Jorge Luis Borges wrote a
fascinating short story ‘Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius’ about a world, discovered
in an Encyclopedia, which slowly through the literary process, comes to posses
customs, philosophies, psychology, history, language and literature. So much so
that it inevitably grows to encompass and eventually overwhelm our own world.
Tlön and Uqbar are a world which:
A secret and benevolent
society… arose to invent a country. Its vague initial program included
"hermetic studies," philanthropy and the cabala. From this first
period dates the curious book by Andrea. After a few years of secret conclaves
and premature syntheses it was understood that one generation was not
sufficient to give articulate form to a country. They resolved that each of the
masters should elect a disciple who would continue his work. This hereditary arrangement
prevailed; after an interval of two centuries the persecuted fraternity sprang
up again in America. In 1824, in Memphis (Tennessee), one of its affiliates
conferred with the ascetic millionaire Ezra Buckley. The latter, somewhat
disdainfully, let him speak - and laughed at the plan's modest scope. He told
the agent that in America it was absurd to invent a country and proposed the
invention of a planet. To this gigantic idea he added another, a product of his
nihilism (4): that of keeping the enormous enterprise a secret. At that time
the twenty volumes of the Encyclopaedia Britannica were circulating in the
United States; Buckley suggested that a methodical encyclopedia of the
imaginary planet be written. He was to leave them his mountains of gold, his
navigable rivers, his pasture lands roamed by cattle and buffalo, his Negroes,
his brothels and his dollars, on one condition: "The work will make no
pact with the impostor Jesus Christ." Buckley did not believe in God, but
he wanted to demonstrate to this nonexistent God that mortal man was capable of
conceiving a world.
-- Jorge Luis Borges,
Labyrinths, 1988
Though I doubt Mike has
ever read any Borges, his sculptures and drawings attempt in their own way to
modestly duplicate Ezra Buckley’s efforts, in that they are the awkward
remnants of a machine-age which never happened.
His sculptures are built
out of concrete, steel and bits of wood. There’s an industrial feel to them;
both in the sense that his work seems to be the creation of some foreign manufacturing,
but also because they’re the tools that would work in some unknown and
unknowable endeavor.
I’m tempted to say that
they seem to be the modernist leavings of a more primitive world. Of a
civilization left behind. An awkward society of giants able to lift monstrous
tools of stone and wieldy machines of iron. Yet, at the same time, those very
materials are those of the world of now. Concrete, forged steel and milled
wood. They’re the detritus of our industrially developed North America and its
crumbling manufacturing sector.
And so, like Tlön, Uqbar,
Orbis Tertius, Mike’s sculptures are the firmament of a world not rediscovered,
but one created in toto and waiting, either for entropy to bury it again, or
for the lands of his fertile invention to overcome and overwhelm our own.
- Lars Townsend, Michael
Wickerson Catalogue Essay, 2012
