Meno {2.1}
23.06.07 – 22.07.07
Peter Lewis is an artist, curator and writer who has exhibited both within the UK and internationally since the 1970s. His works, which may be called ‘configurations’ (to borrow a term from the philosopher Alain Badiou) employ a wide variety of methods, forms and resources. Their point of correspondence is to be found in Lewis’ approach to his source materials, a process of drawing out or ‘subtraction’ that results in compositions that are never calculated or directly nameable. In the process of searching, working and engaging with the source material, the residue or remainder of this dialogical activity results in a complex voiding of established values, fixed classifications and neatly readymade meanings.
For his exhibition at T1+2 Gallery Lewis has taken Plato's short but rich and vivid dialogue Meno as the starting point for a process of subtraction, in effect reading it as the script for a markedly new configuration. Lewis employs the Socratic 'enchelus' (a Greek expression signifying the idea of challenge or of testing) that motivates Plato's protagonists, who are conventionally regarded as seriously (but imprecisely) searching for knowledge through dialogic exchange, with, however, their intention being to end at an impasse. This impasse might be dramatic: an individual subject's pre-conceptions may collapse, smashing to pieces the cause-and-effect chain of articulated meaning, laying bare, with equal measure, the void at the heart of things. Words just might, in this powerful and penetrating interruption of the unexamined ‘reality’, pierce right through the skin.
In Meno, the conversation opens up the question of the recollection of something that can or cannot be known, setting in motion a discussion of the nature of knowledge itself. In Meno {2:1} the dialogue is 'voiced' by subjective and disembodied entities, with Lewis drawing upon a paradox that is already located in the fact that Plato's own voice speaks through Socrates, and vice versa. The search itself, as played out by the protagonists in Meno, is always embarked upon as a risk, that of betraying what is invisible to it with its own visibility.
- Peter Lewis and Peter Suchin
- Installation views
