Dane Mitchell’s second exhibition at RaebervonStenglin, ‘All Whatness is Wetness’, springs a phenomenological encounter on his viewers. Art is to be experienced not as a discrete object but as an unpredictable wetness: a room in which vapour is both present and ever-vanishing. This vaporous sculptural form is always in flux, yet presents an eternal phenomenon, as old as the earliest beginnings of life. Labelled bottles in the back room explain the provenance of the water: the Maeander River (now known as the Büyük Menderes, and from which the word ‘meander’ comes) that winds its way through Asia Minor until reaching the Aegean Sea at what was once the Ancient Greek town of Miletus. There the Milesian school philosopher Thales (c. 624 546 BC) hypothesised that the nature of all matter derives from a single primordial substance water. This notion that all
Read More: RaebervonStenglin opens exhibition of works by Dane Mitchell