The linguistic constitution of art has been the starting point of a new series of works encompassing sculptures, objects, paintings, graphic works, and a bio-chemical installation.

The installation entitled some velvet mourning, conceived for the exhibition, leads us into the world of laboratory kitchens and of alchemy, where art is ‘moist air’ streaming from the mouths of the visitors and subequently condensing against a cooled bronze sculpture. The condensate then is subjected to a chemical synthesis in the course of which spoken words turn into molecular sculptures made up of amino acids, glucose, and ethanol that finally are materialised into liqueurs and spirits. The more people talk about art, the more liquid there will be. The more people drink, the more talkative they become, and the more art will be distilled.

Seventy-two bottle objects have been manufactured for the different molecular sculptures that make up a work entitled genius in the bottle. Graphic works on enamel and mirror glass tie the processes in with a conceptual narrative that is pursued yet further in sculptures and paintings on canvas depicting cartographic landscapes and metabolic primordial soups.

For the exhibition, bearing the title where deathless horses weep, Thomas Feuerstein has created a laboratory of art in which the interconnections between language, images, molecular structures as well as biological and social conditions of life are being investigated. Language, with Feuerstein, reaches beyond communication and data storage and becomes a demonic code that translates symbols, information and instructions into bodies and matter. Talking about art, however, turns into the material of art so as to bring forth elixirs, essences and spirits in which genies in bottles – as enzymes, catalysts and programmes – wait for their media.

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The installation Some Velvet Mourning by Thomas Feuerstein – in a strictly scientific context – combines the classic concept of the primordial soup and of primordial atmosphere with the way black smokers work, namely as accelerating catalysts of bio-chemical genesis. The technical construction thus, on a laboratory scale, mirrors a potential scenario of how the neo-genesis of the molecular precursors of life forms could come about on our planet more than three billion years ago.

 

The interpretation generally accepted within the biological sciences of how life began was supplied by the US scientist Stanley Miller. According to his primordial soup theory, organic matter emerged in Earth’s primordial oceans from a mixture of methane, ammonia, water and hydrogen in reaction with electric sparks. The traditional experiment in a simple glass flask aimed to reconstruct the conditions on the inhospitable primordial planet, over whose oceans wafts of dense vulcanic gases drifted while lightnings flashed through the atmosphere.

 

It wasn’t simply just any chemical compounds that formed in the simulated, bubbling primordial soup, though, but amino acids, ketones, aldehyde or urea – all of which are key compounds of living organisms. In analogy to Miller’s experiment of 57 years ago, Feuerstein too brings water to the boil in a closed circuit made out of glass, the steam thus produced mingling with the gas mixture injected. Electric sparks imitate natural flashes of lightning. The steam condenses, drips back into the flask, and the cycle starts anew. Within no more than two days the simple amino acid glycine forms in this reaction mixture, which is a component of proteins. After a week of the artifical lightnings flashing, the inner wall of the flask is covered by an oily substance, the water itself has turned yellowy brown in colour. The automatic chemical analysis shows that, beside glycine, further amino acids and other organic compounds have now accumulated in the condensed primordial soup.

 

Part of the condensate won in this manner Feuerstein continuously diverts into the second functional construction of the installation, a laboratory-scale black smoker. The liquid thus extracted from the experimental primordial soup the artist continuously replaces by new liquids – in analogy to the global glaciation of the pre-Cambrian era, in the shape of glacial meltwater.

 

Black smokers are natural, hydrothermal wells several thousand metres deep on the ocean floor. They form when sea water penetrates into the seabed’s crust, is heated up, reacts with the crust’s rock, and then rises again to the seabed at a temperature of up to 400 degrees centigrade. Black smokers were first discovered in 1977. Until then scientists had assumed that there was hardly any life in the completely lightless, nutrient-poor and hostile environment of the deep sea. However, the black smokers enrich the surrounding sea water with a cocktail of various chemical elements, primarily helium, sulphur and iron, but also with important trace elements such as manganese, copper and zinc, as well as other minerals that, as catalysts, make possible the development and reformation of organic molecules. The latest findings indicate that especially the loamy iron-sulphur complexes of the submarine vents formed the perfect nucleus for the emergence of the very first life forms. In a certain way this even corresponds with the theory of Adam – at least if we derive the meaning of the name from Hebrew: there ‘adamah’ refers to the reddish brown layer of earth, i.e. to soil or humus.

In any case, it is highly remarkable, yet scientifically explainable, that even today the hot deep sea vents of volcanic origin are home to an astonishing variety of primitive life forms cohabiting. And they are so despite the conditions, totally inhospitable to higher organisms, extreme pressure and temperatures, and total darkness, a complete lack of oxygen, instead in water rich in highly toxic gases and heavy metals.

 

In the experimental arrangement thus presented, the two genesis processors are supplemented by a fractionated purification mechanism for a selected organic ‘primordial substance.’ We thus become witness to a generic process, namely of how ethanol, i.e. alcohol, is being generated from the primordial soup molecule ethanal at the catalytically reducing matrix of the black smoker. In a multi-stage distillation process this biomolecule is separated from all other compounds emerging de novo and thus won as a digestible pure extract.

 

Thomas Seppi

Laboratory of Radiobiology, Innsbruck University of Medicine

Thomas Feuerstein