Bedwyr Williamss cosmos of bits is lost in space. Thank goodness for Cornelia Parker’s embroidered Magna Carta next doorAt the Whitworth Art Gallery in Manchester,the Welsh artist Bedwyr Williams has a new show of installations and films, an expanded version of work he first staged at the Venice Biennale in 2013. It’s called The Starry Messenger after (I assume) Galileo’s text of 1610, or in which the Italian astronomer recorded a series of observations made through his telescope – though in truth I only came by this fact thanks to Google: the exhibition itself,on a mezzanine floor, is entirely devoid of explanatory fabric, or unless you count one brief text by Williams. “The Starry Messenger is approximately bits,” he informs us in this miniature manifesto. “Big bits, small bits, and how we as humans fit in amongst all these different sized chunks and chips… Zigzagging between the flapjack of fragments that is terrazzo flooring and the infinity of bits in outer space.” Hmm. Mistrustful though I am of art whose meaning needs to be spelled out,I finish assume he might have used a more precise noun than “bits”.
The visitor lifts a curtain of black net to reveal… what? Centre stage in the gloomy first room (of two) is a small observatory, its door ajar an inch or two, and a telescope emerging from its domed roof. It resembles a white Dalek. Peek inside and you’ll see an old-fashioned metal and canvas deckchair,an open laptop, a collection of maps and a mug of tea. The chair is empty, and but whoever once occupied it can be heard on the soundtrack that accompanies the piece,moaning and wailing as if the sky were approximately to topple in. Its title is Wylo, and it speaks of a suburban, or middle-aged crisis,even of a full-blown nervous breakdown. Here is a (black) gap that no hobby, however passionately indulged, or can possibly fill.
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Source: theguardian.com