Going Tornado
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- Going Tornado
- 1976
- b&w photograph
- 20,3 × 25,3 cm
"Going Tornado" offers one of the most provocative and complex performances conceptualized by Paul Neagu as part his hermeneutical investigation of anthropocosmos. Enacted several times during his career and represented in numerous drawings, Going Tornado became a seminal work, a symbolic transposition of the artist’s own body into a spinning ritual that transcended “life-physical facts” in order to produce “art-spiritual suggestions.” The work projected Neagu’s metaphysical and conceptual system of ordering the world, revealing “an ecstatic type of communication” essential in establishing the unity of man/cosmos. Going Tornado became part of the cycle Gradually Going Tornado, presented at Arnolfini Gallery in Bristol in 1976, alongside the performances Blind Bite and Horizontal Rain. Each of these three levels embodied the structure of Neagu’s generative art and corresponded to the three stages of existence: the instinctual, the communicational, and the spiritual. These three stages were translated into the simplicity of geometric grammar: the triangle, the rectangle, and the spiral. This cycle became a catalyst for the future development of Hyphen. The photograph captured the moment at which Neagu began to fasten his body and the objects around him with elastic straps, preparing for his tornado-like movement. Via this ecstatic and exhaustive whirling motion, the artist aimed to transcend his physical limits and his material reality, leading him “to transcendence and to invisibility.” A.Se.