Daniel Turner’s get the job done is animated by the faith that supplies are meaningful—and that they carry provenance down to their atoms. Every single immortal, indestructible, indivisible atom in Turner’s cosmology carries its whole history and consists of its possess psyche, and he calls on these atoms to bear witness. In 2016, for occasion, the New York–based artist took all of a cafeteria’s home furniture, together with metal folding chairs and collapsible tables, and ground them down to powder. He then dissolved them into an emulsion to be sprayed on to a gallery flooring, reducing the establishment to its material essence.
Three nearly indistinguishable steel bars lie in the to start with space of the Kunsthalle Basel in his display “Three Web-sites.” One particular is named just after Basel’s BASF chemical concern, the next for the Novartis headquarters across the Rhine River, and the third for a psychiatric clinic in Holdenweid, Switzerland. The bars, every single about three yards in size and much more than 50 percent a ton in fat, are offered with a degree of blankness that propose they may well be self-evident or, offered a delicate adequate viewer, even self-explanatory. For individuals who need to have much more assistance, the checklist suggests they are built from the melted-down radiators from condemned structures at the a few institutions for which they are named. You really don’t have to go considerably in the city of Basel to discover traces of the pharmaceutical sector, as Novartis and Roche contend for the status of the city’s main industrial motor. This is also the town exactly where Dr. Albert Hofmann, the inventor of LSD, took his famous bicycle experience. These structures noticed the creation of both equally the applications for the paranoid-critical investigations of the postwar era and the psychopharmaceuticals made to shackle and regulate mental health and fitness. Radiators really don’t do science, but they do retain structures alive, and in this circumstance they possibly all shared a widespread heat supply, as Basel helps make extensive use of Fernwärme, or district heating, despite the fact that the literal translation is “distant warmth.”
The physical appearance of Turner’s artworks often recollects Minimalism, and he frequently arranges located content in the way of Arte Povera he treats historic movements as suppliers of visual kinds to be drawn upon. Other rooms have artifacts scavenged from the a few properties, displayed in vitrines or stacked on the floor, as effectively as photographic documentation strung alongside one another in a movie. Stylistic markers of modern art provide the remaining form, which is secondary to the things itself. The act of going radiators all over the gallery also has a history, but Turner is not accomplishing institutional critique in the method of Michael Asher, or even of his modern day Sam Lewitt, despite the fact that he obviously references their function. And we see another historical url: All 3 artists have experienced key Conceptual exhibits in Swiss kunsthallen: Asher in Bern in 1992, Sam Lewitt in Basel in 2016, and now Turner. But Turner is not a Conceptualist—he’s a magician. This is uncovered by the four large-format abstract paintings (Holdenweid) Burnish 1–4, 2022, in the last place. These present pleasures as deep as anything to be observed in up to date portray. The “pigment,” if you can phone it that, was designed from the metal oil tank in the basement of the Holdenweid psychiatric healthcare facility Turner ground the item into fine metal wool. He then rubbed the steel fibers into the massive canvases above the study course of seven months. The end result resembles darkish mirrors that renovate in quantity and tone as a single walks about them. Figures appear to emerge, or to be caught within them, like people disappearing into pouring rain, or rain clouds abruptly turning into as substantial as people. At the opening, loud as regular, this room was silent, as if among these paintings even the most voluble suddenly misplaced the motivation to communicate.
Turner’s concept of materials is a weird a single, as odd as Leibniz’s monadology, to which it bears a resemblance. But it is, appear to believe of it, no stranger than the opposite, common perception that resources are in a fundamental way entirely meaningless, contingent, and interchangeable. In the conclude, the place ought to we go searching for the psyche, if not in the materials of the earth?
— Adam Jasper