feature
JOSHUA
MOSLeY The
Thinker
One of the stars of this year’s Venice Biennale, Joshua Mosley prepares to unleash his
thought-provoking animations on Chicago and New York.
words JOshua MaCk
joshua mosley’s deceptively simple, visually stunning short middle age. In Lindbergh,
∞
and the Trans-Rational Boy (1997), created
animations are complex philosophical meditations on values and life when Mosley was a graduate student at the Art Institute of Chicago,
in an incurious age. In A Vue (2004) – the title is rock-climbing jargon a child muses on perpetual motion while crossing the ocean in a
for a clean ascent without prior knowledge of the route – Henry, a boat powered by pet mice running in hamster wheels. As he dozes,
middle-aged park ranger, diligently buffs a 150-foot-high statue of the Spirit of St Louis flies overhead, creating a poetic juxtaposition
George Washington Carver, the former slave who invented over 200 linking childhood fantasy and curiosity to adult inventiveness and
uses for the peanut, while looking pensively down over a cluster of adventurousness. Beyrouth (2001), inspired by conversations between
small suburban homes. When Susan, the cousin of an acquaintance, Mosley and his grandfather, raises issues of family heritage, religious
moves to town for a job in a local fibre-optics factory, they exchange belief, love and optimism in a dialogue sung in Arabic, his grandfather’s
workplace visits, pursuing a halting, and ultimately fruitless, courtship. native language, by a twelve-year-old boy and his elder, a talking donkey.
Susan is transferred. In Commute (2003), the philosopher Descartes guides a young man,
Animated using hand-modelled figures and sparely detailed modelled on the artist, in a search for equilibrium. On the broadest
watercolours, the video has a disarming, ‘aw, shucks’ look that enhances level, this quest is a metaphor for a young person’s engagement with
the poignancy of its plot and gives it the feel of an empathetic short an imponderable future and a sign of Mosley’s profound interest in
story about loneliness born of the conflict between work and the need philosophical discourse.
for companionship. But the piece opens broader questions. For Henry dread (2007), an installation comprising five sculptures and a
and Susan, both labour and love are ways of achieving self-worth video that was on show in the Italian Pavilion at the Venice Biennale
and of situating themselves in the network of social and commercial appears both to complement and expand this enquiry. In the animation,
interactions that constitutes society. By revealing an irreconcilable Blaise Pascal and Jean-Jacques Rousseau meet while observing nature
conflict between these two essential means of fulfilment, Mosley urges in a forest. As they walk, Rousseau argues that nature is ordered by God
us to ponder the tradeoffs inherent in participating in a community. and hence is good: ‘It is – that is enough for me,’ he concludes. Pascal
Alongside the thirty-three-year-old’s three earlier animations, A counters that all things are unto themselves. God is neither present nor
Vue forms a quartet that broadly probes the ways individuals understand good. When they reach a clearing, Rousseau steps into the open to
and establish their identity and place in the world from childhood to engage a dog frolicking there. Proving as large as Rousseau, the dog
Artreview 78
Mosely.indd 2 9/8/07 10:04:38
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