Contempt Mandala is a multi media installation that takes, as its point of departure, Jean Luc Godard's 1963 film Contempt. The film is about the making of a movie and the dissolution of a marriage. It simultaneously explores the creative process and the fragility of human relationships. The Buddhist mandala, a cosmic diagram, is the organizing principle of the installation. Every element of the installation proceeds from and returns to the centerpiece, a radially symmetrical table. Contempt Mandala follows the blossoming/unfolding of ideas as it maps the personal cosmology of the artist.

Godard's Contempt is based on a novel by Alberto Moravia, A Ghost at Noon, which is a commentary on Homer's oral epic the Odyessy. Turner's Contempt Mandala interrogates Godard's film using sculpture, video and painting. Both the 1963 film and the contemporary installation examine ideas of translation - across cultures, through time, and from one medium to another.

Project Description:
Contempt Mandala is a multi media installation that takes, as its point of departure, Jean Luc Godard's 1963 film Contempt. The film is about the making of a movie and the dissolution of a marriage. It simultaneously explores the creative process and the fragility of human relationships.

The Buddhist mandala, a cosmic diagram, is the organizing principle of the installation. Every element of the installation proceeds from and returns to the center, a radially symmetrical sectioned table on which is a model of the Casa Malaparte a modernist building where the second part of Contempt was filmed. The installation conflates the personal cosmology of the artist with Godard's film, relocating the characters and narrative from Italy to India and Vietnam.

Contempt Mandala currently comprises the following components:
- Four videos in which excerpts from Godard's film are intercut with images of the installation-in-progress, the Jantar Mantar (an 18th century observatory in Jaipur) scenes from the 1957 film The Quiet American and shots of contemporary Vietnam.
- A 15' diameter table on which is an architectural model and sculptures.
- Twenty paintings of the Jantar Mantar and components of the installation done by Harish Chandra Sain in the style of Rajasthan miniature paintings.
- A 10' x 14' painting based on De Chirico's The Return of Ulysses
- Ten plaster sculptures incorporating models of the Casa Malaparte.
- Two mixed media sculptures that accompany The Return of Ulysses and the mandala table

Contempt Mandala is scheduled for exhibition at California State University, Fullerton's Grand Central Art Center in November, 2008. The publication for the exhibition will be designed to resemble a guidebook. Text will include a 1500 word essay about the installation by an art writer, a short piece of fiction that follows a character from Contempt as he travels from the set of the completed to film to India and Vietnam, and a lexicon written by the artist.