Oregon Media Insiders

"Orbis Obscurus" (Detail) Ethan Jackson 2008

Ethan Jackson's transformation of the New American Art Union this month is beautiful and baffling. Walking into the first section of the exhibit, Jackson has transformed the front windows of the gallery space into a giant camera obscura entitled 'Polyopticon VII' which depicts the side of the street opposite the gallery. Despite the advanced nature of the technology of optics in this day and time, this ancient discovery of the nature of lenses never fails to awe an audience. As humans, we love seeing the world projected and duplicated, especially larger than life and in real time. Sitting in the first section of the exhibition has a calming effect on the viewer; it is a silent upside down movie without a plot, the mirror image of what exists inside the brain if we turned around and watched the scene behind us. In this way, this section is a strange bouncing off of identical images we perceive and which our brains automatically interpret. The camera obscura is also the secret of Old Master painting techniques, and in this way the exhibition's luminosity and beauty bask in a sort of nostalgic, painterly glow. This is the introduction to Jackson's ideas and to the inflections of his style.


Diagram of Camera Obscura

We leave the first section of the exhibition, guided by a diagram provided by the gallery. In the center of NAAU's space, four television monitors ('Orbis Obscurus') are arranged in a circle. Their screens face the ceiling, and atop each sits a mirrored cylinder. Each monitor depicts swirling whorls of changing colors and as the viewer looks into each cylinder, a traveling view of a three dimensional landscape appears, as if one is flying over the surface of the earth, so to speak.


'Orbis Obscurus' Ethan Jackson 2008

These pieces are visually neat; they display a sort of virtual, inside out kaleidoscope, and it is with these pieces that Jackson most directly points to what he claims to be talking about with this exhibit: a dark and unrecognized mental space that hovers between the meeting point of perception and vision. This is the abstract space Jackson believes to house a sort of transcendental imagination. The entirely abstract nature of this concept is not difficult to comprehend, yet it is not entirely conveyed when looking at the work. The strongest point of the exhibiti is the sheer beauty of Jackson's reification. These pieces are mesmerizing. They are lyrical and poetic.


'Polyopticon IV' Ethan Jackson, Artspace, New Haven CT 2007

Jackson's statement accompanying the diagram delves haphazardly into the inspiration of literature concerning the choices of which landscape fragments he employs for 'Orbis Obscurus'. Yet this information is arbitrary and only serves to weaken the experience of his work. It is apparent that the formal elements of the pieces, when analyzed, would perhaps point to these concepts, yet to mentally travel to this sort of space seems forced. When arriving at these concepts, one naturally jumps to the question of why and is abruptly stopped. Does Jackson propose that this is where the imagination dwells? Where the darkness of the human spirit lurks? Is this place what he deems the 'Orbis Viridis Obscurus'? I am not sure. It seems that by laying these concepts across the tops of these ethereal works might actually be somewhat damaging to them. To allow this work to exist in its own right allows it to breathe and move in the viewer's eye and mind, allows it to move beyond perhaps what the artist ever intended.

In many ways, this exhibition feels as if it calls to the musings of the renaissance spirit in a contemporary context. As many technically advanced optics as this exhibition employs, it waxes nostalgic for the days of old film. The projections of the camera obscura feel like the projections of old film reels. Artists like Joseph Cornell, James Turrell,


'Sky Space' Devin Borden Hiram Butler Gallery, James Turrell 2001

and Shimon Attie


'Mulackstrasse 37 Berlin, 1993', slide projection of Jewish residents (ca. 1932) Shimon Attie 1993


come to mind, artists all interested in the essence of the passage of time and how the landscape (whether natural or constructed) acts as stage and symbol. Jackson's work also uses the lens as poetic purveyor, turning the landscape upside down and inside out to make us pay attention to our surroundings and the actuality of our perception.

Eadweard Muybridge
Animal Locomotion, Plate 700, 1887
Collotype

Eadweard Muybridge understood that a single photograph was of little use when you are trying to understand the movement of an subject. Movement is inherently a function of moving through time and space. Muybridge's genius was that the even though a single photograph could only reveal a frozen moment in the movement of an object, a series of photographs are able to reveal a much more accurate description of movement. Even more important was that when the photographs were taken sequentially so the movement of the object can be observed changing frame by frame. I was surprised at the difficulty of thinking about some of the implications of Muybridge's experiments. You can see all of this for yourself if you look at the excellent show of Edward Muybridge collotypes at Charles A. Hartman Fine Art until August 30, 2008.

I feel like working through the spatial or temporal aspects of Muybridge's work and photography in general is like trying to understand a Zen Koan. It all sounds so simple on the surface. The shutter speed should be about time and the camera lens should be about recording the space or the field of view in front of the camera. The more I work through Muybridge's work, the more I wonder if the exact opposite is a more accurate description of what is happening. We usually associate time with the hands of a clock, no space just the continuous movement of experience counted off second by second. But couldn't time also be measured by the amount of spatial information that we are able to receive from a photo or a given environment? Ironically, this would imply that the clearer the spatial information is in a photograph, the more time and less space there is. Could the shutter speed be recording more space to be exposed on to the negative the longer the shutter remains open? If I could be permitted to go slightly off topic for a minute, it might be helpful to a quick discussion about time and space in art and what it means for photography in general and Muybridge in particular.

Eadweard Muybridge
Animal Locomotion, Plate 163, 1887
Collotype

When we talk about space and time in art one usually gets the feeling like we are talking about them like they are equal. The more I look Muybridge's work, the more I begin to wonder if not only are they not equal but I think that they have opposite effects on the image on the picture plane. I think that even in the most spatial art work it is still 99% about time and 1% about space at the most. Here is why: we measure our selves relative to time because it is easier than space. Maybe it is the way that we are wired to perceive our world but even the way that we perceive space in our world is time based. Our age is even determined by years rather than the amount of space experienced. Time organizes space for us so that things do not overlap and the world is revealed to us in a clear coherent way. Space without time would probably be beyond our comprehension. Trying to think about space that is not time based is very difficult. For the point of this discussion, I imagine that in absolute space, space without time, that all objects from all angles would be visible and the past, present, and future would be simultaneously overlapping. It is time that makes space usable and legible for us. When a photograph is taken at 1/ 1000th of a second it is actually dividing space down to smaller and smaller pieces. The shorter the period of time of exposure the more legible the perception of the space becomes, but the further it moves from the actual experience of space especially if a space without time would imply everything all the time from every angle. Time slows space down to make it legible for us. Any attempt to reproduce our experience, through photograph or other means, is a separation from the experience of space. Time is already inherent to our experience so it is space that is being clarified. A longer exposure in the camera is actually letting more space on to the negative. This might be seen as motion blur on very long exposures. The blur is closer to our actual continuous experience in space when we move around an object.

Eadweard Muybridge
Animal Locomotion, Plate 188, 1887
Collotype

Muybridge's work is interesting because occasionally in these prints we do not have space broken into smaller and smaller pieces, we actually a get a continuity of space that undermines our perception of time. When we are lucky, we get to look at that those spaces from more than point of view. A good example would be the Plate 167 in which two boys are jumping over one another. On top we get to see the boys head on and on the bottom we get to watch the scene from the side. When we link the top photo to the corresponding photo on the bottom we are looking at the same event from two different angles at the same moment. The result is that we might get the feeling that time has slowed down or stopped. In other words, the more angles that we are able to view of a given scene the closer we are to experiencing a slowing down of time. Conversely, the more that a single viewpoint is experienced in a single moment of time, the less space there is in a given photo. Notice that if this is correct, the subject matter of the photo does not determine its space. It also explains why the space that we think we see in a photo is so different than the actual experience of the space. These are just some of the questions and problems that are raised when you are confronted with Muybridge's work.

Muybridge was an English native but he spent more than thirty years off and on in San Francisco. It was in San Francisco in 1877, that Muybridge was asked to resolve a bet between two men, one of which was the Governor of California, Leland Stanford. The bet was whether or not all of the hooves of a horse leave the ground when a horse is running. One hundred years before the birth Silicon Valley, it was the technology of Muybridge that proved that the horse's hooves do leave the ground all at once. The sequential movement of Muybridge's camera was made possible by an electrical trigger that was invented by John D. Isaacs, the Chief Engineer of the Southern Pacific Railroad. The electrical triggers allow a passing object to activate the shutters that are arranged along the path of an object. Although each camera only produces one image, the images of all the cameras are able to be assembled to record the path of an object and to recreate the illusion of space in which time is slowed down.

Eadweard Muybridge
Animal Locomotion, The Horse in Motion, 1878
Collotype

The example of the galloping horse illustrates three key points of Muybridge's work that are worth emphasizing. First in order to capture the movement of an object, the cameras are separated spatially because each camera is located at a different location along the object's path. Second, the cameras are separated in time as well, because it is the movement of the object itself that triggers the camera. Last the images have to be assembled outside of the space of the camera. For me, this is important because it means the all of the viewpoints from the multiple cameras are brought together in a space that exists outside of the both camera and the object. The photos must be re-assembled on another plane for the experience to be coherent much like Hockney will have to with his photo collages a hundred years later. This description reminds me a lot of a ground breaking painter that was working half around the world at exactly the same time, Paul Cezanne.

Paul Cezanne
Le Vase Paille, 1895
Oil on canvas

Whether Cezanne saw Muybridge's experiments is beside the point. It is important that both of them where attempting to be able to expand the sense of space in the picture plane by incorporating multiple points of view; Muybridge through photography and Cezanne as a painter. Cezanne's paintings are famous for the spatial ambiguity in his painting. The four edges of a table rarely align coherently to the front of the picture plane. People look like they are floating rather than sitting on their chairs. Barnett Newman thought that the Cezanne's apples looked more like cannon balls rather than fruit that we could actually eat partially because they seem to exist in a space different than the space of the table. Cezanne's paintings look the way they do because the one point perspective that was created in the Italian Renaissance was being undermined with every stroke. Cezanne wanted his paintings to be closer to the actual experience of seeing. He wanted to be able to recreate the spatial difference that you experience when you look at an object first with one eye and then other. If an object moves position depending on which is eyes is open, how can any object ever be fixed in space? The only conclusion is that one point perspective is an illusion.

Marcel Duchamp
Nude Descending the Staircase, 1912
Oil on canvas

Our eyes, like Muybridge's cameras, are separated by space. We call it binocular vision. Our brains are wired to compensate for the difference between the two eyes because one eye becomes "dominant." The result is that information of the two eyes is balanced in our brains so that we are able to distinguish depth in perspective. Cezanne's paintings are full of objects that are examined from more than one point of view. That is what gives the paintings their sense of space and depth. Because the objects were painted from more than one angle, we can slowly re- experience moving around the painting by looking at the subtle differences in perspective. One of the big differences between Cezanne and Muybridge was that Cezanne was interested in synthesizing all of the multiple points of views into a more or less coherent pictorial space. The effect of the spatial distortions is that at least in photographic terms, time is being undermined because we are experiencing space from more than one point of view. Muybridge could only illustrate the illusion of movement by putting the pictures next to one another while Cezanne's experience was smoother and more synthesized. Cezanne was interested in smoothing the transitions as the viewer moves across the picture plane from one viewpoint to the next as our normal experience of time is being undermined. If Cezanne's pictures were about synthesizing space, it would take another generation of painters like Picasso and Duchamp to synthesize movement.

This is one of the disturbing implications of looking at Muybridge's work for me. I had always thought that Cubism was about space but now I wonder if it is actually be more about time because the more time slows down the more space we see. When you look at Duchamp's Nude descending a stair case or Picasso portrait of Ambroise Vollard, you realize that both painters are attempting to slow down time more and more time rather than adding more space into the painting. In other words, Cubism is essentially about the reduction of time through the addition of space. The more and more spatial information that is included in a picture the more a coherent sequence of time is undermined and the more it comes closer to approximating our own experience. As always, by adding more space into the paintings the result is a loss of precise spatial detail, a painting version of motion blur, and we are left with a wire frame view of object in Duchamp's painting. In Cezanne's painting, we are able to understand the differences between the objects based on the way imprecise way that we see the world. Picasso and Duchamp are more about flattening time so that the space could unfold around the movement of many angles of an object rather that is closer to an absolute space than our traditional time based experience.

Pablo Picasso
Portrait of Ambroise Vollard, 1915
Oil on canvas

In Picasso and Duchamp's paintings, it is difficult to tell if it is the subject or the object that is moving. I would say that in the portrait of Vollard, Picasso's viewpoint, and by extension our own, is moving around a person that is seated. Duchamp on the other hand, is much closer to Muybridge's because his viewpoint is more or less fixed and it is the woman that moves. In both cases, the addition of space results in a loss of detail or resolution about the space. In general, the more space there is in a picture the less detail there is, probably because the multiple points of view would provide too many streams of conflicting information. We would have the same result if we were to composite the Muybridge's entire photos one on top of the other. The irony is that that the sharper or more detailed a painting the more space is squeezed out of the painting. It seems like although time and space are both essential to making pictures, they have an opposite effect on the outcome of the picture. The result is usually some sort of comprise. We want the spatial separation of the camera, or our eyes, because it gives us a sense of space in a picture, of more than one viewpoint. By reducing time everything is fixed and we are left with a world that we could never exist in and certainly could never experience especially not with both eyes open.

David Hockney
Pearblossom Highway, 1986
Photo collage

It was not until the end of the 20th century where artists and filmmakers could separate and work with the aspects of space and time individually in a picture. In the early 80s after having the assimilated the language and potential of Cubism, David Hockney was working on a series of photo collages of various subject including Zen gardens and parks in Paris. Hockney was fascinated that each picture not only recorded the object that was in front of the camera but also the position of the camera itself. He was attempting to pack the collages with as much space and time as possible. If Muybridge's photographs were high speed experiments with film, Hockney's work is literally closer to being a walk in the park. Hockney took the photos with his camera and had the rolls developed at a local one hour photo store. It is worth noting that he never trimmed his photos to create a true, synthetic space that we often experience in collages or in the spatial arrangement that we might see in Cezanne. I think that had he chosen to trim each photo, he would have eliminated the spatial component from each picture. As it was, each photo was allowed to exist as its own time and space. His photo collages are about emphasizing the multiple viewpoints that are required to create a space or a scene. Each viewpoint, each print is a microcosm and a module. The macrocosm is the actual physical space in which the pictures are arranged together on a picture plane. Like the way the Muybridge had to assemble his pictures outside the space of the camera, the pictorial space that Hockney creates did not exist in the object that he was photographing; he had to create it in each collage. In a sense, as we move through his masterpiece of his exploration, Pearblossom Highway, we move through the space by following in the tracks of the camera. The result is that we are as aware of where we are as what we see. In Muybridge it is the subject that moves, in Hockney's work we are the ones moving through the space of the picture.

Bullet Time Set up for the movie The Matrix, 1999

There is an essential quality of space and time in Muybridge's work that is proto-cinematic. We could easily imagine looking quickly at the images one right after the other to see a short animation. The evolution of this line of thought took a significant jump when John Gaeta invented a technique called Bullet Time for the movie The Matrix. The breakthrough in The Matrix was that time could not only be suspended but that you could also create an infinite sense of space because you could potentially look at anything anywhere from any angle all at the same moment. Muybridge's cameras were arranged in line, regularly spaced and triggered sequentially by the movement of the subject. Gaeta's breakthrough was that since a movie is made of still images anyway, what would happen if you put a bunch of still cameras in a circle and triggered the cameras at the same moment. He understood that the result would be a space in which time would be suspended and that you would be able to gather more spatial information from a subject that our normal experience of time and space would allow. If there is no time, space is effectively infinite and overlapping. Muybridge's work is a clear precursor to Bullet Time but Gaeta's insight and application of these ideas is pretty startling nonetheless.

Detail of the camera set up for Bullet Time, 1999

After thinking about Muybridge's work, I think that time and space is subtly opposed in any work of art. They exist together but they also work against one another. If we were to look at an example of something approaching infinite space, say one of James Turrell's Ganzfeld pieces, since there is no movement, there is no time as well, only perception. In the Ganzfeld, since there is no detail or any information at all, it is timeless. Standing in the Ganzfeld you would have no indication of past, present or future because there is no information, just the closest we could probably come to absolute space. At the other ends of the spectrum, I think that music or television is inherently about time because they can only exist through movement. Music can create a space, but it is momentary, and dissolves soon after a note is played although the emotional effect might last much longer. Music is like the continual imprinting of a space in which the imprinting does not leave a residue. Perhaps the effect of Bullet Time was so startling in the movie The Matrix was because it was the first time that the audience had an awareness of space in a medium that is inherently about time. Muybridge's work is definitely a precursor to some of the much larger problems of time and space that we are still trying to come to grips with a century and a half later. His work raises some basic questions that relate to how humans perceive the world around us that which formed the basis for most of the breakthroughs in the art of the 20th century.

Still from the move The Matrix, 1999

Allied Works Architecture
Maryhill Overlook, 1999
Photo by Sally Schoolmaster

Brad Cloepfil is the principal of Allied Works Architecture in Portland, Oregon. Allied Works is a nationally recognized architecture firm that has recently completed projects like the extension to the Seattle Art Museum, the Contemporary Art Museum of St. Louis and is currently finishing the Museum of Art & Design at 2 Columbus Circle in New York. PORT recently sat down with him to ask about the impact artists have had on his work.

How did your early experience with art feedback into your own creative process as an architect?

When I was younger, I tended to be influenced by the raw experience of the work itself. At first, I wasn't even aware of who created a work, whether it was Richard Serra or Robert Irwin, it was the experience of the work itself that was important. The experience makes you ask yourself about the spatial quality of that type of work and about the ideas that those artists are exploring. It just resonates with you. I wasn't seeing anything comparable in buildings. It just seems like those guys understood more about the intentions of the 19th and 20th century architecture than the architects did. They had clarity of thought and a practice that was built on the exploration of material that became very important to me. The singular act of focus to create a work of art was really impressive. I saw Richard Serra's Circuit at MoMA and it is just four pieces of steel propped up in the corners of the room. The physical presence and the mass of the steel and its ability to radiate space into the small gallery was for me a very architectural experience that I could relate to much easier than the so-called "architecture" that was being produced at that time. The experience is about the material and the way that the material is made. It was also easier to learn from the artists because their work is so pure. By that I mean, the work that I was interested in was focused on the exploration of only one or two ideas.

Buildings tend to be more complicated. It is hard to understand buildings when you are young unless they are a pure pavilion or something. A building is full of program, structure, stairs and support spaces that are necessary for the function of the building but very different than the direct experience of seeing work by Serra or Irwin. As a young student, art was more accessible. It was easier to understand what the artists were thinking about and what they were pursuing in their work.

Ad Reinhardt
Abstract Painting, 1960
Oil on canvas

Were there any other artists or works beside Richard Serra's Circuit that made a big impression on your early trips to MoMA?

Yes, there were some Sol Lewitt pieces that I saw in 1978.

Were they the cubes?

Yes, they were the cubes and some of the related work. It was also the first time that I heard Steve Reich in 1978 when I was in New York. Minimalism made a big impact on me at the time. In the late 70s, I was studying at Pratt. I was searching for an understanding of art movements and trying to find out why some of these things had an effect on me, I bought an Ad Reinhardt book on his Black Paintings. I still have that book, it is right there on the bookshelf.

Did the serial quality of Ad Reinhardt's paintings have an effect on you?

I am drawn to the discipline that was required to make those paintings. I am working on a project now that is a series of conversations with a wide variety of people including a few artists and even a theologian. A recurring idea in this project is this emphasis on ritual and service. It is the repetitive exploration of the singular idea. I mean, what does a farmer do? Every year he reworks the land and makes subtle tweaks and variations but it is always working with the same plot of land. Even over 50 years, he is still working the same plot of land.

Richard Serra
Circuit II, 1972-86
Hot Rolled-Steel. Four Plates
Each: 10' x 20' x 1"

Did Richard Serra's focused exploration of the material properties of steel or Tadao Ando's rethinking of the potential of concrete to make space have an impact on your approach to architecture?

...And even Reinhardt's painting process of adding a miniscule amount of pigment to create the subtle color variation that he was looking for - it's the idea that you can change something so subtly and that it has such a profound impact on the experience. I know that I keep coming back to this, but it is the discipline that is interesting to me. I don't want to get lumped into some reworking of minimalism because, for me, it is not about the language or reduction, if anything it is about the amplification of experience. It is about getting as much experience as one can, but without realizing it. If architecture does too much it becomes the subject, rather than the space and the experience. I think that is what we have seen lately, you see a lot of buildings that are very beautiful objects and then you walk inside and you are left with...nothing or at least confusion and chaos. Or it could be that you are left with a fancy gallery or an utterly banal gallery or row of boxes. The idea is that the architecture needs to be in the service of something, whether it is a profound insight or even just the experience of existing in a building.

Some of the legacy of that work is following a simple idea with discipline. When I did the Maryhill Overlook, at the beginning of the process I went in the completely opposite direction - you should see how many over-designed things I did. Later in the project, when we were concerned about the budget - since the only the person that we could bid the job was a highway contractor, we decided to pursue a very clear idea. The surprising thing was that the one clear idea became very complex as it started to interact with the light - the weather and your physical location relative to the piece all became very important. The act of architecture itself did not have to do a lot to have such profound diversity of experience. Part of that was based on my encounters with the works of artists that I admired in the late seventies and part of it understanding what I could do. As a younger architect in Oregon, you did not have any budget. You were practically making up your own projects. In every project, we tried really hard to figure out if there was one clear idea that we would be able to express. We were trying to find an idea that we would be able to explore in the context of a project.

Robert Irwin
Untitled, 1968
Synthetic polymer paint on acrylic and electric lights

Did the work of Robert Irwin or any of his scrim pieces make an impression on you during your trips to New York? He seems to be the epitome of being able to execute one clear idea for a space.

If you look at the work that Irwin was doing in the 70s and then you look at some of the architecture was being made in a slightly earlier time, say the 50s and 60s - in both cases there is a very interesting crossover. Irwin was able to take some of the modernist ideas about space and move them forward within his own language as well as being able to make the primary experience of the art to be your perceptual understanding of a space. If you were to contrast the very interesting work of Irwin with some of the not very interesting architecture that was also being made in the late seventies, it's obvious that Irwin was the much more interesting model to learn from. I was drawn to it because it was more about the ideas of architecture than what the architects were doing. There was simply more to learn. If you were to walk in to Irwin's Homage to the Square that was at the old Dia, the experience is both simpler and more complex than most architecture that we see.

Have you ever seen one of Robert Irwin's discs like the one that we have on display at the Portland Art Museum now?

I remember seeing one of Irwin's discs at Berkeley a few years ago. An interesting thing about the discs is that you really see how Anish Kapoor has taken Irwin's language and ran with it. Kapoor's introduction of color changes your perception of the space in his sculpture. It is an extension of the more ephemeral and translucent experience that Irwin was working with. It is a very deep dialogue.

Anish Kapoor
Void, 1991-92
Fiberglass and pigment

That is interesting because in Irwin's work you cannot separate space of the disc from the space of the wall. The two of them are interdependent but Kapoor's work he seems more interested in creating a free standing object, even if it is attached to the wall.

Yes, but it is an object that loses its own sense of boundary. At the same time, it is an object that is aware of its own limits. The cobalt dishes have their limit but they are also infinitely deep. When you seen one of them, you feel like you could put your hand clear through it. It is the same dialog but it has evolved.

Did Donald Judd ever have an influence of you or your work? Have you ever been to Marfa?

I went for the first time three years ago. It was amazing and the field in front of the Artillery Sheds at Chinati, which had these large concrete sculptures, was incredible. In the concrete sculptures as well as some of the other works that we have discussed, it is the iterative exploration of the singular idea that made the biggest impact on me. I hate this analogy, but it is a little akin to music where a musician is revisiting the same composition over and over again. The serial nature of the arrangement of the sculpture as well as the way that the openings change from one sculpture to the next is the basis of an art experience that was very interesting. Those lessons are completely primary. You see it over and over again in contemporary art, at the least the contemporary art that is non-narrative.

Donald Judd
Untitled, 1980-84
Precast concrete
Chinati Foundation,
Marfa, Texas

Did you respond to his exploration of the single sculptural module that was developed to create a very complex experience across the field?

I think that there was a level of humility in that act. (...laughs) On the one hand if a guy takes over a field with concrete boxes he had a very heroic spirit but on the other hand there was a very consistent rigor of thought. It was almost like he said to himself: "I am going to stay in this domain and see what I can learn." You see a very similar rigorous thinking in Dan Flavin's work. Everyone thought they understood what Flavin's work was about before the installation at Chinati, but after you walk into the rooms you realize that he had found something completely new. It is absolutely beautiful. The entire experience is reinforced by travelling from building to building so you are able to see how his language of color, light and shape evolves. It was amazing for me because each building is the same but the space created by the work is very different. I was amazed at what he had accomplished.

Dan Flavin
Untitled (Marfa Project, 1996
Flourescent lights, film and enclosures
Chinati Foundation
Marfa, Texas

I was impressed not only with the way the lights are installed but also the way that he was able to mix the different colors of the lights from what should have been more or less, inert tubes of fluorescent light. For me, the experience was surprisingly painterly.

That was interesting for me as well, especially in how it relates back to my own work. It is not reductive but it is a controlled language with a completely rich and varied interpretation of experience. The variety of experience alludes to an infinite possibility in some way.

Did you experience the Judd's concrete sculptures after you had done the Maryhill Overlook?

I knew Judd's work before I went out there and I was familiar with Michael Heizer's work which was a big influence on me. It was during the period when I was trying to find my own voice and not looking at architects. It might seem like a rejection of architecture, except at the time, the only way that you could find architecture was looking at the artists. I believe that it was not the first time that architects were influenced by artists. If you look at the 20th Century Avant-Garde architects, it is clear that they found their language for architecture by looking at paintings.

Le Corbusier was a painter.

Right. Certain disciplines keep the dialog alive, while other disciplines fade away. Eventually, those disciplines come back and the whole cycle starts over but in a different direction. Rather than everybody trying to be everything, it is nice is when you just add your voice to the continuum of ideas.

Allied Works Architecture
Wieden + Kennedy atrium, 2000
Photo by Sally Schoolmaster

How did you respond the 100 mil Aluminum pieces in the Artillery Sheds at Chinati?

I had actually never seen those before I went to Marfa. The composite and cumulative effect of all those sculptures in such a tight space is really beautiful. The light on the sculptures makes the boundaries of the form completely ambiguous. I was recently at an opening of one of Ann Hamilton's new works, which is a tower that functions like a vocal chord. The first time I saw Hamilton's piece I thought that she hadn't created a building but an instrument that would allow Meredith Monk to create a voice piece. I was impressed with her quest for a spiritual resonance between the form and experience of her work. Anne's work was a large vessel but it also had associations of ruins and astronomical references. The work is about our existence in the cosmos with all of these astrological and cosmological signs that made for a very sublime experience. On the other hand, you have an artist like Meredith Monk that synthesizes all of these chants from Tibetan monks and Gregorian chants which transformed Hamilton's sculpture into a kind of church.

That is interesting if Hamilton's work became a resonant chamber for a variety of activities and associations.

I remember that I took an Episcopalian priest through Wieden + Kennedy when it first opened and he told me it was the most spiritual space that he had ever been in. Ann Hamilton is close to my age and Meredith Monk is a little older, we were the post-Vietnam generation and we had a complete lack of faith in a form of authority. Your heroes are all murdered, you are twelve years old and everybody gets shot and every night on the news you are watching guys with the machine guns just shooting into the jungle. That is what I grew up with. I wonder if there isn't something in this generation that is on a quest for meaning. It is almost like we need to affirm some connection that it all means something. There are certain ways of dealing with chaos. Either you look at the chaos of the world around us and you produce something that is equally chaotic, perhaps a caricature of that chaos, or you respond by producing something very still. I definitely see myself as trying to create a counterforce to that chaos.

End of Part I