Cosmos & Chaos

Robertson Museum
February 1 – April 30, 2004

Written by Albert Boime, Art Historian
University of California at Los Angeles

Then there is the case of the artist who questions the very existence of a Godhead and hence it's antithesis, boiling life down to an existential struggle of the individual. Mosner for example states: “God is nonsense; a primitive explanation for the obvious, life is a beautiful infinite nothing. I hate science, a compulsive dispassionate game. Currently science and technology solve problems and then enslave people.” Or further: “If humankind continues or ends (extinct) is of no consequence (sic). The universe is too diverse to care (dispassionate). It does not matter. What if humans are a hideous infection? I am a fighting cell in the war of decency, economic rights.” Despite Mosner's pessimism, he accepts some form of change through his art, and says, “I work at connecting with the soulful spirit of people through shared experience using beauty and experiment with craft.”

His two works Guard-Army of the Disenfranchised and Oozing Door both point to a loathing of the objective world and material substance. In the first, space is skewed and disorienting with a colossal object in the foreground, wrapped Man-Ray-like looms up abruptly and threateningly to confound the viewer's position, while in the second matter melts into viscous pools, again confounding the perspectival scheme while keeping conventional detail. Here he suggests the phrase from the Communist Manifesto that, “All that is solid melts into air,” leading us to doubt our senses and question reality and the mystification of experience. The apertures in the door of Guard-Army of the Disenfranchised resemble bullet holes, and the wrapped object of a person in a body bag, the frames of pictures unloosed from their moorings all combine to express the utter desolation of the forgotten people, the “disenfranchised.”