Keith Tyson: A Wiz of a Wiz at Pace Wildenstein

I instantly clicked with British artist Keith Tyson's installation extravaganza, Large Field Array, currently on view at Pace Wildenstein. The veritable flea market of diverse squared sculptures, all telegraphing the dominant signs of an omniscient memory - the face of Ronald Reagan, ruby red slippers, a photo cube, the levitating woman, the horn of plenty, the coffee cup from the Friends TV show, to name just a few of the 230 individual pieces that are arranged here on a grid, necessitated walking through it and forming associations this way and that. Some people go both ways.

As a flâneuse I engage in this sort of practice every day, and so upon walking into the installation space I first resisted this uninvited busman's holiday. If you have stumbled across this website, for example, and surveyed it long enough to see that walking in New York leads to topics such as medieval life, Leon Trotsky, inexpensive hotels, Diane Arbus, The Patty Duke Show, Alex Rodriguez, the fairy kingdom, squirrels, Julian Schnabel's residence, vintage Dutch footage of the Monkees, and the Hill Country bbq place, and then realized that the creator thought all of this made sense, then you know exactly how I felt walking through the gallery.

I stuck with Tyson's installation long enough to appreciate his catholic (in the sense of universal) imagination and so didn't have any problem with him winning the Turner Prize back in 2002. You may want to know in advance that Large Field Array derives its title from the Very Large Array, radio telescopes sited in New Mexico that collect data to form interference patterns but function as a single giant telescope.

I felt slightly dizzy after looking at Tyson's sculptures, mainly due to the proliferation of centrifugal imagery. Several of them emit sounds, the most dominant being a ball spinning around a roulette wheel on the back wall to the left. Tyson must need a very large array of munchkins to assist him.

Keith Tyson's Large Field Array is on view at Pace Wildenstein, 545 West 22nd Street, in Chelsea through October 20, 2007.

Image: Tornado, 19 Apr 1977, Valley of the Prairie Dog Town Fork of the Red River near Lakeview, Texas. Photo courtesy of NSSL.