Why Depend on Space and Time, 2014

This sculptural work by Shezad Dawood is intended as an homage to Robert Anton Wilson (1932 – 2007), the American author and polymath who became, at various times, a novelist, essayist, philosopher, psychonaut, futurist, libertarian and self-described agnostic mystic. Robert Anton Wilson’s novel Schrödinger’s Cat Trilogy is also the starting point from which Shezad’s ambitious film project: Towards the Possible Film takes its cue. Wilson described his work as an ‘attempt to break down conditioned associations, to look at the world in a new way, with many models recognized as models or maps, and no one model elevated to the truth’.

A similar attempt underpins Shezad’s idea for Robert Anton Wilson’s bust. Conceived as a quantum portrait in honour of Wilson’s theories on quantum physics, the bust will formally and conceptually draw on the futuristic endeavour to capture movement and multiple points of views, contained in Umberto Boccioni’s work (such as Unique Forms of Continuity in Space, 1913), and in the constructed sculptures of Naum Gabo, yet updated to present a vista of the future-past via contemporary technology.