A common, generic, white plastic chair undergoes a series of material transformations and diverse formal distortions, which prevent it from fulfilling its designated function. This significant metamorphosis cuts through the familiar domestic space to a remote surreal space. Manipulation of the artificial plastic chair reveals in it organic, zoological, and botanical (bones, joints, plants, insects) or paleontological (parts of ancient skeletons of extinct animals) contexts and potentials. The white wooden sculptures presented in the large hall, whose origin and model was a white plastic chair, are a Janus-faced entity combining natural and supernatural elements as mechanical parts or pieces of a chassis – but also as bones and joints left from giant primordial animals. Miron himself presents the rudiments of his praxis in evolutionary terms:

I refer to natural selection and the demands of survival that operate on the time-scale of one generation, at the level of the individual organism rather than that of an entire species. The mutations that arise in a given individual should promote its immediate survival, but cannot look ahead or foresee future conditions and preserve only those traits that will benefit future generations. In this respect, evolution by means of natural selection cannot be said to have a “direction” or a “goal.” The direction that appears to have been taken by the evolution of a given species is, in fact, only a direction in retrospect – an accumulation of ad hoc solutions that continue to succeed over time. This so-called “direction” is not only purely retrospective, but also almost entirely dictated by the past: mutations and variations occur at random and are either preserved or exterminated according to the degree to which they either promote or hinder the individual organism’s ability to survive and produce offspring. The kinds of mutations and adaptations a given organism can “perform,” however, are highly dependent on its current shape and structure (also arrived at through past mutations). Thus, the past “dictates” the future to a certain degree, although without foreseeing it. Seen this way, the genetic makeup of each individual organism represents an unbroken chain of evolutionary events linking it directly to the first DNA molecule that ever existed, and each organism encapsulates its own, specific four- billion-year-old genetic history. It is my aim to work in an analogous manner: the past – personal, private, or even accidental – of a particular formal kernel (a given fragment of plastic chair, for example) provides the starting point from which the piece develops by means of a sequence of ad hoc decisions. In this manner, the past of the artwork extends into the present. The four sculptures installed by Miron in the large hall are in dialogue with surrealist notions and aesthetics.
They bring to mind Salvador Dalí’s Soft Construction with Boiled Beans (1936) or his images of forms supported by narrow stilts. They also correspond with Alexander Calder’s surrealist sculpture, since they invite one to approach them, circle, and even enter them. The plastic chair which served as “origin” for their design was left behind. The sculptures are made of wood, painted white, concealing the material’s organic origin; the joints between the units were carefully sanded and finished, although they remain conspicuously present. When speaking about it with Miron, he refers to the great impact left on him in his childhood by the giant dinosaur skeletons in New York’s Museum of Natural History.
Unraveling is an installation presented in a greenhouse, which is placed in the museum’s yard. The plastic sculptures3 within seem to grasp at the greenhouse walls in an attempt to break through them. In his book The Poetics of Space, the philosopher Gaston Bachelard draws an analogy between natural elements and those that are part of man’s living environment.4 Miron’s greenhouse may be seen as an object that straddles both. As a natural environment, it is a regenerative microcosm where organisms grow; at the same time, it is a man-made, degenerative living environment full of plastic clones that can never generate life. The plastic objects make up a subtle, dual arrangement in which the artificiality of skeletal plastic is contrasted with the life and regeneration of young plants.
The title Playing for Time, which the artist gave to a group of large-scale sculptures, attests to his yearning for the dimension beyond the rational – a liberated, childlike, creative super-reality controlled by the imagination. Time, which is an abstract concept, is depicted in his works as a real material presence, elastic and malleable. As an image, the stretched plastic chair conjures Salvador Dalí’s melting timepieces. To quote Miron’s own words, “I systematically and deliberately avoid envisioning the final form of the piece while I am making it, in order to allow it to come into being through an organic and open-ended process.”
Miron explains that the title, Playing for Time, refers to delaying both the work process and the object’s viewing by transforming it into a line.” Essentially, a line is one- dimensional – and therefore, by definition, not a material entity – and imaginary. Consequently, transforming an actual, material object into a linear form amounts to a transformation of the real into the imaginary. Miron’s works strive to cross the line between material and space and between space and time in order to become, to the greatest extent possible, non-material, non-spatial entities in pure time, such as Henri Bergson called the durée(duration).5 Space is therefore a representation of duration, metaphoric of time. “When we wish to conceive of time, it is space which responds to our call,” Bergson writes.
Time, he maintains, is not a multiplicity of instantaneous positions but is rather a moving continuity of material extensity, which is change itself. To be able to conceive of the abstract notion of time, it is translated in our mind into a succession of instants, an artificial multiplicity which is an attempt to resolve the contradiction inherent in unchanging duration, which is whole and undivided and cannot have any such instants. Focusing on the relationship between artist, object, and viewer, Miron’s project is engaged with both the artist’s moves and those of the viewer. The long process of work on each piece (approximately two months) is characterized by a calculated use of trial and error to distill the artist’s thought and express it in matter. The work is only finalized by the viewer’s presence. “Let us say then,” Bergson proposes, “that in duration, considered as a creative evolution, there is perpetual creation of possibility, and not only of reality.”
In the same spirit, the exhibition reflects a state of consciousness and creativity that exists between times, between worlds and within them: the past is stretched into the present, conjoining with an evolving, near future. The temporal joins the timeless, nature is bound up with culture, concept becomes matter, and the inanimate transforms into a living organic body.

Uriel Miron, born 1968 in Tel Aviv; Lives and works in Tel Aviv.

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