ACTEA ARTEMESIA / Artemesia absinthium

From: Additional Notes on the Plant Projects, 1995

Artemesia absinthia or wormwood is an infamous plant due to its use as a flavoring in absinthe flavored annisette during the late 19th century France. The immoderation and excess related to this drink seems to have little chemical basis and was evidently a cultural addiction. The green oil and its surrounding material culture are interesting on a visual level. This interest in distortion grew from over wintering the plant works under artificial light, whereby the plants became distorted and leggy, leaning to the light.

To "read" such a codex is to reverse-engineer a language through its metaphors... to reverse-engineer the material culture of the Enlightenment through its accidents of language. – Porges

A recent interest in anamorphism, (not disconnected to a longstanding interest in mathematics, morphology and topology), and in particular anamorphs of moths brings together metaphorically the connection between moths attracted to light, plants attracted to light, and the distortions and excesses of some aspects of our culture. The metaphor is dependent on the obervation/ discovery that the beautiful green Saturnid moth the Luna moth is named variously, Actea luna, Actea artemesia and Tropea luna, (tropism, a form of tropos see Atropa belladonna, means to turn, and is used in biology to describe attractions such as phototropism in nocturnal moths and all plants).

Whitehead's massive sculptural poem/ montage/ installation is a meditation on the mechanics of vision, power and light...

That Luna moths are green and so is absinthe oil, that attractions and distortions describe their behavior and/or history and that they continue to be described linguistically by words that begin with A or AN is of great interest. They linguistically continue the curious chain of words that have been associated with many recent works: Amnesia, anamnesia, anamorphism, artemisia, absinthe, abstain, atropa, actea –linguistic tropes.

.. a meditation on nature and the baroque, where issues of beauty, excess, and entropy play out in complex configurations...

All of this is also related to an underlying interest in the gothic, the baroque and the relation of the decorative and its re-evaluation in the face of modernism, and in particular minimalism in sculpture. (This is also a critique of modernist reduction as the only mode for conceptual work, and thus as a form of amnesia.)