Acceptable Differences (2010)
Belgrade Cultural Center, 2011
Variable media.
| Variable dimensionsEducation of the Eye
Education of the Eye is a two-part project to be exhibited at the Cultural Center of Belgrade, Belgrade, Serbia. Part 1 was created in my studio in Berlin and part 2 in Dafen, China. This work utilizes a rule-based method to emancipate perception from institutional constraints. Unlike the rule based works of Sol Lewitt, in settings and contexts by assistants, this work uses a set of rules to create diverse and heterogeneous art products by singular cultural laborers. Whether this work is carried out in Berlin in the heart of Eurocentric Capitalism or the newly emerging context of China’s Communist state run Capitalism the results of my experiment are the same. The underlying pluripotentiality of our perception of color, its innate variability, residing in the subject is unmasked and released!
Part 1.
Ten Berlin painters with skill in mixing acrylic paints to match colors were invited to my studio in Kreuzberg. They were each given the task of contemplating for three hours a copy of a William Hogarth’s Self-portrait, 1757 that I had bought on-line. The original hangs in the NationalPortrait Gallery in London. Hogarth could have painted out the palette but instead locates it almost dead center to the viewer’s gaze. Every painter chooses from an array of possible colors a specific concoction with which to create the palette of his picture(s).
Each artist of this experiment is given a palette with a grid drawn upon it in pencil made up of seventy-squares each 2 cm by 2 cm. The artist is given brushes and tubes of differently pigmented acrylic paints with which to mix colors. A 3200 Kelvin photographic studio light is the only source of illumination.
What resulted was ten very different palettes. They differed in two profound ways. First some artists saw colors that no other artists managed to see as if they were gazing at different paintings. Secondly the methodologies with which they performed the assignment were either of an analytic and highly arranged type or one more intuitive. The former was characterized by the establishment of a color system in which, for example, each shade of orange was constituted together followed by each shade of green and so on and so forth. The latter seemed to have no pattern at all and the colors seemed to painted into the grid randomly.
Part 2.
I was intrigued by these found differences and wondered whether this unleashing of perceptive abilities was context sensitive. I was also interested in the manner in which these paintings were produced. After all I had ordered them in Berlin off the Internet and paid for them with a credit card. Were the very practices of making the painting also informationalized? How far down the hierarchical ladder of cultural labor did the tertiary economy manage to exert its’ influence?
To answer these questions I decided to combine a speaking engagement at the Hong Kong University with a trip to Dafen Village near Shenzhen in south China where I had determined that my Hogarth painting had been
made. The idea was to engage a studio to paint the Hogarth painting with myself present to document its fabrication and then to reenact my Berlin studio experiment with the now copied edition. I was fortunate to enlist two Chinese painters fulfill the latter.
Dafen, China is a city that doubles as a kind of distributed factory in which the entire population is focused on the production and distribution of copies
of famous classic European paintings and contemporary Asian artworks. This operates in the real world, as painters use artisanal techniques such as brush strokes, as well as the virtual one, computer printers make the
underpainting which is completed by the copy painter. The cultural worker are organized by a number of agents and intermediaries who take the orders and send the finished works around the world. My project in Dafen consisted of three parts.
Part 1 was to make a photographic documentation of the town itself focusing on especially the story of the town and its workers.
Part 2 concerned the documentation of the production of the Hogarth painting in the studio of one Mr. Wu, a local copy painter and owner of a small studio dedicated to copied painting.
Part 3 was a documentation of the experimental performance first staged in my studio but now reenacted there with the new Hogarth painting in the new context of the local Chinese artists studio.
The following results were as follows. The painting made in my presence by people who had met me and now knew me was of a much higher standard and more completely mimicked the original painting hanging in the National
Gallery. Second the results of the artist experiment made in China corroborated those found in my studio in Berlin. The colors of the palettes were remarkably different and the methodology used to make each was
dissimilar. In other words the temporary perceptual administration administering each country was lifted as the artists’ perception was emancipated by the rule instead of being subjugated by it.
Rainbow Brushes
The Rainbow Brushes, 2008 series was inspired by my own research into the Cultural Foundations of Color Perception. I noticed that even though the rainbow is the result of a specific optical effect caused by the combination of the prismatic separation of the wavelengths of light and their internal reflection inside each individual raindrop that makes up the millions of drops that constitute itself, their representation in painting throughout history has varied considerably.
Creating a plethora of forms and colored bows of light that I would like to suggest are more a manifestation of the social, political, historical, psychological, spiritual relations in which the artist was subsumed in his or her lifetime then the raw facts of its physics.
These relations also form the ideological conditions for the formation of mind. I am arguing, through a discourse of knowledge I coined back in 1995 called Neuroaesthetics, that much of the history of the investigation of the rainbow took place not only in the physics laboratory but as well on the surface of the painters canvas. Artists using their own methods, histories, performances, apparatuses, spaces, critiques can investigate, for instance, natural phenomena with as much insight as science but with very different results.
The canvas is the sight of the projection of the Mind’s Eye upon the blank screen of the white canvas. The condition of the Mind’s eye, how it produces the forms of images of a projected cinema inside the skull, is based on how it earns to comprehend the world that shapes the mind. Today culture has replaced nature as the prime sculpture of this mind’s eye. As such the history of the representation of the rainbow might be looked at as an ontology of mindedness. Their historical trajectory can be considered a projected image of the condition of the mind itself.