Art Blog - ArtId

The Spencer Finch exhibit, "What Time Is It On The Sun" now showing at the MASS MoCA museum in North Adams, MA is by far the most poetic and inspiring show I have seen in a long time, ever perhaps. It is a very "human" show. I say "human" and yet none of the pieces depict human beings as the subjects. Instead, Finch puts the observer at the center of the experience in which each piece explores the idea of human perception by attempting to recreate, through scientific methods, how people remember, experience, and represent the visual and sensory phenomenon that occur in everyday experience. Using a variety of media, Finch manipulates light, temperature, air velocity, and color to create art which literally replicates life. What makes this poetic is that Finch has chosen subjects that are elusive in nature: weather, dreams, stars, memory, sight, thought processes, and other equally mysterious phenomenon, which elicit an instantaneous emotional response.

One of my favorite pieces is "Sunlight In An Empty Room, (Passing Cloud For Emily Dickinson, Amherst, MA August 2004)" For this piece Finch traveled to the home of the famous poet Emily Dickinson, in Amherst, MA. While there he recorded the light in the poet's yard. It was afternoon and clouds occasionally passed, breaking into the sunny day. Finch took multiple readings of the clouds overhead and marked the change in light due to the clouds. To recreate the experience of the day, Finch replicates the actual light, color and shadow created by the sun and clouds that day. To do this, he affixes two rows of sixty florescent tubes to the wall -- a formula which exactly creates the same measurement of light he noted that day. Then, he creates the effect of the cloud. Not, the cloud itself, but the "effect" of the cloud. To do this, he assembles a mass of translucent blue, gray, and violet filters held together by clothes pins and hangs it from the ceiling so that it floats in front of the florescent lights at a distance of about eight feet.

!IMAGE161!The observer is meant to walk around the artificial cloud to experience the exact change in light and temperature that occurred on that day at the Emily Dickinson Homestead. I walked it slowly, paying little attention to the "cloud", concentrating instead on the overall effect. It was fascinating. I felt as though I were outside and a cloud was truly passing overhead -- a low cloud perhaps that blocked the sun so much it reminded me of one of those days at the beach when the sun is out and it's a great day to be outside, but when the clouds pass by, it gets dark and cold immediately and a feeling of disappointment arises until the cloud passes and it's sunny again. I really felt I knew exactly what it was like to be there with Spencer Finch on that day in August 2004. Sharing the same perceptual moment with him brought me closer emotionally to the artist, to the physical and emotional effects of nature, and wonderfully, to Emily Dickinson, an artist whom I imagined experienced similar days as she wrote her poetry in that yard.

The show exhibited many other like pieces such as "Two Hours, Two Minutes, Two Seconds. (Wind At Walden Pond, March 12, 2007)" in which Finch creates a large horseshoe shape of forty stacked fans to exactly recreate the changing breeze which occurred on the aforementioned date at Walden Pond. The observer stands inside the horseshoe and feels the winds.

I also thought some of the "smaller" pieces were extremely powerful. I was particularly taken with "Poke In The Eye", a painting describing the aftermath of that particular injury -- bleary and beautiful.

Other highlights from this show are: "102 Colors From My Dreams", "Trying To Remember The Color of Jackie Kennedy's Pillbox Hat", "Butterfly", and the very funny, "Blue (One Second Brainwave Transmitted To The Star Rigel)".

Here's a tip: If you go to see this show, you must, I mean must, pick up and read the booklet that accompanies the show. Without it, you will wander aimlessly not knowing why the art is the way it is. I was so saddened to see dozens of people staring at the blue cloud not knowing what to think of it. Not one person actually walked around the cloud as the booklet instructed -- many had the booklet, but didn't look at it. I was lucky to overhear a woman reading from hers when I arrived, so I immediately went to get one.

For more information about Spencer Finch's "What Time Is It On The Sun", and the MASS MoCa museum, please visit www.massmoca.org.

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