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Spencer Finch
Postmasters Gallery, New York,
USA
Megan Ratner |
In his memoir
The Magic Lantern (1987) the Swedish filmmaker Ingmar Bergman
describes being ‘captivated by the problems of light, the gentle,
dangerous, dreamlike, living, dead, clear, misty, hot, violent,
bare, sudden, dark, spring-like, falling, straight, slanting,
sensual, subdued, limited, poisonous, calming, pale light’. His
reverie sets just the right tone for Spencer Finch’s new exhibition,
entitled ‘As much of noon as I can take between my finite eyes’.
Bergman was one of several luminaries gracefully brought to bear in
the recent work, which centred on perception and on what we make,
physically and metaphorically, of shadow and light.
Bergman
figured directly in The Magic Hour, Stockholm, May 8, 2003 (Stalking
Ingmar Bergman) (2004), a virtual overture to the show. Finch
transformed the full-length window of the gallery’s antechamber with
a spectrum of stained-glass panels, their blues, lavenders and pinks
recreating in the Manhattan October the dusk outside Bergman’s
Stockholm house in late spring. The ambient sounds and vague
outlines of people and vehicles passing by on the street outside
averted any potentially inflated hocus-pocus effect. These prosaic
intrusions shifted the attention instead to the harmless yet rather
voyeuristically ridiculous implications of Finch’s stake-out of the
Swedish director’s home.
Another work, Abecedary (Nabokov’s
Theory of a Coloured Alphabet Applied to Heisenberg’s Uncertainty
Principle) (2004), was a 36-panel transcription of Werner
Heisenberg’s theorem – letter by letter – into coloured ink droplets
on paper. The palette corresponded to Vladimir Nabokov’s notion of
‘coloured hearing’, as detailed in the novelist’s autobiographical
Speak Memory (1951), in which he describes experiencing the alphabet
as a ‘colour sensation […] produced by the very act of my orally
forming a given letter while I imagine its outline’. Working in
batches of four, Finch avoided obvious borders, with each group of
four panels pinned up adjacent to the next and occupying an entire
wall. The initial impression was more polka-dot decorative than
cerebrally conceptual, but closer inspection revealed the
unexpectedly wide splatter of each ink and watercolour blotch, their
shapes not so much daintily placed as detonated. Finch subtly blurs
Nabokov’s system with Heisenberg’s theory, elegantly concretizing
the crux of the latter’s principle – the im-possibility of
determining simultaneously the position and momentum of a particle –
while simultaneously abstracting Nabokov’s idea. What clinches the
piece is the sheer modesty of its materials, their simplicity an
ideal counterpoint to the big ideas Finch is exploring.
The coda
for the show, occupying a separate space at the back of the gallery,
was Sunlight in an Empty Room (Passing Cloud for Emily Dickinson,
Amherst, MA, August 28, 2004) (2004). The piece is composed of
azure, purple and grey gel filters that were bunched,
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