#peter hennessey

[am-currently-reading]

Found in the back of my new copy of Frankenstein apparently from 1976. I wonder if they're still in business? 🤔

[newlabours]

One of the best things about meeting Peter Hennessy was the story he told me about the time Clem Attlee was on holiday in ROI and then drove back over the border into NI quite late at night. And the border patrol didn't recognise him. Him. The Prime Minister. Not a clue. So they ordered that he unpack his boot for them to examine his holiday things for bombs.

At this stage basically any normal human being would say um, I’m the Prime Minister, can we not. But the moral of the story was clearly that Clement Attlee has never borne even the remotest resemblance to a normal human being, because he just obediently unpacked his boot for them to search through and honestly I wonder how many people appreciate that time we had an actual angel for a Prime Minister 

[contextreview]

Peter Hennessey, Where we are now (Navstar Block II-F satellite, USA) , 2014 Plywood ABS plastic, wax. Above: Peter Hennessey, Maquettes for a monument to escape velocity #1 , 2014 Pewter, wax. From the exhibition Here be dragons. 

“Hic sunt dracones is a medieval Latin phrase meaning ‘dragons are here’.Early cartographers would place this phrase over areas of their maps that were blank. These were places that were unexplored or literally unknown. There might have been some suspicion that strange beasts lurked there but really it was more about the lack of knowledge. They knew something was there but had no idea what. I guess that made it dangerous.” - Peter Hennessy via Domus

[dmqnm]

New Romance: Alone with the gods

Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, Sydney 2016. my favourite part of the strangest immersive experience I’ve ever had.

[aamjp]

Review of ‘Peter Hennessey: Making it Real’ at UQ Art Museum

This major career survey will reflect on the past decade of Peter Hennessey’s practice. Trained as an architect, Hennessey has established an international profile for his physically imposing, conceptually rigorous sculptures. He is inspired by the science of space exploration and comparable technological advances, and scours the Internet and other publicly available information to produce his work. The resulting sculptures are ‘re-enactments’ of objects that allow people to encounter in three-dimensions what they would otherwise only see in reproduction, or on the Web. In recreating these structures, Hennessey explores the ‘space between images and experience’ and expounds on related social, political and economic imperatives. Making it real will include Hennessey’s most significant extant sculptures, including My Humvee (Inversion therapy) 2008 from The University of Queensland Art Collection, as well as new work emerging from a related residency at UQ’s Centre for Hypersonics.

Hennessey’s sculptural work employs the vocabulary of the architectural model to “re-enact” the subject in reference to “related social, political and economic imperatives” so as to “explore the ‘space between images and experience’ and allow people to encounter in three-dimensions the [hardware] they would otherwise only see in reproduction, or on the Web”. Unfortunately, the majority of the work presents only as reproductions: lifeless, diminished, and conceptually lacking.

The work is most successful when Hennessey alters the scale of the object and/or its reading. Overlooked (Street View Capture Apparatus) (2014) for example, utilises a 1:1 scale version of the Google Street View camera and generic ≈1:200 human figures typical of architectural models and drawings. This variance of scale alters the viewer’s perception of the work, such that the camera structure appears as an observational tower populated by an eager crowd seeking the extended horizon that Street View offers, however also introduces connotations of the omniscience of companies as Google to the mind of the viewer. Read as such, the work is multi-layered and insightful, engaging, and, ultimately, successful. 

The balance of the exhibition, however, is generally a self-indulgent and gratuitous technical exercise in model making. Works such as My Luna Rover (You had to be there) (2005), a 1:1 reproduction of the Apollo 17 Lunar Roving Vehicle; My NICU (2006), a 1:1 reproduction of a Neo-natal Intensive Care Unit; and Maquette for a monument to unknown space #1 (2014) and Maquette for My Ikara (2005), reduced scale models of the world’s oldest submersible research vehicle and a missile launching system respectively, are all technically impressive though conceptually-bereft reproductions of the respective subjects, succeeding only in diminishing the wonder of this technology, regardless of the scale employed. (It is difficult to not interpret Hennessey’s identification of the reduced scale models as ‘maquettes’ as being an admission of their unresolved state.) 

I could go on, but what’s the point? Middle-aged men have been building model train sets since the 1840s; with a few exceptions, this exhibition is no different.