|
The purpose of this text is to explore the artistic relationship between the concepts of thing, space and experience; to suggest some philosophical principles at work and to consider a recent example of their application in an exhibition by Cheyney Thompson. To speak broadly and evoke general categories like thing, space and experience is to venture into speculative territory and risk blurring the specificity of individual works of art. That blurring itself will become my subject in due time. But I want to begin with a simple exploration of the three terms. Thing: The art object. The thing is an artwork that is produced, that goes on display and that can be removed when the exhibition ends. Space: … |
 |
Mine the Gap – Nicholas Knight
The purpose of this text is to explore the artistic relationship between the concepts of thing, space and experience; to suggest some philosophical principles at work and to consider a recent example of their application in an exhibition by Cheyney Thompson. To speak broadly and evoke general categories like thing, space and experience is to venture into speculative territory and risk blurring the specificity of individual works of art. That blurring itself will become my subject in due time. But I want to begin with a simple exploration of the three terms.
Thing: The art object. The thing is an artwork that is produced, that goes on display and that can be removed when the exhibition ends. Space: Where the thing is. The relevant quality is that the space contains the thing, becomes the initial context for experiencing the object. Experience: The perception and cognition of the things and the spaces. This is the most fraught and contested category. At its most basic, experience involves synthesizing perceptual information with prior knowledge and prior experience.
The three categories depend on each other. Things consist of the materials they’re made from, and material takes up space. To experience them requires a larger space than the things occupy. But art spaces generally go farther than providing just the minimum conditions for perceiving the artwork; they modify and manipulate those conditions towards certain ends.
The first of these manipulations is the physical nature of the space. Wall color, lighting style, architectural materials, temperature, location: each affects the presence of the art things. Beyond that, factors less given to immediate perception operate on the experience: the architectural and exhibition histories of the space; the critical reception and dialog surrounding the work; the reputations of the people responsible for bringing the work before the viewer and the viewer’s expectations, formed from prior experience. The sum total of these factors is that space is transformed into context, a gestalt umbrella over the work whose exact periphery is impossible to discern, since it varies for each viewer, daily, in unpredictable ways.
The philosophical stakes here revolve around the directness of the experience. To fully experience an artwork demands that the viewer confront it physically, be exposed to its material and visual reality; but precisely at the moment of confrontation, a host of factors are already at work to inflect its reception. If conditions are favorable, the work is enhanced; if unfavorable, the work suffers. But can one conceive of no conditions? Everything is continuously inflected. What would a thing be without inflection? Unformed, undifferentiated: invisible to cognition. Any moment of maximum clarity is riddled with circumstances.
The irreducible presence of so many mediating factors opens gaps in one’s experience of the thing in the space. Of particular interest here is the gap that opens between the ostensive subject, that content which the work is about or represents, and the experiential subject, which registers the context of the experience of the work. The experiential subject is necessarily more broad, since it begins first with the ostensive subject and then incorporates conditions that are outside the artwork but constantly impinging on it. The type of installation that I am arguing for is one that draws attention to the disconnect between the ostensive and the experiential, a type of attention that is primarily and broadly political (by political, I am referring to the realm of meanings that are shared but slippery—we, as viewers or constituents, think we understand what is being said. But by exploiting the collective ambiguity among individuals’ ideas of the same thing, our beliefs are influenced surreptitiously). When an installation focuses the viewer’s awareness on this disconnect, the experience of the work is broadened beyond the physical limitations of both thing and space.
To articulate these points further, I want to examine the most recent exhibition by Cheyney Thompson, “Quelques Aspects de l’Art Bourgeois: La Non-Intervention,” at Andrew Kreps Gallery this winter.
Thompson’s exhibition consisted of four main components: four large gray paintings along one wall in the front room; 16 monochrome photographs, laid out on eight folding tables stretching diagonally from the front of the gallery into the backroom (the photographs, two to a table, collectively formed a gray-scale from white to black); and five grids of five photo-based lithographs depicting the gallery’s storage racks. The inventory in the racks changed from image to image, and each lithograph was printed in a different chromatic hue. The final component was the storage rack itself, visible in the rear gallery.
The show was a conceptual “hall of mirrors,” with ideas darting back and forth through the space and obscuring which were reflections and which were primary declarations. Piecing it together, one saw that no individual work was only a locus, or only reflection; instead, each component contributed both form and inflection to a broad meditation on the disconnect between “where a work comes from” and “where it’s going.” The paintings, with their shadowy imagery depicting Xeroxes of crumpled sheets of paper, were copies-without-originals, yet paradoxically presented as one-of-a-kind objects. The carefully handled palette of the paintings was then recapitulated in the very formalized presentation of the gray-scale photographs. Their solid tones formed an elemental visual alphabet, restoring the clarity that was mixed into the painterly blend hanging on the wall. Isolated as a complementary pair, these two works amounted to an eager revelation of the banality at the core of artmaking.
But the same discrete, enumerated form used for the gray-scale photographs took on quite a different character when applied to the storage rack lithographs. The five arrangements of five prints represented not the elemental components required to make an artwork, but instead created a decentralized model of the life of a work that has entered the world. (The storage rack is the purgatory between the studio and an artwork’s eventual destination; yet it is likely that more art makes its home in a storage rack than on open display, announcing itself.) The chromatic colors of the lithos push the images in a different direction, too. Whereas a gray-scale is unrelentingly linear, chromatic tones are usually arranged in a wheel, with no clear starting point. The work has entered the world: its tones are an inflection, but open to interpretation, circling, and unmoored.
By the time the viewer confronted the actual storage rack at the back of the gallery, its presence had been altered. It was now a site, a once-banal location that consciously registered as an object full of intention. The rack became a reflection, a stand-in for the idea of “storage rack”. But its newfound philosophical condition was really just another contingency, as the rack would likely become, at the end of the show, the destination for Thompson’s paintings, whose carefully honed intellectual discourse would itself revert to the status of mute material, wrapped, and waiting to hang again.
Thompson’s exhibition enacted the philosophical dynamic described at the beginning of this text. By anticipating, manipulating, and commenting upon the actual experience of disentangling its strands, the entire installation transformed into a gestalt umbrella beneath which an extra, and more enriching, layer of meaning came into being. The singularity of each piece was subsumed by the larger discourse. When earlier I spoke of “blurring the specificity” of the individual work, it was towards these ends. The ostensive subject—the “content”—makes a statement, has implications; but the experiential subject—the “context”—of the work subverts the statement, reverses course. If the encounter allows us to trust that these subversions are incorporated into the conceptual fabric of the installation, the entire experience is reshaped by this discursive exchange.
The purity of categories is, in the end, the enemy of a work: when the object stays within its prescribed bounds, no demands are placed on the experience, beyond a simple confirmation of the expected, and the surreptitious gaps beneath the veneer of experience remain unexamined. But displacing the focus away from the surface of the object, and into the space of the experiential, creates an opportunity. The viewer gains an awareness of the stultifying effects of staying within the comfort of the well-understood; the gaps in consciousness normally governed by spin, become, if only briefly, a place to dwell, and question.
