To create a wall plane art, free from picture-plane and frame …. to revive seeing as an instantaneous, ongoing, physical awareness - a dance of attention between elements, properties, and place …. to extend Cezanne’s ‘non finito’, Mondrian’s ‘DeStijl’, and Rabinowitch’s ‘Construction of Vision’ as paths towards a concrete, continuous comprehension. Although I use computers in my creative process, my work is anti digital in a time of its growing influence in how we see.
Conscious Seeing - “We see immediately and continuously with our whole bodies. Pictures are for the head.” (James Gibson)
Using wall plane applications made from washi, art papers and other light responsive materials I create an array of elements held within a viewer’s field of vision. Eclipsing relations and oppositions between elements and their properties can both create and destroy an array’s appearance. Changing appearances within an unframed field can heighten awareness of our ‘making’ of a work’s ‘poetic’ unity.
Poiein/poiesis (to make Gr.) "the activity in which a person brings something into being that did not exist before.”
Recognizing our unifying ‘making’ force in seeing can draw attention to our participation in what we consider to be “real”. This in turn can present “reality” as a cultural construction, a process of collective “realization” through perception, imagination, and language - changing and evolving over time.
Our awareness of seeing itself as the creative force in Art is subdued by the dominance of the bounded ‘picture plane’ that unifies, subordinates, and isolates its contents both before and after ‘seeing’. Any identity formed from our engagement with the infinite energy of the universe and its looming sheens of appearance comes from within. “Where man is not Nature is barren”. William Blake
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“We evaluate artists by how much they are able to rid themselves of convention, to change history,” Richard Serra
Against interpretation: not an explanation for “that” … for direct perception and play, an ongoing participation in “this”
" It must be abstract. It must change. It must give pleasure.” (from Wallace Stevens' poem 'Notes towards a Supreme Fiction' ):
“A war between the mind and sky” (Wallace Stevens) field of light ) ( light of mind
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field of light: An equivalent to Monet’s “Envelope” -- "For me, a landscape does not exist in its own right, since its appearance changes at every moment; but the surrounding atmosphere brings it to life - the light and the air which vary continually. For me, it is only the surrounding atmosphere which gives subjects their true value." Monet
Can awareness of Monet’s "envelope" be made directly present in art, rather than through representation?
Arrays are designed to engage a flat white wall as an open ‘ground’ for element applications and a reflector of ambient light. I am not interested in a theatrically lit "White Cube", just a sufficient wall space with adequate light from different sources. Ambient light: reflected - diffused - absorbed
light of mind: judgments of sameness and difference between elements and their properties, alignments, proportions, and locations. — a coherence and decoherence of relations across time within the unifying presence of the field of light.
An extent of appearance - not a content of recognition
field of light ) ( light of mind (polarity: mutually generative force of oppositions)
“Extent”: a polarity between an array’s expanding outness in the field of light (vertical and horizontal extension) -- and its cohering inness in the directed light of mind. (focused intention)
the visual field as a process of transaction between boundary and intimacy (peripheral and foveal - physiognomic?)
an ornament becomes art when it appears to generate its ground as place, and when this ground presents its ornament as particular. i.e. Some Romanesque capitals appear to be the source of their vaults while the convergence of vaults to their column accentuates the uniqueness of each capital.
a process of individuation -- In Art, mind and matter coexist. Perception is an ongoing act of measure that enables existence of both perceiver and perceived. -- anti "picture" (i.e. the picture as object....a frozen window to an imagined place.) anti essence? A polarity is anti essence.
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( tangents and elaborations on these initial thoughts have been temporarily removed)