We visited an institution called MASS MoCA this last weekend in North Adams, Mass. Unbeknown to us , a legal saga was in the process of being resolved, as a court in Springfield found in favor of MASS MoCA . The institution and Christoph Buchel had been locked in a dispute over the disposition of an unfinished project whose budget had ballooned out of control.
What did catch our attention was a show featuring the work of Spencer Finch. I was unable to take shots of his work as there was a general photographic lock down, a likely consequence of the Buchel matter. However, his site: Spencer Finch, includes a number of pieces in the show. One can also look in on the MASS MoCA site.
Why Mr. Finch? The more that I saw of his work, the more I was reminded of A&P and the things that we tend to discuss here. Finch is an artist who can, on one hand, be seen as an earnest soul bemusedly pursuing his muse (A&P), or, on the other, a clever exploiter of the system (not A&P).
We understand that Mr. Finch began by looking into subjective color. A number of his earlier pieces consisted of creating color samples, in watercolor, of objects that he was observing under differing conditions. Three sheets give us such samples taken from objects in a room in the vicinity of the Rouen Cathedral, Monet’s subject in a famous series of paintings. Another grouping displays his attempts to remember and paint various degrees of darkness that he encountered in his studio. This concern with color memory forms a thread in the show which, for me, has a certain continuity and economy, complicated a little by his story about Monet.
Beyond that, the show devolves into a panoply of equipment and effects that ends up far away from what seems the original premise. Indeed, I thought I was looking at a quotidian survey of art from the seventies and eighties until I discovered that it was all Spencer Finch.
My intention is merely to bring Mr. Finch to our attention. I can see at least two areas of discussion: his work with color and memory – or otherwise the nexus between language and perception – and his success as an impresario. What do you think of his approach to the color memory issue? Is there something fresh here? How about his employment of off-the-shelf ways to fill a gallery? Is that fair of me? Honestly, I got the strongest feeling that he is using a lot of sure-fire stuff to give his ideas a greater sense of consequence. But it’s clever. He makes me think of Warhol. But instead of soup cans, he draws from the given M.O. and paraphernalia of art itself. One gallery contains a hundred framed pink-painted discs. These are said to be his attempts on subsequent days to remember the color of Jackie Kennedy’s pillbox hat – all in the purported context of the Warren Report. Warhol spoken here, but in a very interesting dialect.
This installation is programmed to replicate a wind pattern that S.F. recorded at Walden Pond.
So what do you think?
Still having a interesting time with inserting images. It is possible that the image that I lifted from Spencer’s site is so configured as to resist inclusion elsewhere. Sorry for the inconvenience, but you may actually do better flipping from this to the other sites I mentioned.
Hi Jay,
I checked out Finch’s Web site and the Mass MOCA site but I need time to process.
I appreciate his preoccupation with light, as I have the same thoughts. And in my slowly evolving ideas on being an artist, I have come to believe the depiction of light is all that will matter for me.
That’s great you made it to Mass MOCA. I can’t remember if it had opened yet when I moved out of Massachusetts. I remember David Byrne was heavily involved in its creation and I’m happy to see the area’s economy has perked up some.
Hello Kimberly:
MASS MoCA seems to going great guns. It now has a working agreement with the Clark Institute that ought to bring greater prestige and prosperity.
I would like to hear your take on Mr. Finch. His preoccupations are beguiling. His manner of seizing the day I find beguiling as well.
Spencer Finch is preoccupied with light and memory and color, all very traditional and in my opinion, fascinating themes for artists. He’s also very concerned with the mind, its thought processes and its observations (what exactly is observing and observing the observer).
All of this is very intriguing for me and I found some of his art to be intellectually satisfying. But visually, a lot of his work falls flat for me as it can come across as very bland and boring; in particular,some of his installation pieces using stained glass and light.
So what does this mean? Is he a bad artist? Does he lack talent because he fails most of the time to visually capture my attention? Probably not although I do think when a work is too conceptual, too intellectual, it loses a certain passion to it. And after all, with his installations he is only creating with objects and light what others create with paint.
The interesting thing for me is how irritated I became when I realized the lengths Finch goes to in order to replicate a “certain slant of light” or a specific color of the sky. I mean, can’t people just look out the window and see it for themselves? Is he insulting us or forcing us to look deeper? And really, how is this any different than say, Monet capturing light dancing around haystacks? But that doesn’t aggravate me like Finch’s work does.
There is one piece in particular that bothers me but at least I know why. Finch has a piece of, I believe, over 100 panels painted different shades of pink. This is his attempt to capture the color of Jackie Kennedy’s pillbox hat, the one she wore the day Kennedy was shot. Yawn. I couldn’t be any more sick and tired of the Kennedy myth than I am at this point in my life. Enough already. Move on.
Ultimately, Finch is trying to capture what is ultimately un-catchable. A brief moment, a mood, how the sky looked for Homer when he wrote of “the rosy fingered dawn.”
But when Emily Dickinson wrote her line about a certain slant of light, this included her mental state as well, and how can anyone capture that? And why would anyone else try if it was already attempted by Dickinson herself?
But wait…Maybe Finch is breaking through the conceptual wall in order to relate pure thought and pure experience. A pink hat on a November day in Texas without the cloud of memory, trauma and attachment. The Amherst sky without the burden of Dickinson’s depression.
How very Buddhist.
Is any of this possible?
Jay,
I think Finch is fascinating, thanks for drawing our attention to his work. I haven’t had time to do more than glance, but it appears you’re quite right that he’s concerned with aspects of perception we’ve also been interested in. Particularly the role of memory in artistic production, which by chance I was just reading about in some of Derrida’s overboard but intriguing musings. I’ll get more on that later (maybe not today…)
On the picture: if you email it to me, I’ll put it in for you. I’ve been thinking it’s time to write up more on dealing with pictures in the blog, so I’ll do that, too. You might want to add links for the MASS MoCA site and for Spencer Finch’s web site.
P.S. I agree with Tree that the artworks can be conceptually fascinating without having any gut-level (for lack of a better term) attraction. Like a well-written textbook that you want to read for information, but not re-read for pleasure. But I may be unfair, I need to look more at the work.
Kimberly:
We took the tour. The guide lost control of the group in the Jackie Kennedy gallery. People were questioning the sincerity of the series and the ultimate banality of the product. I was saying things like: “I too was interested in the Warren report. But it didn’t make me think about somebody’s hat.”
Each pink blob was separately framed and, as such, invited image-by-image inspection. But such scrutiny was not significantly rewarded, as all one got for one’s progression was yet another, slightly different, circular shape. Then the ultimate poison began to drip: “How might one do this better?”. How about dumping the frames and tacking the sheets up in a massed effect, like seen elsewhere in the exhibit? That sort of thing.
I believe that Finch’s associations with famous stuff tended to drain the overall impact. Why the Warren Report? why Walden Pond? Why Monet? I was trying to get into the color patches series and my mind kept going back to that kind of a question?
The room with the colored windows was nice in the manner that a room so adorned can be so. And then it was pointed out to me that Finch had measured a candle flame with a calorimeter and was attempting to replicate the flame’s color through the massed effect of the windows. My mind began to cast about like a parent who realizes his kid has run off. Where did the color/memory construct go? Somewhere along the line it turned into a machine. And one wanders of in search of…
So I see a man with a box of paints, quietly trying to match the colors that he sees about him and then,all in one thought, a carnival of gee-gollies, whiz bangs and wowsers, sprung from the same fertile brain. It should have been more than one show.
Steve:
To what Tree comment are you referring?
Yes, it was like that. There was a large procedural component to the show. It had a plan your work and work your plan quality to it. I felt like he had gone to an Art Depot store where he picked up a book on how to do florescent lights, another on the strategic placement of CPU’s and wires for best effect and also something like, “It’s a Gas when you Mass.”
Oops, by Tree I meant Kimberly. Slow to adapt, I guess.
I finally had a chance to look, though still quite incompletely, at some of the Spencer Finch stuff. The Derrida I had been reminded of is where he gets a long run of deconstructive rumination from the observations that the artist, at the moment of applying brush to canvas (or pen to paper, etc.) must look away from the subject, and at the same time cannot see the paint or line being applied, as the brush blocks it from view. The artist is doubly blind. Acknowledging Derrida’s stunning command of the obvious, I actually think this is an interesting route into the realization that cognitive processes, such as memory, play a critical role in art production as in other activities.
Similarly, I find Finch’s concept of trying to reproduce the pink of Jackie’s hat from memory quite fascinating. Not only is he probing how we remember color, but, by repeating the attempt many times (assuming this is done honestly), one could see how one effort is affected by previous ones. I agree with Jay that the chosen presentation might not be the best. This could be a good use of video, perhaps with the changing daily versions presented next to the first or the actual color.
Most of Finch’s work appears to be conceptually interesting in the same way. I’d love to see it in a museum, probably wouldn’t have any around the house. As for attention-grabbing by choosing that pink hat, or Monet, etc. as a launching point: why not? It seems to serve the purpose well. A backdoor way of approaching concepts that will have broader appeal.
Steve:
I’ve heard Derrida mentioned, but I don’t know his work. I can just wonder in isolation what he would make of somebody choosing the brush in his or her hand as the subject.
Re: Finch: imagine, Steve, if you were to hie off to a Budweiser facility, there to photograph the famous Clydesdales. There’s a perfectly good Clydesdale ranch in your neighborhood, but they’re not famous enough for you. The point is that Finch can do things that draw upon an anonymous setting – maybe like that series where the scene outside his window melts into the reflection of a door; all as the daylight fades. It does not rely upon a famous scene or door – and needs neither. What he did there may have appeared in a hundred shows and magazine spreads over the years, but I accepted it as a thoughtful piece.
And therein lies another issue to chew upon.
There is so much being done by so many everywhere that I have developed a preoccupation about it. I heard tell of a local artist, who spent years developing a personal approach, only to find it deemed derivative by big city critics. It appears that he had been independently inventing something that had come and gone as a blip on the New York scene. He really should have adopted a greater curiosity about the big picture, so better to adapt to it in his own work. But then, such a preoccupation with what somebody else might be doing, could have sapped his work of its personal validity. I’m afraid that I came to Finch’s show with my mind stuck on that setting.
Hmm, much the same subject as my comment (#6) on Do or die lists for artists. The agony of influence.
Steve:
Or, as is often, the influence of agony.
We have posted some installation and detail shots of Spencer’s work on our website. You will find them if you scroll down here: http://www.massmoca.org/event_details.php?id=28
Note: The prohibition on photography in the galleries has nothing to do with our recent court case, rather there were quite a few lenders to the exhibition who requested that their works not be photographed so we had to prohibit photography altogether. In general, our policy has been to permit photography and we will continue to do so unless asked not to by the generous souls who loan us their art.
Katherine,
Thanks for providing an official link. It’s the same one I guessed at earlier, but it’s also down in the comments.
And thanks for the note about the photography. I’m curious as to whether there is still some concern about damage from flash with modern cameras, or whether collectors don’t want high quality images of their works made because they might depress the value of the originals.
Folks:
Katherine, is Katherine Myers, Director of Development and Public Relations for MASS MoCA.
Thanks, Katherine, for doing this. I must agree with the prohibition on photography as a matter of policy. There were times, however, when visiting the show, that I dearly wanted to catch a detail or aspect of something, and refrained from doing so. It would seem to me that there are further horizons in show documentation to explore and MASS MoCA might be just the place.
As you can see, Spencer Finch is of interest to many on A&P. I, for one, will be watching the MASS MoCA site early and often for upcoming events.
Jay, I wish I could see the Anselm Kiefer exhibit there. He has some interesting/brainy stuff.
Tree:
On the courtyard outside the galleries is a small depot of ingredients. Looks like the show will be a heaping up of wavy concrete shapes with rebar and other unidentified things sticking out. I myself am an absolute hog for his art. There were a few of his paintings on loan to the Akron Museum while the Milwaukee Museum was being overhauled. I took the trip down twice as they couldn’t be absorbed sufficiently in one go around.
Jay, the Cincinnati Art Museum has an Anselm Kiefer. Have you seen it?
Tree:
No, but I’ll look it up.
Jay, I should have been more specific. The CAM has a painting, a very large one with thick paint. It’s gorgeous but much to my chagrin I had to read the wall text to gain a fuller appreciation.