SPENCER FINCH
"As Much of Noon As I Can Take Between My Finite Eyes"
Postmasters Gallery
459 West 19th Street, New York City
October 23 to November 20, 2004
By VICTORIA LUDWIN
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Conceptualist Spencer Finch delightfully plays with the imprecise nature of perception in his quietly beautiful art and installations. In his most recent show at Postmasters, entitled “As much of noon as I can take between my finite eyes,” (after a line from an Emily Dickinson poem) he continues to wryly manipulate the idea of arriving at a “truthful” portrayal of not only what he sees, but what he remembers. In each piece, he strives for an authentic re-creation or realization while incorporating into his art the impediments of translation inherent in the object/artist/art relationship: time, perception, memory and language.
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In the mural-size set of ink drawings entitled “Abecedary,” Finch concerns himself primarily with translation using Nabokov’s theory of a colored alphabet, in which each letter is assigned a particular color. A master of language, Nabokov frequently inserted word games and clever puns into his writing. Finch “translates” from letters to colors twelve pages from Werner Heisenberg’s “Uncertainty Principle,” which states roughly that a particle’s location or speed can be identified at any point in time, but both pieces of information are impossible to have at the same time. Finch scatters ink drops in various colors, each corresponding with the letters to the words in the Uncertainty Principle, over 36 panels. The result is an abstract of floating three-quarter inch dots over an expanse of nine feet tall by 30 feet wide, with an underlying clever twist: Heisenberg’s text, now rendered indecipherable through translation, about the impossibility of totally precise information about particles in space.
Finch purposely chooses to impair his own vision of an object to create a new kind of portrait of it in “Peripheral Error (after Moritake).” Similar to the restrictions poets use with language and form (sestinas and sonnets, for example) in order to suppress the ordinary and create new work, Finch’s “errors” are his art, as well as an expansion on the Japanese poet Moritake’s haiku (“The falling flower / I saw drift to the branch / Is a butterfly”). Capitalizing on the delicate effects of watercolors, Finch observes a series of butterflies from the periphery of his sight and attempts to represent them exactly as he saw them. The viewer is asked to stand 18 inches away from the paper in order to re-create the original viewing situation. Finch’s fluttery images, like flower petals, do remind me of flying objects I’ve seen in my own periphery. I can almost believe that what I see on the paper is what Finch saw in glimpsing these butterflies. Almost. The titles of each of the watercolors are the Latin names of the butterflies (Dryas Julia, Apatura iris), furthering the idea of Finch’s attempts at precision.
Finch also plays with the depiction of light quality, about as ephemeral as representation gets, in his work, namely in “The Magic Hour, Stockholm, May 18, 2003 (stalking Ingmar Bergman)” and “Sunlight in an Empty Room (Passing Cloud for Emily Dickinson, Amherst, MA, August 28, 2004).” Memory shapes each of these pieces, or to be more specific, Finch’s memory. In the first, Finch installs a series of stained-glass panels to filter the noon light; the panels are meant to transform the light as it comes into the gallery to the color and intensity of the light outside Ingmar Bergman’s house in Stockholm at dusk during May of 2003. With his title, Finch also chooses to tell the viewer that this is the light he saw while stalking Ingmar Bergman: moodily absurd and in keeping with the tone of Finch’s work. The title gives narrative to the light, bringing forth action, desire and covert nature to the work.
In the latter piece, Finch ostensibly re-creates the exact color of sunlight in Emily Dickinson’s backyard with a bank of fluorescent lights. Next to the lights is a tangle of blue translucent filters, wound into a ball and held together with clothespins. The light on the other side of this bundle is meant to create the exact color and intensity of the shadow cast by a passing cloud on the day Finch was there. The title, open to many interpretations, injects a mysterious narrative to the piece, much like “The Magic Hour.” Dickinson, like Bergman, has a cultish following and is often appreciated for her dark writing. By including the exact dates in the titles of the pieces, Finch reinforces his desire for specificity, attempts to preserve the moment in history, as well as acknowledges that time influences the quality of the light. The light in both pieces strikes a chord of memory and feels haunting, even more within the shadows of Bergman and Dickinson. With his Proustian recall, Finch attempts to create a scenario for the viewer to step into.
In these last three works, Finch himself is an important component to the art in the way that a writer is such a large component in his memoir: these are about Finch’s perceptions, about his travels and stalkings, his moments and memories. Using himself, Finch illustrates the inherent subjectivity in representation, as well as the sources shaping perception. He shows how delicate recollection can be, how personal perception is and how absurdity touches precision and translation.
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