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Siri Berg’s monochromes are only comprehensible
in this age of mechanical reproduction. They are the human version of a digital
product so commonplace that we can barely remember how historically recent it
is: just as every color television videotape of forty years ago begins with a
rainbow test-screen of solid vertical stripes an inch wide, the colorsample on
the opening screen of photoshop includes a square of blue that diminishes in
hue, or intensity, or saturation, as the pixels proceed to the right. This is
absolutely easy for the math engine of the c.p.u. to produce.
Conversely, it’s absolutely excruciating
for a painter to achieve with a brush and a tube and a solvent. Just as Berg’s
flat, fitted collages require a machinelike precision, her monochromes admire,
and win, an almost inhuman severity in the application of the paint and the fading
of the color from one side to the other. A chess game can be lost, or it can
be won; but it’s also in the nature of chess that a rare winning game can
not only prevail against the opponent but also be error-free. Such a game is,
in chess parlance, “correct.” In a similar way, a Sanskrit grammarian
named Panini was the first to produce a grammar of an Indo-European language
that was totally systematic, accurate, and complete: in the tradition, this 4th
Century B.C. text is called the first “perfect” grammar.
Berg’s monochromes are as dreamy as Rothko’s,
but they happen inside an airless domain of mathematics in which nobody can breathe,
and nobody needs to breathe, and all that’s left of us is vision.
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