Future Gestalt

2012 - Installation (Installation)

Brody Condon

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Future Gestalt re-imagines a large-scale sculpture “ Smoke” by Tony Smith as embodying a futuristic intelligence that communicates with a group of communitarians undergoing experimental psychotherapy. Future Gestalt is not a video of a performance, rather, it is a documentation of the last of four unscripted sessions of guided participation led by the artist. Through the title and form, the sessions suggest Gestalt therapy, promoted as a form of personal transformation in California at the Esalen Institute. The sculpture “ Smoke” was conceived in 1967, but fabricated after the artist’s death in 2005 and is permanently installed at LACMA in Los Angeles. It “reflects the artist’s [Smith’s] lifelong exploration of patterns in organic life,” but its sleek painted black aluminum exterior also suggests a science-fiction spacecraft or supercomputer. Condon recognizes these implications and casts it as a character, a processed and distorted version of his own voice.

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Brody Conlon is an American (born 1974 in Mexico) based in Berlin. He constructs situations to explore human experience, often involving synthesis of role-playing and collective, participatory performance. Both fascinated and skeptical, Condon’s work raises doubts about self/other representation, authenticity and pretense, and lingers in the strangeness of engagement.

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Colors:

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• future.n.01
• distortion.n.05
• reinterpretation.n.01
• extraterrestrial_being.n.01
• fanciful.s.02
• psychotherapy.n.01
• virtual art