ARTICLES

• Kicking Away the Crutches in Bullet Time: Day’s Long Journey into Now
By Doug Harvey

• Linda Day and Stuart Allen at JayJay, ArtWeek Magazine

• PULSE 2004 - 2005

• CORONA 2005-6

• CHIME 2005-6

• PULSE (Flesh) 2007-8

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Kicking Away the Crutches in Bullet Time: Day’s Long Journey into Now
By Doug Harvey

I’ve been thinking a lot about this idea of paintings as mechanisms. I recently met the eccentric visionary artist Paul Laffoley, who insists that many of his two-dimensional mixed media works are, in fact, interactive devices capable of distorting local space-time – with a variety of effects including time travel, group telepathy, and contact with alien consciousness. Form follows function.

Of course, this way on thinking isn’t entirely alien to contemporary discourse about more mainstream art – albeit couched in somewhat less specific and more academically respectable terms. Mark Rothko’s signature abstractions are said to “function” properly only under certain lighting conditions, viewed from a particular distance. Ad Reinhardt, Bridget Riley, Robert Irwin, and many others have been identified as technicians exploring and manipulating the relationship between an artifact and the viewer’s consciousness. In fact, any artist statement or review referencing phenomenology is basically pointing at the same territory.

But why stop there? It isn’t really a stretch to imagine the cave paintings of Lascaux as DIY virtual reality simulation rides, to see medieval icons as self-hypnosis eye-fixation objects, or to consider the Renaissance obsession with perfecting perspectival trompe l’oeil as the quest for a better retinal mousetrap? Tibetan, Australian Aboriginal, Navajo, and other non-Western traditions are open about the sequential, psychologically operative processes encoded in and triggered by their visual art traditions.

What really got me thinking along these lines are the recent paintings of Linda Day, whose elaborately composed 2003 digital glitchscape Pulse series I characterized at the time as “intricate stripe paintings saturated with the spectrum and perceptual idiosyncrasies of the Southern California landscape.” While these works still bear up to that reading as analogous representations of a localized sensorium, in retrospect they seem less illustrative, and more like – well, mechanisms.

Oddly enough, this interpretive shift was triggered by a reduction in the compositional complexity of the Pulse project, from the information superhighway boogie-woogie of the original 2004-2005 paintings to the striated freeze-frames of the recent Flesh and Between/Beyond series. The effect is similar to the cinematic special effect known as “Bullet Time” where a flurry of action is suddenly slowed down drastically, or frozen entirely, but the viewer’s perspective – as mediated by the camera of course – continues to move through the virtual pictorial space, allowing for careful detailed examination of events and processes that were previously only a heady blur.

Of course the key phrase there would be “as mediated by the camera,” which puts the finger on the point where these technologies of visualization diverge: at the exact juncture where the creative participation of the viewer becomes a possibility. For whatever special effects are being offered up by a painting – optical, pictorial, spatial, kinaesthetic, spiritual, what have you – depends enormously of the volition of the viewer to establish and maintain contact between the artifact in question and their own perceptual systems.

Much of Linda Day’s work is directed toward the activation of this co-creative feedback loop, and her aesthetic decisions can be traced in part to the gradual tweaking of the parameters of this relationship. The shift from the streaming grid of the first Pulse series (via passage through the architectonic Chime and Corona series) involved the disappearance of the hovering, interwoven vertical rectangular tab shapes which – while articulating the complex and ambiguous spatial characteristics of the horizontally striped “ground” – also suggested a horizontal (though not necessarily left-to-right) reading.

Although this quasi-informational signal pattern added a further layer of dimensional complexity to the already intricate and subtle effects created by the bands of luminous saturated color along which it was arrayed, it also triggered the narrative centers of the viewer’s mind as well. Hardwired (and continually conditioned) as we are to surrender ourselves to the most linear and teleological of entertainments, the prodding awake of our brain’s storytelling subroutine often has the effect of derailing less privileged and more contemplation-dependent modes of perception, persuading us that we have had a physical experience that we have not.

I would venture that Day’s intention in eliminating these modular units of punctuation from the vocabulary of the new Pulse paintings lies in the desire to direct the viewer away from passive engagement with sequential narrative tropes, kicking away the conceptual crutches so that these subtler visual mechanisms move to the foreground, and empowering the viewer to determine the durational parameters of their engagement with the painting less encumbered by a framework that suggests a beginning, middle and end to the experience.

I find the question of political content in art somewhat perplexing, since it tends to emphasize verbally encoded content almost exclusively over the artwork’s impact on the human body -- which is, after all, the actual battleground where any political discourse must be put to the test. For the artwork itself to require the viewer to take greater co-creative responsibility for its operation is to direct human consciousness towards an awareness of its own operation, and to awaken it experientially to the potential for divestment from habitual, ethological, and culturally imposed behavioral scripts.

Whether this is Day’s intention or not, it is how the paintings function has shifted in my experience. The Between/Beyond series still contain horizontal bands of rich and subtle color – though considerably less hard-edged and increasingly transparent than in earlier incarnations. But without the suggestion of periodic interruption, their horizontal scan extends to a hypothetical infinity, effectively disabling the narrative imperative. Instead, the striations slowly begin to undulate forward and back, oscillating between sumptuous surface and atmospheric depth, like a rhythmically flickering spectrographic analysis of a Turner landscape.

This hovering, cyclical mode of temporal engagement is not without parallels in experimental cinema, music (Morton Feldman’s Rothko Chapel springs to mind), and assorted avant-garde media – all of which have explored some form of disruption to linear narrative structure as part of their respective attempts to awaken from the Nightmare of History.

Minimalism – particularly in its visual art manifestation – generated a plethora of object lessons manifesting the incremental stripping-down of the art/machine to its bare-bones phenomenological gearbox. What is harder to come across is artwork that, on the one hand, dispenses with prescriptive durational framing altogether, while committing to the responsible representation of the innumerable permutations and combinations of sensory variables arising within any set of aesthetic or conceptual parameters, however narrow.

It’s a question of good faith in the co-creative capacity of the viewer, and of optimum engineering. There’s been a lot of metaphorical techno-fetishistic art world discourse about cyborgs over the last couple of decades. Linda Day’s Pulse abstractions demonstrate that the most efficient cybernetic hybrids of human perceptual mechanisms and technological artifacts are not some far-off sci-fi endpoint, but as old as the species itself. All you have to do is plug yourself in.

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Linda Day and Stuart Allen at JayJay

In “Horizons,” an exposition of nine acrylic paintings, Linda Day has taken the basic tenets of hard-edge, geometric abstraction and turned them upside down. Where in the recent past she employed the orthodoxies of the genre -- precise lines, bold colors and repetitive shapes -- to create an optical buzz, her paintings now reveal something entirely different: references to landscape that inject moodiness into what has historically been an icy, formalist province.

Unlike Kenneth Noland and others of his ilk who formulated this style in the early 1960s, Day embraces beauty and the sheer tactile joy of manipulating pigment. In horizontally stacked layers of mostly muted colors laid down in wavy and sometimes jagged lines that spill out over the edge of the frame, Day’s new paintings display a visible, archeological record of their creation.

You may think you’re looking at conventional stripe paintings, but such thoughts dissolve quickly. How, exactly, this happens is unclear. But there are clues. One is that Day’s lines are never straight. They roll and slope and pile up like towering confections in a plethora of close-hued colors whose glossy textures recall pulled taffy. (From “Pulse: Between/Beyond # 8,” a painting looks good enough to eat, I recorded more than a dozen shades before exhausting my color vocabulary.) Another clue is that these colors are achieved by an improvisational process of layering which yields unintentional Rorschach-like artifacts that linger amorphously below the surface.

Bands of colors define themes and counter themes. Gently loping lines tap out rhythms and polyrhythms, and subsurface shadow blots add accents. If it’s true, as Josef Albers said, that “the origin of art is the discrepancy between physical fact and psychic effect” then “Pulse: Between/Beyond # 8” qualifies as Exhibit A. It’s an orchestra for the eye.

The same holds for the other major work in this show, “Pulse: Between/Beyond # 10.” A large-scale (3 x 11’) mash-up of forest and sea rendered in blue/green shades, it evokes a never-ending horizon – something that hard-edge abstraction (or color field painting as it was also known) claimed to do but rarely achieved. Day’s ambiguous lines and interleaved colors produce a hypnotic, transporting effect.

It’s instructive to note what preceded the current Pulse series. “Chime #3”, from a body of work made in 2006, features short vertical bands organized in a grid that start out pale at the edges and build to a searing orange crescendo at the center. Combined, they form multiple perspectives of what looks like a constructivist cityscape bisected vertically by a superhighway -- an update of Barnett Newman’s “zip” paintings in which opposing color swatches stand-in for ones and zeros to represent an information-saturated universe. The contrast between the two bodies of work couldn’t be sharper; it demonstrates the distance she’s traveled in a short time.

Stuart Allen’s sculptures, which reference light, space and flight with kites and other forms made from sail cloth, were an interesting counterpoint. Five were on view here in “Measured.”

One, a box kite, hung from the gallery’s clerestory ceiling; the other four were wall-mounted and used repetition as a key ingredient. “One consists of seven sail-shapes affixed to a wall with turnbuckles; another featured 60 small box kites deployed perpendicularly around a corner, a possible reference to molecular geometry. While Allen’s work deals with environmental factors, it typically appears indoors, which means it can sometimes feel a bit constrained when not arrayed across big spaces as it was in 2007 at the San Antonio Museum of Art.

Yet the opposite can also be true. “A Kite for Flying in the Air” and “A Kite for Flying in Water” – two well-paired departures from Allen’s ultra-minimalist aesthetic – resemble battle shields garnished with braided rope. That uncharacteristic piece of ornamentation thrust the work into a different realm, bringing to mind the kinkier aspects of Mathew Barney’s work, which in this context was not a bad thing.

Both Day and Allen seem to have inched out of their comfort zones. Day simplified, Allen complicated, and in so doing they created a symbiosis of compatible opposites – one that points toward fresh and exciting directions for both.

– DAVID M. ROTH

“Horizons” by Linda Day and “Measured” by Stuart Allen closed at JayJay October 25, 2008.
David M. Roth is a contributing editor to Artweek.  

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PULSE 2004 - 2005

In 2004 I described the PULSE Series as a response “to the steady stream of visual and auditory in-put, of the technological filler, that permeates our culture.” PULSE was evidence of my interest in information – both visual and auditory – and in our bodies as receptors. As an information junky, I have often thrived in that cacophonic atmosphere of over-stimulation:  

In my studio the radio plays against the ringing of the telephone, the jazz emitting from the room above mingles with the sound of the street traffic from beyond the front door.  In this space a fusion is created between the human and technological and the beat of the human heart is tracked with the steady pulse of the apparatus. Surround sound.  Saturated color extends across the screen.  I am dreaming of Vista vision, Cinemascope. - May 2004

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CORONA 2005-6

In 2005 I initiated the CORONA Series. In these paintings the horizontal structure and corresponding stripes of the earlier paintings has been substituted by the vertical, the rhythmic “ruptures” are omitted, and a symmetrical composition is employed, thereby implicating the figure onto the vertical field. This simplified structure illuminates the interior and center of the painting. As the maker, I focused on the edges created by each vertical band of color, adjusting each band’s width and the color contrast between them in order to create a rhythmic movement that moves towards the center– and then out – and in.

We speak of “inspiration,” and the word should be taken literally. There really is inspiration and expiration of Being, action and passion so slightly discernible that it becomes impossible to distinguish between who sees and who is seen, who paints and what is painted.1

My intention is to focus on that physical reciprocity between the painting and the viewer. The scale and proportions of the CORONA paintings echo that of the body while the use of rhythmically repeated vertical bands of color create the visual experience of breath: as the space moves in and out so does our breathing torso.

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CHIME 2005-6

In 2006 I began a series of drawings that became preliminaries for another manifestation of PULSE. The central shape in the drawing is an elongated stacked triangle. The shape’s slightly odd proportions were inspired by the structure of Hindu temples in the nagara style, referencing the Hindu cosmology of the universe. In terms of Hindu iconography, the structure reflects the universe and, like the mandala, functions as a schematic map of the universe. The CHIME series embeds a triangular structure within vertical bands of color, camouflaging these forms within the oscillating field.

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PULSE (Flesh) 2007-8

Beginning in 2007 I began to combine the greater precision of the early PULSE series with a more fractured application of paint, thereby implicating the body into the painterly field. These paintings suggest the corporal – the blood and bone - in a field of metaphoric flesh.

As the series has progressed the field has become increasingly translucent, the paint more voluptuous. In Between/Beyond atmospheric bands of color are overlapped and marked by rhythmic lines of saturated color.

I continue to work on these projects simultaneously. Through a manipulation of space and form and a determined figure/ground ambiguity, the PULSE series investigates alternately the technological landscape and the corporal body.

1    Galen Johnson, ed., The Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics Reader: Philosophy and Painting (Northwest University Press, 1993.) p.129.