A Sample "A" Museum Paper.
By Matthew Dillon
1. Olafur Elliason's "360 degree room for all colours" (2002) is, as is suggested by the title, a room whose walls form a full circle. The diameter is roughly 26 feet and the walls are 10 feet tall. They are composed of a projection foil that glows with the lighting provided by the fluorescent lights rotating without. Outside, the woodwork supporting the walls is exposed, providing a tangible and earthy counterbalance to the fantastic lightwork within.
During my time in the piece, the walls transformed from ivory to an almost violently intense white, dark and emerald green, rose, scarlet, magenta and soft blue. Immediately the family resemblance to Rauschenberg's "White Painting" was apparent, with a white canvas absorbing the shadows and images of the participants within. However, "360 degree room for all colours" not only forces us to obey the conventions of a museum, but also -- as its form indicates -- those of a cathedral. The encircling walls beg for some sort of iconic piece, a stained glass befitting such a meditative space.
Instead, the walls fluctuate through a spectrum of colors, themselves ranging in intensity depending on one's proximity to the light-throwing bulbs. Staring at the walls, the overwhelming presentation of a single color intoxicates the eyeballs, stamping them with after images of sufficient intensity to play with the color that follows. Turning to the fellow participants, all baked in the colour of the moment, the typical stereotypes of association, or Carlyle's customs of experience, are removed. (ITL 88) That is, instead of being numb to the beauty of a human face because the colors, texture and and format are all so familiar, the rush of external color returns the magnificence of the form to the beholder so that they can be seen anew. Scarlet hues draw out new appreciation of lips, a recognition of the texture of pores; the green light strikes blond hair and teeth and makes them sickly, yet causes one to reawaken to the mystery of seeing hair or teeth. Consciousness is revivified through a minor tweaking of its input.
2. Upon conclusion of the 4'33" meditation before Rauschenberg's "White Painting," I turned to my chosen piece: Joseph Albers' "Study for the Homage to the Square" (1954, 1960, 1969, 1972). On first approach, the series is as plain as possible while continuing to utilize color. Each painting depicts a centrally located, block-painted square bordered by a sequence of colored squares, increasing in size until culminating in a silver frame. While still art works in the sense they are artistic compositions, they are nonetheless conceptual insofar as the experience of them is intended to awaken a sense of rapture for "the simple produce of the common day". (ITL 12)
I began my contemplation of the series with the 1960 piece. My eyes settled on the yellow immediately bordering the burnt-orange interior, my focus soft but deliberate. Soon the yellow began to grow in intensity, brighter, a frame of color levitating off the canvas. Investigating its borders, the random freckles and hairs of paint that had spilled over into the eggshell white square exhibited an electric dynamism, lively yellow creatures unharnessed by its drab fence. Eyes relaxed, the eggshell white married the yellow, cooling the intensity of color but creating an effect akin to a bacterial culture viewed under a microscope -- a yellow-white melange with white dots floating within.
My eyes refocused on the burnt-orange interior, concentrating now on the impressions of the canvas: the grainy contours, miniature bubbles capped in a desert orange, thread-thin rivulets uncoated by paint lending a third dimension to the ostensibly flat canvas. No mere block of colour any longer, I recognized single brush-strokes in the composition, tiny naked patches of canvas complementing pools where splotches of paint had settled thick and still. Nor was the coloring consistent, with one area exhibiting a deeper auburn hue, nearby a livelier, tangerine orange. Relaxing my intensity of concentration, the whole painting -- what had been a set of burnt-orange, yellow, egg-shell white and gray squares in ascending order -- melded into a framed organism of orange-yellow vibration, a dazzling, living curtain of colour reminiscent of the veil ibn Arabi contends is the final separator from Allah. In time, the electric storm of color returned to the canvas, the squares took their proper places, and I was left flabbergasted.
Turning my attention to the 1954 installment in the lower right corner, I was astonished at how magnificent and lively each color had become! The dark pumpkin orange in the center, bordered by a light turquoise that itself was framed by canary yellow each exploded from the canvas with the breath-taking violence of fireworks. Stunned though I was, I soon recognized that my experience with the 1960 piece had, to borrow Richard Kuhns' phrase, helped me "metabolize" the experience of color itself. (ITL 11) Every moment we are bombarded with such a rich and extraordinary pallet of colour, yet are less enraptured by Wordsworth's "paradise" in the "simple produce of the common day," than we are concerned with Muni's inability to keep a recognizable train schedule. (ITL 12) Obedient prisoners to Carlyle's four customs of experience -- names, science, time and space -- we impose a peculiar schema on our experience that neglects the wonder of existence in order to tame its unsettling mystery. These "names subtly, inevitably stereotype experience," giving us the term "maple tree" where there are mystifying contours of brown bark, firm yet moist, extending in uncanny balance into a dazzling nest of zigging gray branches and green budlets that explode like grenades into white flowers come Spring.
Yet the reprogramming of our reality schema that lies at the heart of many mystical traditions -- from Saint Ignatius' "Book of Spiritual Exercises" to Gurdjieff and Ouspensky's Fourth Way -- is merely an initiatory step. Staring at the 1954 installment, the same experiences that accompanied the 1960 started to develop: my investigation of the light turquoise rim exposed lighter and darker shades of blue, contours in the canvas itself and its interaction with the paint that transformed this seemingly dull block of color into a riot of harmonious detail. Peering at the inner brim of the turquoise square, at the edge where it meets the orange, I recognized for the first time that these paintings were not simply a single canvas featuring ascending squares, but multiple canvases layered upon each other, with fringes where an unsharpened scissor had taken a lousy cut left exposed.
Concentrating on this meeting point of two canvases, the entire painting again blended into a vibrating curtain of colour; flecks of yellow swimming through a menagerie of blue-orange storm clouds. Having this experience for a second time forced me to ponder what could have generated it and, meditating on this curious yet remarkable episode, I recognized the my experience of the painting had a pixilated effect, with tiny dots turning from orange to blue, blue to yellow or any combination thereof. Occassionally, color would drop out entirely and leave a black dot hovering momentarily, usually for around thirty seconds or so. Pulling back, I realized that I was becoming conscious of the machinery of sight itself -- I was not merely seeing passively, allowing colors to filter into my pupils, but was instead aware of the effects that were being generated by my rods and cones burning out and regenerating, or the film leftover from investigation of one color being projected onto another. Not only was I experiencing color, but I was becoming conscious of the experience of color.
Despite having meditated daily for going on seven years, I was stunned to realize that, in the course of my concentration, I had unwound into a quite profound meditative state. My body felt light, relaxed and strong. My back was straight -- abnormally so for a person with relatively poor posture. Having entered SFMOMA weak and disheveled from an insidious illness, this seemed even more remarkable. Yet behind my body-state, the curious thing was that I felt insulated, conscious of my body the way one is aware of one's being an individual within an environment. That is, consciousness itself was having experiences, and my body itself was merely an environment that it was experiencing.
What followed this realization was Natural Supernaturalism par excellence. Engaged in the 1969 installment, featuring variations of green -- lime green, army fatigue, forest and aqua-marine in ascending order -- my awareness extended to the museum environment. A pervasive silence first undone by the security guard walking behind me, shadow caught first in the far right silver frame, casting shadow on the paint and continuing through to the opposite side of the frame, cast on the wall, across another painting until sharply reflected in the plastic casing for Albers' nameplate. His polyester pants swish in step, sharper, deeper, then sharper again like a march of rough fabric. A woman in flip flops walks past, sweeping dust with her in-step, plastic soles popping on the hardwood. In the silver frame I see the reflection of George Braque's le guerdian, the white base of which reflects a woman sifting through her purse, keys and knick-knacks jingling like bells. A baby cries in alto; a young woman clicks by in staccato heels; an old man coughs. I realize the soul of Cage's 4'33', the true transfiguration of commonplace is not enraptured contemplation of a single object or an unaccustomed noise, but the recognition that experience itself gifts consciousness with a symphony whose instruments are filtered through the whole of our sense datum. The lavish magenta at the core of Albers' 1972, a toddler's sneeze, a waft of a woman's peach shampoo and the twitch of tendons in my knee are all parts in this orchestra of momentary experience.
Much like Danto's "sophisticated audience" at the Stable Gallery, contemplating Warhol's Brillo Boxes with as much integrity as a Cezanne, I turned away from the Albers' installment after slightly over an hour of contemplation and exposed myself to an embarrassment of riches. (ITL 3) Everywhere I was dazzled by these "mere real things" that, by recognition of the process of seeing -- and, in turn, achieving a small degree of Vision -- were transfigured into phenomenon more extraordinary than anything on the walls. Emerson contends "away with your nonsense of oil and easels. . .except to open your eyes to the masteries of eternal art." That is, having fully digested the experience of color through Albers' work, the texture of skin on an old man's face, a limp fold in a woman's pant-leg or a crumpled straw wrapper laying in dust on the floor all assumed status as fountains of the godhead, worthy of contemplation and appreciation.