The Metaphorical Museum and a return to The Underworld

1st June - 6th July 2023

The Reality Gap vs Archeology in the Digital Age an essay by Bruce Davis June 2023

“At first I could see nothing, the hot air escaping from the chamber causing the candle flame to flicker, but presently, as my eyes grew accustomed to the light, details of the room within emerged slowly from the mist, strange animals, statues, and gold everywhere the glint of gold. For the moment an eternity it must have seemed to the others standing by - I was struck dumb with amazement.”

Howard Carter on entering the tomb of Tutankhamun

Discovery perches at the edge of a precipice, beyond which a void beckons. What would happen if one day we discovered the secrets of the human brain. Would we understand ourselves differently? Would such knowledge fry our circuitry and destroy our consciousness such as it is now? Are the gaps in our knowledge a purposeful kill switch to avoid us from discovering what we truly are and the nature of our relationship to the universe? Does a god, or many gods, look down upon us in an act of benign magnanimity as we go about our daily business in possession of free will, or is the universe indifferent to our existence?

The work of Jeffrey Knopf is something akin to an archeological dig. Ancient history through the lens of digital technology. It seems like the perfect moment in our own living history to view the past from a point that we have not yet reached, the point where existential dread has crept into mainstream thought around the significance of AI (artificial intelligence). Just like Douglas Adams’ Restaurant At The End of The Universe, where intergalactic travellers can visit a point in the future, where night after night guests witness the collapse of the universe and the end of history, the end is in sight but remains tantalisingly just out of reach. The future beyond the eventual end of everything is still a dimension that we cannot experience. 

“What happens after I die”

“A lot happens after you die, it just doesn’t involve you” 

Even if we were to crack the ability to travel in the fourth dimension -time- we can never experience the dimension that is the feeling of death, as from death there is no return. And this is our kill switch. Ensuring that some things remain a mystery. 

And so Jeffrey takes us from our current moment in time, with its imperfect technology, and places us back in an ancient world also incomplete but longing to be explored. On the opening night of Knopf’s Metaphorical Museum, more than one visitor likened the descent of our narrow staircase from kitchen to basement as how Howard Carter must have felt entering the tomb of Tutankhamun, opened for the first time in thousands of years. The darkness gathers and the outside world recedes into the background. Down here in the half-light of the underworld we are experiencing a preserved death of the past. Through this preservation of the body beyond death we can learn about their life and the nature of their death, but what happens beyond continues to be a mystery. 

We teeter on the precipice, wobbling back and forth, knowing that when the time comes we must step into the void to complete our knowledge knowing that there is no way back. 

A head and an arm struggle to escape from a red plastic bag, hung from a small meat hook. Like a slab of Serrano ham dangling from the ceiling as Jeffrey observes, or maybe organs being weighed to judge the weight of a soul before entering the realm of the dead. Elsewhere Akhenaten looks down on us, alongside him sits his hypercubic counterpart from the future. Here history is abstracted, just as we have blind spots so too does the camera. As with human imagination, the camera guesses at the information it cannot read. 

What would Freud say about all of this? Well he would probably sit back and contemplate the historical objects laid out before him on his desk. We too can do this through Jeff’s scans from the Freud Museum in London. Yet, with the elongation of time and space, the display becomes like a series of frozen waterfalls, objects reduced to a series of planes, a panoramic view of history, moving and revealing itself at a glacial pace.

Laid out on the window shelf between front and rear exhibition spaces, is a structure that will be familiar to those that have followed BasementArtsProjects’ ‘Jacob’s Ladder’ project with Keith Ackerman. Here the stages are laid out from left to right. The isolated staircase, rough with sprues and bleeds from the casting process in aluminium, is transferred into a golden coloured 3D print of the entire sculpture in plastic. Next to this the staircase, again isolated, 3D printed in gold plastic and to the right of that, two more isolated staircases further refined and printed in a translucent space age plastic and presented in a pyramidal shape. Adding to the egyptological feeling of this exhibition.

Objects are secreted away throughout both exhibition spaces. As in the tomb of Tutenkhamun, the feeling is one of being a collection hidden for centuries in piles of gathered dust, perhaps never intended to be looked upon by human eyes again. Of course our desire to understand as much of the world as possible means that we will always strive to uncover as much of the past as we can. And yet the mystery persists . . .