New York based artist Alexandre Singh is interested in connecting principles and mythical tales, which often combine reality with fiction. His most recent exhibition at Jack Hanley Gallery in San Francisco at the end of 2008 was entitled Assembly Instructions. In 2008 he also collaborated with two other artists - Jonah Freeman and Justin Lowe – to create Hello Meth Lab in the Sun, an immersive installation at Ballroom Marfa, Texas, in which visitors appeared to have stumbled upon a modern form of alchemy site in the guise of a meth lab. Upcoming projects include the Performa Biennial 2009, New York and group exhibitions at Galerie Christian Haye, Berlin; La Galerie, Noisy-le-sec and at The Drawing Center, New York.

LMF: Tell me about your interest in Aleister Crowley.....

AS: HP Lovecraft, when asked if he believed in the supernatural, would often explain that he was entirely sceptical about the existence of extramundane phenomena. It was for that reason I think that he was able to write so wonderfully on that subject since he had a level of removal from it. It was not the babblings of a believer. I’ve had a long interest in alchemy and the hermetic tradition, especially as applied to the process of making art. The parallels are, I think, quite obvious - a mystical approach to thinking about matter, transformation, enlightenment etc. Mr. Crowley, in this field, is definitely a babbler and a believer. And so I like to poke fun at him whenever I can. Hence in the video there’s a image from the frontispiece of his book Magick Vol. IV in which we see “The Magician, in his Robe and Crown, armed with Wand, Cup, Sword, Pentacle, Bell, Book and Holy Oil.” I have replaced the photo of the self-important looking Crowley with one of a 1960s magician who looks a little bit like Tommy Cooper. Sporting a fez, he is pulling the lid of a silver plate to reveal, of course – the white rabbit.

LMF: I really like the way that this piece is presented - almost like it is a doctor looking at X-rays on a light box, but with the voice of a magician about to do a card trick. How did you come to this way of making the film piece? Is it something you have used before?

AS: Yes it is a bit like an X-ray, it might be nice in future to parody the doctor’s finger pointing out where you’ve broken your arm! In fact the images are being projected using an overhead projector, which is the machine that your teacher might have used at school and that used to be quite popular in business before the advent of PowerPoint. The camera is pointed at the wall recording what is projected, which is why my hair keeps popping into the frame. The ‘slides’ are photocopied transparencies of the collages placed on the glass. I wanted a way to manipulate the images in an analogue and tactile way that was direct, and that like the voice, stumbles and errs. I have been trying to develop a lecture performance based on this material very much like the video in which I use an overhead projector. It’s however much harder in real life to talk and change the slides at the same time.

LMF: This seems to relate to a similar set of images at your recent exhibition at Jack Hanley gallery San Francisco - could you perhaps tell us a little bit about this show, and how it relates to this online work for ArtReview.

AS: The work is part of an ongoing series called Assembly Instructions. It involves me preparing a large amount of related collages on a musing or chain of thought that I have and then arranging them on the wall as giant flowcharts or brainstorms. All the individual collages are connected to each other by lines of dots drawn in by pencil. The result is a somewhat cryptic work that I hope unfolds to the viewer a little like a crossword puzzle: gradually, as you examine it, the smaller connections between individual pieces enable you to imagine a larger thought process. These ideas are derived from my notebooks, often being those thoughts a little too whimsical or puerile to fit into my main practice. For example the show at Jack’s included a work called Vectors of Confession in which I traced the path of a person’s confession from their priest to his bishop, from the bishop to his archbishop, onwards and onwards till the collective whispers reach the Pope who, unable to find a superior being on earth, buries the secrets by conveying them into the lowest region of the lowest creature – the anus of the donkey. The donkey strokes the Pope’s head with its tail in a consolatory manner and then a voice in exclaims in all caps “NEVERMIND”. That aside, the principal thrust of the show was a quite self-reflexive examination of ‘tangential thought/logic/causation” as opposed to ‘linear thought/logic causation’. This is the kind of thinking evinced in dreams, mental illness, and of course these collages on the gallery walls. This examination of ‘tangential thinking’ led me to wonder about the possibility of ‘tangential magic’. The collages on that subject formed a shorter and more coherent narrative that I thought could adapt well to the nature of a video on the web (as opposed to the hour long marathon that the other subjects might have produced).

LMF: There seems to be a particular aesthetic that you are drawn to which is almost museological, certainly monochrome and antiquated….

AS: I do in my installations often make reference to museological devices, particularly placing objects in quasi-vitrines and cabinets. With the two-dimensional works I try to avoid an overly antiquarian aesthetic but it is sometimes inevitable. A lot of the aesthetic of the Assembly Instructions is derived from the source material, mostly encyclopedias, I’m a big fan of those Time Magazine books that project a very certain, optimistic 20th century view of science, nature and the search for truth, which is nice to juxtapose with my ‘cock and bull’ stories. I decided to use black and white photocopies because of the restriction of the medium in terms of manipulation; but also more importantly because of the historical flattening which makes my job a lot easier. If I put a 1960’s Time Life photograph and a contemporary image from Flickr onto the glass of the photocopier, the resulting Xerox is timeless. You’re not immediately aware of the fifty years that separate the two images; collaging them together is then much easier and the result is I hope a new historical reality, not merely a fetishization of the past. I’m passionately opposed to the current prevalence of nostalgic images and presentation methodologies in contemporary art. If an idea merits it, then it is appropriate. Too often though the artist and viewer are seduced by the 1970’s reel to reel player and not by the content spinning on the spools. You can probably guess from my vehement opposition that I am myself often tempted to stray in that direction – those vacuum tube amplifiers are just too sexy!

LMF: How do you think David Copperfield made the Statue of Liberty disappear in 1983?

AS: As a child this was just too amazing, even as a young boy I had a gut feeling that most magic was just trickery, but to magic away The Statue of Liberty? How could that be? Didn’t the citizens of New York notice it was missing? It sounded like the ultimate trick. Years later I saw one of these TV shows that explains how famous illusions are realised. You can’t believe how disappointed I was. It seems the more ambitious the trick, the less amount of work or ingenuity goes into it. It’s a bit like that aphorism of how ‘the bigger the lie, the easier it is to believe.’

LMF: Can I ask about this piece of work in relation to the theme of this series - Apophenia - how did this provide a stimulus for you?

AS: The Surrealists made an art of finding drawings in the grain of wood. I think I do the same finding stories in the grain of Wikipedia.