italian artist Piero Manzoni, who presented an upside down plinth, slyly suggesting that the plinth supports the entire world and therefore that anything can be considered art.

Everything engages concepts of a similarly grand scale, evoking through its title, the "Theory of Everything", a holy grail for mathematicians and physicists seeking a single law explaining the properties of all known phenomena.

However, Cullen doesn't see his work as being quite as definitive.

"I think it's more inclining towards the ridiculous rather than ultimately being something which can encompass all, and that's not intended as a comment on science. I think that it is really an amateur attempt at trying to do something in that way, which somehow is ultimately doomed to failure."

Exhibition

*What: Everything, by Paul Cullen

*Where and when: 40 George St, Mt Eden, to Nov 6 (Thu-Sat only)