Published on December 10, 2005

Aeneas Wilder’s artwork comes to a crashing end, just like this big old world of ours will someday. Scotsman Aeneas Wilder has spent the past five years erecting towering sculptures of fragile bits of wood without any nails or adhesive and then kicking them apart. It seems like an exercise in futility, but it’s actually a powerful lesson in impermanence.

Lord Buddha taught that all things change, that all things must pass, and Wilder is determined to spread that message, currently via a show at Bangkok’s Silpakorn University gallery called “Empirical Association”.

He’s piled thousands of thin, flat rails into nine tall columns, and atop each mounted something that plugs in - a television, a radio, a wall clock, a guitar, a light bulb.

You can drop by anytime, but if you do so before next Tuesday you might merely see something akin to the little-changing solidity of your own living room (albeit with Jack’s beanstalks as furniture).

Come on Tuesday - the day the show closes - and you can watch Wilder give each stack a good kick. The sky will fall.

“It represents a simple metaphor of life,” says the 38-year-old. “Destroying something you’ve built means returning to the beginning. A lot of pieces of wood lying on the floor were piled up, and in the end the stack of wood will be laying on the floor again.”

Bangkok’s unique contribution to Wilder’s touring Shiva act is the electronic gear perched on his skinny skyscraper pedestals.

“There are lots of signs and sounds here that are difficult to follow exactly,” says Silpakorn’s latest artist in residence. “The television with all its rubbish programmes and the radio stations with their pop songs waste my time. When I destroy my work and all this equipment comes down, that’s the moment I control them.”

In Japan in 2003 Wilder topped his high columns with chairs, different kinds to represent people’s different personalities.

“When sitting on a chair you feel comfortable and safe, but in fact the chair is on top of a fragile wooden column that’s easy to collapse,” he points out.

Wilder’s inspiration for creating something utterly temporary came when he was admiring a famously “eternal” sculpture a decade ago in Milan - Michelangelo’s time-weathered Rondanini Pieta.

“When I saw his wonderful sculpture I thought, ‘How can we preserve this treasure permanently for future generations?’ Eventually it must be destroyed. In approximately five billion years the sun will expand, incinerating everything. So just create something for the moment, and then take it back to the component parts.”

The final act in Wilder’s piece of theatre - for it’s ultimately a kind of performance art - naturally involves some high drama.

“Many people see the collapse of my work like dominoes, when all that balance comes down just with the touch of one finger. But with dominoes you can enjoy the process of something collapsing and falling over - my work tries to indicate that everything that has a shape will eventually go back to nil.”

The wispy fragility of Wilder’s wooden towers is contrasted at the Silpakorn show with another untitled sculpture that is solidity embodied. Large pieces of aged wood are piled into a massive sphere that’s covered in four places with well-worn sheets of canvas. The canvases are covered in miniature flags of many countries.

“The canvases symbolise the continents that separate people according to ethnic groups,” he says. “You’re different from me because I’m from here and you’re from there. In the future, though, countries’ borders could change. It’s the ideal at work - that we don’t have borders, just one nationality.”

The old wooden components are on loan from a shop.

“This work will be removed too,” Wilder chuckles, “but I won’t kick it because it’s too heavy!”

On one wall hangs a black T-shirt embossed with a multi-hued series of receding rings. Wilder calls it the “universal flag” - though he’s only printed enough for 100 citizens of the universe, at Bt500 apiece.

“It’s the ideal model for our planet, one that’s unifying and not divided by national borders. The central ring is red because the planet’s core is hot and powerful. The central power transcends to the earth’s surface, the sea and the sky, represented by yellow, blue and navy blue. The outermost ring in purple symbolises spirituality. The black background is the united world.”

Wilder delves into the creative process behind his works in a series of videos. In one of them he tries to balance a wooden stick on his finger.

“I wasted an hour of my time trying to control the stick, and I invite people to waste an hour of their time too watching my video.”

So if you’ve booked a restaurant table someplace, you might want to skip the video, but certainly the grand finale to “Empirical Association” shouldn’t waste anyone’s time. Come round on Tuesday at 3pm and watch the world end.

The gallery, at Silpakorn’s Faculty of Painting, Sculpture and Graphic Arts, is open Monday to Saturday from 9am to 4.30pm. For more information, call (02) 225 8991.

Khetsirin Pholdhampalit

The Nation

Post your comment to this story here