February 15, 2024 : Issue #61

WONDERCABINET : Lawrence Weschler’s Fortnightly Compendium of the Miscellaneous Diverse

WELCOME

A triptych on the lived experience of perceptual reality (Ad Reinhardt, Robert Irwin, and “Stereo Sue” Barry) and a Riteous 4-handed Stravinsky chaser.

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The Main Event

A TRIPTYCH ON THE LIVED EXPERIENCE OF PERCEPTUAL REALITY

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ONE: Picturing Reinhardt

The other day I received an exceptionally felicitous catalog in the mail, fully two years in the making, the Pace Gallery’s documentation of their Ad Reinhardt show, as curated by James Turrell, from back in February 2022. Veterans of this ’stack will recall my celebration of the show at the time (time being an essential element here, the extended time of slow experience) toward the end of our Issue #10, in the context of a commemoration of my late Polish friend Piotr Bikont’s jazz-backed declamation of Reinhardt’s seminal text “Art in Art is Art-as-Art.”

Anyway, I remember noticing at the time the extraordinary lengths to which Turrell and the gallery had gone to stage the exquisitely subtle, only seemingly monotone paintings (the alcoves, the benches, the lighting, the pacing), and I remember thinking how impossible it would be to photo-reproduce the experience. Such that the true revelation of the catalog (notwithstanding the excellence of the accompanying texts by the likes of Lucy Lippard, Brian Greene, and Wayne Koestenbaum) was the quality and variety of the photographic capture, its fidelity to the experience of having been there in person (by turns alone and amongst others)—how either way it had rewarded, indeed compelled, experience across time. Capture and release.

As in the case (to focus here on just one instance) of these multiple vantages on Reinhardt’s Abstract Painting (Red) from 1953 (do pause and lean in):

Most astonishing, with this specific painting, was a Daylight Sequence, prefaced by an explanation to the effect that the day after the close of the exhibition, the painting was “temporarily rehung in an adjacent second-floor viewing room with windows measuring fourteen feet high and five feet wide. The aim was to capture the effects of varying levels of daylight on the canvases over the course of a morning and afternoon.”

And boy, did they (again, slow down, take your time, and lean in):

In the days after I received the catalog, I kept wondering what all must have been involved in prising these and other photographic vantages. Presently I called the Gallery and asked whether they could put me in touch with the photographer, one of their regular freelance contractors named Peter Clough, which they graciously did. I caught up with him by phone (as it happened, he was in the Pace warehouse in the midst of photographing another body of work, this time pieces by Jim Dine), but he immediately proved enthusiastically expansive:

The whole project {he said}—and it took up pretty much the entirety of the two months the show was up, documenting the installation as a whole and the paintings one by one all from multiple angles when the gallery was closed, and then the flow of visitors through the place when it was open—was very rewarding though also incredibly challenging in all sorts of technical ways both for the camera and the laptop computer tethered to it. For starters figuring out how to reproduce the incredibly subtle variations in tone across each canvas—how to maintain an evenness within each passage but at the same time between the different adjacent passages in any given painting—one, that is, that would prove true to the experience of actually standing before the painting in question.

Keep in mind, we were deploying technologies that didn’t even exist at the time the paintings were made. Though it wasn’t just a technical problem, a scientific one, say, of getting the reading on the light meter or the focus on the lens, the length of the exposure or the accuracy of the color just right. Because the eye sees differently than the camera, especially across time, the time of slow looking. During the first moment that one is confronted with many of these paintings, one doesn’t even see that they are evincing distinctly different tonal passages across the breadth of the canvas; those only emerge gradually, and more and more so the longer you look and your eyes gradually adjust to the incredibly subtle spectacle playing out before you—and I was constantly trying to adjust for that as well. Furthermore, it would often take a good deal of time with each exposure to see if I had gotten it right, requiring such an intense focus that I literally had to take breaks. Not unlike, it occurs to me, the experience of visiting a Turrell installation: that dazed look people often have emerging from one of those visits.

Because the experience of standing before one of these paintings can get to be a little like that of sensory deprivation, how you have so little information to go on (the tonal distinctions being so infinitesimal), and yet at the same time so much more, in that your brain is so much more actively engaged in the act of distinguishing between those minute distinctions, thereby yielding a different weight of information even across such subtle effects.

The paintings of course could shift in all sorts of ways depending on how you lit them, which of course was part of the whole point of the show, Turrell having gone to great lengths to set up distinct lighting environs bespoke to each individual painting. But that became especially evident on the day after the show closed when we took two of the paintings, one red and the other blue, and hung them on blank walls in two adjacent otherwise empty second-floor rooms with big windows facing out onto the street, arranging entirely separate camera-and-laptop set-ups aimed at each one of them and then going back and forth between the rooms and regularly clicking away over the entirety of the next eight or nine hours.

There was no artificial light in those sequences, it was all natural, just the reflected daylight pouring in through those windows, but what was fascinating to me is that while you would expect an almost continuous even shift of tone over time with those sessions, that’s not what happened. What happened was that there were long expanses where things seemed almost static and the session could even start feeling boring and futile, moments where we felt like we’d taken that exact same photograph an hour earlier, but then other moments when the light took to changing incredibly quickly and things got very dramatic, I’m getting chills just thinking about it.

Hemingway has that great line in The Sun Also Rises, I suggested, where he has one character ask another how he went bankrupt, and the other guy replies, “Well, in two ways: gradually and then suddenly.”

Totally, exactly.

But did he have any idea why that happened?

Well, I have some theories. One would be that different kinds of pigment reflect different wavelengths of light, which is what color means, so it may be that there were certain angles of dropoff where somehow the light reflected up to a point and then shifted past the threshold to the point where the pigment was no longer reflective. And the other thing that occurs to me is the question of the facing architecture, since these were not rooms that were exposed to the sea or open space, and maybe there were moments where the sun came from behind a building or a cloud in such a way that its direct rays which had been reflecting off a particular patch of wall across the street moved along, plunging that patch into shadow and thereby affecting the temperature of the light in our room on the other side of the street. And then also there’s the camera: digital cameras especially don’t register every single wavelength the way our eyes do; however smooth and high fidelity such equipment is, it’s measuring individual wavelengths of light, like a staccato or a pointillism or something, whereas we ourselves perceive light in fuller gradients.

Though there too, there are some theories, I suggested, to the effect that human visual perception is itself characterized by similar stepwise gradations at the micro level: even, even, even and then lurch., And that too has been reflected in certain finely observed phenomenological passages of fine writing. I’m thinking, for instance, of the last pages in Philip Roth’s exquisite early short story “The Conversion of the Jews,” where the narrator pulls back to note how “Somehow when you’re on a roof, the darker it gets the less you can hear.” And a bit further on: “The light took an unexpected click down and the new darkness, like a gag, hushed the friends.”

Hmmm, could be. For me, though, partly because I am a fan and I was by this point deeply invested in what we were doing, I was kind of thrilled, and it also felt like an amazing privilege, because we undertook those daylight sequences on a Sunday, there was almost no one around, and while usually the galleries are full of hubbub and activity, this by contrast was like a very focused, very calm day, there was nothing else going on, it was just me and one other person, and we were going back and forth between the two adjacent rooms. But I would become so absorbed—and, yes, hushed in that absorption—that I kept having to remind myself to switch rooms. Because one could in fact get utterly and completely captivated in watching what was happening.

As one can, I suggested, by the results in the catalog—a catalog which incidentally can now be procured by way of the Pace Gallery’s own online shop here.

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Two: Morgan Meis on experiencing Robert Irwin’s acrylic columns

Speaking of the lived, embodied experience of perceptual reality, just around the same time that I received the Reinhardt catalog, I happened upon another essay, this one by our old friend Morgan Meis (see the outset of our Issue #44), waxing eloquent (by way of the 3 Quarks Daily weblog) on what it could get to be like happening upon, getting blind-sighted by one of the late Robert Irwin’s legendary prismatic acrylic columns. To wit:

Robert Irwin died a few months ago. He was 95 years old, so this was not a great tragedy. I didn’t know the man personally, but I have the sense that he lived a good and fulfilled life. He was quite famous within the more or less refined corners of the international artworld. He’ll probably always be most associated with the so-called Light and Space Movement that emerged in California, more properly southern California, in the late 1960s. Judy Chicago also did important works from within the Light and Space sensibility. James Turrell. Mary Corse. If these names mean anything to you. Quite fine if they don’t.

It is hard to describe the works of Robert Irwin. A typical work by Robert Irwin is, for instance, a piece called Untitled (Acrylic Column), which is generally listed as having the dates 1969-2011. I guess that’s because he kept making and remaking the piece over those years. It’s a simple work of art. Basically it’s a free-standing column of see-through acrylic about fifteen feet high. The column is constructed in a kind of ‘V’ shape so that it doesn’t fall over. Also, stuff happens with the light and with the refractions of vision in that shape.

Stuff happens. This is not the most helpful description, I know. But that’s what is interesting about the work: the stuff that happens in the room because the column is in the room. The column itself isn’t interesting at all. If you stand there, in the gallery or museum or wherever, and just look at the column you’ve completely missed the point. The column is there because of what it does, not what it is. And what the column does is to split the room up in visually startling ways. The column messes with the visual unity of the room. People walking behind the column suddenly disappear, or are sliced into various sections. Visually, of course. Not really. But then again, what is really?

The column makes something happen in the room. This is only possible because people, or I suppose other kinds of creatures too, but most essentially because people go into the room and then encounter the strange way that the column messes with one’s experience of the room, creating a kind of heightened sense of being in the room altogether. So the work Untitled (Acrylic Column) is really about experience. Or it simply is experience, since it isn’t exactly about anything in the normal sense that an artwork can be about something. The work doesn’t reference or represent or symbolize or anything like that. It just makes experience.

Philosophers, especially those of the Kantian extraction, sometimes like to talk about transcendentals. To make a long story short, transcendentals are conditions for the possibility of other things to be. Space and time, for instance, are transcendental because they are necessary conditions for there to be physical objects at all. An object, to be an object, has to be here or there at this or that time. You could say, then, that when you think transcendentally you are trying to go to the very roots of experience. What is there at the root? What underlies the possibility of experience altogether?

Interesting questions, philosophically. But Robert Irwin was an artist, not a philosopher. Except that he did, probably more than once, but at least once, he did utter something like a philosophical axiom. In this case, it was an axiom that made an important update to Descartes. Irwin said, “I feel, therefore I think, therefore I am.” You’ll notice the little trick here. Descartes was fine with cogito ergo sum, I think therefore I am. Irwin starts with I feel.

Irwin is talking here about the full embodied experience of being, being in a particular space at a particular time with the light just so and perhaps a certain smell, maybe a whiff of eucalyptus on the Southern California breeze, a warm sensation on the skin from the sun overhead, the difficult-to-describe nagging tug of nostalgia created, perhaps, by the vague and distant childhood memory of just such a mix of smell and warmth that brings both a longing for something lost, something that maybe never even quite existed in the first place but seems all the more real for hovering at the cusp of your consciousness, making you feel both content and discontent at the same time, content in the warm embrace of the half-erased memory and discontent in the realization that it can’t be grasped, that it can never be grasped, that nothing, no experience, no memory, no hope, no dream, no possibility can ever be grasped, not really, not in the way that one would like to, never.

Is this tension at the heart of all experience itself a truth, a reality, transcendental perhaps, transcendent? What would it be like to create works of art that themselves produce these feelings and experiences? Particular in every way, fully situated in the specifics of a place and time and context, like the tower of acrylic when it makes something happen in one room at one time, with this or that human being in the room experiencing it. But also, something else is happening too. A kind of lifting of the self from the boundaries of the self and into the realm of experience as such. Without losing the specific touch and feel and sensation of being in that room at that time. Being beyond all containment and fully contained at the same time.

Bonaventure, the thirteenth century theologian and friar in the order of the Friars Minor, a Franciscan, once said, “To know much and taste nothing—of what use is that?” It seems like an obvious point. We are in this world. We must not leave it behind in the pursuit of knowledge or anything else. “No Ideas But In Things,” as William Carlos Williams once put it.

But what would it look like to live that way? What would it look like to experience the depth of experience in its full intensity and yet never to have left one iota of creation behind? It is a question that Robert Irwin asked himself over and over until the day he died.

Amen. (For more on Irwin from our own pages here, see our issues 14, 50, 54, and 55; and for a profile of Jack Brogan, the fabricator behind Irwin’s acrylic columns and so much other work of his and other Light and Space masters, see issues 2 and 3. Most of the photos illustrating this piece by way of the White Cube Gallery in London).

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Three: Stereo Sue’s first letter to Oliver Sacks on Stereoscopic Vision

Susan R. Barry, professor emerita of neuroscience at Mt Holyoke College, was born with a serious case of strabismus—which is to say crossed-eyes—for which she underwent three operations between the ages of two and seven, whereupon, her gaze apparently straightened, at least in cosmetic terms, she was pronounced cured. Indeed it was only in college that she became aware that she was not seeing like other people, that because her eyes were still not properly aligned, she was apparently favoring one and then the other, and hence never achieving stereopsis, which is to say three-dimensional vision. Furthermore, everyone was now telling her that because such an ability had to have been achieved in childhood, she would never now be able to attain anything like it. Years later, however, she found her way to an exceptionally innovative therapist who suggested there still might be a way. She undertook a course of therapy, keeping a “vision diary” all the while. Toward the climax of that treatment, she began filling that diary’s pages with the draft of a fantasy letter to the neurologist Oliver Sacks, more as an exercise than anything else (she doubted she would ever build up the nerve to actually send it).

In the first chapter of a marvelous, only just released book (as it happens, I received a copy at almost the same time as I encountered both the Reinhardt and Irwin instances above), she summarizes and selectively quotes from that diary entry and then goes on to recount what happened next. We join that account in midstream, just as she is relating the aftermath of those childhood operations:

Several years later, I discovered that I had not been “cured.” While taking a neurophysiology course in college, I learned that I didn’t see the way most people did:

The professor described the development of the visual cortex, ocular dominance columns, monocular and binocular vision, and experiments done on kittens reared with artificial strabismus. He mentioned that these cats probably lacked binocular vision and stereopsis.*

(*Stereopsis, or stereovision, allows us to see in 3D and requires simultaneous input from the two eyes. Since the two eyes see from a slightly different angle, they send a slightly different image to the brain. The difference is integrated in the brain, resulting in a single image seen in 3D.)

I was completely floored. I had no idea that there was a way of seeing the world that I lacked. Perhaps, this explained why I drove poorly and could not operate a sewing machine. I went to the library and struggled through the scientific papers. I tried every stereovision test that I could find and flunked them all. I even learned that one was supposed to see a three-dimensional image through the toy stereo-viewer that I had been given after my third operation. I found the old toy in my parents’ home but could not see a three-dimensional image with it. Everyone else who tried the toy could.

More than twenty years passed, but when I reached midlife, my vision grew more troublesome. When I looked in the distance, everything appeared to jitter. So I found an optometrist, Dr. Theresa Ruggiero, located in a neighboring town, who provided vision therapy for people of all ages. At my first visit, Dr. Ruggiero noted that my eyes were misaligned both horizontally and vertically. My right eye saw lower than my left, so she prescribed a prism for my right eyeglass lens, which reduced the vertical (but not horizontal) disparity between the two eyes. Once I had received the prism glasses, I began vision therapy and was particularly impressed with an eye-alignment exercise called the Brock string, which I described as the “bead exercise.”

Now, here’s the amazing part. After the first therapy session with the bead exercise, I went back to my car and happened to glance at the steering wheel. It had “popped out” from the dashboard! I closed one eye, then the other, then looked with both eyes again, and the steering wheel looked different. I decided that the light from the setting sun was playing tricks on me and drove home. But the next day I got up, did the eye exercises (which I continue to do every morning), and got into the car to drive to work. When I looked at the rearview mirror, it had popped out from the windshield.

Over the next several months, my vision was completely transformed. I had no idea what I had been missing. Ordinary things looked extraordinary. Light fixtures floated and water faucets stuck way out into space.

In my letter I added all sorts of everyday yet surprising sights that I had recorded in my diary: how an open door now seemed to stick way out toward me, how the fork held over a bowl of rice looked different because I could see how it was poised in the air above the bowl; how I could see the empty, yet palpable, volumes of space between leaves on trees; how the skull on a horse’s skeleton appeared to stick out so far into space that when I first approached it, I actually cried out and jumped back; and how roads appeared to stretch out farther in the horizontal plane, lanes appeared wider, and turns in the car seemed less abrupt.

Everything is sharper. Borders are crisp and distinct, not blurry as previously. Is this due to the prism in the glasses? Is it due to looking at the world with two eyes at the same time? When I use only one eye, I am only getting half the visual information at any one moment. Have I always had binocular cells in my visual cortex? Have they just been waiting for the right input? I don’t know all the explanations but I do know that this is absolutely delightful. I experience moments of joy, a childlike glee, like I haven’t felt in years. I’m seeing the world in a whole new way.

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Moreover, flat, two-dimensional views also take on more depth. A painting done in perspective appears more three-dimensional than it did in the past. These experiences make me wonder whether a binocular individual can really experience a monocular view of the world simply by closing one eye. Even with one eye closed, that individual can use a lifetime of visual experiences to create a three-dimensional image. I tried to explain to friends my changing view of the world, but they all looked at me uncomfortably. There was no way I could really have them experience the change in my vision. While many people, such as neuroscientists, are aware of the fact that their vision is a creation and interpretation of their brain, they are not reminded of this fact on a glance-by-glance basis as I am. I find that it is best to enjoy quietly and privately my new view of the world.

{…}

Imagine a person who saw only in shades of gray suddenly able to see in full color. Such a person would probably be overwhelmed by the beauty of the world. Could they stop looking? Each day, I spend time looking head-on at objects—flowers, my fingers, faucets, anything—in order to get that strong three-dimensional sense. I lie in bed at night looking through stereoviewers. After almost three years, my new vision continues to surprise and delight me.

One winter day, I was racing from the classroom to the deli for a quick lunch. After taking only a few steps from the classroom building, I stopped short. The snow was falling lazily around me in large, wet flakes. I could see the space between each flake, and all the flakes together produced a beautiful three-dimensional dance. In the past, the snow would have appeared to fall in a flat sheet in one plane slightly in front of me. I would have felt like I was looking in on the snowfall. But, now, I felt myself within the snowfall, among the snowflakes. Lunch forgotten, I watched the snow fall for several minutes, and, as I watched, I was overcome with a deep sense of joy. A snowfall can be quite beautiful— especially when you see it for the first time.

Once I completed this story and added it to my diary, I felt a sense of peace. By documenting my childhood experiences and combining these with recent journal entries, I had assembled my vision history and thus preserved it. What I was to discover, however, was that this diary entry was not the coda to my visual adventures but rather a prelude to a whole new direction in life.

The next day I showed the diary entry to my husband Dan, who encouraged me to send it to Dr. Sacks. I was not so sure. I didn’t think anyone would believe me. My acquisition of stereovision at age forty-eight after a lifetime of being cross-eyed challenged a half century of research on “critical periods” in visual development. These studies indicated that stereo-vision could develop only in early childhood. Since I was a professor of biology and neuroscience at Mount Holyoke College, I was very familiar with this research and had lectured many times on critical periods in class. Indeed, it had taken me many months to convince myself that I was now seeing in 3D. How was I going to convince anyone else? And even if Dr. Sacks believed me, would he appreciate just how novel and wonderful the change in my vision had been? My newfound and hard-earned stereovision meant everything to me. I couldn’t stand the idea of someone dismissing my experiences as exaggerated, overly dramatic, and perhaps even delusional. Could I risk sending the letter to Oliver Sacks?

In the end, of course, she did send it (in early 2005). As a longtime friend (and eventual posthumous biographer of Oliver’s) myself, I vividly remember the day he got that letter and how excited he was to be encountering such a dazzling and articulate correspondent. He wrote back, and a floodtide of letters back and forth ensued, the two presently met, and Oliver ended up contributing a Neurologist’s Notebook piece on “Stereo Sue,” to The New Yorker (subsequently included in his collection The Mind’s Eye), which (as was often the case with Oliver’s interventions) in turn helped precipitate a veritable revolution in the treatment of adults with such conditions. (He also contributed an enthusiastic introduction to Barry’s own first book Fixing My Gaze.) A few years later, Sacks himself developed a cancer of the eyeball, treatment of which resulted in his loss of vision in that eye, and suddenly it was he whose experience was becoming monocular and hence stereo-blind, a reversal the two monitored and chronicled in fastidious detail. Indeed, they continued corresponding and remained close friends through Sacks’s passing in 2015.

Anyway, now comes Stereo Sue’s own epistolary memoir of the experience, Dear Oliver: An Unexpected Friendship with Oliver Sacks. Fans of Sacks will relish yet further instances of the good doctor’s exquisitely empathic and epiphanic presence, but the real revelation in this volume is the distinctive quality of Dr Barry’s own voice: passionate, questing, witty, whip-smart, and wise—endlessly delighting and delightful. A real treat, and highly recommended.

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INDEX AUDIO SPLENDORUM

Samson Tsoy and Pavel Kolesnikov scale a 4-hand version of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring

This past Tuesday—my 72nd birthday as it happened—I woke to the splendid spectacle of a swirling snowfall (the heaviest in over two years and a spectacle rendered all the more enchanted and enchanting with Stereo Sue’s uncanny description of same still thrumming in my ears).

The Nor’easter had blown clean through by the afternoon which was a good thing since friends of mine had arranged a celebratory evening outing to the recital of a pair of Siberian four-hand pianists—Samson Tsoy and Pavel Kolesnikov—who I’d initially and serendipitously encountered a month or so earlier in London (a whole other story: another time) and who (speaking of things still ringing in my ears) I couldn’t stop talking about.

And now here they were, about to be playing in New York, at the Weill recital space in Carnegie Hall, reprising their fiercely propulsive rendition of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring and achingly yearning evocation of Schubert’s Fantasy in F Minor (as it happens the two young men are both artistic and life partners).

Just to give you a taste:

And believe me, it was all of that and more.

For more on the pair see here and here. If you happen to get a chance to attend any of their far-flung concerts in the months ahead, definitely do so! And in the meantime, look forward, lean forward, keep your ears peeled for their electrifying debut duo album, due out from Harmonia Mundi this coming June.

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ANIMAL MITCHELL
Cartoons by David Stanford, from the Animal Mitchell archive

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